DEMOCRATS PROPOSE YET ANOTHER NEW TAX: A WAR TAX

Democratic Congressmen late Monday evening released their demand for a war tax to help pay for the additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan. (Has that been established yet?) Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., chairman of the purse- string controlling House Appropriations Committee, is calling the idea a "war surtax." It has not been announced yet how much that tax will be, but you can be  sure it will apply only to the rich. The hook in the proposal will be how little you have to make to be classified as rich.

High taxes are driving the big earners out of California, New York and other states where taxes are particularly oppressive. Their generous welfare benefits are attracting non-producing consumers of welfare. The net effect is the population is gradually becoming poorer and more needy at the same time revenues are drying up. This is a prescription for disaster.

The same thing is happening to the nation as a whole. You won’t hear it shouted from the rooftops, but right now an American moves out of the country to escape confiscatory taxation and increasing regulation at the rate of one every 54 minutes around the clock. Those are our wealthiest, most productive citizens, the ones the Democrats think are bottomless, uncomplaining pits of tax resources. 

IS GUANTANAMO TOO GOOD FOR THEM?

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is planning to send up to 2000 of its prisoners to other states because its prisons are seriously overcrowded. The candidate receiving states are Kansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia. Say, I know a facility that will become available soon. Why not send them to Guantanamo?

By Alan Caruba

For those of us “skeptics” and “deniers” who have been jumping up and down, pointing at the Sun, and saying, “See, it’s the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth is. See it? Up there in the sky?” The truth about some of the scientists behind the global warming hoax has finally arrived.

The hoax has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an instrument of the United Nations Environmental Program, for whom global warming was the open sesame to achieving a one-world-government by scaring nations into signing a treaty that would control their use of energy, the means of producing it, and require vast billions to be sent to less developed nations in exchange for “emitting” greenhouse gases.

Energy is called “the master resource” because, if you have lots of it, you can call your own shots. If you don’t, you are condemned to live in the dark and keeping people in the dark about the global warming hoax was essential.

For years the IPCC has been controlled by a handful of the worst liars in the world, utterly devoted to taking actual climate data and twisting it to confirm the assertion that the Earth was not only warming dramatically, but that humanity was in peril of rising oceans, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, more hurricanes, the die-off of countless animal species, and every other calamity that could possibly be attributed to “global warming”, including acne.

So, around November 20, when some enterprising individual hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), making off with thousands of emails and documents that demonstrate the level of collusion and deception being practiced by its scientists.

It’s a climate hoax expose that some are calling the revelations a “little blue dress” while others are comparing it to the Pentagon Papers. It has also been dubbed “climategate.”

As James Delingpole wrote in the Telegraph, one of England’s leading newspapers, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read.

The conspirators had a visceral hatred for scientists who challenged their phony statistics and climate data, but they also agonized over the difficulties of hiding a long established climate cycle such as the Medieval Warm Period. At one point it was left out of a graph that famously became known as “the hockey stick” because it depicted a ludicrous sudden rise in warming, ignoring the previous natural cycle.

Read more »

NEXT: THE TV SYSTEM THAT SEES BETTER THAN YOU DO

Thrilled with your new HDTV system? Prepare to need something better. World, get ready to need UHD-TV. Yes Ultra Hi-Def is coming and it will make your HDTV look primitive. It will initially come in two definitions, the better to get you to buy two systems rather than just one. The top of the line, the one worth waiting for, will offer resolution of 7680x4320 pixels, that’s 16 times the resolution of 1080p. And it will sport a 22 multichannel 3D sound system. (Will you really be able to tell the difference between 22 channels and 16 channels?)

And do you really need a device that produces a picture that resolves higher than your eye? No doubt Rush Limbaugh will be one of the first to own such a system. And viewers in California will probably find such voltage guzzlers outlawed there.

The marketers expect it to take until 2023 before major residential penetration is achieved. I think that will depend on the economy. There will always be a market for the best and latest but how big that market is remains to be seen. 

DEMOCRAT PLAN TO RAISE MONEY: RETROACTIVE TAXES

You won't find this in the MSM.


That’s right. They can avoid raising the nominal tax rate as high as it should be to reflect reality by taxing events that happened in the past. Think that’s unconstitutional? It should be but it isn’t. That was decided in 1983. (Anyway, who is paying any attention to the Constitution these days?)

Here’s the Pelosi Plan: Nancy said she wants Congress to repeal retroactively to January 1, 2010, Bush’s tax cuts before their scheduled expiration date in 2011. For high income earners. that will push the top rate on ordinary income from 35% to 39.6%, long term capital gains tax from 15% to 28%, plus the 5.4% healthcare tax on gross. Oh, and the estate tax will also return retroactively at its full rate. Bad news for Art Linkletter who had planned on dying in 2010 to beat the estate tax. Maybe he can die retroactively, too.

If you have any long term capital gains, it would be prudent to sell them before the end of this year, incurring the lower tax rate.

It could be worse. They could make the taxes retroactive to 2005. What’s to stop them?

AUDIT BUREAU LOOSENS ITS RULES TO INFLATE CIRCULATION NUMBERS

Have you noticed how almost every newspaper, even the dinkiest, now has an electronic edition? There is a reason. Effective last April Fools Day, the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the outfit that reports newspaper circulation, changed its reporting rules. It is now possible through the magic of electronics, for newspapers to count phantom readers of electronic editions as paying customers. That's why so many want you to register. Even so, their numbers stink. Imagine how bad they would be if they counted only people who put down their money for a physical paper!

CHEATER'S CLUB Video

PRIVATE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR OUR RICH READERS

We know from electronic marketing studies that we have a super-rich crowd of readers. So I am pleased to announce that the new Gulfstream G650 is now available. Let's ride.
No, I don't know how much it costs. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

KA'CHING

Did you ever get the strong feeling that our political “leaders” frankly don’t have a clue what they’re doing? I’m sure I don’t have to spell that out. They seem to be political will o’ the wisps, bending whichever way the opinion wind blows them, the opinion of lobbyists being the strongest wind. If they knew how to do anything productive they’d be doing it.

The government is truly the employer of last resort for so many, whether appointed, or elected, a position in which they get to forgive their own mistakes and appoint their own comforts. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you run.

All of which might be forgivable if they really were imbued with the superior wisdom they affect. But the opposite seems to be true. They are like that shiny ball in the pinball machine, just rolling along until it hits an obstacle, then going off in a new direction, rolling around until it disappears under the glass at the front and a new ball is released at the top. The game ends when you run out of power to run the machine. We are fast approaching that point now. 

ELBONIANS ALL

                                                             "I can't believe he stole one of our caps."

Look who just got back from Elbonia.

WHAT HATH THE SENATE WROUGHT?

This (pardon the rough photo) is the Senate version of the healthcare bill. As I pointed  out yesterday, there are 2434 pages in the healthcare bill the Senate produced. That's not so long. Martin Leach wrote a book called Marianbad My Love. He took 17 million pages to make his point, whatever it was. I doubt anybody read it all. And I suspect the healthcare bill will suffer the same fate. No law should be that long. No one can or should use that much of his life reading it.

OBAMA'S DREAM, AMERICA'S NIGHTMARE

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a plan to set up a new “volunteer corps” and consider whether “a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people” should be developed.
The legislation also refers to uniforms” that would be worn by the “volunteers” and the “need” for a “public service academy”, a 4-year institution” to “focus on training” future “public sector leaders.” The training, apparently, would occur at “campuses.”

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved. Michele Obama, February 2009

"Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school, and 100 hours of community service in collge every year." Website of "The President Elect"

THE MAGIC OF MOTIVATION

Unlike the strange people who inhabit Dilbert cartoons, I have learned that the key to getting people to do the right thing (what you consider to be the right thing) is motivation. If people have the conviction that they have something to gain by a certain action or inaction, they will invariably pursue that motivation.

I learned this truth at a tender age: I was in law school. In an effort to keep body and soul together in those lean days, I taught piano lessons to children in their homes. That was in the days when an adult person could be trusted alone with a child without needing three witnesses for protection. It was in the days of $3 gasoline, too. Not $3 a gallon, $3 to fill the tank.

Anyway, I was able to teach the kids to read music, a talent I had not perfected myself. I did this simply by motivating the kids to learn. They sucked up the learning like a sponge. I assume they had an aptitude for the skill, but I always felt teaching someone to do what I could not was rather a neat trick. But it taught me the value of motivation. A skill that can be applied to lawmaking if it is structured right.

If you notice that a law is observed more in the breach than the obedience, you know that the motivations are poorly structured.

THE GLOBAL CARBON FOOTPRINT SCAM

By Alan Caruba

I never cease to marvel at the environmental alarmists who create one “crisis” after another using wretchedly bad “science” to support their scams. On Tuesday, November 24, the Global Footprint Network is going to “release new data on the Ecological Footprint of 100 nations and humanity as a whole, and the current ledgers are sobering.”

Well, of course, they’re sobering. Everything the Greens announce is sobering because, as you well know, the oceans are rising, the glaciers and polar caps are melting, we’re running out of oil, every animal on Earth is endangered, incandescent light bulbs and global warming will destroy all life on Earth, yada, yada, yada.

“The figures provide a data-driven look at some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, from climate change to equitable distribution of resources.”

Is the “equitable distribution of resources” the same as Barack Obama’s “redistribution of wealth”? Is this shorthand of every liberal’s wet dream, communism? Oh, yeah. Been there, seen it, don’t want any part of it. After giving communism a try for over seventy years, the Soviet Union imploded because it doesn’t work, never has, and never will.

After Chairman Mao Zedong introduced communism to China, his various programs managed to kill off several millions through starvation until his death allowed a revision toward capitalism that initiated the transformation that holds out vastly improved lives for its 1.3 billion citizens.

However, according to the Global Footprint Network, “Humanity now requires the resources it would take almost one and a half planets to sustainably produce, according to figures to be released.”

The Greens have an established pattern. They use bogus computer modeling to conjure up scads of “data” that take years to debunk and dispute. In the meantime, billions are wasted on their schemes.

This new hogwash conveniently debuts just before the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. The many delegates will wine and dine their way through tons of champagne, caviar, and other delicacies while trying to convince everyone the Earth is doomed unless virtually all industrial activity is ended

They will warn that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are responsible for “global warming”, but there is NO global warming beyond what the Sun provides and CO2 plays no role whatever in climate change.

The phony “carbon footprint” ignores the fact that carbon compounds form the basis for all known life on Earth!

ANOTHER SHORT TAKE

You can kick a can only so far down the road before you kick in into a cul-de-sac.