Ann Coulter started her column of Wednesday with …
Before we begin, can we stop referring to Wisconsin as “Midwestern nice”? That’s all we’ve heard since Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump there: Wisconsinites are just so nice, they couldn’t abide Trump’s rough style.
Does anyone remember the whole taking over the capitol thing? How they nearly recalled a sitting governor a few years ago? Remember the protesters fighting with cops, rounds of arrests in the rotunda, the drum circles and chanting? How about the midnight raids on citizens for supporting the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill”?
Wisconsin is a lot of things, but “nice” is not one of them. “Soviet” is more like it. It was always a bad state for Trump because there are virtually no immigrants in Wisconsin, and peevish Wisconsinites refused to believe the rest of the country about the cultural mores we’re bringing in.
Who ARE you, and what have you done with the real Ann Coulter? …
Does anyone remember the whole taking over the capitol thing? How they nearly recalled a sitting governor a few years ago? Remember the protesters fighting with cops, rounds of arrests in the rotunda, the drum circles and chanting? How about the midnight raids on citizens for supporting the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill”?”
Um, Ann…do I really have to point out that the thugs who did the “whole taking over the capitol thing” were…Leftists and Libs? Leftists and Libs weren’t voting in the Wisconsin Republican primary.
And, Ann, do I really have to remind you that the recall effort against Scott Walker was a Democrat thing, not a Republican thing. Democrats didn’t give Cruz the Republican primary win. Oh, and that recall effort? Walker won by a slightly greater margin in the recall than he did in the previous general. Damn those mean-as-snakes Wisconsinites, huh?
About those protesters fighting with cops, arrests, drums, midnight raids – ALL Leftists and Liberals and Democrats, NOT the Republican voters who delivered Cruz’ Republican primary victory.
She used to be so spot-on and acerbic. Now she’s just vicious, and with credibility and intellectual honesty on a par with MSNBC and the mainstream media.
President Obama says tax avoidance “is a big global problem,” and it is—to big-spending liberals who fume that they don’t have enough taxpayer money to redistribute and waste on crony projects.
Actually, tax avoidance is not only legal and appropriate; as an American, it’s your patriotic duty. The less money taxpayers send to the government, the less money government wastes, and the more money citizens have to spend and invest—both of which create jobs and wealth.
Tax avoidance—Avoidance of tax is not a criminal offense. Taxpayers have the right to reduce, avoid, or minimize their taxes by legitimate means. One who avoids tax does not conceal or misrepresent, but shapes and preplans events to reduce or eliminate tax liability within the parameters of the law.
Tax evasion—Evasion involves some affirmative act to evade or defeat a tax, or payment of tax. Examples of affirmative acts are deceit, subterfuge, camouflage, concealment, attempts to color or obscure events, or make things seem other than they are.
Hmm, that last sentence could describe an Obama press conference, but I digress.
Tax avoidance is absolutely legal, appropriate, and widely practiced—even by the tax experts who fill out Obama’s Form 1040. Tax evasion, by contrast, is illegal.
Maybe Obama misspoke and meant to say “tax evasion,” because the only ones who think tax avoidance is a global problem are those who think the government deserves most of our income, whether we actually owe it or not.
On second thought, that does sound a little like the president. He was the one who started pushing the term “economic patriotism,” as a way of castigating companies that legally leave some their profits overseas—after paying taxes on that money—to avoid being taxed again when they bring that money back to the U.S.
The fact is that minimizing your tax obligation is the patriotic thing to do, for several reasons.
First, the U.S. Constitution limits the federal government to those powers enumerated in the document. But Washington has repeatedly ignored those limits and expanded its powers to the point that it now invades every aspect of our lives.
One thing we as voters can do to fight that expansion is to stop feeding the problem—which is what our tax dollars do.
By legally minimizing what you pay in taxes, you help starve the beast and stunt its growth—just like the Founders envisioned.
Second, you put pressure on Washington to make the tax system simpler—hopefully, something close to a flat tax with few or no deductions.
Many of the problems we face as a country are the result of a bloated, complicated, and incomprehensible tax code. There are some 74,000 pages in the code, up from 67,500 when Obama took office.
The Tax Foundation says that Americans annually spend 6.1 billion hours of lost productivity and $31.7 billion in direct out-of-pocket costs complying with the tax code. Talk about waste!
But by taking advantage of all the legal options to minimize our taxes, we demonstrate that the nominal tax rates are mostly a sham. We all pay a lower effective rate, which makes the argument that Congress should scrap most of the tax breaks and lower the rates more compelling.
Finally, by minimizing our tax obligations, we help grow the economy.
I hate to break this to the president, but the government doesn’t create jobs; the private sector does. When taxpayers keep more of their money, they can buy more products and services, which creates jobs. Or they may choose save it, which allows companies to borrow that money and invest it, thereby creating jobs and growing the economy.
Tax avoidance is not a global problem, as Obama asserts. It’s a tool for fighting big-spending liberals.
For seven years, Obama has pushed, and often passed, higher taxes so he can redistribute that money to his supporters and cronies. When Americans—both individuals and corporations—engage in tax avoidance, they stymie his efforts. That’s what I call real economic patriotism.
Today in 1969, MC5 demonstrated how not to protest a department store’s failure to sell your albums: Take out a Detroit newspaper ad that says “Fuck Hudsons.”
Not only did Hudsons not change its mind, Elektra Records dropped MC5.
Detective Kenneth Hutchinson of a California police department had the number one single today in 1977:
A mysterious planet that wiped out life on Earth millions of years ago could do it again, according to a top space scientist.
And some believe the apocalyptic event could happen as early as this month.
Planet Nine — a new planet discovered at the edge of the solar system in January — has triggered comet showers that bomb the Earth’s surface, killing all life, says Daniel Whitmire, of the University of Louisiana.
The astrophysicist says the planet has a 20,000-year orbit around the sun and, at its closest to us, it knocks asteroids and comets toward Earth.
Fossil evidence has suggested most life on Earth is mysteriously wiped out every 26 million to 27 million years.
Whitmire claims Planet Nine’s passage through a rock-laden area called the Kuiper Belt is responsible for the “extinction events.”
Conspiracy theorists in the ’80s and ’90s previously claimed a red dwarf planet called Nibiru or Nemesis, which orbits too close to Earth every 36,000 years, was behind the events.
Now some are convinced there will be a collision or a near miss before the end of April.
Nemesis or Nibiru was widely dismissed as crackpot pseudo-science — until Planet Nine was identified in January by the California Institute of Technology.
Maybe I better buy a Corvette sooner rather than later. After all, to quote the late great Harry Caray, it’s later than you think.
Kevin Binversie writes about Senator for Life Russ Feingold:
What a difference six years makes.
Facing defeat squarely in the eye in 2010, Russ Feingold and “progressive” commentators did all they could to stave off political oblivion. One of the most curious, was embracing a narrative that the “Middleton Maverick” was as “Tea Party” as they come.
Pro-gun, anti-bank, and a staunch defender of civil liberties, Russ Feingold should appeal to the Tea Party crowd.
Here’s a quick political quiz:
Which candidate running for U.S. Senate this year just released a radio ad attacking his opponent for being insufficiently vigilant about citizens’ Second Amendment rights?
Hint: This candidate frequently invokes the Constitution, and has taken lone-wolf positions opposing government wiretapping and other forms of Big Brother-like over-reaching. This candidate also opposed the Obama Administration’s recently passed financial reform legislation, saying it did doesn’t end “too big to fail” and won’t stop more bailouts of the banks.
Rand Paul?
Sharron Angle?
Nope. Make that Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.
Feingold and his campaign would continue this narrative all the way through the debates*. At the Wisconsin Broadcasters’ Association debate, Feingold boasted that he knew the Constitution better than Ron Johnson.
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) used his first debate against self-funding Republican nominee Ron Johnson Friday night to extend an olive branch to the tea party movement that’s poised to rattle races across the midterm map.
Feingold, who is trailing Johnson by single digits in most public polls, first took a swipe at his GOP opponent for being a latecomer to embracing one of the tea party’s most cherished symbols: the U.S. Constitution.
[…]
“Even though he made some comments originally about how the Patriot Act maybe had some problems, he fell in line to the Republican view, says he’s for the Patriot Act,” Feingold said, pointing out that he was the only senator to vote against the post-Sept. 11 legislation. “And the tea party people agree with me.”
“Tea party people know that I stood against the Wall Street scam from Day One, that I voted against TARP, that I voted against repealing Glass-Steagall Act that kept these guys under some control,” he said, referring to the 1930s law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Fast-forward to the 2016 rematch between Johnson and Feingold, and things have changed. Much like his garage door pledge and insistence on liberal third party groups staying out of his race, Feingold’s apparent “love” for the Tea Party has gone overboard.
“I think the Tea Party was a mistake,” he said of a recent wave of Republican lawmakers who won seats, including the Senate seat Feingold lost in 2010. “I think it’s going to turn around. I don’t think people like this whole obstructionist attitude.”
Why the sudden change of heart by Feingold?
Because he doesn’t need votes from so-called “Tea Partiers” anymore. With public polling in his favor and the public’s perception of the Tea Party much lower than it was in 2010, Feingold feels he can finally be honest about the Tea Party’s agenda. He also isn’t holding back about how he truly feels about things like Obamacare, getting the national debt under control, and other tenants of the Tea Party.
Among some in the Wisconsin Tea Party, it has become vogue to say Sen. Ron Johnson has “sold out” during his time in office. Honest people can have some disagreement over that belief, but Feingold’s statement confirms something that’s long been known – he tried to con them in 2010 and is showing that his return to the U.S. Senate would ensure he will grow government, grow debt, and rubberstamp a President Hillary Clinton.
There’s no mistake in that reasoning.
Feingold’s phoniness shows in his attempt at defining the tea party as merely obstructing Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats, instead of its original purpose to reduce the size and role of the federal government. Feingold also shows as much respect for the Second Amendment as Comrade Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
Feingold went around earlier this week claiming he was for the middle class because he supports keeping the home mortgage interest deduction. (Which certainly benefits the big banks, which purchase mortgages from smaller banks, doesn’t it?) But M.D. Kittle points out that Feingold’s tax record is not what he’s telling you:
In Wisconsin, taxes, spending and the $19.2 trillion national debt will be key issues in the closely watched contest between conservative U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, and liberal Russ Feingold, D-Middleton, the long-time former senator who Johnson beat in 2010.
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it on Sunday, “Johnson and his Republican allies are expected to harp on Feingold’s record as a U.S. senator.”
There’s a reason for that.
As Johnson and his allies like to point out, Feingold supported more than 270 tax increases during his 18-year tenure in the Senate.
The justification for his tax-and-spend record, Feingold and his allies like to point out, is in part the former senator’s focus on combating the ever-growing national debt.
“The top of my agenda is the federal deficit, making sure that as we go forward to try to get the country moving again from an economic point of view that we don’t forget that part of that has to be a serious plan to reduce the federal deficit over the next four or five years,” then Sen.-elect Feingold said during a Nov. 9, 1992 press conference in Washington, D.C.
How’d that work out?
Well, U.S. debt climbed $10 trillion during Feingold’s tenure in the Senate.
The debt clocked in at $4.2 trillion when he arrived in January 1993, and stood at $14 trillion when he left in January 2011.
Debt has gotten no relief during Johnson’s first term in office, rising about $5 trillion over that time. But Johnson backers say at least the senator has attempted to rein in runaway spending and check soaring Obama administration spending plans.
Feingold on four separate occasions voted against a resolution proposing a balanced budget constitutional amendment. Most Democrats did in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Johnson co-sponsored a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, as well as legislation demanding dollar-for-dollar spending reductions when a president asks for an increase in the debt ceiling.
The Republican-led “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill, which Johnson supported in 2011 and Democrats almost universally hated, identified more than $1 trillion in potential savings from wasteful government programs.
“This mountain of debt and the irresponsible spending that worsens it every year now threaten the hopes and dreams of future generations. This is immoral. We must stop,” Johnson notes in an issue statement on the debt and deficit.
Feingold and his supporters have billed the liberal as some kind of progressive fiscal hawk. He did, at times, draw a line in the sand on debt-raising proposals. In 2003, Feingold authored an amendment reducing by $100 million President George W. Bush’s $726 billion, 10-year tax cut.
“We are in a war, and the budget must reflect it,” Feingold said, referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Feingold seemed to have a hard time saying yes to spending cuts and no to spending.
During President Barack Obama’s first years in office, Feingold was constantly ready with an affirmative vote for a litany of spending plans. He said yes to an additional $825 billion for the economic recovery package, massive spending that Feingold argued was critical in saving the U.S. economy from ruin. He was arguably one of the deciding votes for Obamacare, pegged to cost taxpayers about $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
And over his time in the Senate, Feingold supported hundreds of millions of dollars in increases for Medicaid and other social welfare programs.
“Senator Feingold hasn’t met a tax he didn’t want to raise, and he has a long record of choosing to raise taxes on hardworking Wisconsin families, rather than make the tough choices to keep government fiscally responsible,” said Pat Garrett spokesman for theRepublican Party of Wisconsin. …
In his first year alone, Feingold voted at least 25 times in support of higher taxes, according to a review of Congressional Quarterly vote tallies.
Feingold voted to kill an amendment to eliminate instructions to the Finance Committee for a $32 billion tax increase over five years on Social Security beneficiaries. The revenue increase was created by hiking from 50 percent to 85 percent the amount of benefits subject to tax for single recipients with incomes of more than $25,000 and couples with more than $32,000. The amendment would have cut new spending by the same amount in order to meet the same deficit-reduction targets in the resolution.
A further review of the Congressional Quarterly records found that the senator also that year voted against exempting small businesses or family farms from increased taxes on income that is reinvested in the business. The costs would have been offset by cutting discretionary spending. Feingold backed a 1994 budget reconciliation bill that raised $241 billion in revenue through tax hikes.
In 2001, Feingold voted at least 30 times to raise taxes, including voting against the adoption of a concurrent resolution to implement a 10-year budget plan calling for $1.8 trillion in tax cuts over the period, according to CQ.
Again, Feingold argued in part that such tax cuts would only expand the deficit, even as he voted for spending increases that did just that.
Two years later, the senator voted for tax increases 41 times, the review found.
Between 2007 and 2008, Feingold supported hiking taxes at least 45 times, including voting against an amendment to provide an employee payroll tax holiday over a six-month period. That time, the senator went against Obama, who traded Congress a two-year extension on the Bush-era tax cuts for the payroll tax holiday.
“Senator Feingold spent 18 years in Washington supporting big government over Wisconsin families and small businesses, and his hundreds of votes in favor of higher taxes prove it,” said Brian Reisinger, Johnson campaign spokesman. “Wisconsinites fired Senator Feingold in 2010 because he voted for policies that raised taxes and grew the government instead of growing the economy.”
Jen Kuznicki explains why if you’re looking for a reform conservative presidential candidate, it won’t be Donald Trump:
A lot has been said about so-called New York values. It was said by Donald Trump in 1999 to mean “liberal values” when it came to social issues. Today he swears it means how people came together after 9/11. The definition keeps changing to fit the times, yet looking at Trump’s past, perhaps it means “being on the take,” which may be loosely what Ted Cruz has intimated by using the phrase.
Certainly, you could describe the state’s Democrats as “being on the take,” after all, that’s what socialism is. As Margaret Thatcher used to say: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Cruz has hit the Democrats who run New York on their failed socialist utopia, but the Donald’s past is rife with screwing the taxpayer for his own benefit.
Using other people’s money is how Donald Trump got ahead; in fact, he was the subject of an LA Times report in 2011 titled, “Trump has thrived with government’s generosity.” The Times focused, as all leftists do, on the amount of money Trump short-changed the government through tax abatements and tax credits, but the article also cited the fact that he has actively sought money from the taxpayers to give himself a leg up, building that tremendous company.
Trump’s first deal in Manhattan was to transform the Hotel Commodore into a luxury hotel. He sought, and received, taxpayer money to make the renovation, and got a 40-year tax abatement to boot.
Was it stupid of the city council to approve these taxpayer funds to help Trump turn a profit? Of course; however, there is no question that Trump has been on the take for decades.
Trump asked the federal government for $200 million to augment the highway near an abandoned railroad yard, which would be the site for his new luxury hotel. Once a congresswoman secured the money, Trump would promise lower income units to qualify for yet another federally subsidized loan for his hotel. Not all of his pressure on federal monies worked, but he secured some of that and much more in the form of tax abatements from the state.
So early on, Trump had “them” coming and going. “Them” meaning the taxpayers. In a documentary entitled “Trump the Movie,” Donald was quoted as having laughed about how easy it was to convince government entities to give him money for his projects. Add to that the years upon years of tax abatements — just asking for them shows he has zero respect for the taxpayers of his home state and the nation.
But Donald Trump’s mentor, his father Fred, also used government largesse to create his empire. “Without FHA,” wrote Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, “Fred Trump would have been running a supermarket (one of his earlier investments). With it, he became the biggest builder in Brooklyn.”
This is why Donald’s mentality is that government is there to help you get ahead, instead of get out of your way to allow you to get ahead. Donald would never want the free market to remain truly free, because there would be nothing left for him to use to one-up the other guy (usually small businesses).
Coming back to New York values and the trickster way Trump twisted the meaning to invoke the emotions of 9/11, it is also true that Donald even took taxpayer dollars that were meant for small businesses as part of a recovery package after the terrorist attack.
The Weekly Standard reported back in February that federal funds, distributed by New York State, that were earmarked for small businesses affected by the terrorist attack ended up padding Trump’s pockets.
Remembering that day, how the reporters and others on the scene ran to get inside small restaurants and stores when the towers came down, it is not hard to back some sort of aid for these businesses covered in grey choking dust, debris and damage. But Donald Trump horned in on that package, too. After affirmatively asserting in an interview with German television that none of his properties were damaged and he is certainly not a small business owner, he received $150,000 from the aid package. Trump’s invoking the people that helped one another after 9/11 — a lofty, emotional plea — is sullied by the fact that he grabbed money meant for the small businesses during that horrific time for himself.
That’s not how business works. That’s how business helps government control the rest of us.
One of the main concepts that drives the conservative movement today is the abolishment of corporate welfare, of business-government partnerships, because what ends up happening is exactly what Donald did. He used government contacts to grab taxpayer dollars, threw cash at politicians, all to better his standing. His tactics are that of welfare queens and fraudulent disability claimants.
And who gets left in the lurch? It is the small businesses that make up the bulk of employers in this nation, who aren’t politically connected, who aren’t wasting millions on lobbyists and leveraging the taxpayer for sweet deals. Worse, being on the take destroys competition, and if capitalism is anything, it is competitive. When Trump and others step on the taxpayers to get ahead, capitalism is dead, and without capitalism, our nation can never be made great again.
A former boss of mine was a huge fan of the Rolling Stones. His wife was a huge fan of the Beatles. The two bands crossed paths today in 1963 at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, England.
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, the Illinois Crime Commission released its list of “drug-oriented records” …
You’d think given the culture of corruption in Illinois that the commission would have better and more local priorities. On the other hand, the commission probably was made up of third and fourth cousins twice removed of Richard Daley and other Flatland politicians, so, whatever, man.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 