Today’s Poser

Why do many things seem to move from conservatives toward the wrong-headed liberals ... FoxNews, Supreme Court justices, the Drudge Report, etc. ... how come so seldom does it go the other way?


STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Fractured Definition

Prognosticate — an uber-liberal’s refusal to play ice hockey

Me, a Liberal?

As conservative as I often seem, there are still some progressive ideas that attract my sympathies. In particular, I do believe income inequality is a problem that needs correcting before it forces the underclass to the streets. So the question becomes — how do we fix things within the context of a constitutional republic? Here are a few suggestions:

- Trump promised when he ran to eliminate the “carried interest” tax break for hedge fund managers. So far, nada. It’s long since time for him to keep this promise.

- The current tax law allows corporations, like Amazon, sometimes to pay zero taxes. I would be in favor of having an Alternative Minimum Tax rate for corporations ... say 5%.

- Corporations use stock options to inflate senior executives’ take-home into the tens of million dollars. This is a major reason for the huge income gap between these executives and their lowest-paid employees. Those stock options profits are often taxed at a lower capital-gains rate. As I have previously proposed, I believe that, instead, they should be considered always as ordinary income.

- There are other ways that corporations, colleges and other non-profits have to reward their higher-ups with non-taxable benefits ... non-interest-paying loans (like for Harvard’s to Elizabeth Warren), loan forgiveness, low-rent housing, etc. These perks should always be recognized and taxed as ordinary income.

- There are many schemes that the wealthy use to avoid taxes ... like donating fine art, at ridiculously inflated prices, to museums. These deductions should be reduced out of the stratosphere with some meaningful constraints.

- There are literally hundreds of other tax-avoidance mechanisms used by the wealthy to reduce their tax burden. There needs to be a house-cleaning of these work-arounds to eliminate those that are outdated and no longer provide any social benefit.


Enough? Am I now in AOC’s fifth column?


Afterthought: Actually, this fine-art donation tax avoidance might have been changed in the last tax code revision where charitable donations may no longer be deductible ... I’ll have to look into this further.

Registrate y Vota

Community organizers are essentially the ground game for the Democrat party and, in many instances, this ground game is meant to subvert the laws of the United States ... such as, in California where they are trying to register Latinos to vote so that they can support Democrat candidates in the Fall ... see: The Press Enterprise Story. This article implies that these registration efforts are only for legal immigrants ... but anyone who pays attention knows that illegals are also being recruited (now that, in many states, illegals have driver's licenses.)

And the community organizers doing this work are quite often front organizations like PICO, the Center for Community Change and many others (often funded by government grants and tax-exempt charitable donations) ... see: New York Times Article. This article also points out that many colleges are now offering courses in community organizing and acting as conduits ... feeding this progressive movement.

And these community organizers are also then used on Election Day to get out the Democrat vote.

Before he became a politician, Barack Obummer was a community organizer in Chicago for three years ... see: Byron York Article. Community organization is but one way that the Democrat party maintains its grip on governance despite the fact that only 31% of Americans consider themselves to be liberals ... see: Wall Street Journal Article. The other is liberals' insidious infiltration of higher education and our national media. As I have previously said, no well-meaning government program, like community outreach, cannot be subverted for some self-serving end.

Snake Eating Its Own Tail

Bill Maher is sounding more and more like a right-winger with every of his passing HBO shows ... see: Breitbart Video. This is a video of another of his monologues with which I can mostly agree. Can somebody ... like a snake eating its own tail ... become so liberal that one ends up being a conservative?

Language

Retail stores are going to school on our political establishment. They have learned that language or even just words can be used to influence the masses. Recently I received a brochure from Kohl’s that listed “performance tops” for $19.99 whereas its T-shirts were listed for $9.99. Essentially the same garment, Kohl’s has found a way with words to extract another $10 from its gullible customers.

Of course politicians learned this legerdemain a long long time ago. The “Affordable Care Act” (Obamacare) is anything but affordable. The only adjective that the Democrats seem to use is “extreme” or their noun is “extremists.” A number of years ago Republicans realized that “liberal” was a political killer and it was used to help defeat Dukakis’s presidential hopes. Rifles magically become “assault weapons.” When “global warming” started to lose its ability to sway, it was morphed into “climate change” … which was harder to debate. Such words are opinion-panel tested to a fair-thee-well and then disseminated to their apparatchiks to drum into the American psyche. The sad truth is that it works … facts be damned.

I have often opined on this subject under the term “Orwellian” … see: Red Flags, More Newspeak and Weasel Words. Once one’s ears are attuned to this political ruse, one cannot watch or hear a newscast or read a media message (mine included) without being bombarded with such subliminal syllabic slyness. “Illegal immigrants” become “undocumented workers.” (What happens if they are not working?) A terrorists attack at Fort Hood becomes “workplace violence.” Attempts to stop voter fraud becomes “voter suppression.” The Tea Party is besmirched (even by our President) with the smirked slur “tea baggers.” I sometimes wonder if Noam Chomsky is not on the Democrat payroll?

All I ask of you, dear reader, is please learn to filter out and ignore such blather.

The Difference

Delta -- the Mathematical Symbol for Difference

Because of the tremendous polarity that is now prevalent in Washington, I’ve lately got to thinking about what are the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans … some are quite obvious and some are a little less blatant.  Here are my assessments:

Republicans                                          Democrats                      

Guided by their heads                      Guided by their hearts

Put their country first                      Put their party first

Clustered in the heartland              Clustered on both coasts

Are for less regulation                     Are for more regulation

Male dominated                                  Female dominated

Driven by policy                                 Driven by politics

Support Israel                                      Support the Arab world

Wish a strong military (hawks)     Wish a weak military (doves)

Want less social welfare                   Want more social welfare

Anti-federalists                                    Federalists

Driven by morality                            Driven by mammon

Realistic foreign policy                     Naive foreign policy

Regulate for less taxes                      Regulate for more taxes

Pro life                                                      Pro abortion

Listen to talk radio                              Listed to network news

Very much non-ethnic                      Very much ethnic

Are mostly conservative                 Are mostly liberal

More humble                                         More hubristic

Effective administrators                   Sloppy administrators

Middle class                                           Upper and lower class

Respect religion                                   Disrespect religion

Patriotic                                                   Often unpatriotic

More passive                                          More active

Believe in the Constitution               Suspect the Constitution
Don't use Botox/plastic surgery    Use Botox/plastic surgery

And so kind reader, if you want to decide with which party you should identify, print out this list and put a check mark next to your prime tenets.  Then count up the marks and see in what party you may really belong.

Goldwater Redux

"Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me also remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Barry Goldwater, in his acceptance speech as Republican candidate for President, 1964

Barry Goldwater, with the above words, attempted to move the Republican Party back to the right after 35 years of "moderation" (read ideological coziness with the Democrats).  Unfortunately, it also cost him the 1964 Presidential election.  But, he did manage to re-plant the flag of conservatism that was then carried forward by the likes of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan.  Now, Jeb Bush, has managed to throw Barack Obama a lifeline (after The Barry's few disastrous weeks in his quest for re-election.)  His poorly-timed comments in New York City at the Bloomberg LP were:

“Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad, they would have a hard time if you define the Republican party, and I don’t, as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground,”

In response, the keeper of the conservative flame, Grover Norquist, riposted in the following quote from the Washington Post:: 

Grover Norquist is lashing out at former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) for his comments critical of Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. Bush has said in recent days that Republicans should accept a deal that includes $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. “There’s a guy who watched his father throw away his presidency on a 2:1 [ratio of spending cuts to tax increases] promise,” Norquist told Talking Points Memo . “And he thinks he’s sophisticated by saying that he’d take a 10:1 promise. ... You walk down that alley, you don’t come out. You certainly don’t come out with 2:1 or 10:1.”

Who is right in this internecine squabble?  Even though I kinda cringe at a lot of what Grover Norquist says, I do believe that the "radicalism" that is being exhibited by him and many many others in the Republican party is nothing more than a recognition of the squishiness that has seeped into the Republican ideology since Ronald Reagan's Presidency ... and the continued drift leftwards in our political ethos as a result of the ideological resolve of the radical left.  Let me offer three examples:

- President Richard Nixon in some ways was even more liberal than LBJ.  He called his approach "New Federalism" which included expansion of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the government's first affirmative action programs, and a proposal for comprehensive national health care (with an employer mandate!)

- President George W. Bush "43" prided himself as being a "compassionate conservative."  Yet, to some, he was in fact more of a "slow-walking liberal."  Witness his $4.8 trillion expansion in our national debt, his extreme ballooning of our federally-funded entitlement programs -- the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit of 2003, his huge increase in government regulations, and, with Ted Kennedy, the "No Child Left Behind" program.

- We now have the most radically-left President in our history.  Recent revelations of Barack Obama's membership in the socialist New Party (see: Breitbart Story) is just one indication of the hidden agenda that he brought with him into the White House.  Obama has been resolute in not compromising with the Republicans during his term in office.  Even when he got Speaker of the House John Boehner to agree to a $800 billion revenue (tax) increase, he reversed himself the next day and demanded $1.2 trillion.  Isn't this the kind of lack of finding a "common ground" that Jeb Bush might have highlighted?

Yes, I think we all agree that compromise should be part of politics.  But when one party is constantly and perniciously loath to move to the middle (read the Democrats) ... and this rigidity is lauded by many in the media ... this gives rise to the kind of radical mimicry that Grover Norquist represents.  The persistent and consistent take-no-prisoners attitude on the radical left is now being matched on the radical right ... and, in a way, I can't blame them.  And until there is a relenting on the left, I don't believe that there will be any relaxing on the right.  If compromise is always painted as being willing to move left, then, eventually, the body politic revolts and gives rise to the Tea Party and the kind of reaction we just witnessed in uber-liberal Wisconsin ... in its failure to recall its conservative Governor, Scott Walker.

This is why Grover Norquist, the modern-day Barry Goldwater, might indeed be a good thing for our nation in the long run ... even though he is a bit of an anathema currently.

Canard Test

There is a somewhat suspicious old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.  We now have a true-to-life test of this canard in that our uber-liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and his guests were recently robbed by a machete-wielding intruder in his Nevis vacation home (see: Fox News Story).

Side Bar: Does anyone believe that any vacation home on Nevis is only worth between $100,000 and $250,000 ... as reported by Breyer in his latest financial disclosure statement?  Or is this the real canard?