Monthly Archives: November 2012

When they tell you they need to raise taxes to pay for teachers and cops and firemen…

Don’t be fooled. It’s really for stuff like this:

Head Of Fed Dept Wasted Thousands In SUV Rental For Three Block Drive

A federal audit obtained by Channel 2 Action News reveals the head of a federal government agency used tax money to lease a pricy SUV and a driver to avoid a three-block walk in Washington, D.C. The Federal Maritime Commission spent more than $1,600 a month for a 2011 Chevy Tahoe, fully loaded with leather seats and GPS. The agency also spent up to $75 an hour for a staff member to drive the vehicle in the nation’s capital. According to paperwork reviewed Channel 2’s Scott MacFarlane, at least 105 of the trips made with the vehicle were used to shuttle the agency’s chairman, Richard Lidinsky, a short distance from his office to a nearby train station. Walking between the two points could take less than 10 minutes.

We don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.

The Obama Administration is living in, and selling, a fiction

And the best part is, this essay is from a Left-Wing hipster blog.

You can’t solve America’s fiscal crisis by increasing taxes on the rich. That Obama continues to insist on this course reveals his true intent: a permanently larger government controlling the economy, and a diminished private sector. Kind of like Europe.

In Obama’s world, government is the source of jobs and economic growth. Government is a capital provider—preferably, the main one, with private banks operating under strict government supervision as regulated utilities (by the way, the government’s plan for the eight largest banks, released quietly last week, actually uses the words “regulated utility model” to describe the intended regulatory framework).

Government tells people what to do, and what not to do. Government is the great leveler. All will be equal in their access to goods and services in the Obama utopian government-run world.

Just like France.

Obama can’t explain how it’s paid for, though. He probably doesn’t understand that anyway. All he knows is that after the banquet he is throwing, “the rich” will be presented with the bill. They’ll be “asked” to pay it, but they won’t really have any choice. They won’t have enough money, either, because the bill is larger than their annual income, by a considerable amount.

Goodbye America. Hello USSR.

Congratulations Unionistas! You put Hostess out of business. I hope you choke on your food stamps.

They wouldn’t accept an 8% pay cut. So now their pay cut is 100%.

Hostess-rip

Hostess filed for liquidation. No more Twinkies. No more fruit pies. No more Ding Dongs. And no more jobs for 18,500 people.

But it’s also another 18,500 Obamabots who are now totally dependent on the munificence of Dear Leader, so there’s that.

Bakers-union-killed-twinkies

Unions suck.

Prayers for two fine bloggers

Sad news tonight. Amusing Bunni, a stalwart friend of the blogophere, a warrior for all that is right and just, is dying. She’s got terminal liver cancer. Doctors say 3 to 6 months, tops. Zilla is collecting donations on her behalf. 

She needs other things as well, including our love, prayers, and support. Bunni is in the Chicago area so if there is a blogger reading this in or near that region, she would like to talk with you. She’s going to need help finding resources for assistance quickly, so if you are familiar with charitable organizations in her area, please let her know about them or let me know and I’ll pass the information along. Bunni lives with her adorable cat (the one in all those delightful videos) and we are going to need to help her make arrangements for Kittenkins’ care when that becomes necessary.

Always prayers, of course. Send prayers. Please.

Also I’ve learned that Steven den Beste has suffered what he calls a “mild” stroke. Don’t know the prognosis yet, and he’s already headed to rehab, but again prayers are always needed.

I could say something here about how Obamacare was supposed to obviate the need for begathons on behalf of our friends. Universal Health Care cures all!

Except that’d be tacky. So we rally the troops instead. Because that’s what people who really care always do. 

Well, now we know why traffic is always so screwed up…

Crazy women drivers!

Road reversal: More women have driver’s licenses than men in U.S.

Women have passed men on the nation’s roads. More women than men now have driver’s licenses, a reversal of a longtime gender gap behind the wheel that transportation researchers say is likely to have safety and economic implications.

If current trends continue, the gap will only widen. The share of teens and young adults of both sexes with driver’s licenses is declining, but the decline is greater for young men, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. The study looked at gender trends in driver’s licenses between 1995 and 2010.

“The changing gender demographics will have major implications on the extent and nature of vehicle demand, energy consumption, and road safety,” predicted Michael Sivak, co-author of the study.

That highway’s not jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive…

He taxed Olympic Medals, so of course Obama wants his cut of your Hurricane Sandy insurance check

Before you cash your insurance check make sure you figure out how much of it goes to Dear Leader.

Watch Out: You Might Have a Taxable Involuntary Conversion Gain:

When you have insurance coverage for disaster-related property damage — under a homeowners, renters, or business policy — you might actually have a taxable gain instead of a deductible casualty loss. Why? Because if the insurance proceeds exceed the tax basis of the damaged or destroyed property (normally equal to its cost), you have a taxable profit as far as the IRS is concerned. This is the case even if the insurance company doesn’t fully compensate you for the pre-casualty value of the property. These gains are called involuntary conversion gains — because the casualty event causes your property to suddenly be converted into cash from the insurance proceeds.

For example, you could have a big involuntary conversion gain if your valuable vacation home is heavily damaged or destroyed and your insurance coverage greatly exceeds what you paid for the property when you bought it years ago.

If you have an involuntary conversion gain, it generally must be reported as income on your Form 1040 unless you (1) make sufficient expenditures to repair or replace the property and (2) make a special tax election to defer the gain. If you make the election (you generally should), you have a taxable gain only to the extent the insurance proceeds exceed what you spend to repair or replace the property. The expenditures for repairs or replacement generally must occur within the period beginning on the date the property was damaged or destroyed and ending two years after the close of the tax year in which you have the involuntary conversion gain.

Because, you know, you haven’t suffered enough. And those Obamaphones don’t pay for themselves.

500 years from now…

We Came On A Ship They Called Mayflower; We Came On A Ship That Sailed The Moon

They met in secret.  No one is really sure how it started.  It was sometime after the fall, sometime after the riots, but before the biolords.  The world was a dark place and individual life worth nothing.  Or less than that.

We can’t tell you for sure how it was or when, because they didn’t talk.  A secretive sect with illogical beliefs, they gathered in twos in threes, they trusted only those closest to them.

It is said they carried – and later on, when recognized as a religion and before the prohibition – they wore, sewn on their clothes, a patch that was supposed to be a piece of a true flag once flown in their lost homeland.

But in the beginning, who knows what they were, and who they were?  A persecuted people, with a lost cause, considered dangerous by every land in the world.  Not quite a political belief, not quite a religion, and yet a bit of both.

By the time they came to public notice, this much was already established: they believed that the USA, that mythical, perhaps never-existing land was a special place, blessed by G-d, a place where humanity for the first time reached the heights of what it was meant to be, the heights of its potential.  Stories were told of freedom and riches, of ships that could reach the moon, of tolerance for all beliefs, all faiths, all skin colors.  We’re sure at least half of this must be exaggerated if not fabricated.

They also believed in two “holy books” the Constitution and the declaration of independence.  They sang The Star Spangled Banner, and the Battle Hymn of The Republic and inclined their heads, and prayed for strength to go on believing.

The afterlife didn’t interest them.  You were allowed to believe in it or not, as you pleased.  Some members developed an idea that the deserving hero would be born again in a reconstituted promised land, when the time came.

They named their children with the names of their heroes and omitted the middle name that made it particular: Benjamin (Franklyn); George (Washington); Samuel (Adams) and others, even the generals of a long forgotten war said to be for freedom and equality.

Through the night of centuries, five hundred long years, while principalities, mandates, caliphates and satrapies, while world governments, engineered rulers, rational systems and monarchies succeeded each other, they survived in the dark, in silence.  Briefly legal, then punishable with death, yet they carried on.

Through a revolution, through recolonization of their lost land they survived.

Read the whole thing. And weep for our children.