For this to be mere irony would mean that Obama and everyone around him are completely blind to the fact that he nominated a score of tax cheats to his cabinet. Of course, for it to be hypocrisy would mean that they know and don’t care. Paying taxes is for the ruled, not the rulers.

So which is it: irony or hypocrisy? I’ll be charitable and let you decide. But keep in mind that the person in charge of the agency enforcing this edict is Timothy ‘turbotax cheat’ Geithner. Maybe Charles Rangel can help enforce this as well?

Tax problems

If this is how Obama is going to pivot from the direct loss in Mass in his second year of office

Obama Seen as Anti-Business by 77% of U.S. Investors

Our Leftist President and Congress, at odds with the American people, fully intend to ram ‘Healthcare Reform’ down our throats no matter what– for our own good! “They’ll learn to love it,” they say. Hope and Change indeed. But Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are more likely to feel feedback of another sort from voters if they continue down this road of arrogance and ruin.

Carville poll: Only a third of voters support Barack Obama’s national health-care plan

According to Democracy Corps, likely voters have a sharply negative view of the president’s health-care and economic plans, and a far more favorable view of Republicans than they did a few months ago. Because Democracy Corps was founded by Democrats James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, the firm’s findings have significant influence in national Democratic circles.  ~dailycaller.com

Just another example of how Obama is bringing America together.

In light of this what is the best course of action? When your ideologically driven political agenda is distasteful to most Americans is it wise to disregard the will of the people and double-down? To attempt to ram the legislation through no matter what? Democrats have already hinted that they will try to delay seating Brown if he wins in Massachusetts Tuesday because his election will lose them their 60 seat filibuster safety margin.

Some are hinting that they must cheat in order to win this seat– to save healthcare and to, ‘keep those bastards out [of office].’

A defeat in Massachusetts will not translate into anything resembling thoughtful consideration of the people’s will. Not for Obama and not for Congress.

President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say.

“This is not a moment that causes the president or anybody who works for him to express any doubt,” a senior administration official said. “It more reinforces the conviction to fight hard.” ~dyn.politico.com

And the queen of the House has issued a proclamation as well:

“Let’s remove all doubt, we will have health care — one way or another,” Pelosi said. “Back to the drawing board means a great big zero for the American people.”  ~sfgate.com

The American people don’t want it, but that sure that doesn’t seem to matter to the left.

“…we will have health care — one way or another,” Pelosi said.

U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms

The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document. ~washingtonpost.com

My first thought upon hearing this was that this is the deathknell of our democracy. First, go after the money. Total and complete political meddling.

Besides seizing a company outright, the document states, the Treasury Secretary could use a range of tools to prevent its collapse, such as guaranteeing losses, buying assets or taking a partial ownership stake. Such authority also would allow the government to break contracts, such as the agreements to pay $165 million in bonuses to employees of AIG’s most troubled unit. ~washingtonpost.com

Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism.

Because the free market has failed? What– failed to reward blatant liberal bias? Failed to reward shoddy reporting and a failure to check facts? Failed to keep afloat journalists who skew their stories so routinely that the new objectiveness is in fact liberalism. The reason for these failures is that journalism = liberalism. There is no objectivity.

…We begin with the notion that journalism is a public good, that it has broad social benefits far beyond that between buyer and seller. Like all public goods, we need the resources to get it produced. This is the role of the state and public policy. It will require a subsidy and should be regarded as similar to the education system or the military in that regard. Only a nihilist would consider it sufficient to rely on profit-seeking commercial interests or philanthropy to educate our youth or defend the nation from attack. With the collapse of the commercial news system, the same logic applies. Just as there came a moment when policy-makers recognized the necessity of investing tax dollars to create a public education system to teach our children, so a moment has arrived at which we must recognize the need to invest tax dollars to create and maintain news gathering, reporting and writing with the purpose of informing all our citizens.

So, if we can accept the need for government intervention to save American journalism, what form should it take? In the near term, we need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big. Let’s eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.

What to do about newspapers? Let’s give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers. The newspapers would have to publish at least five times per week and maintain a substantial “news hole,” say at least twenty-four broad pages each day, with less than 50 percent advertising. In effect, this means the government will pay for every citizen who so desires to get a free daily newspaper subscription, but the taxpayer gets to pick the newspaper–this is an indirect subsidy, because the government does not control who gets the money. This will buy time for our old media newsrooms–and for us citizens–to develop a plan to establish journalism in the digital era. We could see this evolving into a system to provide tax credits for online subscriptions as well.  ~thenation.com

Couple this with the fairness doctrine and what do you have? State-run and approved media.

New York’s Mike Bloomberg, mayor of an economically damaged city, has noted the pointlessness of raising taxes on the rich when their wealth is plummeting, or of eliminating the charitable deduction for people who have less to give anyway.

True but irrelevant. Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, “Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities.” The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of “wealth” from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget’s “Top One Percent of Earners” chart.

The White House says its goal is simple “fairness.” That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, “it is our duty to change it.”  ~online.wsj.com

The Obama agenda is a morality agenda. This isn’t about economics its about morality. Specifically forcing one morality on everyone.

But is this the policy that Obama got elected on? A tax cut for 95% of all Americans? Conservative fiscal discipline? Cutting the deficit and outlawing earmarks? Already in the first 50 days this is nothing if not a trainwreck of lies and broken promises.

• The ‘tax cut’ is estimated to actually be $13 extra a week from changing the withholding tables not the tax rates — meaning that it is not actually a tax cut if you’re still paying the same rate.
• A trillion dollars of increased spending in the first five weeks alone with more spending to come.
• Budget increase to $3.6 trillion dollars in the first year of office.
• A trillion dollars in tax increases.
• No earmarks ‘next year’ as Obama signs bill with 9000+ earmarks
• Federal takeover of Healthcare…

pic stolen from gatewaypundit!

Some argue that capitalism itself has failed and free market ideology is the problem. Hence the Obama Solution: tax, spend, control. Repeat.

Higher taxes not just on the wealthy but on everyone and everything. Notably energy.

Republicans had one chance to turn back the tide of tax and spend policies but failed to seize it. Republicans controlled all three branches of government. Did they follow through on their platform? No. They compromised. They may have slowed the growth of government in comparison to the extent that Democrats would have but in the end will anyone note this?

Culture of corruption update:

By GEOFF EARLE Post Correspondent
March 11, 2009

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has gone from frequent flier to jet-aircraft connoisseur, with aides berating military officials to get the best planes, e-mails revealed yesterday.

Pelosi, who clashed with the military to get nonstop service when she flies home to California with police protection on government planes, revealed a particular fondness for Gulfstream’s sleek G-5 – a plane glamorized in Hollywood films and rap videos.

“It is my understanding there are no G-5s available for the House during the Memorial Day recess. This is totally unacceptable . . . The speaker will want to know where the planes are,” a Pelosi aide wrote in an angry e-mail to the military. ~nypost.com

These people are out of control. Mitch McConnell says they are spending $1 Billion dollars an hour!

“In just 50 days, Congress has voted to spend about $1.2 trillion between the Stimulus and the Omnibus,” McConnell says. “To put that in perspective, that’s about $24 billion a day, or about $1 billion an hour—most of it borrowed. There’s simply no question: government spending has spun out of control.”  ~politico.com

So what it begins to look like is that all these years that Democrats were using spending as a cudgel against republicans the reality is that the precense of the GOP in power was actually holding back Democrats from spending like drunken sailors (which is in fact an insult to drunken sailors everywhere).

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” ~Barack Hussein Obama, Missouri, October 30, 2008 – (Now with youtube video!)

Fundamentally transforming America? Too bad the complete and total economic ruin of this country will be the result of this effort, but then you can’t make an omelet if you don’t break a few eggs, right?

Obama ran as a centrist, a moderate, a conservative even; and once again we see that if we don’t know how the left has redefined a term we have no idea what they mean. He is decidedly not a centrist and certainly wants to conceal just how radical his agenda really is. We have seen a purposeful strategy of talking conservative and then doing liberal. All to what end?

The current economic free-fall is not unwelcome to the Obama administration, in fact, it may be crucial to their plans. It is the perfect opportunity.

Hillary Clinton:

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience Friday “never waste a good crisis,” and highlighted the opportunity of rebuilding economies in a greener, less energy-intensive way. ~in.reuters.com

Rahm Emmanuel:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” ~allthenewsthatfits.wordpress.com

Obama:

Obama: Crisis is time of ‘great opportunity’

WASHINGTON – As the dreadful economic news piles up, President Barack Obama challenged the nation Saturday to not just hang in there but rather to see the hard times as a chance to “discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.” ~msnbc.msn.com

As Jonah Goldberg so perfectly illustrates:

Imagine a child falls down a well. Now imagine I offer to lend the parents my ladder to save her, but only if they promise to paint my house. Would you applaud me for not letting a crisis go to waste? Or would you think I’m a jerk?

I ask because I’m trying to come to terms with Rule No. 1 of the Obama administration.

“Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,”  ~LA Times

Read the manual

Why is crisis important to a community organizer? Well, for starters, it’s in the manual. Chicago radical Saul Alinski is the father of liberal ‘community organizers’ and Obama and Michelle are students and followers of his in Chicago. They’ve quoted him in their speeches and they have set about to do exactly as he has advised in order to ‘transform America’.

The opening sentence of “Rules for Radicals: A pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals,” by Saul Alinski:

“What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Alinsky describes his ideology as the, “Ideology of Change,” and in describing  how to bring about that change Alinski says, essentially, that the ends justify the means when “mass salvation” is juxtaposed against “personal salvation.”

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.

…the third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.

Why am I quoting from Rules for Radicals? Because it is highly relevant and I believe that it is the blueprint for Obama’s entire political career; indeed his entire campaign for president seems to be lifted from it’s pages.

In little over a month Obama has begun the first step of his radical agenda by deepening the economic crisis. Spending a trillion dollars (in addition to and outside the annual budget)  in the first month alone. That’s twice as much as has been spent on the entire Iraq war over six years! 

He has instituted Cap and trade, which is certain to drive energy costs to unimaginable levels. Far eclipsing any theoretical $13 tax cut for 95% of all Americans. Obama himself describes it as bankrupting Coal Power plants.

Facts, aides said, would be the cornerstone of the administration’s public relations push. Officials faced a tough haul, even as Mr. Orszag and others said the proposal would raise taxes on wealthy Americans and increase energy costs.

Mr. Emanuel said energy costs are too low anyway. ~washingtontimes.com

He has outlined his economic policy as one of ‘fairness’, and pitting the rich against the poor, promising businesses and investors tax increases and punishment for profits.

His proposed budget for this year is $3.6 trillion dollars in addition to a trillion dollar stimulus and who knows how many other emergency spending bills.

Every time Obama releases details about his agenda the stock market goes down and he says he doesn’t care. Why? Why would a President be completely unconcerned with the stock market plunging daily? It could be because he believes that the money in the stock market is in the wrong hands. And his whole plan is to put that money in the hands of those he thinks are more worthy.

To do that he must first prepare the battlefield. Soften up his targets.

–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.

There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.”

And this is the method of the first five weeks of the Obama administration’s madness of presiding over the largest stock market decline in the history of the United States.

For the last seven or eight years the left has constantly harangued the country and accused the Bush administration of using crisis as a pretext for an imagined fascist takeover. Many even outright claimed that Bush caused/planned/executed the 9/11 terrorist attack in order to become a dictator. But what we are witnessing today is nothing less than a revolutionary coup.

I, for one, agree with Rush Limbaugh in hoping, even praying, that Obama fails in this attempt to radically restructure the American political-economic system. The mess we are in has nothing to do with an imagined lack of utopian social justice.

The Prince of Wales is preparing to tell the world we have “less than 100 months to act” before the damage caused by global warming becomes irreversible. ~news.sky.com

A worldwind tour campaigning for Global Climate change. Hopping on the Royal 747 no doubt jetting from country to country sounding the alarm about how we need to cut corbon emissions or WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!! Yes, that’s the way it’s done. Hypocrisy intact.

Only 100 months to act!

Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake.

True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent.

The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state. ~Vladimer Putin

The Rooskies know socialism when they see it.