Patterico Explains It All

This cannot possibly be improved.

Looks like the cash-for-clunkers program may be near an end. I don’t qualify; I made the mistake of buying a fuel-efficient car in 2000.

Didn’t get any money for my house either. I made the mistake of getting a mortgage I could afford.

I’d love to get my student loans paid off — but dammit, I paid them off myself.

I’m trying to think if there’s some area of life where I can be stupid and irresponsible now, so I can get paid by Obama in the future. Because so far I’ve really screwed myself by doing things right.

And the winner of best comment on the thread so far:

Why work for a living when you can vote for one instead?

Tax Cuts For The Rich!

(and other assorted fiction).

Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the "rich" are not paying their fair share of taxes.

Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.

Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. In 2007, the bottom 95 percent paid 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. This is down from the 58 percent of the total income tax burden they paid twenty years ago.

To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined.

Taxes For Thee, But Not For Me

Or, as my grandfather always puts it, "Never a problem to order steak for everyone when you're not paying the bill".

Wait For It....Wait For It....

and there it is!

The intraparty dispute had racial overtones. One African-American Democrat, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia, pointed out that the seven Blue Dog Democrats holding up the health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee were “a nondiverse group” of white men.

Question to all liberals: what, exactly, is the amount of minorities that you need to have in a group for it to be "diverse"?

So Right, Yet So Wrong

You know the whole healthcare dog-and-pony show is in trouble when even Pravda DC is saying it's a bad idea.

But what I thought particularly hilarious was the equivocating paragraph used to at least preserve some shred of leftist cred.

THERE IS a serious case to be made that the U.S. income tax system should become more progressive. The average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households shrank from 33 percent in 1986 to about 23 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of adjusted gross income claimed by that highest-earning sliver of American society doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. So, in principle, higher taxes for the well-heeled could make sense -- as part of a broader rationalization of the unduly complex tax code.

However, what the non-mathematicians leave out is the fact that, while their share of income doubled (increased by 100%), their taxes only fell by 30% (23% divided by 33% = 70%). In other words, if you were making $100 before and paying $33 in taxes, you're making $200 now and paying $46 in taxes.

That explains why a) the total share of Federal taxes paid by the top 1% has gone steadily UP since 2001 and b) the Treasury was collecting record revenues prior to the crash.

Question: What, exactly, SHOULD the top 1% be paying, then?

What Newspapers Does Pelosi Read?

Because evidently one of them isn't the New York Times.]

The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, senior military and intelligence officials said.

The previously undisclosed C.I.A. list includes key Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials said. The names of about two dozen terrorist leaders have recently been on the lethal-force list, officials said. "It's the worst of the worst," an official said.

President Bush has provided written legal authority to the C.I.A. to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation. Some officials said the terrorist list was known as the "high-value target list."

But of course, the Obama Party insists they never knew anything about it.

What Founding Father Am I?

It's the ginger thing, I guess.

New Truisms for Our Society

If you even consider airing an advertisement critical of socialized medicine, Obama will shut you down.

If your legal case that you won threatens the confirmation of an Obama nominee, Obama will have you publicly smeared.

Hope and change!

Who Knew?

For those of you who don't go around reading the DSM-IV, here's a bit about what one of the larger Internet exams says about me.

Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion |||||||||||||||||| 78% Stability |||||||||||||||| 62% Orderliness |||||||||||| 46% Accommodation |||||||||||||||||| 74% Interdependence |||||||||||| 50% Intellectual |||||||||||||||| 70% Mystical |||||||||||||||| 70% Artistic |||||||||||||| 56% Religious |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Hedonism || 10% Materialism |||||| 30% Narcissism |||||||||||| 50% Adventurousness |||||| 30% Work ethic |||||||||||||||||||| 83% Humanitarian |||||||||||||||||| 76% Conflict seeking |||||||||||||||| 63% Need to dominate |||||||||||||| 56% Romantic |||||||||||| 43% Avoidant || 10% Anti-authority |||||| 23% Wealth |||||||||| 36% Dependency |||| 16% Change averse |||||||||||| 50% Cautiousness |||||||||||||| 56% Individuality |||||||||||| 50% Sexuality |||||||||||||||| 70% Peter pan complex |||||||||||| 43% Family drive |||| 16% Physical Fitness |||||||||||||||||||| % Histrionic |||||| 30% Paranoia |||||| 23% Vanity |||||||||||| 43% Honor |||||||||||||||| 63% Thriftiness |||||||||||||||||||| 90%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality test by similarminds.com

And, more specifically:

Stability results were moderately high which suggests you are relaxed, calm, secure, and optimistic.

Orderliness results were medium which suggests you are moderately organized, hard working, and reliable while still remaining flexible, efficient, and fun.

Extraversion results were high which suggests you are overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense too often of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity.

F'ing Brilliant

She just changed the paradigm.

Gov. Sarah Palin announced Friday that she will step down as Alaska's chief executive by the end of the month. She will not seek election to a second gubernatorial term in 2010.

Ace and Allah seem pretty convinced that this is the end for her.

Says Ace, “It’s over. You can’t resign from a governorship and then run for higher office.” I agree. Placing your ambition over your commitment to the state looks shady, especially for someone who won’t have a single full term as governor under her belt for the primaries.

Love you, guys, but that analysis and those objections are based on 11/3 tactics -- or, more precisely, the maxims of politics that were in place prior to November 4th, 2008.

Let's go over them in more detail, shall we?

Substance always trumps style. Palin should concentrate on serving her term in Alaska so she has a record of accomplishments there, and then she can run.

There are two phrases that ruin that one completely: "President Barack Obama" and "Senator Al Franken".

Seriously, fellas. If substance were what mattered, we'd be back in the good old days where every word out of the President's mouth was a lie, every misstep was a scandal, and Helen Thomas's diatribes about controlled press conferences would have been six months earlier.

Palin has a tremendous record already of fiscal conservativism, fighting corruption, doing what's right, and sticking up for principles of good government. No one cared. They were all too busy dancing along to "HopeyChange, The Musical" and vague promises to be even looking at Obama's dismal record, much less hers.

Substance is indeed important. But what Palin has recognized is that substance is irrelevant unless it is heard, which brings us to:

You can overcome blatant and obvious media bias by having great, perfectly-timed interviews and speechmaking opportunities.

Um, no. There are enough times when TelePrompTer Jesus has fallen into the Pit of "Uhhhhhhs" and Land of 57 States to demonstrate that foulups in message don't really matter -- unless those are the only clips that the Main$tream Media has to run.

As a former point guard, Sarah knows the gospel of the run-and-gun: it doesn't matter if you only make half your shots if you're taking twice as many of them. The only way to prevent yourself from being pigeonholed by the media is to flood the zone with bigger and better material, and dilute the impact of anything negative.

With that in mind, we come to the last maxim:

Staying put is better than being branded a quitter.

Problem with that one is this: it assumes that the people who are most likely to attack Palin would be cowed by her staying in office.

Doubtful at best.

This is simple political calculus. To win against Obama, Palin needs to do only one thing: get her face and story out in the media on her terms.

That simply cannot be done while she is governor of Alaska. Her job precludes it. She is hamstrung both by her official duties, which she cannot neglect, and the fact that, as governor, she is subject to abuse of good-government laws by Obama's flying monkeys. It's the worst Catch-22; if she fulfills her duties and responsibilities, people can take constant potshots at her without her being able to fight back, and if she fights back, they'll claim she's putting her interests ahead of her constituency.

Palin has come to one of the most empowering realizations in politics: if you are going to be criticized regardless of what you do, then there's no reason you shouldn't do the right thing. By resigning her position, she has the capability now to take the initiative and attack. When David Letterman makes rape jokes about her daughter, she can pound the bejesus out of him on all three morning shows instead of having to do it by remote before the throwing out of the ceremonial first salmon. The only scheduling conflicts she'll have to worry about are the ones she chooses. She can wear what she wants, spend what she needs, and go where she pleases without worrying about frivolous "ethics complaints". Most of all, she can be out there telling her story and connecting with the people who will ultimately put her in the White House.

Most of all, she has Obama in exactly the box she was. If he stays put, she owns the media field. If he starts campaigning, she nails him for not doing his job and unleashes her own bevy of people to file ethics complaints. Sweet, ironic, and perfect.

And the obvious question? I can hear the response already: "All politicians quit their jobs to go campaigning. My constituents deserved me being honest about it. Some politicians don't care that their voters are paying them for full-time work while they're not working; I do."

I could certainly be wrong on this. But hoping to God that I'm right.

When Moonbats Attack.....Each Other

Rule #3 of Really Bad B-Movie Sci-Fi: Any monster you build to take your revenge on others will invariably come back to kill you.

And yet, people still keep building them.

Anyone got the popcorn?

Have Some Carrots, Karen

'Cause it sure looks like you're going blind.

How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature's work?

The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: "You vote for revenue and your career is over." I don't know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it's about free speech, but it's extremely unfair.

But of course, it's not "terrorism" when Speaker Karen Bass's Obama Party is the one doing the "threatening".

Love it. Exercising your constitutional right to remove an elected official with which you disagree is "terrorism" and "career-ending" -- but destroying a private individual's business and career over a political donation is perfectly OK with Karen Bass and the Obama Party.

Jenny Sanford, You Are My Hero

Word.

Jenny Sanford said Thursday that her husband Mark Sanford's political career is "not a concern of mine" and that she'd be just fine -- regardless of whether their marriage survives.

"His career is not a concern of mine," she told reporters as she departed the family's vacation home in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. "He's going to have to worry about that. I'm worried about my family and the character of my children."

She added that she would be fine, with or without her husband.

"I have great faith and great friends and great family. We have a good Lord in this world and I know that I'm going to be fine and not only will I survive, I'll thrive," she said.

"I don't know if he'll be with me, but I'm going to do my best to work on my marriage because I believe in marriage. I believe in raising good kids is the most important thing in the world," she said.

Call it, sister.

This Makes Perfect Sense, I Suppose....

if you're a complete and total idiot.

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office on Monday defended allowing about a half dozen first-time drug offenders to clear their records by going through a job-training program, even after prosecutors learned they were deportable as undocumented immigrants.

But Harris' aides said they have since made changes in the program that would prevent a recurrence of instances in which illegal immigrants got their criminal records cleared by going through the Back on Track jobs program, which trains offenders for jobs that undocumented immigrants legally would be prevented from holding.

But wait, there's more!

Harris was quoted in the Times as saying that enforcing federal immigration law was not the job of local authorities. The district attorney was explaining how her office handled the case of Alexander Izaguirre, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who had been enrolled in the Back on Track program in July when he allegedly robbed a woman of her purse in Pacific Heights, then got into an SUV that drove into the victim.

Again, given Obama Kamala's past record, this is not a surprise to anyone; it merely has become a question of just how far off a rocker one can go.

It's Not Always Bad.....

After three years of habitation here, you get used to people who know you and your opinions opining how anyone to the right of Bill Ayers can possibly live in San Francisco.

The answer: A faith in the inherent good nature and rebelliousness of people who fully realize and are used to the fact they're living under a completely-dysfunctional totalitarian state constructed on screwball ideology and run by nitwits. Sort of like Das Kapital meets A Night at the Opera.

This week's prime example:

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.....

Moore is nothing if not dutiful. He attempted to work his way through the byzantine city government channels, although he didn't get much help.

"I guess my gripe is that when the city came by and told him to get his papers in order but couldn't tell him how to do it," said Travis See, who manages the Custom Shop Clothiers on the corner of Market and New Montgomery. "This lady couldn't even tell him which building to go to so he could stand in line and waste all day."

But don't despair, folks; there is a happy ending.

Larry Moore shined so many shoes on Thursday that he ran through two bottles of polish.

Then there were the women who walked up to give him a hug, the tourists who had their photo taken with him, and the people - more than one - who stuffed $100 bills in his shirt pocket.

"Honestly," Moore said, "it is probably the best day of my life. And not for financial reasons. It just means so much to have people come out and recognize someone working hard."

Now we just have to work on the general realization that our main control on this system is failing to re-elect the idiot politicians who appoint, employ, otherwise protect, and receive generous campaign contributions from the dimbulb city employees who cause these sort of problems.

But there is hope.

It Lives....It LIVES!

It never fails. Just when you remove someone from your blogroll for lack of activity, they come back to life.

But given that it's Matt and Robbie....I have never been happier to see a reanimated corpse.

Save a Step and Skip to "Nyah, Nyah!"

Blogger Ed Whelan at The Corner offers an explanation for his behavior in outing an anonymous blogger that has to be described in only one word: "Obamaesque".

Excuse #1: "Nobody needs to be pseudonymous."

A blogger may choose to blog under a pseudonym for any of various self-serving reasons, from the compelling (e.g., genuine concerns about personal safety) to the respectable to the base. But setting aside the extraordinary circumstances in which the reason to use a pseudonym would be compelling, I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision.

With this much projection, Whelan needs to be opening a movie theater.

For some reason, despite the clear and present danger that this blogger's anonymity presents, in Whelan's opinion, the person has managed to blog for years without anyone else engaging in the same sort of e-stalking that Whelan has done. Did Whelan bother to postulate why so many other people were content to live and let live?

Excuse #2: "He's a hypocrite."

Blevins desired to be unaccountable—irresponsible—for the views he set forth in the blogosphere. He wanted to present one face to his family, friends, and colleagues and another to the blogosphere.

Based, of course, on Whelan's exhaustive analysis and Cerebro scans that says the blogger has never actually told anyone else about their blog.

The irony of this is that these kind of outings are self-fulfilling prophecies; people blog pseudononymously because they don't want their families, friends, and jobs involved in online arguments, and then people like Whelan go right ahead and drag their families, friends, and jobs into these things.

Why? Well, that leads us to Excuse #3: "It's HIS fault!"

If he wanted to avoid the risk of being associated publicly with his views, he shouldn’t have blogged.

Sure. And if people didn't want their employers picketed, their churches vandalized, or white powder mailed to their offices, they shouldn't have donated to organizations that were against Proposition 8.

This really is what puts the godawful stink on this whole process. Whelan has inadvertently made it clear that his whole point in doing this is to create problems for the blogger with said blogger's "family, friends, and colleagues". This has nothing to do with what was said; this has everything to do with creating trouble outside the blogosphere for someone who disagrees with you with the sole intent of getting them to stop doing whatever it is with which you disagree by hurting them somehow.

That isn't honest dialogue; it's hostage taking.

This blog exists primarily because of my utter revulsion and disgust for people who engage in this sort of behavior. Ed Whelan is now among them.

Roundup of opinion at Instapundit.

R.S. McCain offers a slightly-different perspective (Rule #2! Rule #2!).

Along similar lines, I'm linking Little Miss Attila's post because a) she's in California, b) she qualifies as a Talented, Sexy, and Beautiful Straight Woman Who Blogs, and 3) she has a gun and knows how to use it.

Updated the Blogroll

Any and all omissions are purely due to oversight. Email me if you want to be added (or re-added).

The Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly, Etc., Etc.

Yes, it has been quiet lately.

Perhaps the schedule will explain matters somewhat.

January 15th: Start new volunteer commitment

January 30: Start new job

February 1: Start teaching flagship classes for professional organization

February 15th: New volunteer commitment expands to two weeknights a week

February 28th: Flagship classes expand to the other two weeknights a week

March 1st: New job kicks into high gear of basically redesigning entire department

March 15th: Other instructors for flagship classes unable to teach for remaining class

March 30th: Volunteer commitment sprouts required trip to England in 30 days

April 1st: Redesign shifts to layoff of 10% of organization

April 15th: First of three weeks where I am busy every night

April 28: Give classes final exams

April 29 - 30: Perform individual layoff counseling meetings for 10% of workforce

May 1: Hop plane to England

May 5: Return from England

May 8 - 12: Family celebration and emergency

May 16: Husbear's milestone birthday celebration with 70 people, 4 staying at house

May 20: Drop off husbear at airport at 5 AM for five-day trip, run household

May 21: Massive all-day volunteer commitment

May 25: First day off in months


Man, I got tired just writing that.

Here Comes Another One

My husbear insists that this is the sign that he is successfully influencing me to be "practical".



Ha.

Although I must admit that it does suit the times; next year, when, thanks to The One, gas is $5 per gallon, inflation is at 7%, and interest rates are at 14%, I will have 34 mpg, positive equity, and 0% financing.

Not to mention a stinking huge tax deduction and credit.

Sweet.