Commentary by James Shott
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave a speech on the Senate floor last week where he said this about the disastrous implementation of the Affordable Care Act: "Despite all that good news, there’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue."
This abjectly stupid remark ignores the problems millions of the people Harry Reid serves as Majority Leader have encountered at the hands of this Democrat-created nightmare, some of them with life-threatening consequences.
Some say he really was alluding to claims made in ads paid for by the Koch brothers, about which he specifically commented shortly after that major gaffe, claiming the Kochs are trying to “buy America” through Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)(4) started by David Koch and Richard Fink.
He believes that the Koch brothers are the single greatest threat to liberty, “spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling Americans that Obamacare is bad for them.”
However, Koch Industries donated less than $3 million in the 2012 election cycle, earning 77th place on the Top Donor List of OpenSecrets.org. Americans for Prosperity is reported to have spent $40 million, but does not appear on the Top Donor List.
Top Donor organizations ahead of Koch Industries include: the National Education Association, #5 at $14.7 million; the United Auto Workers, #8 at $13.3 million; the American Federation of State/County/Municipal Employees, #10 at $11.4 million; the AFL-CIO, #14 at $9 million; and the Service Employees International Union, #18 at $6.6 million. Ten more labor unions beat Koch Industries in spending. Organized labor is “buying America” to a much larger extent than Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity combined.
Harry Reid misleads us on political spending, and lied to us during the 2012 campaign about Mitt Romney having paid no taxes for 10 years. He epitomizes the sordid aspects of partisan politics, and simply cannot be believed.
*****
On May 5, 2010 Latino students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California turned out to celebrate their Mexican heritage on Cinco de Mayo.
When some American students showed up at school wearing American-flag shirts, school officials ordered the American students to turn their shirts inside-out or go home, to avoid a repeat of the unrest that had occurred during past observances of this date.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld the action of school officials.
So, when students from Mexico attending American schools want to flaunt their Mexican-ness in the face of the American students by waving Mexican flags on a Mexican holiday, and some American students decide to show their patriotism by wearing American flag shirts, the school authorities believe that the American students are wrong, and the Mexican students are right, and a federal court agrees with them.
Disgusting!
Whacky, radical rulings like this one have earned the Court the nickname, “The 9th Circus.” The Mexican students should not be allowed to stir up sentiments by waving a foreign flag around to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. If they prefer Mexico to the U.S., perhaps they should just go back.
*****
Congressman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has produced a tax reform plan based upon three years of hearings and discussions with bi-partisan groups.
Hardly anyone who pays taxes will argue against reforming this overly complex system. The last round was in 1986, and at that time the tax code was more than 26,000 pages. Thirty years later, the tax system is a incoherent mess that negatively affects prosperity, job creation and investment, and is regulated by a tax code that has nearly tripled in size to roughly 75,000 pages.
Each year the tax code gets further complicated with more special interest loopholes, credits, and carve-outs.
Rep. Camp would make several changes to the code, like eliminating loopholes, reducing tax rates, whittling down the current seven tax brackets to three, and lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world, to 25 percent.
In those 75,000 pages are goodies for numerous interests, and they will scream bloody murder if their special goody is on the chopping block. The Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore notes that we can “expect the White House to lambast this plan as a ‘tax cut for the rich,’ but the evidence from history shows that lower tax rates are usually associated with higher overall tax receipts and more taxes paid by the rich. In the 1980s after two rounds of Reagan tax rate reductions, income tax receipts doubled, and the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent rose as the economy expanded.”
This plan simplifies the tax code by allowing millions of tax filers a larger standard deduction, meaning they don’t need to itemize and can use the EZ form. For those who do itemize, the mortgage and charity deductions remain.
While the Camp plan isn’t perfect, and produced quite a few knee-jerk criticisms, it has many advantages, and is certainly a good start toward finally transforming the current tax code into something that is sensible and easy to understand. Let’s hope Congress has the courage to follow through.
Cross-posted from Observations
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Sean Hannity and Thomas Sowell argue about Ted Cruz. Did the GOP establishment get to Thomas Sowell?
It’s a rare occasion I disagree with Thomas Sowell and on this occasion I respectfully say we have a disagreement. Sowell’s argument sounds strangely like something what a GOP establishment guy would say. That’s disappointing coming from Sowell.
The Republican establishment’s criticisms of Sen. Cruz are criticisms of his rule-or-ruin strategy, which can destroy whatever chance Republicans have of taking back the Senate in 2014 and taking back the White House in 2016. And, without political power, there is no real hope of changing things in Washington.
Bobby Jindal schools Dannel Malloy tangle outside White House
Good for Bobby J! That’s how you these SOB Democrats that this GOPer has some moxey. That’s a quality the GOP establishment knows nothing about.
Politicoreports a group of governors emerged midday Monday from a meeting with President Barack Obama that stressed bipartisan cooperation — but that sentiment didn’t last as far as the White House driveway, as a Republican who’s had bigger political aspirations offered a tough assessment of what he’d heard.“This president and the White House seems to be waving the white flag of surrender” by focusing on a limited set of executive actions, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told reporters outside the White House, breaking from the comity of the first dozen minutes of a press conference led by National Governors Association chair Mary Fallin (R-Okla.) and vice-chair John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) — and from typically more innocuous readouts describing nearly all meetings as “productive.”
More here
Chris Wallace on Susan Rice Skipping Fox News Sunday: “Perhaps she didn’t want to answer the tough questions we would’ve asked.” i.e. Benghazi
No way was Susan Rice going on the only news outlet that practices real journalism.
The Blaze reports “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace suggested Sunday that National Security Advisor Susan Rice failed to appear on his program because she didn’t want to face his tough questioning.“I wanted to ask the Obama Administration about the crisis in Ukraine, but they decided to put National Security Advisor Susan Rice on only one show today in her first Sunday appearance since 2012 when she blamed the Benghazi terror attack on reaction to an anti-Islam video,” Wallace said. “Of course FOX has led the way in questioning how the administration handled Benghazi.”
Governors 'Not Waiting' for Dysfunctional Congress to Fix Nation's Problems
Waiting on Washington is a losing proposition. But, GOP governors know how to run a state into fiscally better times unlike their Democrat counterparts.
NewsMax reports the nation's governors are squaring off against a dysfunctional Washington — implementing their own programs to create jobs, rebuild infrastructure, lower property taxes, and improve education.
"We're not waiting," Michigan's Republican Gov. Rick Snyder told The Wall Street Journal at a meeting of the National Governors Association in Washington, D.C. "It would really be great for them to solve the mess here, but in the meantime we're going to do what we can."
Snyder cited a program begun last year in Michigan to reduce unemployment in some of the state's hardest-hit areas, the Journal reports. The effort is a public-private partnership that has exceeded its goal of placing 1,000 workers, he said.
In another public-private venture, Michigan has created a $5 million program to provide loans to small businesses in the state, with a pilot program beginning in Detroit.
Governors told the Journal that Washington's preoccupation with the November congressional elections have prevented officials from acting decisively on issues critical to the states.
"There's no long-term infrastructure plan coming out of D.C. — none," said GOP Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina.
The governor praised legislation he lobbied through last year to give priority to transportation projects that helped the economy — highways that connect urban centers and relieve congestion, for instance.
It is part of the state's 25-year plan that will focus on addressing the state's various transportation needs, involving roads, rail, ports, and airports.
McCrory told the Journal that the bill he sponsored stemmed from Washington's inability to revise the formula that allocates transportation funding based on federal gas-tax revenues, the Journal reports.More here
McRINO aka Joh McCain: Hillary Would Win Presidential Election if Held Tomorrow
This really is a slow Friday if I’m bothering to put up anything John McCain has to say. (H/T) National Review
FCC Temporarily Throws In the Towel on Explosive Monitoring Newsrooms the way they do totalitarian countries like Hitler’s Germany
I’m not going sugarcoat what President Obama’s FCC wants to do to stifle real journalism that is practices at Fox News and conservative blogs like this one.
Have you notice have you notice how the vast majority of the corrupt media ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC have nothing to say about this story? That’s because they already carry the water for the Democrat Party agenda and take their talking points from the White House as we speak.
National Review reports the Federal Communications Commission has pulled the plug on its plan to conduct an intrusive probe of newsrooms as part of a “Critical Information Needs” survey of local media markets.However, a revised version of the survey could raise new concerns: that it will trade its now-kiboshed news questions for a demographic survey that might justify new race-based media ownership rulemaking.“[I]n the course of FCC review and public comment, concerns were raised that some of the questions may not have been appropriate,” the FCC announced in a statement Friday. “Chairman [Tom] Wheeler agreed that survey questions in the study directed toward media outlet managers, news directors, and reporters overstepped the bounds of what is required. Last week, Chairman Wheeler informed lawmakers that that Commission has no intention of regulating political or other speech of journalists or broadcasters and would be modifying the draft study. Yesterday, the Chairman directed that those questions be removed entirely.”The Critical Information Needs (CIN) survey has been a slow-burning controversy since ever since this reporter first revealed its existence in October 2013.First Amendment supporters objected that the design of the survey would have had FCC representatives interrogating newsroom staffers about how they make coverage decisions and select (or spike) story ideas. Many commentators objected to the potential intimidation involved in such a survey.More here
Obama hates that there are outlets that don’t suck up to him and the truth.
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