It’s funny how Rep. Bart Gordon calls himself a “blue dog” but is basically walking in lock-step with the expansion of government while also wasting taxpayer money on trips to Europe for him and his wife.

http://tinyurl.com/cwe5wb

mB

By mjB on 03.19.09 9:37 pm

I sent Tanner a request to bring up the fair tax given that he is on the ways and means committee. His response back against the tax was pitiful. I don’t know what tax he was referring to but it sure wasn’t the fair tax. He didn’t understand the simple concept how income and payroll taxes are built into the price of goods and services. I forwarded the response to Neal Boortz and he read it on the air as an example of DC stupidity.

By Pogo on 03.20.09 8:41 pm

Who is dumb enough to be shocked? Almost half of the nation saw it, those that didn’t see it or wished to ignore it or the very worst of them, hoped to profit from it are clearly to blame for this and should suffer and be punished for their crimes against our Nation and their fellow citizens.

So the President is hell-bent for leather on controlling ALL aspects of payroll now. Why didn’t he just take his puppet Congress and legislate it to be so? I mean if casinos can get the stimulus money, then simply taking away money from the “haves” based on the perception of wrong doing is a no brainer. If the egotistical, narcissistic Obama knows that others will look at that legislation and say WHOA!! Even politicians will look at their creamy soft jobs that they are lobbying so hard for while they collect a check from us and will look into their crystal balls and see that their fat-cat lobbying and consultant jobs will be fined into oblivion. They will be able to see how it starts.

So how does he start it? I can try to explain it in great detail but I’m not that articulate. Let’s let C. S. Lewis do it from the perspective of a demon in the service of Satan. See if you can see any similarities in this toast to the demons of hell and straight from the horse’s mouth (so to speak). This toast is to a class of graduating Temptors that will attempt to drag souls to hell for the devil to feed on. This is the last work connected to The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.

“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.
“The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
“And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”
“Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic. “

He further explains what I believe is Obama’s plan later in the toast:

“What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.”

I can see it in this case as well as others. Who knew that Screwtape was a member of Obama’s cabinet? I just hope the demon tempter paid his taxes. Congratulations America, We’ve slit our wrists and are going to bleed out. Will we seek help or just allow the resulting death to overtake us silently?

By BCB on 03.22.09 1:43 pm

He asked Morgenthau for a list of the thousand richest people in America. The president seemed to want them investigated because he thought they were avoiding the payment of taxes. He was particularly annoyed at tax-exempt as possible loop-holes.

In July 1941, as he planned his third term, he suggested to his budget director a proposal for a 99.5 percent tax rate on all income over $100,000. When the budget director was clearly startled by such a request, FDR responded, “Why not? None of us is ever going to make $100,000 a year”.

History repeats itself…

By Pogo on 03.23.09 10:13 am

The authority to seize non-bank financial firms has emerged as a priority for the administration.

“We’re very late in doing this, but we’ve got to move quickly to try and do this because, again, it’s a necessary thing for any government to have a broader range of tools for dealing with these kinds of things, so you can protect the economy from the kind of risks posed by institutions that get to the point where they’re systemic,” Geithner said last night at a forum held by the Wall Street Journal.

All the pundits asked last September where it would stop. Now we know there is no stopping it. And of course they must move quickly! Is every friggin piece of legislation going to be on a 2 day fast track from now on to find out months later that buried deep into the bowels of the bill are economic time bombs aimed at the taxpayers?

You’re freakin kidding me! After the TARP or as I like to call it, The TRAP, they want the power to step into other industries to keep them from failing? There is no risk only more moral hazard for the taxpayers. Failure is not an option. $5 billion for newspapers, billions to make credit card companies and auto finance companies whole. The era of big government is upon us.

Is dis a graate kuntrry or whaaat?

By Pogo on 03.24.09 11:25 am