Rush Limbaugh Repeats The Rich Man's Lies: Middle Class Has "Bulk Of The Money"

Here:

Where this is all going to end up, I'm pretty sure -- we'll see if I'm right; won't be too long, maximum next year sometime, maybe two years -- where this is all going to end up is that the middle class is going to get soaked.  The middle class is going to see their taxes go up, and the reason is, that's where the bulk of the money is. 

You could confiscate all the money the middle class has and run the government for quite a while.  Much longer than if you confiscate all the money the rich have.  There's a reason why the rich are called the top 2%.  There aren't very many of them, folks.  They're only the top two, the top 1%.  And the idea that 98% of the country is not going to have a tax increase under this president is absurd.  Everybody is going to see a tax increase under this president, because his objective is to shrink the private sector and expand the government so that the government becomes the primary source of prosperity and benefits for the vast majority of people.

In 2011, the poorest Americans, those making between $0 and $20K, had total net compensation of $501 billion in the aggregate. The so-called middle class, those making between $20K and $75K per year where net compensation aggregates every $5K up the income ladder constitute piles of cash in excess of $200 billion each, had total compensation of $2.9 trillion in 2011.

The income tranches of the middle are what greedy liberal tax-farmers focus on, as do disingenous rich people, because they stick out like a sore thumb, representing as they do the largest individual tranches for ordinary income purposes and constituting an unbroken line of 11 of them just begging to be ogled. See them here for yourself. You will not find any tranches among the so-called rich in excess of $200 billion. But they make a lot of money nevertheless.

Add it all up and everybody making beyond $75K per year in 2011, which includes the upper middle class, if you piled all their net compensation for Social Security purposes together, would total another $2.8 trillion, just shy of the middle's $2.9 trillion.

If you think this proves Rush's point, you would be wrong. Such net compensation isn't all there is to it, not by a long shot. It's much, much more complicated, and obscure, than that. And that's the way rich people like it. If you can't see their income you can't know how rich they are and they can thus escape becoming a target. That's why so many rich people, and their advocates like Bruce Bartlett who want to tax the middle class and deflect taxes from themselves, insist so strongly that they are middle class just like you.

While net compensation totaled about $6.2 trillion in 2011, personal income was more than twice that. The Bureau of Economic analysis, here, reports that personal income was $12.95 trillion in 2011.

People like Jeffrey Immelt, Jamie Dimon, Mitt Romney, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates receive tons of income from stocks, bonds, capital gains, dividends, rents, royalties, et cetera et cetera et cetera, adding at least another $6.75 trillion to that $6.2 trillion in net compensation for Social Security purposes in 2011.

To be sure, lots of people who aren't the very rich receive such income, too, but there is no way on God's green earth that there are enough of them in the so-called middle receiving it to say that the bulk of the money is in the middle. The middle class would like to be receiving the bulk of its income as unearned income like the investor class does, but it doesn't for the most part. It works for its money (unless you're a government employee).

No matter how much the boob with the microphone and the subscription to The Wall Street Journal tells you otherwise, the bulk of the money is not in the middle, most people know it, and that's why Obama is succeeding with his class warfare rhetoric. He has picked his targets, personalized them, polarized them and frozen them, and all the rich can do, because there aren't enough of them, is surrender (Warren Buffett), create diversions (the home mortgage interest deduction flap) or tell lies (The Wall Street Journal).

It really is quite pathetic that we do this to rich people in America and pat ourselves on the back for it. It's actually disgraceful in a country which claims to believe in equal treatment under the law that a wealthier earner is discriminated against because we say he must pay taxes at a higher percentage rate on his ordinary income than a poorer earner must pay. And we feel guilty enough about it that we then turn around and create exceptions to these unjust tax rules when taxing income which is not ordinary. Is it any wonder then that more than half of the personal income in the country has fled for refuge to be classified as other than ordinary? The founders thought a tax was equal only if everyone in the country paid the same amount. This consensus necessarily kept federal taxation low and infrequent because the great masses of people could not afford to pay very much.

The least we could do in homage to that old idea of America would be to tax everyone's income in the country in similar fashion, at one low rate, making no distinctions between the income from a job and the income from an investment. Of course, that would mean a pretty low rate compared to what's exacted today, and would necessitate some pretty drastic cuts to spending. A 10% tax on the personal income of the country of $13 trillion in 2011 would have yielded only $1.3 trillion in revenues, far short of the $3.8 trillion or so we spent.

And that, as we on the right keep saying, is where the real problem lies. Unless we slay the spending monster, there will never be taxation equality in America.

The Rats Are Jumping Ship

"Tea Party favorite" Senator Demented Jim is resigning his Senate seat early to head up the Heritage Foundation, whose spawn was RomneyCare, and, you know, ObamaCare, and which has otherwise utterly failed to stop the leftward drift of the country.

The reason, of course, is that Heritage is the standard bearer of Reaganism, which is really a form of liberalism. As such it has furthered the leftward drift of the country as it made Republicanism home for Reagan Democrats who fled the radicalism of the Democrat Party and in their turn liberalized the Republican Party, driving out the conservatives in the process and making the Republican Party safe for the Bush family.

Meanwhile at FreedomWorks Dick Armey has controversially bailed out with a boat load of cash donated to help elect conservatives, which didn't go so well in November. After co-opting the Tea Party, the Republicans have now raped it.

It's interesting how the public face of both organizations has been the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program from noon to 3 daily, where Rush runs paid ads for them. Today, in fact, Rush had Sen. DeMint and Ed Feulner on the show to interview them about the move, no doubt to help preempt the narrative that DeMint is bailing out because of the increasingly hostile environment for conservatism in the Senate, led by squishes like Sen. Mitch McConnell. And right afterwards we got a nice little plug for FreedomWorks.

The glaring problem for the so-called conservatism of the Republican Party is that it is still trying to preserve the excrescences of the progressivism of the early 20th century when what it should be doing is challenging the originalist credentials of figures like Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. The latter did more to ruin the original constitution than any president before or since, which is why no thinking conservative can call himself a Republican.

The only people in the country who used to have the habit of mind necessary for overthrowing foreign accretions to the original faith were Protestants, but any examination of them today demonstrates few instances of the virtues which characterized their forebears, unless the followers of Westboro Baptist Church be accepted. The capitulation of Christianity in America generally to the gay mafia tells you all you need to know about the intimate (can I say that?) connection between contemporary theology and liberalism.

Just ask yourself when was the last time the Heritage Foundation or FreedomWorks got upset that Obama has presided over the sweeping away of the Hyde Amendment, the single bulwark in law erected by conservatism against the radical advances of a dictatorial, blood-thirsty, liberalism? Communion, anyone?

Or did they ever object? None of us can remember.

The Wittiest Line Of The Week Past

"The generals are being led by their privates."

-- Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh Is Grasping At Straws To Explain Romney's Loss

Yesterday Rush informed us that maybe Romney lost because there are now more of "them" than of us.

In other words, we on the right are now demographically outnumbered by Democrat Hispanics, Blacks, etc. and won't be able to win anymore without more of "them" in the Republican Party. That is the reflexive interpretation of the Republican Establishment, as reported here:

"It's not about geography anymore with the Republican Party," said Margaret Hoover, a Republican strategist and CNN contributor. "It's about demographics, and we've got to start thinking about growing the party."

Today he's changing his tune. Today he's blaming . . . the white or conservative or Christian Republican base!

In other words, because Romney may have underperformed McCain's turnout (by 2.8 million) therefore Republicans didn't turn out for Romney.

Well, how does Rush know they were Republicans? What if they were independents?

I don't know how you can blame the base when for the first time ever I had to wait in line to vote on Tuesday, in deep red semi-rural Michigan, like many others all across the country.

And I don't know how you square that with the fact that it wasn't even close in South Carolina, ground zero for Tea Party antipathy toward Mitt Romney. The right everywhere held its nose and turned out, not for Romney it is true, but to defeat Barack Obama.

And now Rush is blaming US!

Gee, thanks Rush. You've just given the Establishment another reason to exclude conservatives from the Republican Party, and it isn't even true.

Turnout yesterday won't be precisely known for weeks, and it is important to wait, not just to learn the Republican turnout, but the Democrat contrary to what Rush is saying today.

In 2008 McCain slightly underperformed Bush in 2004 in the swing states, but in 2008 Obama way outperformed John Kerry from 2004, by 3 million in the swing states if I remember correctly. Obama won in those states by a margin of only 1.4 million. A half million Republicans weren't to blame for that.

   

Rush Says Rasmussen Puts Republican Registrations +5.8 Over Democrats

Here:

Rasmussen's out with his final Summary of Party Affiliation, as of October 31st.

This is a huge sample of people that Scott Rasmussen asks are they Republican or Democrat or independent or what have you. He has the Republicans at their highest party affiliation he's ever recorded since he's been doing this. Basically it's Republicans plus six: Republicans 39, Democrats 33. The actual number is 5.8. We'll round it up to six points. Rasmussen had the exact turnout in 2008 at Democrats plus seven.

Rasmussen has a +/- 4 margin of error in his polling, which is basically dead even in the daily presidential tracking poll, so I'll go out on a limb and say Romney gets +5 in the popular because of his overwhelming advantage with independents and in Republican registrations, and maybe 285 in the Electoral College: 206 per Rasmussen's current assumptions, plus Florida (29, hello seniors), Virginia (13, hello defense industries), Ohio (18, Kasich and Co.), Wisconsin (10, Walker and Co./Paul Ryan) and Colorado (9, pro-family voters).

Conservatives Have Become Wrong-Headed About Taxes

Conservatives have become wrong-headed about the tax code.

Steven Malanga provides an exasperating take on "tax reform", here, which was really a liberal Democrat conceit from the beginning but became a so-called conservative one under Ronald Reagan, who was, need we remind everyone, a "former" Democrat:

Most conservatives (though certainly not most Republicans) have come to see the range of incentives and exemptions in the tax code as wrongheaded, including those for businesses which smack of little more than corporate cronyism. This is in sharp contrast to 1986, when many Republicans in Congress resisted reform until a popular GOP president came along willing to take on the business community.

Sacre bleu. The liberal Democrats are nothing if they are not great simplifiers, and if conservatives join them in that enthusiasm, it doesn't mean they are right. Little ideologues all, regardless of party.

Prior to the income tax, a president had to be a pretty smart cookie to figure out all the ins and outs of the tariff system if he wanted his federal government to have enough revenue to continue operations. By 1909, however, the whole country seemed to have wound down so far intellectually that it was just too tired to carry on any longer with that rigorous enterprise and bowed instead to the simplicity of an income tax. Tax reformers today, take note. It doesn't speak well of you that you admit the code is too much for you.

Actually real conservatism opposed the income tax way back when not because it would grow too complex but because it was wrong. When amending the constitution is necessary in order to make something legal, conservatives' first instinct is always to question the advisability of the idea before they conclude there is a defect in the constitution requiring a remedy. The income tax was one such idea. It took four years to gain ratification in the states. As an invention of progressivism the income tax eventually worked a revolution in government by allowing government to grow to gargantuan size with a ready pool of available cash, stolen by force from the population's income. And it is no coincidence that the first major expenditure financed by the income tax was US entry into The Great War. Not long after which came The Great Depression. If progressive ideas were good ones, no one seems to have paid much heed to the early evidence to the contrary.

Every effort by the people since the introduction of the income tax to obtain deductions, exemptions, credits and other incentives in the tax code should be understood by conservatives as wholesome reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rear-guard opposition to what the income tax represents, but today you can hardly find a conservative who will even entertain the idea of overthrowing the income tax, let alone any other of the so-called "achievements" of the progressive era. In fact, some so-called conservatives have become veritable cheerleaders for the income tax. Rush Limbaugh, for one, can't seem even to imagine an America without one for the first 137 years of its existence. An originalist in name only is he.

The problem with so-called Reagan conservatism, then and now, is that it makes peace with the tax code, just as it does with the social welfare state, including Social Security and especially Medicare. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan actually campaign on just such a platform of preserving Medicare for future generations. As Reagan compromised in the direction of liberalism in the 1986 tax reform, so will they.

These people wouldn't know conservatism if it ran up and bit them in the ass.

Tax reform is a fool's errand. You can't "reform" something which is fundamentally wrong in the first place.

Tea Party Support Has Dropped 20 Percent Since Summer 2010

Gallup has the numbers, here.

30 percent of respondents supported the Tea Party in August 2010.

In August 2012 support is just 24 percent.

In the interim Republican operatives have worked to co-opt local chapters, assisted by Rush Limbaugh and Freedom Works in particular.

You know Rush Limbaugh, the guy who thinks President George W. Bush used the tax code to pander to the middle class.

Would Republicans have retaken the House in 2010 with 2012's level of support?

Just sayin'.

Video Of Romney Backtracking On Tax Cuts, Threatening Your Deductions

Romney will take away your deductions and exemptions

Romney the tax simplifier, tax leveler, tax back-tracker, tax flip-flopper, uncertain tax trumpeter was on display in Ohio this week, posing himself as a clear and present danger to the tax code's many indispensable props to middle class family life, including not just the mortgage interest deduction but also for the first time "exemptions".

The last time a Republican talked this way was in 1986 when Ronald Reagan took away deductibility of credit card interest in exchange for lower overall rates.

Those rates lasted until Clinton, when they were raised. But deductibility of credit card interest? That never came back, and never will.

The same thing is going to happen to the home mortgage interest deduction, and possibly to "married filing jointly" and other such provisions of the current tax code. You'll get lower rates . . . for a while, until they have to raise them.

And then the protections of the current provisions will be absent, exposing you to the full force of increased tax rates.

The fat cats from The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine to Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, the Libertarians and the Simpson-Bowles crowd all want their greedy little hands on more revenue from the middle class . . . so they don't have to pay as much. It's just that simple.

And they are betting you are so stupid that you will vote for that!

There is nothing wrong with the current code which spending cuts cannot fix.

Story and video here.

Rush Limbaugh Indicts George Bush As A Panderer

I can't believe he left in the transcript, but here it is:

"But tax policy leading up to Obama... You know, politicians have pandered to the middle class forever, and there's a whole boatload of Americans not paying income tax right now. I think the numbers, depending who you talk to, is 47% or 49%. The top 5% number you're talking about, it's 59% of all tax revenue is paid by the top 5%."

Nice of you to pit your working class listeners against the middle, Rush.

Now what was that class warfare Obama engages in that you were complaining about?

Romney's Alarming Flip On Taxes: Expect Cuts To Deductions And Exemptions

The Wall Street Journal, here, is describing this flip as a shift.

I'll say, like a mountain shifting, or a Giant Foo Bird shifting its entrails over your house:

Mitt Romney on Wednesday told an Ohio crowd that while he would work to lower tax rates on businesses and individuals, they shouldn’t “be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions.”

The deductions we all fear losing are relatively common knowledge, like the home mortgage interest deduction. Romney has been cagey about this, on again off again about reducing the benefit for higher earners only. But this outburst sounds like cutting the deduction for those farther down the income ladder is possible. 

Cuts to "exemptions" is an entirely new animal, however, and goes to the very heart of the tax code. Since Americans fought hard after WWII for the tax-filing category "Married Filing Jointly", the prop to families trying to raise children on one income has come under repeated attack, first under Nixon, and then from feminists who deplored the special tax status given to families. Gay and lesbian couples tirelessly work for recognition of their unions as marriages mostly because they want in on the tax preference.

It is extremely disappointing to hear Romney talk this way. It plays entirely into the hands of the opposition, who can use it to sow doubt in the minds of his would be supporters about whether Republicans will raise taxes on the middle class. I , for one, think Romney will say anything he thinks he has to in order to win votes, even if it is self-contradictory. But the fact of the matter is Romney was a tax equalizer in Massachusetts, which meant privileges for favored groups went out the window, and so fees went up on businesses and taxes went up on properties to adjust to his leveling programs. 

With Rush Limbaugh candidly letting it slip today that the middle class has been pandered to through the tax code, the drumbeat against the people grows in intensity.

And the dupes will vote for it.

Flashback November 2011: 2012 Obama Campaign Writes Off Whites

The pot doth call the kettle black when complaining Romney has written off the 47 percent.

Democrats already wrote-off the white working class last November.

So Thomas Edsall for The New York Times, here:

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

Rush has been all over this like a chicken on a june bug.

Mitt Romney Reaps What He Sows, Or Something

The liberal President Ronald Reagan once handed down an 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican."

He learned this rule from his life among the Democrats, whence he came to the Republican Party after he realized his former pals were getting cozy with the commies. To this day it takes forever for the Democrats to abandon one of their own to the wolves, even when they deserve it. Recent cases include Charley Rangel and that wiener guy from New York.

But Republicans still haven't learned this rule, proving the other one about old dogs. One whiff of trouble and a fellow Republican drops you like a hot potato. Hence the Rep. Todd Akin affair, even whose money they've cut off and would cut off his nuts if they could (a little Rev. Jesse Jackson humor there). Mitt Romney, being more at home with liberal Democrats, waited while everyone else piled on Akin before he decided to do so. Not exactly a profile in courage. More like a man torn about what he believes and which party he belongs in. As a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, he really is a fish out of water, seeing that the Democrats are the former and the Republicans are neither.

So it's not a little amusing to see the Republican establishment and Romney's other would be supporters now crucifying Romney for his 47 percent remarks last May, only just recently made public. If anyone will be to blame for Romney's loss in a few weeks' time, it will be the Peggy Noonans, Bill Kristols and John Tamnys of this world, not the conservatives. Rush Limbaugh rightly points out the irony that the conservatives, Romney's fiercest critics during the primaries, are his defenders today against his critics who were his liberal supporters yesterday, who insisted at the time that Romney was the only candidate who could win.

Meanwhile the clerisy rallies round the redistributionist, under whom income inequality has only increased. Spreading the wealth around all right . . . among the wealthy.

Same as it ever was.

When The Weekly Standard Says Romney's Not Conservative, You Know He Is

It's the right's "pot calling the kettle black moment" of the campaign:

Plenty of conservatives are pushing back against the worldview espoused by Mitt Romney in his "arrogant and stupid' [sic] remarks at a private fundraiser earlier this year.

When representatives of National Review, The Daily Caller, The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard agree that Romney has sinned, you know he's finally done something right.

Rush Limbaugh and Red State counsel Romney to pile it on because they know that most Americans agree with Romney that handouts through the tax code are wrong, even if they don't quite understand the arithmetic.

But the aforementioned conservative establishment fuddy-duddies rebuke him, here, where you will find not a single mention of the specific handouts which Republicans have used as a form of welfare for the lower tax bracket filers, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit of the tax code. Taxpayers use those credits, which are refundable, to offset any income tax they may owe and receive any remaining balance in the form of tax refunds. Usually those "refunds" are substantial balances due because they file under the 10 and 15 percent tax brackets where they pay little tax relative to higher earners in the first place, amounting to hundreds and even thousands of dollars in tax "refunds" which are no refunds at all, just handouts. This is the slimy work of liberalism on display, capturing a definition and gutting it, demonstrating for all to see that the so-called conservatives of the Republican Party are no conservatives at all because they participate in the ruse.

When just 17 percent of the American people still use paper and pencil to figure their taxes, it is not surprising how little understanding there is on this issue. Most people hire a tax-preparer or use something like TurboTax, and consequently have no mathematical understanding for the reason they are getting so much money back. But if so-called conservatives really were conservative, they would be explaining this to you, and not little ole obscure me.

Even On The Most Generous Interpretation Of The Data, Rep. Akin Of Missouri Is Right

There are about 6 million pregnancies in the US every year.

The wildest estimates of pregnancy resulting from rape range from as few as 200 to as many as 83,000, the latter representing many self-reported cases.

As a percentage of all pregnancies, 83,000 pregnancies represents almost 1.4 percent of the total.

Calling that rare evidently is impermissible among liberals, and frightened conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. But if 1.4 percent isn't rare, I don't know what is.

The sorriest spectacle today is how conservative talk radio is throwing Todd Akin under the bus.

Congratulations, Rush, For 24 Years Of Success With Irritable Mental Gestures

Neil Barofsky, TARP "Watchdog", Blasts Financial Fascism In New Book

And Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times provides a favorable review, here:

He is Neil Barofsky. Remember him — the man whose job it was to police the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program? And his new account, a book titled “Bailout” (Free Press), to be published on Tuesday, is a must-read. ...

He soon discovered that the [Treasury] department’s natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren’t at risk for fraud and abuse.

“The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.” ...

Meaningful changes to our broken system may finally come about, he writes, if enough people get angry. His conclusion is this: “Only with this appropriate and justified rage can we sow the seeds for the types of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks.”

At the center of that whole sordid affair of regulatory capture at the time was Tim Geithner at Treasury, former head of The New York Federal Reserve Bank, who obviously isn't simply morally challenged with respect to paying his taxes, but also with respect to reporting LIBOR irregularities.

Unfortunately for us, we not only had two candidates for president in 2008 who voted FOR TARP (Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama), in 2012 the Republican candidate still defends it, as recently as March here in USA Today Away:

"There was a fear that the whole economic system of America would collapse, that all our banks or virtually all (banks) would go out of business," Romney told a town-hall-style forum in Arbutus, Md. "In that circumstance, President Bush and Hank Paulson said, 'We've got to do something to show we are not going to let the whole system go out of business.' I think they were right. I know some people disagree with me, I thought they were right to do that.".

And not only that, Romney is as unlikely as anyone to get angry about bailouts in future. We can't even get Romney to be angry about ObamaCare.

It's not even clear Obama's recent $100 million in attacks against Romney's personal character have made him mad, especially when it's the subject of speculation on conservative talk radio. Here Rush Limbaugh notes Romney "finally" gets ticked off about Obama's (plagiarizing) use of (Elizabeth Warren's) "you didn't build that", but even Rush isn't 100 percent convinced:

RUSH: You know, folks, I think this actually made Romney mad! I actually think that what Obama said finally ticked Romney off. I think Romney now has realized Obama is not a nice guy who's just befuddled and wrong. That was Romney's prior description of Obama: "He's a nice guy, just doesn't know what he's doing." I think this really got to Romney. Let's squeeze one more in here...

RUSH: Yes, siree bob! Something lit a fire. I am convinced that what Obama said actually has made Romney mad. Not in an insulting way. It has made him mad over what we're up against now. And, of course, as I say: The Obamaites are saying that their guy was "taken out of context." Right. Okay. ...

RUSH: Have you seen anything on Romney's speech in Irwin, Pennsylvania? "A little bit." Well, before we go to the break, let's play sound bite nine again and then follow it up with the last one. This is Romney on fire yesterday in Irwin, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. He's really ticked off now, I think. This is about Obama saying (impression), "You started a business? You didn't do that! You didn't make that happen! You didn't build that. Uhhhh, you didn't -- you -- you -- you had help! You had a road, a bridge. You didn't do that."

And I think Romney is really ticked. I think there's now a fire burning under the posterior. So here are the two bites. Just bang 'em back-to-back, Mike.

If conservatives aren't sure if Romney's really angry, who is? The man is cool, I tell you, as in passionless, just like Obama. And that is the prerequisite for deception.

On the outstanding problems of our time, from massive bailouts of the banking system to government coercion in healthcare, Gov. Romney is on the same side as Obama and the Democrats.

Some choice!

Meanwhile, the American people just shrug.

A country that can't get angry about anything is a country that deserves what's coming to it (see France).

Conservative Supremes Insist It's An Unconstitutional Penalty, Not A Tax, But Romney Gets Attacked For Saying The Same Thing

So-called conservatives are upset with Mitt Romney's team for calling the ObamaCare mandate an unconstitutional penalty, not a tax, which is what the dissenting Supremes have called it.

Here's a question for y'all: Do you have the courage of your convictions and the brains to express them, or are you going to retreat into political expediency?

We already have the answer to that. They want Mitt Romney's man Fehrnstrom to go into hibernation in the summertime.

Here's another question: Are the dissenting Supremes conservative, or not? If they are not, then tell us why. Ignoring their arguments isn't going to make them go away. Real conservatives respect what they have to say. Anyone who's telling us to accept the tax argument as framed by Roberts for the liberal wing of the Supremes is doing it for political reasons and is a fake conservative. Prominent among these are Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham.

If Romney's camp keeps this up he might actually get accused of being a conservative by real ones. I'm suddenly feeling less alarmed by Mitt Romney.

Well, that's the spin from the Financial Times anyway, here, whose idea of a conservative is a Jack Welch or a Rupert Murdoch. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Pure agitprop.

Bile: The Autonomic Fake Conservative Detector

"I'll make it simpler for you than Rush [Limbaugh] does . . . : if bile doesn't rise in your throat at the very notion of an Obama presidency, then you are NOT a conservative."

-- Kathy Shaidle, 25 October 2008

Rush Limbaugh Has Faith In The American People To Do The Right Thing. Do You?

Do you have faith in the American people to do the right thing?

If you do, which half would that be, the half which has a last will and testament, or the half which dies intestate?

See Gallup, here.

An Historicist Explanation Of Fascism Which Unintentionally Describes America

Seen here:

"Fascism resulted from the mobilization of mass armies, the creation of command economies, and the problem of reintegrating veterans into war-torn societies."

Is there a better explanation than this for what happened in America since The Great Depression, whose presidents have drawn their inspiration, now more, now less, from the strong men of Europe as mediated through the legacy of FDR?

In America the creation of the command economy preceded the mobilization for the world war, but the twin developments set the conditions for the state's new role in American life. 

American-style fascism bloomed in The Great Depression and Second World War and then grew through the post-war cult of education, with its original GI Loan Program writ ever larger year by year with newer names and until finally nationalized under Barack Obama, who owes his political success not to the Marxist socialists who inspired and bank-rolled his education but to Chicagoans whose financial success in real estate depended upon government planning, cooperation and exploitation of the poor. He is the epitome of the strangely blended system. 

The proliferation of American fascism occurred through the decades-long expansion of minor educational institutions, cow colleges and junior colleges into degraded and degrading universities which came to elevate the promise of mere vulgar employment to the status of an educated person's learned and wise perspective. A Bachelor's Degree in Physical Education became the equivalent of one in mathematics, and the sixth grade teacher seriously asks the students today to bring an empty white business "envelop" to the next class.

If an education no longer results in gainful employment, we are told, a sin has been committed against education's one and only commandment: Thou shalt get a credential for a job. From fund-raisers who call university alumni to the Rush Limbaughs and Dave Ramseys of the world, an education in a traditional department of human knowledge which fails to lead to employment is useless and worthless.  

Today there are hopeful signs of acute crisis in this consensus even as it reaches its zenith.

Participants graduate with crushing loads of debt in a new environment of depressed wages, long before they have good jobs, spouses, homes, cars and children.

And while the fields of graduates are white unto harvest and they continue to be recruited on-site by big businesses, many of which are responsible for key program funding for the system itself, the number of available jobs has shrunk dramatically as low American GDP resembles present day Europe more than it does its own much more vibrant past. It's as if the system has reached its limit to perpetuate itself.

The lesser products of the universities end up as functionaries in government union shops in the public school system or as media mouthpieces whose job it is to promote the jobs message, but declining tax revenues in the states and diffusion of media due to technology change the calculus for career-minded teachers and "information" workers. As we've seen in Wisconsin, the people who must pay and pay and pay again have had enough. And today's pad will doubtless become yesterday's laptop.

Those not yet quite up to the college experience who can't get an assembly line job because there aren't any may hope to join the military with the promise of money for education later, after the tour of duty. But the prospects for duty look less likely to include personnel-rich adventurism going forward as drone-war proliferates. Out-of-shape teenagers and malcontents in any event will find it increasingly difficult to join a shrinking all-volunteer military.

The failure of faith in the cult of education will necessarily precede the demise of the system, and it appears to be accomplishing this all by itself by not delivering on its promise. It wouldn't be the first time, but you'd need a useless degree to appreciate that.