Cain's Accuser Bialek Was Accused by Father of Her Son of Mental Problems

As reported here:

The father of Bialek’s now-13-year-old son sued in an ugly paternity fight to win sole custody of the child, accusing her of “significant mental and emotional problems,” court papers from 2000 show.

Cain Accuser Kraushaar Can't Remember Complaint Filed at Subsequent Job

As reported here:

Kraushaar said Tuesday she did not remember details about the complaint and did not remember asking for a payment, a promotion or a Harvard fellowship.

Underwater Mortgages: Effectively Half of All, or 25.5 Million, Says Mark Hanson

Because it's not just a matter of selling for a price which pays off the current note. It's a matter of also paying the realtor 6 percent and having enough left over for 10 percent down on the next purchase.

Half of all mortgage holders are in the situation where they would not have enough left over for 10 percent down on the next home. This is the key problem according to Mark Hanson:

"Because repeat buyers have always carried the market as the foundation, this is why demand has not come back. It's as if half the potential buyers in America died over a two-year period of time."

Read the full story about negative equity from Diana Olick here.

Technically 14.6 million are in negative equity on the note alone, but that's only 28.6 percent of homes with mortgages. 50 percent is more like 25.5 million homes with mortgages which cannot be sold without bringing money to the table for the next purchase. People are quite literally stuck.

To paraphrase Jonathan Swift:


Mortgages, the lifeblood of the nation,
Corrupt and stagnate in the veins,
Unless a proper circulation
Their motion and their heat maintain.

Bill Bennett Should Just Shut Up About Herman Cain

What does he want Herman Cain to do? Some kind of magic dance to make the accusations stop? 

"Four women are not an insignificant number. One or two anonymous charges, perhaps. Three anonymous charges (where, as I understand the story, Cain knows of at least two of the women) plus one woman who went very public and opened herself up to all manner of investigation are a lot. It is no longer insignificant. Neither is it insignificant that the Cain campaign discounted the charges in the initial stories, saying they were based on anonymous sources, only to make a mockery by blaming other campaigns with less substantiation than the original stories."

It's all here, but I look in vain for a defense of the rules of evidence, fair play and the like, all of which one would expect one's allies to marshall at a time like this in defense of one of their own.

But Bill Bennett is not a reliable ally.

Democrats on the one hand know Herman is the real threat to Obama, not Romney. Moderate Republicans, on the other, know Herman is the real threat to Romney.

Their joint mission is to destroy the source of Herman's success, which is his likeability. Relentless below the belt stuff will be tried until something sticks. Herman isn't even that important. It's the Tea Party he represents. Dispirit that and you automatically depress the turnout. Meanwhile Democrats can count on the individualist vein in Republicanism to cause Republicans to hang Herman out to dry as a matter of principle, the last refuge of the scoundrel.

"A man big enough to run for president should be big enough to have a full and candid press conference on all of this."

One important difference between Republicans and Democrats is that when a Democrat gets attacked, Democrats circle the wagons around their wounded, but when a Republican takes a hit, Republicans either run and hide like sissies, or join in the attack.

The electorate respects party unity, not because it's often right but because it's logical and predictable. Republicans aren't unified and haven't been since Reagan, which is why no one trusts them. They're insane, and occasionally fly off the handle and hurt somebody in the process.

And right now it's Herman Cain Republicans want to hurt.

Red State's Erick Erickson Says Romney Will Be The Republican Nominee

Because Perry blew it on immigration and Newt and Cain blew it with women.

There are many money lines in the post, here.

Oh, and Romney will lose to Obama, and conservatism dies.

And that means now we should rethink . . . John Huntsman (!).

Doesn't that mean conservatism is already dead?

The real conservative in the race is Cain, who likes $400 wine and a national sales tax. Therefore the argument is social, that is, with the women, who gave us their opposites: Prohibition and The Income Tax. Real conservatives like Phyliss Schlafly support Cain's ideas to unleash American business.

What we need is more women like Phyliss Schlafly, and fewer like Ann Coulter.  

Gloria Allred, Representing Cain Accuser, Made Light of Sexual Touching by TSA

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: "Did they touch your body parts?"

GLORIA ALLRED: "Yeah, they did and it was a first time anybody touched them in a long time and frankly, I liked it."

Video here from November 2010.

I Got Your Sexual Harassment Right Here, Pal

According to The Chicago Sun Times, here, Herman Cain's latest accuser was awfully chummy with the so-called scoundrel only a month ago:

"[Cain and Bialek had an] encounter a month ago while backstage at the AM 560 WIND sponsored TeaCon meeting in Schaumburg Sept. 30-Oct. 1 at the Renaissance Hotel and Convention Center."

The very attractive one time reporter for NBC's WMAQ in Chicago, Amy Jacobson, is the source for the story. She is now on AM Radio Station WIND in Chicago.

Peter Morici Says Herman Cain's 999 Plan 'Makes Great Economic Sense'

Here, but doesn't explain why in the same breath he criticizes Cain for being short on explanations (!):

Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax proposal makes great economic sense but when pressed, he cannot explain why it does or how it would work. For example, when asked about how the nine percent sales tax would treat imports, he doesn’t know—this despite the fact that European countries have extensive experience with this issue, economist and lawyers have studied those issues ad nauseum, and the treaties the United States and EU have signed permit applying sales taxes to imports and refunding the same on exports to maintain neutrality in competition between foreign and domestic products.

I think Herman is being coy about treatment of imports because he intends to apply tariffs wherever necessary to level the playing field to make American exports more competitive.

Herman can't be entirely candid about that sort of thing at this stage because Republicans have been hooked on free trade since at least the 1960s. In the general campaign against Obama, however, Cain could conceivably make a bid for the Democrat union vote with such a tariff threat as part of an overall strategy to form a broader coalition not unlike Reagan put together in the 1980s.

Chinese Communist Calls Europe a 'Worn Out Welfare Society'

China's slave labor camps

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, well yours is a worn out slave labor society.

Jin Liqun, quoted here:

"If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society. I think the labour laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking. The incentive system, is totally out of whack. ... [A] welfare society should not induce people not to work hard."

Sarkozy and Obama Caught Dissing Bibi Netanyahu on Open Microphone

"I cannot stand him. He is a liar." According to the report, Obama replied: "You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!"

Story here.

Barry Ritholtz Can't Take It That Fellow Liberal Bloomberg Blames Congress For '08 Meltdown

In The Washington Post, here.

In the end, I think this is because of two things. One, a bias toward liberalism, the finger prints of which are all over the current crisis, so Barry can't stand it when one of his own departs from his version of the accepted narrative and puts the blame on liberalism's institutional face. And two, a widespread intellectual failure affecting liberals, conservatives and independents alike, which conflates the free market and the banking sector:

The previous Big Lie — the discredited belief that free markets require no adult supervision — is the reason people have created a new false narrative.

The banks are beholden to a fiat currency mediated by a fiat central bank fed by a government printing press. They are by no means a private sector player, and haven't been since 1913. Banking isn't a free market, it does require adult supervision, and the taxpayers should be outraged by the on-going failure of it every goddamn Friday night. Congress willingly acceded to this failure in the 1990's under Clinton and the Republicans when they gave banks free reign over money creation. The Federal Reserve became beside the point. It only took a decade to implode.

To paraphrase Russell Kirk: Free markets aren't a failure, they just haven't been tried recently.

Off the Hook

Remove the taxpayer guarantee and put bankers personally on the hook, and that will change things for the better in a hurry. 

Seal Target Geronimo Insists bin Laden Was Not Murdered, Obama Blew Intel For Political Gain

Read all about it, here.

Famous Serial Monogamists of Conservatism

(source)

The Anti Heritage Foundation Line of the Day

"Heritage’s economic policies are reasonably free-market, at least when Democrats are in power."

-- Ryan Young, here 

The Broadest Tax Base Which Can Possibly Be Imagined Implies a Tax Rate of 6.2%

Herman Cain's 999 Plan is focusing attention on the perennially perplexing problem of taxation for the American electorate in 2012. His plan has brought questions about broadening the tax base for tax reform front and center, including: What tax base is large enough to generate adequate federal revenues? and: What rate of taxation is fair?

Herman's big idea is to scrap the entire tax code and start over with three new bases taxed at the same low rate for a temporary period of time, eventually transitioning the country permanently to just one of these bases, taxed at a much higher single rate.

His scheme is quite conventional in that it looks to the existing traditional bases of taxation with which we have been familiar for decades: corporations and individuals.

What is new, however, is the national sales tax, the base for which was fairly sizable in 2008 at $10.1 trillion in personal consumption expenditures [PCE], and running at almost $10.8 trillion annualized through August 2011.

Currently the overwhelming burden of taxation falls on the individual filer whose personal income is taxed in order to provide Social Insurance and Federal revenues, which in 2011 are currently running at an annualized rate of $2.3 trillion, as shown here by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Corporations, excises and tariffs provide puny sums by comparison: less than $500 billion in 2008.

This means that in 2011, Herman Cain's ultimate idea of taxing consumption to replace current revenues of approximately $3 trillion would imply a national sales tax rate of 28 percent on $10.8 trillion in goods and services expenditures this year. That's a pretty hefty rate by comparison with present conditions.

Currently the personal income base on which we exact that $2.3 trillion in Social Insurance and Federal taxes is just over $13 trillion. This implies an overall tax rate of 18 percent. If personal income in that aggregate amount had to do all the pulling to generate the full $3 trillion in revenues, personal income would have to be taxed at a rate of 23 percent to do the same thing as the consumption tax. Not as high, but still much higher than the 9 percent Herman Cain has called for currently, if only temporarily, in deference to the God of the Bible who asked for just 10 percent from his chosen people.

By way of comparison, if there were some way to easily tax GDP, currently running at $15 trillion, the effective tax rate would have to be 20 percent.

So is there a tax base which is broader still, from which we can derive the necessary sums and get that rate even lower?

Given that people by definition receive income in consequence of the conduct of business of one kind or another (aside from gambling, prostitution and bank robbery), it seems reasonable to look at the size of the various tax bases available strictly from businesses, without whom none of the other tax bases would exist in the first place. If we really mean it when we say we want to tax income only once, we need to go to its source, and for nearly everyone in our society, that source is business.

Corporations in 2008 had total receipts of $28.5 trillion, 2.8 times the size of Herman Cain's PCE tax base. It would have taken a gross receipts tax of merely 10.5 percent on this sum to have generated $3 trillion in tax revenue in tax year 2008, a year when revenues were actually lower at $2.5 trillion. That implies a gross receipts tax of only 8.8 percent on corporations in 2008.

In such a world, there would be no more income taxes on individuals, no Social Security or Medicare taxes either, and no capital gains taxes nor taxes on investment income or savings of any kind, and government would not go wanting. Nor would business be constrained by other taxes and fees imposed on it if we were to throw out the current code and replace it with this simple levy.

But the base could be made broader still in order to lower the effective rate even more.

Add in partnerships, which had $5.9 trillion in total receipts in 2008. And S corporations, which had $6.1 trillion in total receipts in 2008. Both of these added to corporation total receipts yields a gargantuan tax base for 2008 of $40.5 trillion in gross receipts.

All of that could have been taxed at a mere 6.2 percent to meet the federal revenue of $2.5 trillion collected in 2008.

No more talk of a flat income tax, nor of a progressive income tax, nor of a consumption tax. No more compliance costs of $450 billion because of the current code. No more lost time equivalent to 3 million full time jobs.  Just one, low, simple, rate on business. That's it.

In addition to God, John Tamny might go for it, too:

"The answer as always is for the government to simply get out of the way. If it must tax corporations, its taxation should be blind in the way that justice is. A flat gross receipts tax would make all corporations equal before the IRS. That would ensure the most economic allocation of capital on the way to rational, market-driven growth."

Herman Cain's Consumption Tax Is Firmly Rooted In The Framers' Original Intent

Lawrence Hunter for Forbes provides an excellent primer on the Framers' argument for indirect taxation, which is to say taxation on consumption, showing how such taxation was chosen by them on purpose because it is by nature self-limiting, which is a necessary predicate to limited national government:

Hamilton’s exposition in Federalist #22 illustrates the sophistication of the theory of political economy that informed the original constitutional design, which gave rise to a constitutional pincer holding the national government firmly in check.  History has borne out the Framers’ expectations that taxes on consumption are to a large degree self-limiting, while direct taxes know far fewer limits.  In the case of the original Federal design, the self-limiting tendency of indirect taxes on consumption augmented the other arm of the constitutional pincer—limiting the national government solely to the exercise of delegated powers—to make unnecessary other specific constitutional limitations on the national government’s taxing and spending authority, i.e., explicit taxing, spending and borrowing limitations.

The whole thing, here, is must reading.

31 Percent of Occupy Wall Street Protesters Support Violence to Advance Agenda

Doug Schoen has the results of his survey, here, concluding that Occupy Wall Street is:

a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal.

Establishing a Motive for the Norway Shooter's Crimes

The motive appears to be a political response to left-wing anti-Semitism, if the details of the alleged shooter's biography reported widely are accurate.

The bombing in the land of Quisling looks like an elaborate diversion designed to provide cover for the real operation, which was to murder as many members as possible of the youth arm of the left-wing, anti-Israel Norwegian Labor Party, being groomed at their summer camp for future service:

The Workers' Youth League (Bokmål: Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, Nynorsk: Arbeidaranes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF) is the youth organization affiliated with the Norwegian Labour Party.

AUF was formed in April 1927, following the merger of Left Communist Youth League and Socialist Youth League of Norway. It's [sic] ideology is social democracy and democratic socialism. The current leader is Eskil Pedersen. Many former leading figures in AUF have gone on to serve in significant positions in government, such as the incumbent Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg.

A survivor of the shooting explains what all those kids were doing on that island where the murders occurred:

What can I say? The last normal thought in my head was about the AUF´s organization of students. I had just been to a political workshop (that´s what we do at Utøya) – and was on my way up tp [sic] the AUF-shop where I was going to take a shift. ...

Blowing up important buildings in Oslo and killing the future politicians of the Arbeider-party (ed. AP) who are attending summercamp at Utøya. What wrong have we done?

Those who resort to violence have run out of arguments. How could he do this to my AUF-friends? It seems so surrealistic. I don´t understand. I can´t comprehend.

She doesn't understand because she has been taught not to. This formal, political indoctrination of the young is designed to pave the way for the strident, anti-Semitic views of the Norwegian Labor Party, as detailed here, here, here, here and here. Which goes far to explain what could possibly motivate an extremist fanatic of the opposite persuasion, equally misguided, in this case a loner with delusions of grandeur.

[A] young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.

-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.3, here

Progressive Taxation: What Would Jesus Take?

The short answer is: all of it.

The long answer is more complicated.

Rush Limbaugh was a little ticked off a while back because liberals were asserting that Jesus would raise taxes, especially on the rich, which is, of course, a complete caricature of Jesus' teaching. Jesus wouldn't just raise taxes. He'd have made them completely irrelevant. For everyone.

The fact of the matter is, Jesus advocated complete liquidation of one's assets as a condition of discipleship. And after one did so liquidate, one would have no job to tax, either, because one would have to leave one's job to follow him.

Read the famous story about the rich man in Mark 10, paralleled in Matthew 19 and Luke 18, whom Jesus instructed to "sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor." Liberals like to stop right there, with the obligations this story places on the rich.

Few like to reckon, neither liberals nor Christians it must be said, with Luke 14:33: "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."

Or with the calling of The Twelve Disciples, who left all and followed Jesus at his command, wandering around Galilee and Judea for something between one and three years until Jesus met his coup de grace, leaving their families unsupported for the time and becoming deadbeat dads in the process. A fine lot, they.

The truth is Jesus had only these 12 takers, and all of them proved to be something of a disappointment in the end, to say the least. Everyone else he called to discipleship found it a bit of a stretch, and followed at a distance, as it were, especially if a miracle feeding looked to be in the offing. The analogy would be to the Jewish proselytes to whom Paul preached his gospel, which they found rather more attractive than that whole circumcision thing required to become Jews.

Jesus' radicalism makes a certain kind of sense if the end of the world and The Final Judgment is just around the corner, which, of course, would make practical concerns beside the point. "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on." "Some of you standing here will not taste death before you see the kingdom of God come with power."

This is the sort of stuff from which progressive liberalism, inspired by 19th Century liberal Christianity, tried to salvage something, denuded as it was of its supernaturalism and its apocalypticism. Inappropriately inserting their interpretation of a timeless Christian religion into American life, the progressives advocated a moral sensibility based on an unhistorical reading of the history of the religion, pretending all the while that only fundamentalists sought to impose a theocracy on America. In view of the high rates of taxation they came to advocate starting from 1913 (see here), one would almost gladly settle for the fundamentalists' theocracy with its tithe. What rich man in America wouldn't kill for a 10 percent tax rate?

Progressive taxation is a Christian heresy, arbitrarily ratcheting up the cost of discipleship citizenship the richer one gets, but never quite taking all the money, and never really justifying the varying costs in any given year, nor from year to year. Why is the price of entry at a lower rate for a relatively poorer rich man than for a richer rich man? Oh, progressivism tries to pretty this up with sayings of Jesus such as "To whom much is given, much is required" and the like, but at the expense of the full record which shows that Jesus demanded the same from everyone: a complete turning of one's back on one's former existence, no matter how great or how small by human standards of measurement. The Christian conception for this turning was summarized in a single word: "repentance." By contrast the paying of taxes in America is merely with reluctance.

In addition to this heresy, progressivism offers a related one which asserts that a better, improved future is just around the corner for all, if only the rich pay their fair share. This promise of an immanentized eschaton is a bastardized version of Jesus' belief in the coming sudden end of the world and of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. But the reality is, like the prediction of the end of the world before it, the progressives' expected bright future never arrives, no matter how much money they throw at it.

The message of Jesus was much more stern and demanding than you will find in any church in America, or in the tax-writing committees of the Democratic caucus for that matter. Jesus' message was both much more pessimistic and much more undemocratic than most Americans would care to hear, which is why you don't hear it. It assumes that though many may be called, few end up being chosen. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it." (Note to Rev. Rob Bell).

To a significant degree, that pessimism about human nature naturally animated the American founding generation, which ever sought to restrain human evil by recourse to divided government and divided powers within it. They were as familiar with the weaknesses of human nature through their reading of ancient history, literature and philosophy as they were through their reading of the Gospels and St. Paul.

They knew better than most men before them or since that you can't make men good simply by passing laws.

Paul in particular had written that sin was not counted where there was no law, but that when the law came, sin revived, and he died. The analogy from the tax world is similar: If you want to witness tax evasion, multiply the taxes. So funding the new government was going to be at best a tricky business. Which is one reason I think the founders decided to export the sorry business of taxation the way they did, imposing tariffs on foreign trade to generate government revenues, instead of taxing the population directly. They knew it was better to raise the ire of the alien who could be kept at bay than the ire of the countryman who could not.

It's a lesson we need to relearn, and fast.  

Annual Cost to the Taxpayers of Earned Income and Child Tax Credits is $109 Billion

So admits the liberal Tax Policy Center, here:

Each year the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit (CTC) deliver more than $109 billion of cash assistance, mostly to families with children.

There's corporate welfare, and then there's . . . well . . . welfare!

By contrast, the mortgage interest deduction costs the Feds about $88 billion in lost tax revenue annually.

And the rich don't pay Social Security taxes on any compensation beyond $107,000 in wages and salary each year. I estimate that loss to the Treasury at about $100 billion annually.

So, Solomon, which is worse?