Earlier today, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the NAACP Nation Convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. What did media need in order to attend? That’s right, government issued photo identification (and a second form of identification too!), something both Holder and the NAACP stand firmly against when it comes to voting. Holder’s DOJ is currently suing Texas for “discriminatory” voter ID laws.
via Townhall.com.
The double standard appears obvious enough.
Denise Rich, the wealthy socialite and former wife of pardoned billionaire trader Marc Rich, has given up her U.S. citizenship – and, with it, much of her U.S. tax bill. Rich, 68, a Grammy-nominated songwriter and glossy figure in Democratic and European royalty circles, renounced her American passport in November, according to her lawyer.
Another fine Tax Avoidance / Laffer Curve example.
Good to see a rich Democrat in on the action (no pun intended.)
I was reading this story:
President Barack Obama will officially launch the battle over the impending fiscal cliff this morning, announcing a plan to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for people earning under $250,000, while letting the rest of the tax cuts expire.
via Business Insider.
This got me thinking about how much money will really flow into the Treasury from “the rich”? I remember this from awhile back.
If you have not seen… it’s just plain excellent.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661pi6K-8WQ?rel=0]
Another oldie but goodie:
For years, Kerry has invested millions in a number of green energy companies that have benefitted from the president’s efforts to aggressively subsidize the industry with taxpayer dollars.
These companies include Exelon, which received a $646 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan in 2011 to build a solar facility in California and created only 20 permanent jobs, as well as Fisker Automotive, the fledgling electric car company that offshored its manufacturing operation to Finland after receiving a $529 million federal loan guarantee in 2010.
The loan guarantees, approved by the Department of Energy, were made possible by funding allocated in the 2009 stimulus bill, which Kerry supported. According to Kerry’s own office, the Senator “played a key role” in crafting the portions of the legislation designed to offer federal support for green energy projects.
Additionally, Kerry co-authored the controversial cap-and-trade legislation that would have effectively imposed a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions. Though the bill ultimately failed, the New York Times noted that Exelon and companies like it “would emerge as financial winners” if the legislation was enacted.
Kerry has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a venture capital firm run by John Doerr, a prominent Obama donor who served on the president’s Economy Recovery Advisory Board.
The firm, where former vice president Al Gore is a partner, invests heavily in alternative energy companies such as Fisker Automotive and Amonix Inc., a Nevada-based solar panel manufacturer that laid off two-thirds of its workforce earlier this year despite receiving nearly $6 million in federal tax credits.
Amonix was one of 16 companies (out of 27 overall) listed in Doerr’s “green-tech” portfolio to receive some form of federal support under Obama.
People — the problem in NOT in Washington. The problem in on Main Street. The goofballs in Massachusetts keep voting for this guy (the Lord knows we have our own corrupt politicians.) That said, how is the not a crime? And, where is the MSM on this story?
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
via Wired.com.
Like most Wired articles this one goes into incredible detail about how the government spy’s on you and me.
Frankly, it’s kinda terrifying. I wrote in an earlier post about how we’re at the point in time where Fahrenheit 451 meets 1984. The government now has all the data in needs to know everything about your life. All they have to do now is choose to control it… oh, wait. Check out the Obama health care bill.
Somewhere right now a government jack-booted thug is ordering a few rat masks.
There’s something too this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdTyUvY66Mw?rel=0]
There is a similar situation going on with gun control in the states. The argument is always”we need the federal government to control all guns because they travel from state to state.”
This is a common theme with people on the “Left.” They realize that their policies are horrible and people will react by leaving. So it’s always not enough to just destroy one state/country, they need to destroy the whole world.
Enter the UN. Note that this week the brain trust at the UN said that we need a global tax to help the poor.
Beware the globalists.
So I’m reading two stories (here and here) about a new law that will effectively outlaw Roll-Your-Own tobacco stores. It’s something I kinda follow because I always thought it was a decent business model (until the government outlaws your business) and another fine example of what steps people will go through to avoid taxes.
In short:
A tiny amendment buried in the federal transportation bill to be signed today by President Barack Obama will put operators of roll-your-own cigarette operations in Las Vegas and nationwide out of business at midnight. …
The machines are used by customers who buy loose tobacco and paper tubes from the shop and then turn out a carton of finished cigarettes in as little as 10 minutes, often varying the blend to suit their taste. Savings are substantial – at $23 per carton, half the cost of a name-brand smoke – in part because loose tobacco is taxed at a lower rate.
via ReviewJournal.com.
And I was thinking about how sad this was for all the people who work in this industry: the store owners, their employees, the folks who manufacture the RYO machines, their families, the companies who make the cigarette tubes, and the loose pipe tobacco makers, and all of the folks who work in packaging all of these things.
And then… in the comment section of the Law Vegas article I read this:
James Fliess Jul. 6, 2012 | 2:47 p.m.Just a thought. My understanding, and maybe I’m wrong, is that cigarettes manufactured by these machines must cost (via taxes) as much as other cigarettes. How about this arrangement. The store sells the tobacco and supplies as they always have, but they do not have a rolling machine. A buisness next door does not sell tobacco or supplies, but it rents time on their rolling machine. Does it work?
Kudos to you Mr. James Fliess!!
Last year, nearly 1,800 Americans surrendered their citizenship. In a nation of 300 million folks, 1,800 émigrés is hardly a rush for the exits. But the recent trend is, nevertheless, intriguing. …
Who knows the exact reason why 1,800 Americans chose to leave last year — nine times as many as left four years earlier. Certainly, each one of them had their reasons. But like a corporate insider that sells his own stock, there’s one thing you know for certain about his motives: he is not selling because he believes the stock will go up. Maybe he doesn’t believe the stock will go down, but no one sells a stock they believe will go up.
via Business Insider.
I wrote about this before. Still no mainstream press on this issue.
Herman Cain has a new website complete with video. My first as so far favorite video is entitled Give a Lamb a Gun.
It’s a priceless quote from Benjamin Franklin.
The video is under 2 minutes… go check it out.
In the city’s most violent districts, police officers say, they may be assigned half a dozen jobs or more—covering everything from traffic accidents to assaults—at the start of a shift. Their watches are spent racing from call to call, while anything that requires investigation stacks up. Officers describe having to weigh whether to make an arrest. The process “downs” their car, taking it off patrol for a few hours or so, which leaves their beat uncovered and puts more pressure on their fellow officers.
Sometimes, they say, when it comes to minor offenses, they just look the other way.
This is from a fairly long piece about Garry McCarthy but it’s this paragraph that struck me.
In Chicago No Report = No Crime. You have beat cops who are overworked / overloaded they and cannot focus on the little things. So what happens? They let some of the little things go because they have more important — higher priority — calls already waiting for them. When this happens the little things don’t get reported. It’s like the crimes never even happened.
Of course Compstat is at the center of this. It gives the Mayor and McCarthy the plausible ability to say things like, “Well overall crime is down.”