On Friday, I dashed off a check to Uncle Sam for just under two grand. That is over and above what we bled out during the year. So I’ve been doing a slow burn all weekend since I am part of the 99 percent, and we definitely felt the bite.
If you had to scratch out a tax check this year or are curious as to where that amount in the mysterious “FICA” box goes, take a blood pressure pill (or get a prescription for some) and allow me to enlighten you as to how your money is being spent.
If you have a spare minute, you might want to swing by the website of the Taxpayer’s Protection Alliance. It’s a nifty watchdog group that hasn’t gotten nearly the press it should. In addition to building the Museum of Government Waste, the Alliance has currently set its sights on Senate Bill 1813 which is brought to you courtesy of Barbara Boxer. The TPA has set up a page on its website urging people to take a pledge to oppose SB1813.
By way of a brief review, SB1813, which incidentally allows the IRS to revoke your passport, also mandates that vehicles built after 2015 must have an Event Data Recorder or “Black Box” as factory standard.
As a Christian, I will welcome Resurrection Day, just not at the polls. Unfortunately, the dead seem to be rising a bit ahead of schedule when it comes to voting.
Recently, I spent about fifteen minutes talking with Horace Cooper of Project 21, a branch of the National Center For Public Policy Research. According to Cooper, recent election days in New Hampshire and other parts of the nation resembled a horror movie as voters rose from their graves to cast ballots for the candidate of their choice. Cooper noted that the modus operandi in some states has been to move voters by bus from one precinct to another.
It would appear that some of the Greater Minds of our nation have reached the conclusion that the government needs to look further up your colon than we would have dreamed. Literally. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco have decided that sugar is a toxic substance and that the federal government should regulate it much as it does alcohol and tobacco.
Amendment I of the United States Constitution:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Recently the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case Utah Highway Patrol Association v. American Atheists. The ADF has a story on the matter. At issue: whether or not memorial crosses can remain along Utah’s roadways. The crosses mark the places where Utah Highway Patrol Troopers sacrificed their lives in the line of duty. One such cross stands about 90 minutes from where I am writing this. Another is about 15 minutes away from my house, and was erected by the family of a sheriff’s detective who died in a helicopter crash while searching for a missing woman. I knew him. He was a good man, a good cop, and had a wickedly dry sense of humor.
I live in Utah. And with all due respect to Real Salt Lake, the Utah Grizzlies The Utah Blaze and the Salt Lake Bees, the Utah Jazz is pretty much all we have in the way of big-time pro sports. And we love The Jazz here.
That being said, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for these NBAcompoops. Any of ‘em. Not the players, and not the owners.
As I write this, the NBA lockout is in its 117th day. And it appears the NBA has cancelled another two weeks of the season. With the chance that the Christmas Day games can be salvaged.
I’m proud to say that my great-great grandfather fought for the Union during the Civil War. In fact he gave a leg to the cause. And like many Americans out there, my sympathies lie with the Blue, rather than the Grey when it comes to history, re-enactments, books or the Ken Burns television series.
Setting aside for today the discussion of whether or not the South had it coming in terms of karma; the Reconstruction period in the South following the war was marked by the presence of northern opportunists who recognized that there was a great deal of money to be made by taking advantage of the carnage left in the war’s wake.
Well, I stand corrected.
No sooner had my last column hit TH than I saw that some of the Occupiers were in fact moving to occupy Aspen, Colorado, a place, as Steve Martin reminds us, where rich kids with a sense of entitlement clash with developers with a sense of condominiums.
I wonder: Do the good people in Aspen wonder if this is what they voted for in 2008?
As I understand it, the Soviet OSW occupiers are moving to smaller towns across the United States.
Apparently the effort is on to spread the revolution with self-appointed committees formed in soviets issuing demands.
The All-of-the-Above Pandering Strategy
The Secretary of the Interior was in Salt Lake last week to sign the necessary paperwork allowing a company to drill for energy on land in Eastern Utah. While the energy and jobs are welcome, the Secretary apparently, thinks the people of Eastern Utah will have forgotten that he was the one who took the energy jobs away in the first place, when he pulled the 77 leases from Utah and Colorado, and placed new and tougher restrictions on energy exploration, plunging people into poverty and foreclosure. [Read more]