Usually Right: Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 12, 2013

Monday, August 12, 2013

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 12, 2013

You'd better believe it!

22 comments:

William R. Barker said...: * TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/holder-seeks-to-avert-mandatory-minimum-sentences-for-some-low-level-drug-offenders/2013/08/11/343850c2-012c-11e3-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story_1.html

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is set to announce Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.

* ON WHAT AUTHORITY...???

The new Justice Department policy...

* SHOULD NOT OVERRIDE FEDERAL INTENT AS EXPRESSED BY ACTUAL STATUTE...

The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder will reveal in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, according to senior department officials. He is also expected to introduce a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, non-violent inmates and find alternatives to prison for non-violent criminals.

* REMEMBER BACK IN THE DAYS OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE RULE OF LAW WHEN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH PROPOSED AND THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH DISPOSED...?

Justice Department lawyers have worked for months on the proposals, which Holder wants to make the cornerstone of the rest of his tenure.

* I'M CONFUSED BY THE PISS POOR REPORTING. UP TOP HOLDER'S PLANS ARE REFERRED TO AS POLICIES... NEW POLICIES HOLDER IS SET TO ANNOUNCE... YET NOW THEY'RE BEING REFERRED TO AS PROPOSALS. WELL...? WHICH IS IT...?!?!

Holder is calling for a change in Justice Department policies to reserve the most severe penalties for drug offenses for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers. He has directed his 94 U.S. attorneys across the country to develop specific, locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.

* SO VIA HIS GUIDELINES HE PLANS ON SUBVERTING CONGRESS' GUIDELINES - aka: THE LAW AS ENACTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONSTITUTION. (IF THAT WHAT HE'S PLANNING...???)

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 9:33 AM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

“Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason,” Holder plans to say. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.”

* ACTUALLY THE STATS SHOW THAT WE CAN AND WE HAVE... (*SHRUG*)

The attorney general can make some of these changes to drug policy on his own. He is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.

* SO... PUT IN A LESS FLATTERING LIGHT... "CONSPIRING WITH CRIMINALS TO AVOID CONGRESSIONALLY MANDATED SENTENCING."

(*SHRUG*)

Under certain statutes, inflexible sentences for drug crimes are mandated regardless of the facts or conduct in the case, reducing the discretion of prosecutors, judges and juries.

* WHICH IS WHY GOVERNORS AND PRESIDENTS HAVE THE POWER TO COMMUTE AND EVEN PARDON.

(*SMIRK*)

Some of Holder’s other initiatives will require legislative change. Holder is urging passage of legislation with bipartisan support that is aimed at giving federal judges more discretion in applying mandatory minimum sentences to certain drug offenses. “Such legislation will ultimately save our country billions of dollars,” Holder said of legislation supported by Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable.”

* LISTEN... I'D BE GLAD TO LOOK AT IT... GLAD TO DISCUSS IT... AND CHANCES ARE IF MIKE LEE AND RAND PAUL HAVE GOOD THINGS TO SAY ABOUT CERTAIN PROPOSALS THAT ADDS WEIGHT TO THE SCALE, BUT MY CONCERN IS THAT THE CONSTITUTIONAL SEPARATION OF POWERS BE ABIDED BY! HOLDER SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO IGNORE THE LAW OR BYPASS THE LAW OR GET AROUND THE LAW USING THE EXCUSE THAT HE'S "IMPROVING" THE LAW. HE HAS NO SUCH POWER.

Holder will say he has also revised the department’s prison policy to allow for more compassionate releases of elderly inmates who did not commit violent crimes, have served significant portions of their sentences and pose no threat to the public.

* AGAIN... BY WHAT AUTHORITY...???; August 12, 2013 at 9:33 AM
William R. Barker said...: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/12/surge-mexican-illegal-immigrants-claiming-asylum-overwhelms-border-officials/

A sudden influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico requesting asylum is overwhelming immigration agents in San Diego, forcing agencies to rent hotel rooms for some undocumented families and release others to cities around the U.S.

* GEEZUS... FRIGGIN'... CHRIST...!

* THIS IS INSANITY! THE LAW MUST BE CHANGED SO THAT I.C.E. CAN SIMPLY REFUSE THESE PEOPLE ENTRY. (HOTEL ROOMS... HOTEL ROOMS...) (ROOM SERVICE TOO...?!?!)

(*LITERALLY SICK TO MY STOMACH*); August 12, 2013 at 9:40 AM
William R. Barker said...: * TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/08/06/al-qaida-in-perspective/

* BY PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Apparently, the threat [was] both serious and specific.

* NOT SURE IF HE'S BEING SERIOUS OR SARCASTIC...

The United States ordered 22 diplomatic missions closed and issued a worldwide travel alert for U.S. citizens.

The threat [came] from Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, the most lethal branch of the terrorist organization.

“After Benghazi,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “these al-Qaida types are really on steroids thinking we’re weaker and they’re stronger. …

* YEAH... AND...???

“They want to drive the West out of the Mideast and take over these Muslim countries and create an al-Qaida-type religious entity … and if we ever take the bait and try to come home and create fortress America, there will be another 9/11.”

* SO IT'S IMPERIALISM OR 9/11. UH-HUH. (LINDSEY GRAHAM IS SUCH AN A--HOLE!)

By the time this column appears, America may have been hit.

* NOPE... (BUT THEN AGAIN... IF THEY DID HIT US AND THE FEDS COULD COVER IT UP...) (*SHRUG*)

Yet is it not time to put al-Qaida in perspective and consider whether our Mideast policy is creating more terrorists than we are killing?

* YES!

In 2010 America lost 15 citizens to terrorism. Thirteen of them died in Afghanistan. The worst attack was the killing of six Americans at a Christian medical mission in Badakhshan Province. Yet, in 2010, not one death here in America resulted from terrorism.

That year, however, 780,000 Americas died of heart disease, 575,000 of cancer, 138,000 from respiratory diseases, 120,000 in accidents (35,000 in auto accidents), 69,000 from diabetes, 40,000 in drug-induced deaths, 38,000 by suicide, 32,000 by liver disease, 25,000 in alcohol-induced deaths, 16,000 by homicide and 8,000 from HIV/AIDS.

Is terrorism the killer we should fear most and invest the lion’s share of our resources fighting?

* NOPE...!

Since 9/11, al-Qaida has not proven a terribly effective enemy. Some plots — the shoe-bomber on the airliner over Detroit, the Times Square bomber — failed from sheer incompetence. Other attacks have been thwarted by excellent U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism work. Our home front has been well protected.

* WELL... EXCEPT FOR BOSTON... AND EXCEPT FOR THE "THWARTED" ATTACKS THAT WERE "THWARTED" ONLY BY LUCK... BY HAPPENSTANCE. (AND, AGAIN... WHAT OF ALL THESE "GAS EXPLOSIONS" - I REPEAT THE QUESTION: IF THE GOVERNMENT COULD GET AWAY WITH NOT ACKNOWLEDGING A SUCCESSFUL TERRORIST ATTACK AS A TERRORIST ATTACK... WOULD IT?)

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 11:37 AM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

But by having fought a “war on terror” overseas in Graham’s way — invading, occupying, nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq — we lost 6,000 soldiers and brought back 40,000 wounded Americans.

(*NOD*) (*PURSED LIPS*)

Were the wars in which we suffered such casualties, and that cost us $2 trillion and counting, really worth it?

* NOPE.

Did they make us more secure?

* NOPE.

The Taliban are making a comeback. Iraq is sinking into civil, sectarian and tribal war. Our influence in the Islamic world is at a nadir. And Graham concedes the enemy that we went over there to destroy, al-Qaida, is not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Mali, and is now “on steroids.”

(*SIGH*)

Ten years ago, anti-interventionists warned that a plunge into the Islamic world would produce what it was designed to prevent. We could create more terrorists than we would kill.

Dismissing such warnings as “isolationism,” George W. Bush launched the war. The result? Precisely what opponents of the war had predicted, an al-Qaida that has metastasized and is now “on steroids.”

* ACCORDING TO LINDSEY GRAHAM...

Now, Graham says, al-Qaida wants “to drive the West out of the Middle East” — their objective all along — and “take over these Muslim countries and create an al-Qaida-type religious entity.” But was it not the United States that dumped over Moammar Gadhafi and opened the door to the al-Qaida that perpetrated the Benghazi atrocity?

* OBAMA, CLINTON, AND THE LIKES OF GRAHAM AND MCCAIN!

Was not "liberating" Benghazi why we went to war?

(*SMIRK*)

We "liberated" it, but for whom?

* FOR THE TERRORISTS!

Gadhafi, though himself a terrorist responsible for the Lockerbie Pan-Am bombing, was an enemy of al-Qaida. So, too, are Hezbollah, Iran and Syrian President Bashar Assad. All are fighting to prevent a takeover of Syria by rebels whose principal fighting force is the Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaida.

Does not Vladimir Putin have a point when he asks why America is arming an insurgency dominated by the sort of people who did 9/11?

(*RAISING MY HAND*)

* YES! I THINK HE DOES!

Graham says al-Qaida wants to take over “Muslim countries and create an al-Qaida-type religious entity.” Yet the Muslim country al-Qaida has the best chance of taking over is Syria. And we are arming the rebels who are allied with al-Qaida and who want to take over Syria?

* LINDSEY... GRAHAM... IS... A... MORON...!!!

“If we ever take the bait and try to come home and create fortress America, there’ll be another 9/11,” warns Graham.

Graham is saying we must stay in the Middle East and fight on until al-Qaida, which has grown since our intervention and because of our intervention, is annihilated.

(*HEADACHE*)

Otherwise they create a caliphate and come over here and kill us all.

After 58,000 dead we left Vietnam. How many Americans have the Vietnamese killed since we left?

* ONE... MORE... TIME...

After 58,000 dead we left Vietnam. How many Americans have the Vietnamese killed since we left?; August 12, 2013 at 11:37 AM
William R. Barker said...: * TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/08/09/do-we-really-want-a-cold-war-ii/

* ALSO BY PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking,” said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated... Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin.

(*SNORTING WHILE SHAKING MY HEAD*)

The reason: Putin’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at the Moscow airport, his computers full of secrets that our National Security Agency has been thieving from every country on earth, including Russia.

* WELL... YES... THERE IS THAT...

Yet there are many KGB defectors in the United States, and Russia has never used this as an excuse to cancel a summit.

* WELL... YES... BUT...

From 1989 to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to let Eastern Europe go free and withdraw his troops and tank armies back to the Urals. The Soviet Union was allowed to dissolve into 15 nations. In three years, the USSR gave up an empire, a third of its territory, and half its people. (And it extended to us a hand of friendship.) How did we respond?

We pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders, bringing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, even former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

(*SAD NOD*)

European objections alone prevented us from handing out NATO war guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia.

* YEP...

To cut Moscow out of the Caspian Sea oil, we helped build a pipeline through two former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and, thence, under the Black Sea to our NATO ally Turkey.

In the Boris Yeltsin decade, the 1990s, U.S. hustlers colluded with local oligarchs in looting Russia of her natural resources.

* TRUE!

In the past decade, the National Endowment for Democracy and its Republican and Democratic subsidiaries helped dump over governments in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, and replace them with regimes friendlier to us and more distant from Moscow.

* IT'S TRUE...

George W. Bush sought to put an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Neither country had requested it. We said it was aimed at Iran.

* CLEARLY IT WAS AIMED AT THE RUSSIANS... OR AT LEAST "ALSO" AIMED AT THE RUSSIANS.

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 12:11 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

When my late friend, columnist Tony Blankley, visited Russia in the Bush II era, he was astounded at the hostility he encountered from Russians who felt we had responded to their offer of friendship at the end of the Cold War by taking advantage of them.

* THE WASHINGTON INSIDERS WHO ALSO REPRESENT OUR OLIGARCHS... THE WALL STREET BANDITS... THE U.S. GOVERNMENT BASICALLY "COOPERATED" WITH OUR OLIGARCHS WHO SOUGHT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF RUSSIA. THAT IS THE HISTORY MY FRIENDS.

Putin is a former intelligence officer, a patriot, a nationalist.

* YES! (AND A CHRISTIAN!) (JUST THROWIN' IT OUT THERE FOR THOSE WHO ARE UNAWARE...)

How did we think he would react to U.S. encirclement of his country by NATO and U.S. meddling in his internal affairs?

How did American patriots in the Truman-McCarthy era react to the discovery that Hollywood, the U.S. government and our atom bomb project were riddled with communists loyal to Josef Stalin?

Why cannot we Americans see ourselves as others see us?

(*NOD*)

Why is Russia still supporting the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, the Post and Journal demand to know. Well, Russia has a long relationship with the Assad family, selling it arms and maintaining a naval base on Syria’s coast. Did we expect Russia to behave as we did when our autocratic ally of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, was challenged by crowds in Tahrir Square? (And does not Putin have a point when he asks why we are backing Syrian rebels among whom are elements of that same al-Qaida that killed thousands of us in the twin towers? If the Assad family is irredeemably wicked, why did "Pappy Bush" enlist Hafez Assad in his war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, a war to which Damascus contributed 4,000 troops?)

We ditched Mubarak and washed our hands of him in weeks.

Russia stood by its man.

Is the Syrian war so clear-cut a case of good and evil that the Russians should dump their friends and support ours?

* JUST LET THE ANIMALS KILL EACH OTHER! THAT SHOULD BE OUR POLICY!

There is another reason Russia is recoiling from America. With the death of its Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russia is moving back toward its religious and Orthodox roots. Secretly baptized at birth by his mother, Putin has embraced this. Increasingly, religious Russians look on America, with our Hollywood values and celebrations of homosexuality, as a sick society, a focus of cultural and moral evil in the world.

* AND IN MANY WAYS THEY HAVE A POINT!

Much of the Islamic world that once admired America has reached the same conclusion.

(*NOD*)

Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, trade, arms reduction — we have fish to fry with Putin.

As for our lectures on democracy and morality, how ’bout we put a sock in it?; August 12, 2013 at 12:11 PM
William R. Barker said...: * THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355421/know-thine-enemy-mark-steyn

* BY MARK STEYN

On December 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Three years, eight months, and eight days later, the Japanese surrendered.

These days, America’s military moves at a more leisurely pace.

* BEYOND AFGHANISTAN... (KEEP READING!)

On November 5, 2009, another U.S. base, Fort Hood, was attacked — by one man standing on a table, screaming “Allahu akbar!” and opening fire.

Three years, nine months, and one day later, his court-martial finally got under way.

The intervening third-of-a-decade-and-more has apparently been taken up by such vital legal questions as the fullness of beard Major Hasan is permitted to sport in court.

(This is not a joke: See “Judge Ousted in Fort Hood Shooting Case amid Beard Debacle” - CBS News.)

Army regulations require soldiers to be clean-shaven. The judge, Colonel Gregory Gross, ruled Hasan’s beard in contempt, fined him $1,000, and said he would be forcibly shaved if he showed up that hirsute next time. At which point Hasan went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which ruled that Colonel Gross’s [decision] raised questions about his impartiality, and removed him.

(He’s the first judge in the history of American jurisprudence to be kicked off a trial because of a “beard debacle.”)

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 12:37 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

The new judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, agreed that Hasan’s beard was a violation of regulations, but “said she won’t hold it against him.”

(*SIGH*)

The U.S. Army seems disinclined to hold anything against him, especially the 13 corpses plus an unborn baby.

* OBAMA'S U.S. ARMY. OBAMA'S PENTAGON. REMEMBER, FOLKS, THIS ALL BEGAN - AND HAS CONTINUED THROUGHOUT - THE AGE OF OBAMA.

Major Hasan fired his lawyers...

* OR TRIED TO... (THE AUTHORITIES WOULDN'T ALLOW HIM TO.)

* HASAN ALSO WANTED TO PLED GUILTY. AGAIN... THE AUTHORITIES WOULDN'T LET HIM. (THE REGULATIONS WOULDN'T LET HIM; I DON'T KNOW HOW FAR BACK THAT PARTICULAR REGULATION GOES BACK.)

As a self-respecting jihadist, Major Hasan quite reasonably resented being portrayed as just another all-American loon gone postal. So he sacked his defense team, only to have the court appoint a standby defense team just in case there were any arcane precedents and obscure case law he needed clarification on. ... On the very first day of the trial, he stood up and told the jury that “the evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.” Later, in one of his few courtroom interventions, he insisted that it be put on the record that “the alleged murder weapon” was, in fact, his. The trial then came to a halt when the standby defense team objected to the judge that Major Hasan’s defense strategy (yes, I did it; gimme a blindfold, cigarette, and tell the virgins here I come) would result in his conviction and execution.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. (It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”)

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink.

* AND HE'S OBVIOUSLY A TRAITOR... YET THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION REFUSED TO CHARGE HIM WITH TREASON...

The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons.

* YEP! YOU READ THAT RIGHT!

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 12:38 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)

That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school.

* HMM... 1993... WHO WAS PRESIDENT... (CLINTON!)

* AND OF COURSE BUSH DESERVES A SMACK ACROSS THE FACE FOR NOT RECINDING CLINTON'S IDIOCY UPON ASSUMING OFFICE...

* AND OF COURSE RATHER THAN RESPOND TO HASAN'S ACTION BY REVOKING THE CLINTON REG, OBAMA HAS DOUBLED DOWN! (READ ON!)

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”

* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP!

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.”

The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse.

* READ ON... READ ON... YOU'LL SOON SEE WHERE STEYN IS GOING...

After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff...

* THE ARMY'S CHIEF OF STAFF...

...was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”

* UH... HUH...

(And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.)

* TRUE!

Like I said, we think he’s nuts; he thinks we’re nuts. Right now, there’s a petition on the Internet seeking to persuade the United States government to reclassify Hasan’s “workplace violence” as an act of terror. There are practical consequences to this: The victims, shot by an avowed enemy combatant in an act of war, are currently ineligible for Purple Hearts. The Pentagon insists the dead and wounded must be dishonored in death because to give them any awards for their sacrifice would prejudice Major Hasan’s trial and make it less likely that he could be convicted.

* NO, FOLKS... THIS AIN'T AN ONION PIECE OR A SNL SKIT... THIS IS OBAMA ADMINISTRATION POLICY!

Hence, the Internet petition. Linking to it from their homepage, my colleagues at National Review Online promoted it with the tag: “Thirteen people lost their lives with dozens of others wounded. And now the man responsible wants to claim it was workplace violence.”

That’s not true — and actually it’s grossly unfair to Major Hasan.

He’s admirably upfront about who and what he is — a “Soldier of Allah,” as he put on his business card.

On Tuesday, he admitted he was a traitor who had crossed over from “the bad side” (America’s) to “the good side” (Islam’s).

He has renounced his U.S. citizenship and its effete protections such as workplace-violence disability leave. He professes loyalty to America’s enemies. He says, “I am the shooter.” He helpfully informs us that that’s his gun. In this week’s one-minute statement, he spoke more honestly and made more sense than Obama, Gates, Casey, the Armed Forces Court of Appeals, two judges, the prosecution and defense lawyers, and mountains of bureaucratic reports and media coverage put together. But poor old Hasan can say “Yup, I did it” all he wants; what does he know?

* SUCH IS THE POSITION OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION.

The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war [on terror] is being lost.

[I]t cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged.

(*SIGH*)

Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.; August 12, 2013 at 12:38 PM
William R. Barker said...: * TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/07/climate-change-myths

Global average temperature has been flat for a decade. But frightening myths about global warming continue.

We're told there are more hurricanes now. We're told that hurricanes are stronger. But the National Hurricane Center says it isn't so.

Meteorologist Maria Molina told me it's not surprising that climatologists assumed hurricanes would get worse. "Hurricanes need warm ocean waters," but it turns out that "hurricanes are a lot more complicated than just warm ocean waters." Computer models have long predicted nasty effects from our production of greenhouse gasses. But the nasty effects have not appeared. As far as hurricanes... more hit the United States in the 1880s than recently.

* OOPS...

Why do people believe that global warming has already created bigger storms? Because when "experts" repeatedly tell us that global warming will wreck the Earth, we start to fit each bad storm into the disaster narrative that's already in our heads.

* IT'S NOT JUST "THE EXPERTS." IT'S K-12 MISEDUCATION. IT'S POP CULTURE. IT'S MYTHS, LIES, AND MISINFORMATION BEING PUSHED VIA ENTERTAINMENT - CARTOONS, TV SHOWS, MOVIES, EVEN MUSIC.

(*SHRUG*)

Attention-seeking media wail about increased property damage from hurricanes. And it's true! Costs have grown! But that's because more people build on coastlines, not because storms are stronger or more frequent.

* ONE... MORE... TIME...

But that's because more people build on coastlines, not because storms are stronger or more frequent.

Also, thanks to modern media and camera phones, we hear more about storms, and see the damage. People think Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,800 people, was the deadliest storm ever. But the 1900 Galveston hurricane killed 10,000 people. We just didn't have so much media then.

Climatologist Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, says humans don't have as much impact on global temperature as the doomsayers feared. "Forecasts of global warming - particularly in the last two years - have begun to come down," he says. "We're seeing the so-called 'sensitivity' of temperature being reduced by 40% in the new climate models. It means we're going to live."

(*SNORT*)

Michaels is tired of dire predictions. "I have lived through nine end-of-the-world environmental apocalypses, beginning with (the 1962 environmental book) 'Silent Spring,' and, you know, we're still here."

As a consumer reporter, I fell for dire predictions about cellphones, Y2K and pesticides.

Maybe the new scare will be killer bees, flesh-eating bacteria or bird flu. The media always hype something.

* REMEMBER ANTRAX...? HMM...? REMEMBER WHEN AFTER 9/11 ANTRAX PACKED LETTERS WERE SENT TO A FEW MEDIA AND POLITICAL FIGURES AND THEN... ONLY THEN... WERE WE INFORMED THAT ANTI-BIOTICS WOULD TAKE CARE OF IT?

(*SNORT*)

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 1:24 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Since this is hurricane season, let's at least debunk one specific myth about preparing for hurricanes: the idea you should use masking tape to put X's on your windows. Government brochures did recommend that in the 1930s, but now the National Hurricane Center calls it a mistake. It won't stop glass from shattering, says Molina, but "now you have larger pieces of glass - potentially deadlier pieces of glass - flying around. ... What you should be doing during a hurricane is be in a room with no windows and in a lower part of your home."

I'm a global warming skeptic not because I don't believe the world will get warmer. It may. Climate changes. It always has. Man's carbon output might make it worse. But just because humans sometimes damage the environment doesn't mean government is competent to fix the problem. That's the biggest myth of all.

* WHO SAYS GLOBAL WARMING WOULD BE MORE DAMAGING THAN... OH... GLOBAL COOLING? (BUT IN ANY CASE, WHAT WILL BE WILL BE; WEATHER PATTERNS AND SEA PATTERNS AND TEMPERATURES FLUXUATE OVER TIME... ALWAYS HAVE... ALWAYS WILL. WE WILL ADOPT!)

Government is the same institution that takes over forests to "protect" them - but then builds logging roads into forests to cut down trees that unsubsidized, private roads might never have reached. The forests end up smaller, but people still assume they're safer in government hands than in greedy private hands.

Government is the institution that puts itself in charge of caring for wildlife but recently sent a dozen armed agents into a Wisconsin animal shelter to seize and kill a baby deer named Giggles who was being nursed back to health there... [because] Giggles wasn't in the right type of approved shelter.

* YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP, FOLKS!

When government screws up, we're supposed to say, "They meant well."

When individuals pursuing their own interests screw up, we're supposed to feel ashamed of industrial civilization and let government punish and control us all.

If we let it do that, government will do to the economy what it did to Giggles.; August 12, 2013 at 1:24 PM
William R. Barker said...: * THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355493/lerners-fec-problem-eliana-johnson

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing.

E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office.

Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy.

* AND IF SO... I'LL BE THE FIRST TO SAY SO.

And now, an FEC official is raising the specter of systemic bias at that agency, too, calling the techniques its lawyers employ a “much more sophisticated way” of discriminating against conservative groups than those used by the IRS.

* GEEZUS...

“When we spoke last July, you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption letter from the IRS,” an FEC attorney wrote in a February 2009 e-mail to Lerner.

* AND THE PROBLEM WITH THAT BEING... (READ ON...)

But Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that both “return information” and “taxpayer return information” are strictly confidential. An IRS source tells National Review Online that, within the agency, disclosing the information that Lerner appears to have provided is considered “a violation of Section 6103.” That’s a felony punishable by up to $5,000 in fines or five years in prison.

If found guilty of such a violation, Lerner, who has been on paid administrative leave since May, would also lose her job: “If such offense is committed by any officer or employee of the United States,” the law reads, he shall “be dismissed from office or discharged from employment upon conviction for such offense.”

* BUT AS YET SHE HASN'T BEEN CHARGED... CHARGED BY ERIC HOLDER'S "JUSTICE" DEPARTMENT... (*SMIRK*)

Steven Willis, a professor of tax law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, argues that [Lerner knowingly broke the law].

The law “does not allow for disclosure of pending applications,” Willis says, and though he acknowledges that the law is a “technicality,” he maintains that Lerner’s violation is something more serious. “In her position as director of Exempt Organizations, Ms. Lerner would surely have been aware of section 6103,” Willis tells me. “She would have had responsibility to ensure that employees who reported to her not violate the sections.” Further, her role as a senior IRS official “adds to the seriousness.”

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 8:58 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)

However, it’s not clear that Lerner disclosed anything that could not have been inferred from information otherwise available to the FEC.

* EXCEPT FOR THE EMAIL...

(*SHRUG*)

[Other] tax-law experts, however, disagree about whether Lerner’s apparent disclosure was a violation of Section 6103.

[O]nce an organization is granted tax exemption, federal law mandates that its application as well as the IRS’s approval letter be made publicly available; since its application was not publicly available, lawyers could have deduced that its file was pending. For this reason and others, Bryan Camp of Texas Tech University’s law school does not believe Lerner broke the law.

“Assuming the disclosure occurred, I don’t see that as a 6103 violation,” he says, citing a provision that allows the IRS to verify whether an organization is “currently held to be exempt.” But Camp adds a caveat. “The law of disclosure is complex and treacherous,” he says. “There are very few, even in the office of chief counsel, who understand all the ins and outs.”

The IRS, for its part, is defending Lerner’s actions.

* WHAT... A... SURPRISE...!

The agency told National Review Online in a statement, “The email . . . indicates that both Ms. Lerner and the FEC attorney recognized the IRS obligation to protect taxpayer information and that neither person wanted the IRS to provide the FEC with anything other than publicly available information.”

* REALLY...? FOLKS... RE-READ THE EMAIL!

Regardless of whether Lerner broke the law, the e-mail exchange released by the Ways and Means Committee suggests that information was passed from the FEC to the IRS — and vice versa — and was used by both agencies to target conservative groups.

* SUGGESTS...???

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

The American Future Fund is a grassroots group devoted to advocating conservative and free-market principles. Two months after an FEC attorney first contacted Lerner about the group in July 2008 an agent in Lerner’s unit sent the American Future Fund a second request for more information about the group’s activities. The group was eventually granted tax exemption in October 2008.

The handling of the matter by FEC bureaucrats is equally dubious.

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 8:58 PM
William R. Barker said...: * OOPS... NOT CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 4)

FEC vice chairman Don McGahn, who tells National Review Online that he has seen additional e-mails between the IRS and the FEC, describes the correspondence as “weird.” According to McGahn, in July 2008, an FEC investigator, conceding he had not been able to find public information about the American Future Fund’s tax status, asked Lerner to provide its application for exemption.

But under federal law, the FEC cannot open an investigation until at least four commissioners have voted that there is “reason to believe that a person has committed” a violation of campaign-finance law — and no such vote had yet taken place.

* ONE... MORE... TIME...

But under federal law, the FEC cannot open an investigation until at least four commissioners have voted that there is “reason to believe that a person has committed” a violation of campaign-finance law — and no such vote had yet taken place.

Hans von Spakovsky, an NRO contributor who served as an FEC commissioner from 2006 to 2008, tells me that if the FEC attorney contacted the IRS before the commissioners voted on whether to open an investigation, “that attorney violated federal law.” “The law is crystal clear — no investigation of any kind until the commission votes to open an investigation,” he says.

McGahn views the American Future Fund’s case as but one example of a systemic problem within the FEC. Attorneys in the agency’s general counsel’s office, he says, are less than candid about how they obtain information. ... FEC attorneys “don’t always brief the commission on the information that they have,” McGahn says... The behavior of career employees with regard to the American Future Fund, he says, reflects “a much larger culture of not telling the whole story when presenting a case to the commission,” with the result being that commissioners at times vote to investigate groups without having the facts presented clearly before them.

[Another] example, the case of Republican congressman Vern Buchanan, whose 2006 campaign was the subject of an FEC complaint. According to McGahn, agency attorneys had “obtained exculpatory information but kept the investigation going for a couple of years,” shielding it from both Buchanan’s attorneys and the commissioners themselves. Buchanan’s attorney, William McGinley, told the commission in December 2010, two years after the initial complaint was filed, “All of the exculpatory information disclosed by the office of general counsel in the last 48 hours has been requested by us multiple times during this matter. This is now the second time in as many days that we have received previously undisclosed exculpatory evidence.” (FEC commissioner Caroline Hunter acknowledged as much in a hearing, telling the parties, “The issue about the exculpatory evidence is obviously troubling, and I apologize for having to deal with this at the last minute like this.”)

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 9:30 PM
William R. Barker said...: * FINALLY... CONCLUDING... (Part 4 of 4)

At the FEC, McGahn sees a system of discrimination more highly evolved than that employed by IRS officials. “Making a list of everybody who uses the word tea-party and giving them extra scrutiny, that’s rather amateur,” he explains. “The more sophisticated way is to look up all the complaints that come in” and, for those involving Republican and conservative organizations, “do an extra-statutory search to develop the facts and then decide on what the legal theory is.” It comes down to “the rule of law versus case by case, ad hoc decision making,” where federal bureaucrats are seeking to “decide who broke the rule of law after the fact.”

* FOLKS... THIS WAS WHY THE CIVIL SERVICE WAS CREATED - TO AVOID THIS SHIT YOU'RE READING ABOUT HERE!

National Review Online has also drawn attention to Lerner’s own controversial tenure at the FEC, where she served as head of the enforcement office from 1986 to 2001. During that time, she launched a five-year investigation of the Christian Coalition after which the group was cleared of any wrongdoing.

* AFTER... AFTER... AFTER...

In a 1998 case, she recommended against the investigation of a donor, citing his “high profile as a prominent Democratic fundraiser” and “potential fundraising involvement in support of Mr. Gore’s expected presidential campaign.”

* YOU... HAVE... GOT... TO... BE... SHITTING... ME...

House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa has now requested all documents potentially related to the “inappropriate coordination” between the FEC and the IRS between January 1, 2008, and the present. If McGahn and his fellow critics are correct, the scandal currently engulfing the IRS will extend deep into the bowels of another federal agency.; August 12, 2013 at 9:30 PM
William R. Barker said...: http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2013/08/u-s-pays-1-5-mil-to-help-brazilian-women-quit-smoking/

A Brazilian-born researcher who runs minority health programs at a public university in Alabama has convinced the U.S. government to give her $1.5 million to help women quit smoking in her native country.

* SIGNED OFF ON BY WHOM... (THE NAME...???)

A noble cause indeed, but likely not on the high list of the American taxpayers funding the project. Nevertheless, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s medical research agency, has given the Brazilian researcher, Isabel Scarinci, a five-year, $1.5 million grant to fund her international tobacco-control project.

* WHOEVER AUTHORIZED THIS SHOULD BE FIRED AND THE FUNDING SHOULD BE DISCONTINUED.

The goal is to better understand “women and their tobacco-related issues” in the South American country, especially in Scarinci’s Brazilian hometown of Parana. In the last two years alone, the researcher has received north of $560,000 for the initiative, according to NIH records for fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

* GEEZUS... F--KING... SON OF A B--CHIN' C--KS--KER...

At the University of Alabama Scarinci is a preventative medicine expert who specializes in reaching out to “at-risk populations.” As part of her duties she operates several publicly-funded initiatives to promote healthy lifestyles and disease prevention among “Latino immigrants and African Americans in underserved rural communities.” This likely includes illegal aliens.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

The Obama administration has made minority health a huge priority and has funded projects accordingly through different federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as well as the NIH, which annually doles out north of $31 billion to hundreds of thousands of researchers at thousands of universities and institutions around the globe.

* AROUND THE GLOBE...?!?!

(*STILL SHAKING MY HEAD*); August 12, 2013 at 9:31 PM
William R. Barker said...: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/08/07/would-they-be-proud-n1656443/page/full

Most schools identified as "persistently dangerous" are predominantly black schools. To have a modicum of safety, many schools are equipped with walk-through metal detectors, security cameras and conveyor belt X-ray machines that scan book bags and purses.

Nationally, the black four-year high-school graduation rate is 52%. In some cities, such as Detroit and Philadelphia, it's considerably lower - 20% and 24%, respectively. In Rochester, N.Y., it's 9%.

Born in 1936, I've lived during some of our racially discriminatory history. I recall being chased out of Fishtown and Grays Ferry, two predominantly Irish Philadelphia neighborhoods, with my cousin in the 1940s and not stopping until we reached a predominantly black North Philly or South Philly neighborhood.

Today that might be different. A black person seeking safety might run from a black neighborhood to a white neighborhood.

On top of that, today whites are likely to be victims of blacks.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' 2008 National Crime Victimization Survey, in instances of interracial crimes of violence, 83% of the time, a black person was the perpetrator and a white person was the victim.

* AS TO THE BLACK ON BLACK CRIME EPIDEMIC...

Most interracial assaults are committed by blacks.

After the George Zimmerman trial, in cities such as Baltimore, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Chicago and New York, there have been a number of brutal revenge attacks on whites in the name of "justice for Trayvon." Over the past few years, there have been many episodes of unprovoked attacks by black gangs against white people at beaches, in shopping malls, on public conveyances and in other public places in cities such as Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

* I KNOW... I KNOW... YOU (WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED) DON'T WANNA HEAR "RACIST RANTINGS" LIKE THESE OF... er... DR. WALTER E. WILLIAMS.

There's no widespread condemnation, plus most of the time, the race of the attackers was not reported, even though media leftists and their allies are experts in reporting racial differences in everything else.

* HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL... IGNORE THE REALITY AND PERHAPS IT'LL GO AWAY. (SORRY... BUT I FEAR NOT.)

Would those black Americans who fought tooth and nail against Jim Crow, segregation, lynching and racism be proud of the findings of a recent Rasmussen poll in which 31% of blacks think that most blacks are racists and 24% of blacks think that most whites are racists?

Black people don't need to have a conversation with white people on matters of race.

* NOPE. ACTION IS WHAT'S CALLED FOR.

[F]irst step would be to develop a zero tolerance for criminal and disruptive school behavior, as well as a zero tolerance for criminal behavior in neighborhoods. If city authorities cannot or will not provide protection, then law-abiding black people should find a way to provide that protection themselves.

* I'M ALL FOR THAT!; August 12, 2013 at 9:50 PM
William R. Barker said...: * TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2013-08-07.html#read_more

Erol Ricketts, a (black) demographer and sociologist with the Rockefeller Foundation who researched the origin of black female-headed families in the 1980s...showed that the black family was thriving from the late 19th century through most of the 20th century.

Examining nearly a century of U.S. census reports, Ricketts found that between 1890 and 1950, blacks had higher marriage rates than whites. Until 1970, black women were more likely to get married than white women - and that was despite the high mortality rates among black men, leaving fewer available for marriage.

In three of four decennial years between 1890 and 1920, black men out-married white men.

(And remember... you don't get much poorer, deprived or discriminated against than being a black person in America just a generation out of slavery.)

Whatever else may cause illegitimacy and its associated problems, it isn't poverty, discrimination, lack of education, unemployment or slavery. Black Americans had all those handicaps and yet they still had strong families and low crime rates from 1890 until the 1960s.

But in the '60s, liberals decided it would be a great idea to start subsidizing illegitimacy.

Everyone knew - even FDR's secretary of labor, Francis Perkins, knew - that granting widows' benefits to unmarried women with illegitimate children would have disastrous consequences.

An early 20th-century social welfare advocate, Homer Folks, warned back in 1914 that to grant pensions for "desertion or illegitimacy would, undoubtedly, have the effect of a premium upon these crimes against society."

But under President Lyndon Johnson, that's exactly what the government did.

The "suitable home" requirements for welfare - such as having a husband - were jettisoned by liberal know-it-alls in the federal Bureau of Public Assistance. As a result, illegitimacy went through the roof, particularly among blacks, our most vulnerable fellow citizens.

* THESE ARE THE NUMBERS, FOLKS!

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 10:13 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

In 1970, for the first time, the marriage rate for black women fell below 70%. (But even then, a majority of black children were still living with both parents.) By 2010, only 30.1% of blacks above the age of 15 were married, compared to 52.7% of whites.

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

Liberals keep using the bad consequences of their policies as an argument for more of the same policies.

(Government subsidies to unwed mothers increase the illegitimacy rate, which in turn leads to poverty, criminal behavior and more illegitimacy. So Democrats reverse cause and effect to claim it's the poverty that causes illegitimacy and then demand more payments to unwed mothers.)

* FOLKS! I'VE JUST COME UP WITH A TWO-BIRD-ONE-STONE SOLUTION! BLACK CRIMINALS SHOULD CONCENTRATE TARGET WHITE LIBERALS! OH... OR BETTER YET... ALL CRIMINALS SHOULD TARGET ALL LIBERALS!

(*HUGE FRIGGIN' GRIN*)

* BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS... (READ ON...)

[W]e know poverty does not cause illegitimacy. The black experience from 1890 to 1960 proves it. It's the reverse... If African-Americans started marrying again at their pre-Great Society rates, it would wipe out the entire black "culture of poverty."

* MY GUESS? YES! IT WOULD AT LEAST GO A LONG WAY TOWARDS THAT GOAL!

Nor is there a speck of evidence that poverty causes crime. Murder is the only crime that has been reliably tracked since 1900. From the turn of the century right up to the early 1930s, the murder rate rose steadily, with a few peaks and valleys. Then it began a noticeable decline right at the beginning of the Great Depression, remaining low until the mid-1940s, and rising again only at the end of the Depression. The converse happened during the economic boom of the "go-go" '80s. The homicide rate shot up in the 1970s and stayed high until the mid-1990s. Both the homicide rate and general crime rate have remained at all-time lows through the economic wasteland of the Obama years. (Thanks to Republican crime policies.)

[I]t's illegitimacy driving the black crime rate.; August 12, 2013 at 10:13 PM
William R. Barker said...: * TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will081013.php3#.UgmXY3_fLXQ

"Colleagues," said the June 27 letter to 98 U.S. senators, "now it is your turn."

The letter's authors are Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman and ranking Republican on the tax-writing Finance Committee, respectively.

From their combined 71 years on Capitol Hill they know that their colleagues will tiptoe gingerly, if at all, onto the hazardous terrain of tax reform.

Together with Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., of the House Ways and Means Committee, Baucus and Hatch propose a "blank slate" approach, erasing all deductions and credits — currently worth more than $1 trillion a year — and requiring legislators to justify reviving them.

(*DOUBLE THUMBS UP*)

Hence the Baucus-Hatch letter, in response to which almost 70 senators sent more than 1,000 pages of suggestions.

* THEIR OWN OR THEIR STAFFS'? (OR LOBBYISTS SUGGESTIONS...???)

* FOLKS... THE ACTUAL ELECTED OFFICIALS SHOULD BE THE ONLY ONES INTERFACING WITH EACH OTHER AT THIS POINT. THEY'LL BE PLENTY OF TIME TO BRING IN THE "EXPERTS" - AND SPECIAL INTERESTS.

* I SAY "AMEN" TO THE SUGGESTION TO START WITH A BLANK SLATE AND THEN MOVE ON TO BASIC GROUND RULES REGARDING THE DEFINITION OF "FAIRNESS." AFTER THAT THEY CAN GET TO RATES AND TARGETS AND "THE MATH"... ETC.

Although some [suggestions] often were short on specificity, the submissions were given encrypted identification numbers and locked in a safe, as befits dangerous documents.

Every complexity in the 4 million-word tax code was created at the behest of a muscular interest group that tenaciously defends it. Which is why tax simplification would be political reform: Writing lucrative wrinkles into the code is one of the primary ways the political class confers favors. Furthermore, "targeted" tax cuts serve bossy government's behavior modification agenda: Do what we want you to do and you can keep more of your money. Simplification would reduce the opportunities for the political class to throw its weight around. Hence the flinch from simplification.

* YEP...!

* TO BE CONTINUED...; August 12, 2013 at 10:39 PM
William R. Barker said...: * CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

Of the three biggest tax preferences: employer-paid health insurance (a $260 billion benefit), the deduction for state and local taxes ($80 billion), and
the mortgage-interest deduction (a $70 billion benefit) that goes disproportionately to affluent homeowners.

(Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, which have no mortgage-interest deduction, have homeownership rates comparable to America's. Every congressional district, however, has real estate brokers benefiting from the bankers who benefit by providing mortgages.)

Baucus is proud to have been mentored by the greatest Montanan, Mike Mansfield, a Democrat who for 16 of his 24 Senate years was majority leader. Today, the main impediment to tax reform, aside from Baucus' risk-averse colleagues, is Majority Leader Harry Reid... Reid, who is as petty as Mansfield was grand, ... resents Democrats like Baucus who practice bipartisanship. (Reid says he did not even read the Baucus-Hatch letter...)

Each year 6.1 billion hours are spent complying with the tax code. This is equal to the work time of 3 million full-time workers - making tax compliance one of America's largest industries. Is there time for Congress to reduce this waste of time?

"It's early," says Baucus equably.

Actually, it is late in this legislative year, and elections are next year.

Inevitably, however, the tax code has reached a critical mass of complexity that renders it almost unreformable.

(This illustrates the crisis of the regulatory state: Interest groups fasten themselves onto the government and immobilize it.)

At the 2004 Republican convention, George W. Bush vowed to "simplify" the tax code's "complicated mess." The convention roared approval. Next, he promised new complexities — tax benefits for "opportunity zones" in depressed areas, a tax credit to encourage businesses to offer health savings accounts. Another roar of approval.

(*SNORT*)

Since the 1986 simplification, the code has been re-complicated more than 15,000 times at the behest of Americans who simultaneously praise the principle of simplification. All other taxes could be abolished if we could tax the nation's cognitive dissonance.; August 12, 2013 at 10:39 PM

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Monday, August 12, 2013

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, August 12, 2013

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