Monday, March 24, 2014

Barker's Newsbites: Monday, March 24, 2014


Hey, folks! Late start... limited newsbites. (But... I am now totally recovered from Pearl River Paddy's Day Weekend! Indeed, just got home from the gym!)

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4 comments:

William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/the_profound_arrogant_ignorance_and_stupidity_of_liberals_in_charge.html

The recent Twitter kerfuffle between Matt Drudge and the Obama/media/academic complex over the ObamaCare tax demonstrates in plain view and without question something many of us have known for years: while the organized Left insist that they are the only ones smart enough to run the world, they remain astonishingly ignorant of how it works.

* AIN'T THAT THE TRUTH!

They’re even ignorant of how the most fundamental parts of laws that they champion operate.

* APPARENTLY MANY HAVE NEVER HEARD OF "QUARTERLY FILINGS."

In case you missed it, Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the ObamaCare penalty for not 'getting covered'... I'M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX” shortly after filing his first quarterly installment for 2014 as a self-employed person.

Apparently unaware of how self-employed people pay taxes – which is neither new nor a secret – liberals at the White House, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the National Journal all responded immediately by calling Drudge either a liar or ignorant, or both. After all, the liberal reasoning went, Drudge could not possibly have paid a cent toward his 2014 ObamaCare "penalty" because it's not 2015 yet.

Yes, these wizards who would organize everything and everyone lack even a cursory familiarity with the most basic of tax realities.

What is it Bill Engvall says? Oh yeah: “Here’s your sign.” These liberals really didn’t need Engvall’s sign at all. They tweeted their own "I’m stupid" signs. Some wrote full-fledged low-information articles, including TPM’s Dylan Scott and the HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young.

In none of these attacks on Drudge did it occur to these media maestros how self-employed people are impacted by the tax ramifications of ObamaCare. If Drudge figures he’ll owe, say, ten million in federal income taxes for 2014 (it’s probably a lot more), he is required to send in a quarter of that now. He would also be compelled to include charming little IRS add-ons in his payment, like the ObamaCare penalty. Or is it a fee? A tax, maybe? Whatever John Roberts decided to call it, Drudge and other self-employed quarterly filers have indeed started paying it.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

March 24, 2014 at 7:17 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

This is not some esoteric detail, nor is it overly technical – it is a fact of life that all self-employed people have had to deal with for many decades. And not just the wealthy like Drudge or Rush Limbaugh – quarterly installments impact little shop proprietors and tiny contractors as well. Welcome to the Main Street problems caused by applied liberal policies varnished by isolated but powerful interests on K Street and Wall Street. And yet, liberals who are highly paid to comment on such things know nothing about it. Neither do Obama administration hacks who helped ram this absurdity through Congress.

[Forget] low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence - you know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact[!]

We have a low-information president, who has appointed a low-information cabinet, including the low-information secretary of health and human services who is applying a low-information health care law (one of many such laws) behind the big power of a low-morality Internal Revenue Service.

* NO DOUBT!

So when Matt Drudge – fully complying with the inane and unworkable law as it applies to his 2014 taxes – calls them out on it, they publicly and bumptiously step in their own pile of ordure. These liberals, who claim that they alone can run the auto industry, the banking industry, and all of health care haven’t the foggiest notion how one of the most basic tenets of tax law works. This particular part of a disastrous health care law is exhibit A for what happens when those who have never signed the front of a business check in their lives have power over those who have. And power over everybody else, too[!]

Pardon the worn out cliché, but the inmates really are running the asylum. Yet when you expose their ignorance and incompetence, they just ramp up the outrage. Frankly, Drudge wasn’t even trying to expose their ignorance. He was simply making a point, and the policy mavens came out of the woodwork and volunteered headlong into their own excreta.

And yet, there will be no apologies, nor will any of these pseudo-experts be fired or even censured. This is not what happens on the Left. When they make obvious and grotesque mistakes, they simply double down, or change the subject, or attack someone on the Right personally.

The profound arrogant ignorance of liberals, on display daily. This is the kind of thing that could make for a dynamic, funny, sarcastic, and effective political message, should an opposition party to the Obama machine ever re-emerge.

March 24, 2014 at 7:17 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/244525/risen-obama-administration-is-this-generations-greatest-enemy-of-press-freedom/

* GO RIGHT TO PARAGRAPH #3

“It won’t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,” Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. “For better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the First Amendment.”

The New Yorker staff writer and CNN commentator was appearing on a panel as part of a conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center. A lot has already been written about the conference, so I’m going to pull out a theme that appears again and again in my notes: How much protection do reporters really have with regard to sources, and how much, if any, protection would a federal shield law give them?

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

(*PURSED LIPS*)

The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created “a de facto Official Secrets Act,” Risen said, and the media has been “too timid” in responding.

* THAT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE IN THE BAG FOR OBAMA... HE'S THEIR GUY - THE GUY THEY ELECTED AND MOSTLY (I'M GUESSING) RE-ELECTED.

Toobin appeared on a panel that followed, moderated by Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, who announced that if he weren’t a paragon of journalistic detachment, he’d say “the persecution of James Risen is a scandal.” The attorney Laura Handman noted that the U.S. Department of Justice’s new guidelines for accessing journalists’ records carve out a big space for the government to decide what constitutes “ordinary newsgathering.”

The panel mentioned Risen and Fox journalist James Rosen, who an FBI agent suggested was a “co-conspirator” in another leak investigation. Toobin noted that the number of journalists actually prosecuted by the Obama administration is zero. Not all leaks are equal, and not all should go unpunished, he argued, citing the investigation that snagged Rosen in particular. After Liptak said government officials sometimes mention that they’ve been elected and journalists haven’t, Toobin said: “The answer to your question is quite clear: The Constitution elected us.”

“So you’re willing to concede that the First Amendment protects the press?” Liptak asked Toobin, to some laughs.

March 24, 2014 at 7:45 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/24/barack-obama-visit-brussels-cost-belgium-10m

* HEADLINE AND SUBHEADER:

Barack Obama's first visit to Brussels to cost Belgium more than €10m: Obama will arrive with 900-strong entourage, including 45 vehicles and three planes, and attend EU and NATO summits

* THINK ABOUT IT, FOLKS; IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY...???

March 24, 2014 at 11:23 PM

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