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Archive for 2016
February 9, 2016
CAM NEWTON NOW OWES THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TONS OF MONEY AFTER THE SUPER BOWL: “Losing means his effective tax rate will be a whopping 198.8%. Oh yeah, he will also pay the IRS 40.5% on his earnings.”
“In other words, Cam Newton will pay a Barack Obama-style flat tax. The rules are very simple. The government simply takes all your money. Or, in this case, more than all your money. So it’s akin to a French-style flat tax.” Perhaps that explains why he was so enraged during his disastrous press conference:
What matters if that he’ll be paying about $101,000 of extra tax simply because the game took place in California.
However, if the Super Bowl was in a city like Dallas and Miami, there would have been no additional tax.
The good news, at least for football fans, is that Cam Newton has a contract that prevented him from staying home and skipping the game. So he didn’t have any ability to respond to the confiscatory tax rate.
Many successful taxpayers, by contrast, do have flexibility and they are the job creators and investors who help decide whether states grow faster and stagnate. So while California has the ability to pillage Cam Newton, the state is basically following a suicidal fiscal policy because other people can choose to stay away.
At least for the moment; ponder the long-term implications of this headline: “Millennials have a higher opinion of socialism than of capitalism.”
What could go wrong this time?
Related: Needless to say, the Panthers’ fate on Sunday was already sealed before they entered the stadium: Obama picked them to win the Super Bowl.
SHORTER DAVID BROOKS: Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life. And his pants creases are perfect.
Oh, and did you know, “The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton. We’ve had very little of that from Obama. He and his staff have generally behaved with basic rectitude.”
Oh the fun we’re all going to have when Brooks discovers Fast & Furious, the IRS Scandal, “Richard Windsor,” and the ramifications of the deal with Iran sometime in February of 2017.
Plus it’s fun watching Brooks contradict himself in his conclusion:
No, Obama has not been temperamentally perfect. Too often he’s been disdainful, aloof, resentful and insular. But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.
Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him.
Geez, David — Maureen Dowd already warned you what could happen when you break into her stash box.
Related: Joe Wilson vindicated.
More: Five Huge Problems with David Brooks’ ‘I Miss Obama’ Puff Piece.
JUST WHAT THEY NEEDED, A NEW ADMINISTRATOR: Scandal-plagued UNC to hire chief integrity officer.
AT AMAZON, take 20% off Watches.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: THANK JON STEWART FOR LATE NIGHT’S @#$% LEGACY. TBS’s new late night ‘star’ Samantha Bee “could make her late night mark by tackling subjects other shows don’t go near. Perhaps a segment on how colleges are now a cesspool of PC groupthink, the very antithesis of free thinking? Instead, she devoted more than six minutes Monday mocking the flailing Jeb Bush campaign. How very @#$% edgy.”
HERE YOU SEE THE SEXISM INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM:
Herein lies the thorny political dilemma for politicians. Taking a side on this issue forces them to reject one of society’s two closely held beliefs: that women can do anything a man can do or that men go off to war to protect the country’s women and children.
If a politician supports the idea that women should have choice — in employment, over their bodies and pregnancies, about maternity leave — they probably don’t like the idea of a woman not having choice, even in theory, about joining a war.
So where has men’s choice been all these years?
We have fought for women’s choice regarding their bodies and their lives, but apparently men having no choice about joining a war is par for the course of being male.
But suggesting that women’s role in reproduction and childrearing justifies treating men and women differently opens up its own can of worms. . . .
WELL, THAT’S ENCOURAGING: Zika expert: ‘Microcephaly may just be the tip of the iceberg.’ “We’re seeing a spectrum. Many have fairly severe central nervous system lesions. There are also a lot of calcium deposits. … Those can cause seizures and cause impairment in terms of function for the brain. We’re also seeing that in some babies, the brains, which usually have wrinkles, are actually smooth. That’s a sign that development of the brain has been impaired. Several of them are also impaired with respect to vision and hearing. It seems like microcephaly may just be the tip of the iceberg. The preliminary evidence is that [some] babies who don’t have microcephaly may also have neurological lesions or birth defects that are not as obvious as microcephaly. We’re really concerned because of Zika, but we need to rule out other causes of congenital infection to really make sure. . . . We know so little. We presume that like other flaviviruses, except for dengue, if you’ve been exposed, you will have long-term immunity to being reinfected.”
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Study: Nobody Wants Social Robots That Look Like Humans Because They Threaten Our Identity.
THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT, EVENTUALLY: For habitual liars–like the Clintons– this is a very scary prospect. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller opines, “This Might be Why Hillary Won’t Release Her Goldman Sachs Speech Transcripts.”
As Hillary Clinton resists calls to release transcripts from her paid Goldman Sachs speeches, details of those events are emerging, and they aren’t good for the Democratic presidential candidate.
“It was pretty glowing about us,” one attendee at an Oct. 2013 Goldman Sachs event in Arizona told Politico about Clinton’s speech, which earned the former secretary of state $225,000. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.” . . .
Clinton does have the ability to release the transcripts if she chooses.
Her speaking contracts — which went through the Harry Walker Agency — stipulate that the speeches be transcribed and that she retain rights to them.
She won’t be voluntarily releasing these transcripts. I am waiting for the audience-generated videos to emerge. I bet they’re worth a lot of money.
RELATED: Bill Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey to campaign against Hillary: “Willey is joining the Rape Accountability Project for Education PAC, or RAPE PAC, as its paid national spokeswoman, Reuters reported Monday. She will give public remarks and appear in political advertisements detailing claims of Bill Clinton’s past sexual misconduct.”
MONEY HE’S FLEECED FROM TAXPAYERS, DUH: CBS Interview Devolves Into Asking Obama What’s in His Pockets.
MAN WEARING PLASTIC DOG PUPPET ON HAND PLAYS SCREAMING CAMPUS GARBAGE BABIES LIKE STRADIVARIUS: Triumph the Insult Dog Visits College to Invade Students’ Safe Spaces.
And then they all went out to vote for Bernie Sanders.
THE PASSWORD IS: “MUSCULAR.” This Is How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants.
UPDATE: “NYT also used term ‘muscular’ to describe Hillary’s 7/15/09 speech to the CFR.”
I’D SOMEHOW MISSED THIS: Amazon Allowance.
EXISTENTIAL COMICS: John Rawls Explains Why He Doesn’t Tip, Encounters Resistance. “So you entered the veil of ignorance and came out a cheapskate. What a coincidence.”
Actually, I knew Rawls a bit as a kid — he was on my dad’s dissertation committee at Harvard — and I think he was actually a pretty nice guy, for a philosopher.
ROGER SIMON ON SEEING THE DONALD LIVE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: “He was immediately preceded by a professional video montage, which began with a close-up clip of Megyn Kelly saying ‘And now comes Donald Trump!’ The crowd roared. It was out of context, obviously, but quite witty, as was the rest of the montage:”
Trump is the most relaxed politician — if you can call him that — in front of an audience that I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Rick Perry when I accompanied him to the NASCAR races. But that was definitely “home territory.” Trump seems to be at home everywhere, truly comfortable in his own skin and with what he thinks.
This is a tremendous advantage and is the secret to why he can say such outrageous things and make them, ultimately, seem not so outrageous after all.
Plus a recap of the moment that caused the “yuuuge” controversy currently making the rounds on Twitter involving the P-word.
Read the whole thing.
ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: A Third VA Executive Gets Off Without Being Fired After Appeals Process.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Improve Your Orgasm By Eating These Simple Foods.
AUSTIN BAY: Hillary’s National Security Crime Needs a Special Prosecutor: Clinton’s calculated criminality undermines the law that sustains a free nation. “News cycle-driven Democrats swear Republican conspirators invented the so-called email scandal. Balderdash. This is a national security scandal with major implications. . . . Terrorists and rogue states are deadly threats. Effective diplomacy and reliable intelligence collection and assessment are our first lines of defense against both. Effective diplomacy and reliable intel require institutionally and legally protecting secrets—ie: classified information. Protection includes protecting reliable intelligence sources, from satellites to flesh and blood human spies.”
Hillary, remember, undermined this in order to avoid accountability for shady deals involving the Clinton Foundation and other forms of influence-peddling. Her actions were illegal, and her motives were corrupt.
WHEN OIKOPHOBIA MEETS XENOPHILIA: Asylum seekers given priority for hospital visits: An admission by Austrian health officials that asylum seekers have been given priority for hospital visits has been greeted by angry reaction. It’s coming as quite a shock to many people to realize that those who govern them feel no particular loyalty towards them.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is There A Libertarian Case For Bernie Sanders?
After the debacle that was “Obamatarianism” in 2008, libertarians may need to realize that they often feel culturally closer to the left, but that’s an artifact of the left’s control of culture, and doesn’t represent any actual commonality with a cause that has nothing to do with liberty.
SHOCKER: Maine Required Childless Adults to Work to Get Food Stamps. Here’s What Happened. “In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in Dec. 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015. This rapid drop in welfare dependence has a historical precedent: When work requirements were established in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in the 1990s, nationwide caseloads dropped by almost as much, albeit over a few years rather than a few months.”
RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Flint Fiasco. “After the initial decision to switch Flint’s water service to KWA, there were signs that the discolored water was poisoned. But federal, local, and state officials were slow to remedy the situation. . . . In the midst of the just denunciation of the many public officials who shared responsibility for the damage, its deeper structural cause has generally been overlooked: Flint residents are also the victims of government arrogance and massive misallocation of resources.” It’s as if government officials care more about their own welfare than anyone else’s.