Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Tuesday Edition
• That’s Okay, Howard. The New Media Will Handle This One for You.
• Sixty-Seven Years Ago…
• BREAKING: DNC Chair is Literally a Partisan Hack in Sore Need of A Dictionary
• MD’s Cardin to VP Biden: Kill Medicare Reform and Our Senate Careers, Too.

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Tuesday Edition Posted: 07 Jun 2011 03:10 AM PDT I found an interesting little fact at The Ashbrook Center’s No Left Turns blog. The top 400 richest-households pay 7 times more in taxes now than they did in 1955, when we built our interstate highway system. This leads me to ask a couple questions. The first, and most obvious, is why we can’t fix the roads we have now. After all, if we built the whole system on a mere fraction of what we get from “the rich” now, surely we can maintain them on far more. But another question came to mind. How is it that the rich pay more now, even though they pay a smaller percentage of their wealth in taxes? To listen to the left over the past thirty years (give or take a decade), “the rich” are paying next to nothing and it’s only due to the heroic sacrifices of “the middle class” that we’re not dodging horse-sized pits in dirts roads that once were proud eight-lane blacktops. Why it’s almost as if lower taxes allow for greater freedom to create wealth, which allows for a greater total collection of… …nah. Can’t be. That’s just crazy talk. Don’t forget, The Delivery is live tonight at 9:30 P.M. Eastern. I’ll tell you the one thing a candidate can do that will win them the election in 2012. A hint: Ronald Reagan is involved. Also,I’ll discuss about endless book “trilogies” and the authors who write them. And now, links! It was easy for the public sector unions to bust the city of Providence, RI, after the city handed union leaders unchecked control of the coffers. Dan Collins’ co-blogger Meep provides a nearly-exhaustive list of all the other places under threat from the same kind of union treatment. The evidence is clear: small government and more individual liberty is better for everyone than any left-wing big-government scheme (via Instapundit). Darleen Click is correct. It really doesn’t matter if Sarah Palin was right about Paul Revere or not. Lots of people, some of them inside the Republican Party, have a number of unflattering narratives they want to push about Palin and they’ll take any opportunity to do so, regardless of facts. I honestly do not know why people continue to trust egomaniacs who are open and honest about their mania. I am very nearly where Jeff Goldstein is on the Republican Party right now. I figure one more Boehner backroom betrayal special and I’ll be on the Outlaw Express myself.

That’s Okay, Howard. The New Media Will Handle This One for You. Posted: 06 Jun 2011 06:58 PM PDT So, Howard Kurtz, is there anything you’d like to say to us this evening? To twerps demanding I cover Anthony Weiner Twitter scandal: Whole thing appears to be faked. Sometimes it pays to wait for the facts. May 30, 2011 09:43 via Mobile WebReplyRetweetFavorite @HowardKurtz HowardKurtz Well, anything besides, “Not only are they disappointed. I think they’re hysterical”. Image thanks to the peerless Slublog.

Sixty-Seven Years Ago… Posted: 06 Jun 2011 06:47 PM PDT I don’t think I can express my thoughts on the 67th anniversary of D-Day any better than did my friend Phineas: Sixty-seven years ago today, American, British, Canadian, French, and Polish soldiers charged the gates of Hell — and won. Pat Austin has a couple thoughts of her own and remembers a pair of soldiers who may or may not be brothers whose stories I’d very much like to hear. To those who fought the greatest menace our country has ever known, thank you. To those who gave up husbands, brothers, sons, and friends so that I can live free today, thank you. Thank you.

BREAKING: DNC Chair is Literally a Partisan Hack in Sore Need of A Dictionary Posted: 06 Jun 2011 10:36 AM PDT Literally. Raising the rhetorical stakes around local battles over voting laws, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz yesterday compared Republican efforts to tighten access to the polls to notorious segregation-era Jim Crow laws. And what Wasserman-Schultz said (PDF link): ..now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally – and very transparently – block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. The context here, which Ben Smith did not provide, is that Republicans in several states (including DWS’ home state of Florida) have introduced Voter ID laws that would require everyone to present valid identification before they vote. Democrats have opposed those laws on various grounds, all of which have been amply addressed. There is no other reasonable purpose to oppose an ID requirement, especially when there is no burden other than time on a person to get that identification. The real contention here, and I defy anyone to honestly say otherwise, is that Republicans want to close the obvious avenues for voter fraud and the Democrats want to literally keep those avenues wide open for their ACORN-like allies. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz knows that as well as I do, which is why she has chosen to literally accuse the entire Republican party of rank racism and anti-American behavior rather than deal with the issue honestly and openly. She is literally a dishonest hack who should be literally thrown out of her office and literally never hired to a position more intellectually taxing than that of paperweight. Literally. (via memeorandum) UPDATE: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is literally very nearly almost sorry for that unfortunate analogy, but not sorry for the unfortunate accusation behind the analogy (via Lachlan Markay’s Twitter feed).

MD’s Cardin to VP Biden: Kill Medicare Reform and Our Senate Careers, Too. Posted: 06 Jun 2011 09:52 AM PDT It’s not every day you see a handful of Senators try to demagogue themselves right out of office, but today appears to be that day. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin was one of five Senate Democrats — all of whom are up for reelection next year — to sign a letter to Vice President Joe Biden asking that the Republican plan to overhaul Medicare be taken off the table as part of the ongoing White House deficit talks. The Medicare proposal, crafted by House Republican Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan and passed by the House in April, would provide seniors federal subsidies to purchase private health insurance — a change that would save money by requiring seniors to pay a higher share of their healthcare costs. Democrats have attacked the idea for weeks and have already used the issue once successfully as a campaign theme to win a special election in New York last month. At the same time, Democrats — including President Barack Obama — have acknowledged that entitlement reform of some kind will be necessary to address the nation's debt. That last sentence, by the way, is flatly untrue. The Democrats — including President Barack Obama — acknowledge no such thing. As I have noted both here and on The Delivery, the Democrats’ Medicare plan is to keep things exactly the way they are right now. There’s another neat little deception in the article as well. While Paul Ryan’s plan does require those who will eventually end up on Medicare to pay a higher share of their coverage, the plan will also reduce the cost of care* by a variety of means that don’t include Obamacare’s “because the government said so” approach, so that the payment will be lower overall. In other words, Ryan’s plan will require seniors pay a larger percentage of the bill, but the overall bill will be far lower than it is right now. Remember also, everyone who is 55 years old or older will be completely exempt from Ryan’s plan. This is a point Democrats deceptively fail to mention when they criticize the GOP efforts to fix the evident and inevitable collapse of the system. What Cardin and his buddies are really trying to do is take the entire impending collapse of Medicare off the table because he doesn’t want to deal seriously with it. His party is utterly bereft of useful and sane ideas for how to fix the entitlement monster they built. If that’s really their strategy, who am I to argue with them? I’ll only note that Daniel Bongino, a conservative and a former NYPD and Secret Service agent will be more than happy to help him move out of that cushy office. If only we could move him out of his cushy retirement and health care package that he gets no matter if Medicare crashes or not.   *An interesting sidebar: I spent a few minutes Googling for articles that explained how Ryan’s plan would reduce costs so you can see them for yourself. Five pages of stock Democratic criticisms in the MSM and on left-wing blogs later, I found the article I linked. The GOP is getting their brains beaten out in new media on this issue (and others, but that’s another story) and I can’t for the life of me understand why they continue to let that happen. It is not hard to continually press the “we have plans and they have nothing at all” story online but the RNC isn’t doing it. Neither are the House of Senate Republican coalitions.

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