Patterico Explains It All

This cannot possibly be improved.

Looks like the cash-for-clunkers program may be near an end. I don’t qualify; I made the mistake of buying a fuel-efficient car in 2000.

Didn’t get any money for my house either. I made the mistake of getting a mortgage I could afford.

I’d love to get my student loans paid off — but dammit, I paid them off myself.

I’m trying to think if there’s some area of life where I can be stupid and irresponsible now, so I can get paid by Obama in the future. Because so far I’ve really screwed myself by doing things right.

And the winner of best comment on the thread so far:

Why work for a living when you can vote for one instead?

Tax Cuts For The Rich!

(and other assorted fiction).

Newly released data from the IRS clearly debunks the conventional Beltway rhetoric that the "rich" are not paying their fair share of taxes.

Indeed, the IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.

Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined. In 2007, the bottom 95 percent paid 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. This is down from the 58 percent of the total income tax burden they paid twenty years ago.

To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined.

Taxes For Thee, But Not For Me

Or, as my grandfather always puts it, "Never a problem to order steak for everyone when you're not paying the bill".

Wait For It....Wait For It....

and there it is!

The intraparty dispute had racial overtones. One African-American Democrat, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia, pointed out that the seven Blue Dog Democrats holding up the health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee were “a nondiverse group” of white men.

Question to all liberals: what, exactly, is the amount of minorities that you need to have in a group for it to be "diverse"?

So Right, Yet So Wrong

You know the whole healthcare dog-and-pony show is in trouble when even Pravda DC is saying it's a bad idea.

But what I thought particularly hilarious was the equivocating paragraph used to at least preserve some shred of leftist cred.

THERE IS a serious case to be made that the U.S. income tax system should become more progressive. The average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households shrank from 33 percent in 1986 to about 23 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of adjusted gross income claimed by that highest-earning sliver of American society doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. So, in principle, higher taxes for the well-heeled could make sense -- as part of a broader rationalization of the unduly complex tax code.

However, what the non-mathematicians leave out is the fact that, while their share of income doubled (increased by 100%), their taxes only fell by 30% (23% divided by 33% = 70%). In other words, if you were making $100 before and paying $33 in taxes, you're making $200 now and paying $46 in taxes.

That explains why a) the total share of Federal taxes paid by the top 1% has gone steadily UP since 2001 and b) the Treasury was collecting record revenues prior to the crash.

Question: What, exactly, SHOULD the top 1% be paying, then?

What Newspapers Does Pelosi Read?

Because evidently one of them isn't the New York Times.]

The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, senior military and intelligence officials said.

The previously undisclosed C.I.A. list includes key Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials said. The names of about two dozen terrorist leaders have recently been on the lethal-force list, officials said. "It's the worst of the worst," an official said.

President Bush has provided written legal authority to the C.I.A. to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation. Some officials said the terrorist list was known as the "high-value target list."

But of course, the Obama Party insists they never knew anything about it.

What Founding Father Am I?

It's the ginger thing, I guess.

New Truisms for Our Society

If you even consider airing an advertisement critical of socialized medicine, Obama will shut you down.

If your legal case that you won threatens the confirmation of an Obama nominee, Obama will have you publicly smeared.

Hope and change!