The news out of Sacramento appears good for the California middle class: The good news, Schwarzenegger glowed, is no new taxes. Digging a little deeper, of course, reveals the truth: REVENUES * Accelerate income tax withholding — $1.7 billion * Increase estimated tax payments for businesses and the self-employed — $610 million Between now and [...]

Instapundit links to a NYT Magazine propaganda piece about governing California, and the part about taxation reads as if it were written by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, right down to euphemistically renaming taxes “revenue”: In the view of many, the origins of the mud slog began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the [...]

Politicians are usually most revealing when speaking off-the-cuff, and so it was with Karen Bass: Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work? A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue [...]

Imagine a private school where students sat in a math class for weeks misbehaving and learning nothing. Imagine that school gets on TV news because the administrators suspended the young lady who blew the whistle by taking a cell phone video and giving it to her mom who confronted them. Do you think that school [...]

So, the FTC is coming after bloggers who make money and don’t adequately disclose it: New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers – as well as the companies that compensate them – for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts [...]

…forever.  But, if San Francisco’s most famous street vendor has anything to say about it, that boot will be well-shined: He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up [...]

Yesterday morning I was sent an article written by Michigan House Representative Paul Opsommer regarding the Department of Homeland Security’s push to implement Enhanced Drivers’ Licenses: The Department of Homeland Security is coming to Detroit to push their new “Enhanced Drivers License” (EDL) program on Tuesday as a way to make Michigan licenses compliant with [...]

Dear Representative Schakowsky – I’m a taxpayer.  The Tea Partiers are also taxpayers.  We are the people who make the enterprise of government possible. People in government would object to that statement.  They would say that the US Government has multiple revenue streams:  the income tax, other federal taxes, the Social Security Trust Fund, other [...]

In watching the MSM coverage of the Tea Party protests, the following arguments are used to try and debase the factual arguments of the protests: Obama plans to lower taxes on the majority of Americans while raising them on the rich. Obama’s budget cuts the deficit in half over the next 10 years. Right now [...]

News came out this week of a deeply troubling new bill from Sens. Jay Rockerfeller (D – WV) and Olympia Snowe (R – ME): The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to [...]

I’m watching Barack Obama’s press conference, and he urged people to remember “their commitments to each other” and our “common goals” as a nation. Collectivist economic actions, by not focusing on individuals and their best interest, actually increase economic inefficiency and destroy wealth. Instead of urging the people to change how they act and to [...]

Believe it or not, Jay Leno is not the biggest clown with that particular last name.  No, really, he’s not.  That dubious honor instead falls to my State Senator, Mark Leno.  Leno’s latest clown move is again introducing a single-payer health care measure that would impact all Californians: The new version of the bill, SB [...]

Over at Pajamas Media, Roger Kimball offers up a nice compare and contrast of quotes between a great president and our current bumbler in chief.  Here’s an example: Reagan: “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical [...]

In Barack Obama’s first press conference, he says the following: “It is absolutely true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or economic growth. That is and must be the role of the private sector…But at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is [...]

I said earlier that the “stimulus” package was a declaration of war on those who produce wealth and live responsibly, now and into the future. The kind folks at NRO have taken the time to show just how bloated a declaration it is.

One of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5.  It offered interesting plots and much to think about.  The episode “Deathwalker” comes to my mind when thinking about the stimulus.  Jha’dur, a scientist from a vanquished enemy species, has become known as “Deathwalker” for her terrifying bioweapon experiments.  Now, she appears on Babylon 5 with [...]

One of the most galling moments for hard-left Democrats in the last two decades was Bill Clinton embracing welfare reform. Gone were the days that welfare acted as a black hole that sucked people in and kept them there. The spirit of the law was changed from one of dependence to one of independence, removing [...]

Coyote Blog has an excellent post up about a moving business at the whim of Oregon law: Cato has a video of some folks in Oregon who started a moving business, only to find that sate law effectively requires them to get permission of current moving companies before they can operate (apparently, someone in Oregon [...]

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gives us a look at the kind of stimulation he would give the economy in Slate: The incoming Obama administration and Congress are planning a huge fiscal stimulus package. They hope that such a stimulus will catalyze an economic turnaround and be a cornerstone of a “New New Deal.” [...]

Oregon is trying to devise a system to tax all those shifty, tax-evading environmentalists they have up there: Oregon is among a growing number of states exploring ways to tax drivers based on the number of miles they drive instead of how much gas they use, even going so far as to install GPS monitoring [...]