Posted on By: Fred

FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

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Posted on By: Fred

The Union Myth of Representing ‘Working People’

Unions and their mouthpieces continually bombard us with the catch phrases about standing for “working people,” “working families,” and the poor, oppressed and exploited “working” classes. Truth is, unions represent a privileged minority, a politically connected class, the aristocrats of middle-class workers. And the mainstream of American workers, the real working people agree; it’s why only 6.9% of private sector workers are in unions and union membership overall has decreased from nearly one-third of all workers in the 1940s.

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Posted on By: Fred

The President Who Wasn’t There

We have a president named “Obama.” If you believe your media — (hah!) — he is a kind of Űbermensch, a more-than-human giant intellect. Or, as one addled dork said two years ago, Obama must be A Light Bringer. That’s why the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee got the hots for him so bad that they had to give him the big prize before he did anything. Like Algore’s Peace Prize, it was awarded for postmodern (Po-Mo) — that is, completely fictional — good intentions. No actual achievements were wanted or needed.

Since Marxist college professors are not going to do this job for us, I will now perform a postmodern “deconstruction” of the so-called “president” of the “United States.” (Those sneer quotes are Po-Mo sniggers for things that are obviously fictional except that normal people think they are real. Like “money” and “freedom.”)

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Posted on By: Fred

Leftism, the Religion

Many Americans find it difficult to understand why Jews on the left, including many who would call themselves “liberal” rather than “left,”continued to enthusiastically support President Obama after the revelations about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s religious mentor and close friend. This confusion is all the greater now that President Obama has humiliated the Israeli prime minister and created the tensest moment in U.S.-Israel relations in memory.

Likewise, many Americans wonder how Democratic congressmen who claim to be faithful, pro-life Catholics could vote for a health-care bill that allows for federal funding of abortions after opposing it up to the last day.

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Posted on By: Fred

Are Jews Permitted to Doubt The New York Times?

Courage comes in many forms. But the rarest form of courage, it seems to me, is for a true addict to give up his (or her) New York Times. That seems to go double or triple for the NYT’s Jewish readers, who cling to its daily prophetic utterances with truly Biblical fervor: “absolute truth.”

My sample is biased, obviously, since I hang around with conservatives and such (yech!), but I can think of only one Jewish friend who has ever confessed to dumping All the News You Are Fit to Read.

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Posted on By: Fred

The Chosen One

In our time, asking how a young man of scarce achievement got into position to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president courts the contemporary synonyms for “impious”: “birther,” “conspiracy theorist,” and, of course, “racist.” Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii’s most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones. No wonder some of Barack Obama’s supporters treat him as if he were anointed by an extraterrestrial power.

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Posted on By: Fred

Britain would be a better place if families looked after their own

The welfare state, as conceived by the great social reformer Sir William Beveridge and implemented by the Attlee government after the Second World War, was a sublime idea. It rescued millions of British citizens from the degradation of poverty and lifted the fear of illness. It guaranteed employment or, if jobs were not available, universal benefits. It offered security in old age.

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Posted on By: Fred

Weiners, Wusses and Wonks

What hath Anthony Weiner wrought? Clarity.

It is now crystal clear that our elites — the ruling class, the insiders who tell us where, when, and how to live our lives–are nothing more than a collection of Wieners, Wusses and Wonks. And as surely as the words of telegraph inventor Samuel Morse (“What hath God wrought”) signaled the beginning of the modern mass communication era and the transformation of the United States for the 20th century, so will this Democrat leader’s grotesque digital dissemination of his private parts bring about the transformation needed by this century — the realization that our political and media elites are among the worst this nation has to offer.

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