It’s too soon to get out your “Impeach Obama” buttons, but not too soon to call Colin Powell’s credentials into question or take careful note of Obama fund-raising, the biggest yet and the first since Watergate to go all-out. Typical Democrat chutzpah, of course. Soon as coast is clear, up to old tricks. It’s the “Chicago-izing of the nation,” as commenter Margaret says in re: Pelosi, etc.
I might amend that, to “Cook County-izing,” with a nod to the Stroger hegemony, bidding fair to rival the Daleys, who of course have a hand in the county cookie jar. The father headed the Cook County party as mayor, of course (so does the son and heir), the first to wear both crowns, and they say the son has put him to shame for sheer control of things.
So. As to premature impeachment proceedings, we should note our favorite pollster, Zogby, with his within-margin-of-error Obama lead. Yes! Not to mention Gallup four days ago, with its also thin Obama lead.
Then there’s the tax on businesses earning (or taking in?) $250G/year. Which is it? Does Obama know? Hear Joe the Plumber:
Mr. Obama also muffed details of his own tax plan, confusing a small business’s revenue and net income [he told John Fund], and the tax rate that would apply under his proposals.
Joe had more to say about That One, reports Fund in WSJ.com Political Diary:
He also seemed hazy about the Flat Tax, put forward by Steve Forbes and Dick Armey a decade ago, confusing it with proposals for a national sales tax and saying the rate would have to go to 40%. “I was talking about one thing, and he was answering me about something else,” Mr. Wurzelbacher recalls.
The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank in Chicago, points out that a flat tax would let Americans see exactly how much government costs in one easy, transparent and accountable tax. Mr. Obama’s reforms, in contrast, would only add to the thousands of loopholes, exemptions and complications of the current 67,000 page tax code. “A candidate for president should at least know the difference between a flat tax and a national sales tax,” Heartland concludes. “But both a flat tax and a national sales tax are head and shoulders over the convoluted tax system we have now.”
* Last night’s “Boston Legal” featured a full-throated endorsement of the idea that U.S. military are “not like us,” if we are the suited lawyers of this show, ignoring JAG lawyers. Arguing before a judge whether the military could be sued for malpractice in a veterans’ hospital, the younger but not so young lawyer said wounded GI’s are “not our children” but children of poor people (who need protection), relying on “the canard that the our military is the last resort of the poor and uneducated.” That’s show biz as those lefties understand it.
* In these hard times, we feature government bailouts or rescue packages or government investment — whatever — in private banks. But protective tariffs can’t be far away: “In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow,” say Princeton prof Aaron Friedberg and Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld.
And with them will come withdrawal “from the world stage,” leaving “a dangerous power vacuum” — what’s been called elsewhere economic isolation.
* John Kerry is a natural-born cutup. Here he is at the podium 10/20, having fun with dumb-question askers among our mediums:
“Barack got asked the famous boxers or briefs question,” Kerry went on. “I was tempted to say commando.”
. . . .
“Then they asked McCain and McCain said, ‘Depends,'” Kerry said to lots of laughter from the crowd.
* More on Barry Obama’s tax-unconsciousness:
He also seemed hazy about the Flat Tax, put forward by Steve Forbes and Dick Armey a decade ago, confusing it with proposals for a national sales tax and saying the rate would have to go to 40%. “I was talking about one thing, and he was answering me about something else,” Mr. Wurzelbacher recalls.
The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank in Chicago, points out that a flat tax would let Americans see exactly how much government costs in one easy, transparent and accountable tax. Mr. Obama’s reforms, in contrast, would only add to the thousands of loopholes, exemptions and complications of the current 67,000 page tax code. “A candidate for president should at least know the difference between a flat tax and a national sales tax,” Heartland concludes. “But both a flat tax and a national sales tax are head and shoulders over the convoluted tax system we have now.”
* My question entirely, as in last month’s Wed. Journal column:
How do you create more jobs when you want to levy higher tax rates on the small business owners who are the nation’s primary employers?
Or as I put it:
However the cookie crumbles in November, when the final poll is taken, I’m a winner. Even if my man and woman come up short, I will get to watch a miracle-when Big O. and his Delaware sidekick create jobs while raising tax rates. He will truly be The Messiah if he pulls that off.
* This from PowerLine fits with my column of tomorrow, in which I speak of Saul Alinsky and his ends-and-means thinking. The writer has shown how Obama lied when he said called it “absolutely not true” that he “launched [his] political campaign in William Ayers’ living room.” He comments:
Barack Obama is obviously a candidate who believes that the end–his election–justifies any means, no matter how dishonest. He is not the first Presidential candidate to harbor such a conviction. There was a time, though, when newspaper reporters thought it was part of their job to keep such candidates honest, rather than enabling their deceit.
It does come back to the lemmings of the daily press and television.
Blithe Spirit 