Sotomayor Yearbook Post: Apathy or Calculation?

The question is not whether Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has socialist leanings.

The question is more interesting than that.

Does the White House not realize that posting her 1976 Princeton yearbook photo includes her tribute to Norman Thomas, the perennial candidate of the Socialist Party, or does the White House simply not care?

Or are they trying to create a firestorm over a 33-year-old yearbook entry in order to make the right look mean spirited?

Others weigh in on this HERE, and HERE and HERE.

If you'd like to read more about the late Norman Thomas, this is illuminative.

One of the quotes of Mr. Thomas:

“The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly."

Well, that's pretty much on the money.

Another quote, an echo of Nikita Khrushchev:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

Khrushchev told Eisenhower's Sec. of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, essentially the same thing, only he used the word "communism."

For all that, Norman Thomas, a magna cum laude grad of Princeton in 1905, was well-known and fairly mainstream, adopting a Christian socialism rather than the atheist model.

Of course, the end result is ever the same, and the Christianity gets lost along the way.

Stimulating Dead People: It's Funny, but it Smells

More reports coming in that dead people are receiving the $250 Social Security stimulus checks.

Antoniette Santopadre of Valley Stream was expecting a $250 stimulus check. But when her son finally opened it, they saw that the check was made out to her father, Romolo Romonini, who died in Italy 34 years ago. He'd been a U.S. citizen when he left for Italy in 1933, but only returned to the United States for a seven-month visit in 1969.

Of course it's funny, in the glorification of incompetence sort of way that Americans are accustomed to laughing at their federal government, but there's also something this time that doesn't seem quite right.

What database did the Social Security system link into in order to send out these checks? This is their excuse:

The Social Security Administration, which sent out 52 million checks, says that some of those checks mistakenly went to dead people because the agency had no record of their death. That amounts to between 8,000 and 10,000 checks for millions of dollars.

That's up to $2.5 million, to be specific. Doesn't it also raise the question, why this time? Why isn't the Social Security administration sending out regular checks to these same dead people if they have no record of their death?

It doesn't wash. The mystery deepens:

The feds blame a rushed schedule, because all the checks have to be cut by June. The strange thing is, some of the checks were made out to people -- like Romonini -- who were never even part of the Social Security system.

Never a part of the Social Security system?

Again, I must ask, what freakin' database is being tapped here? What extra names were pooled into the system, and are there more checks going to places we don't know about ... for a reason?

Someone with investigative powers ought to be asking the same questions and demanding some answers.

How Do You Make a Millionaire Disappear?

There is at least one rule of thumb upon which conservatives, liberals and libertarians can agree:

If you want less of a certain type of activity, you tax it. If you want more, you reduce or eliminate taxes upon it (or you extend a tax relief "credit.")

That's one of the reasons anti-smoking advocates support higher taxes on cigarettes. Make it tougher on 'em.

It's why anti-drinking advocates want higher taxes on beer and alcohol. Discourage them.

Postal workers can tell you, the more the rate for a postage stamp has climbed over the years, the more innovative alternate ways people have found to send their important messages.

So guess what happened in one year after the State of Maryland imposed a new "millionaire tax" on its wealthy citizens?

Maryland plan to tax millionaires backfires

A year ago, Maryland became one of the first states in the nation to create a higher tax bracket for millionaires as part of a broader package of maneuvers intended to help balance the state's finances and make the tax code more progressive.

But as the state comptroller's office sifts through this year's returns, it is finding that the number of Marylanders with more than $1 million in taxable income who filed by the end of April has fallen by one-third, to about 2,000. Taxes collected from those returns as of last month have declined by roughly $100 million.

Oops! When you 1,000 of your millionaires move across state lines -- a fairly simple task in tiny Maryland -- you quickly re-learn our formula previously stated.

Admitting it, however, might take a bit longer.

... state officials insist that it's too early to determine if that has occurred and whether any exodus would even have a discernible impact on the state's overall budget.

Denial. It's not just a river in Egypt.

A (Very) Brief Moment of Political Agreement

I never thought I'd find myself in agreement with the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Right Reverend Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but in his recent bitch-slapping of a peace overture from President Obama, he asked this question:

“We don’t know who is making decisions in America — is it the president, the Congress, or some unknown people who pull the strings?”

Need I say more?

90% Political Kabuki: Is There a Hidden Agenda?

Is there a hidden agenda behind the 90 percent tax on the AIG bonuses?

That's what Larry Kudlow is wondering. Kudlow not only is an economist, he plays one on TV as well (CNBC, "Kudlow & Company).

Note that the $250,000 cut-off point for the tax is the same line drawn in the sand in Obama’s budget for tax hikes on investors and successful earners. The president is proposing a tax rate of 40 percent, not 90 percent. But connecting the dots between Speaker Pelosi and Pres. Obama, it will be interesting to see if the president dares sign this bill.

And even though the 90 percent tax is a reaction to the AIG bonus fiasco, you have to wonder if the very-liberal-left House Democrats have a much broader agenda: to completely overturn the supply-side tax cuts of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy.

Kudlow explains past American tax history. Most people have only a vague idea of how high tax rates were for decades.

Following WWI, the Harding-Coolidge-Mellon Republicans returned the country to tax normalcy by reducing Woodrow Wilson’s 75 percent wartime tax to 25 percent — thus triggering the roaring growth of the 1920s. Then came the Depression, spawned in large part by Herbert Hoover and FDR, who raised the top tax rate to 63 percent, 70 percent, and finally 94 percent.

The Robert Taft Republican Congress elected in 1946 lowered those tax rates, but they later bounced back to 91 percent, where they held until JFK proposed sweeping tax reform in the 1960s. The top tax rate was reduced to 70 percent, igniting the 1960s boom — until it was undone by the inflationary Fed and Nixon’s de-linking of the dollar from gold. But Pres. Reagan slashed the top tax rate all the way down to 28 percent. This launched a multi-decade boom, with the top rate not straying far from Reagan’s vision.

So is AIG the excuse the liberals were looking for to launch the first stage of their tax-reform rocket? After all, more evidence is emerging that the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats -- knew of the bonus program weeks, if not months, ago. Certainly Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who helped write the AIG rules last year when he was at the Fed in New York, should have known.

If there was no real surprise, and no real hurry since any tax hike doesn't get collected until 2010 anyway, doesn't this all seem like political kabuki? We are being driven into a populist uproar so that progressives have an excuse to punish "the rich."

Please, if you value your bank account, read Kudlow's piece and think about it.

Carry Moonbeams Home in a Jar?

In the past eight years Republicans complained over Democrat obstructionism to various nominees because they had "conservative beliefs."

In the past eight weeks, Democrats are complaining about Republican obstructionism to various nominees because they have "tax issues."

Whither sanity?

Is Mr. Obama the Manchurian Candidate?

If there were such a thing as a Manchurian candidate, and ...

If a Manchurian candidate got elected and wanted to wreck the economy of the United States ...

Could he do any worse than the Obamessiah?

Kevin Hassett has a scary article at Bloomberg that asks and answers these and other questions.

It is no wonder that markets are imploding around us. Obama is giving us the War on Business.

Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?

What policies, indeed. Read and ponder.