Rick Barber's Tax Scheme

So there's this guy named Rick Barber who's running on the Republican ticket for the 2nd Congressional District in Alabama. He's already run one ad in which he practically rails at men dressed as the Founding Fathers -- in particular, Franklin and Washington -- about how bad things are today, that we have an IRS that's going to make us buy health insurance, and the gentlemen he's addressing started a war over a tea tax.

Setting aside the simplicity of the war over tea for another time, Mr. Barber was on cable television recently, trying to explain to Chris Matthews how he would structure the taxes:

BARBER: No, you wouldn’t be adding any tax.

The fair tax is a replacement for all the embedded tax that’s estimated to be in the products and goods and services that we have already because of our current income tax.
...
MATTHEWS: You would get rid of the sales tax in localities?

BARBER: You would get rid of Social Security, capital gains.

MATTHEWS: No, no, no.

(CROSSTALK)

BARBER: You would get rid of Medicare and Medicaid. You would get rid of the death tax.

All of those conservative bugbears.

BARBER: The estimated tax that’s already embedded in the goods is 23 percent. You would get rid of the embedded tax, replace it with the fair tax, and the states would then have to choose how they want to tax beyond that.
...
MATTHEWS: You’re talking about a George Washington character, talking about gathering an army against our own self-elected government, not the British government, not a foreign tyranny, but our own elected government.

BARBER: No, sir. No, sir.

MATTHEWS: Yes. Look --

(CROSSTALK)

BARBER: You’re putting those words in my ad. It says gather the army and the army we’re referring to --

MATTHEWS: Against whom?

BARBER: Gather our political army.

MATTHEWS: Oh, political army. You didn’t say that.

(CROSSTALK)

BARBER: Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: He’s wearing a military uniform and says gather your armies and you’re saying that’s a metaphor.

BARBER: Chris, do you know who a metaphor is? Do you know what hyperbole is?

Maybe not, but I know what patronizing is.

They finally get to something I can parse about the "fair tax":

BARBER: Here’s an example. You’ve got a Coke -- Coke today costs a dollar. Today, you pay a dollar. In that dollar are already 23 percent of taxes that we don’t see. The difference is now that Coke is going to cost 77 cents, but you’re going to see 23 percent of tax on top of that 77 cents to still yield a $1 Coke and then you add your 8 percent sales tax locally on that. There’s your correct analogy.

Ah-ha. He believes that a portion of the sticker price of every product in the store -- he claims it's 23%, I'd like to see his evidence -- consists of taxes that we don't see. Now this might make some sense if he's talking about taxes on businesses and factories, which taxes are of course passed along to us because corporations are concerned with their bottom line and not our interests as consumers. But what does he want the sticker price to be? Does he want the sticker price on that can of Coke to be $0.77? Then it certainly looks like an extra 31 cents gets added on in taxes, and that's not 23% or even 31% -- for a 77-cent can of Coke 31 cents is darn near 50%!

Or does he want the sticker price to be $1, but the receipt to print out $0.77 and $0.31 in taxes? That seems designed to get people upset about sales tax, which he would probably see as a good thing, because then they would clamor to lower sales taxes and he would look down from on high and whisper, "no." explain that we can only do that by slashing Social Security and the common welfare.

What he probably wants is for the tax burden on that can of Coke to be shifted to the consumer. He probably thinks that consumer products would be cheaper if the corporations don't have to pay taxes and fees and things, whatever goes into that 23% figure he's bruiting about, but they really won't be if you add in that tax at the point of consumption.

Oy. I hope this guy doesn't win his race.

JAQing Off

Shorter Bruce Walker, at The American Thinker:

"Barry" Obama is a real nice guy to have a beer with, and is therefore eminently unsuited to be PUSA.

WARNING! WARNING! Actual Quote Follows! NONFICTION! NONFICTION!

As Robin of Berkeley observed in her truly scary article, Barack Hussein Obama may well be have been a traumatized victim in his youth, perhaps of sexual abuse. If he is, then Obama will have personality disorders which simply cannot be cured (read Robin's article for the details). If Robin is right, then at some point, the true, hopelessly sick Obama will show himself before a horrified nation. Average Americans will no longer like the president. They will, instead, be saddened and repelled -- and they will emphatically expel Obama and his supporters from power or influence in our lives. When folks stop liking Barry, the party is over. [Emphasis mine]

Gee, thanks for helping victims of child sexual abuse move past their trauma, there, you jerk.

And that link to Robin of Berkeley's horrible article will take you to another instance of JAQing off. She's just asking questions, guys. Of course, the questions are why is Barack Obama so strange? and did his drunkard father beat him about the head in Indonesia? and does he have Asperger's Syndrome or is he merely mentally ill? and did his mother leave him in the care of a self-admitted child-molesting Communist? so only go there if your blood pressure is crashing.

These articles, like Goldberg's opus Liberal Fascism, are just intended to get these smears into published form so that they can be referenced as authority on Obama by all kinds of smear artists. Now that Bruce Walker and Robin of Berkeley have produced these articles in which they wonder, in wide-eyed childlike innocence, if Obama is not, in fact, fucked in the head, people like Glenn Reynolds and Andy Schlafly can point to these articles as support for declaring that Obama is, indeed, fucked in the head and that this fucked-in-the-headness is the least of our worries. Don't you know he didn't tip Medvedev off to our intentions to arrest those Russian long-term spies?!?!

The Big Lie: you're soaking in it.

Thanks to Alicublog.

I Think It's An Improvement? Maybe?

Usedtabee, when a decent, God-fearing white American committed suicide, you'd get chain letters or emails with the structure of a parent searching the dead child's room and finding a book that wasn't expected:

Jesse Kilgore committed suicide in October by walking into the woods near his New York home and shooting himself. Keith Kilgore said he was shocked because he believed his son was grounded in Christianity, had blogged against abortion and for family values, and boasted he'd been debating for years.

After Jesse's death, Keith Kilgore ... searched Jesse's room and found the book under the mattress ....

Now what do you think Mr. Kilgore had found under his son's mattress?

If this were the 80's, or the 90's, or even sometimes the Aughts, you might expect the parent to have found one of the following:





or even



But what did Mr. Kilgore find under his son's mattress?



I think this might be an improvement? Maybe? Unfortunately, Jesse's still dead, but now the moral Chicken Littles are screaming about a book of substance instead of a harmless, lightweight pastime.

Personally I don't for one second think that The God Delusion alone drove this man to kill himself. He was a veteran, after all; who knows what psychological damage he was dealing with? And we must also consider the source: I found this on Fundies, but they source it to World Net Daily, a known screech rag. It does not present a neutral account of the man's death, instead getting all of its information from the man's father and relatives. They blame all of the man's troubles on his college education and the people he interacted with in school, thereby allowing WND a second target: Atheists and intellectuals. It's like a wingnut's wet dream, two screech targets with one stone.

Nutshell Rand Paul

Your intolerance of private individuals' intolerance is intolerable to me.

That was him, in a letter to the Bowling Green Daily News, which was published in their May 30, 2002 edition.

Young Master Paul was seriously arguing that a society that legislates against discrimination in the private sector is not a free society, while at the same time arguing that the government should not discriminate using taxpayer dollars.

Mr. Paul's house of cards is divided against itself and cannot stand.

Nod to Crooks & Liars and Right Now.

Someone Robbed This Woman Of The Fruits Of Her Labor

This poor young woman has spent several years earning one of the highest GPAs in her class, and at this moment captured on film she believes that she has spent that time committing the grave sin of "worshiping the intellectual mind:"



She then asserts that there are people in the audience who have not lived as Jesus has called them to live, prays that they will come to see the error of their ways, breaks into tears, starts shaking uncontrollably, and finally collapses. The video ends with one of the officers of the school asking someone to call an ambulance, and announcing the processional.

The note on the YouTube page says this occurred at Midwestern State University, Texas, and the video was posted to YouTube on January 26, 2010; but there is no other indication of when it occurred.

It is unclear from the video whether the girl in question was the salutatorian or the valedictorian. She's giving a "benediction."

Who messed with her mind so much? It seems a cruel and heartless thing to do, to rob this girl of her achievement and wind her up so much she collapses in public.

Shorter John Tierney, New York Times

For Earth Day, 7 New Rules to Live By
John Tierney, the New York Times

Foolish Greenies, don't you know that your efforts to forestall Armageddon has ironically made the world a worse place?

Ha Ha Commie Lois Made Corner Bookstore Employees' Children Starve

This might be one iota more amusing if you couldn't imagine Glenn Beck* making this exact same argument in the future.

*To pull an example out of my hat at random.

Stolen from the Comics Curmudgeon.

Superman: Mixed Messages

You ought to be able to click to embiggen.

If the picture doesn't load, here's a transcript:

PANEL ONE: Superman and some random guy are sitting on a rooftop talking. During this exchange, Superman looks to stage right and uses his heat vision to save someone's life.

RANDOM GUY: Then do you believe in a god?

SUPERMAN: One sec... window-washer's metal scaffolding about to snap four blocks away... okay, there.

PANEL TWO: A long shot from the crowd in the street below up at the building at an angle. Superman and the random guy are specks atop the building.

SUPERMAN: I believe in humanity. If I didn't, I wouldn't be out there every day doing what I do, you know?

PANEL THREE: Basically a reverse shot of Panel One, back up on the roof, but from behind Superman and his interlocutor.

RANDOM GUY: Well, you dodged that question pretty skillfully.

SUPERMAN: Bullets aren't the only thing I'm faster than. And while you shouldn't be afraid to live your life, don't rely on some kind of savior to bail you out. Rely on yourself.

Oh, boy. What a mixed and frankly incoherent message.

A savior, counseling people not to rely on saviors, but on themselves.

Just after he saves someone from a deathly plunge.

I suppose Supes may just be trying to reduce his workload by encouraging people to look out for themselves, but the myth of Superman is that he will be there. Are you a window washer in danger of falling off a high building? Superman will save you, although sometimes he has a little competition.

My point is, the people of Metropolis, of all places, don't have to rely on themselves because Superman will always intervene to resolve their situation. In fact, he has sometimes been punished in the past for slacking off; I recall a comic from the 90's in which he takes Lois off for a romantic Parisian dinner, thus being out of the way when the kidnapper-and-murderer iteration of the Toyman strikes a Halloween party and half-a-dozen children end up dead. Man, was that ever heavy-handed.

As for the random guy he's talking to: You're sitting right next to a god, man. Okay, he's not all-knowing or infallible, or all-powerful (outside of the Silver Age), but you can put your faith in him rather than your window-washing scaffolding (to choose an example at random), and he'll save you. He can't not save you. Okay, maybe he's not Jesus Christ (and lord is that a can of worms) but he's right next to you and you just saw him reach out and save someone. Why are you still having this conversation?

Shorter John Edwards' Lover

Rielle Hunter, Home-Wrecking Relationship Guru
Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon.com

Elizabeth Edwards is a ball-busting bitch and she did everything wrong in her marriage but I did everything right so listen to me when I dispense relationship advice.

The implications of Rielle Hunter's interview with GQ is enough to make me Hulk out and start smashing up real estate. Don't you dare try to victim-blame the cheated-upon, cancer-dying Elizabeth Edwards. A love affair with Rielle Hunter was not her decision.

Bonus rage: Describing Edwards' lover as a "home-wrecker," which has the effect of absolving Edwards himself of any and all guilt and/or responsibility. It's not his fault, don't you see, she seduced him! Plus it's slut-shaming and woman-blaming. Way to go, Salon. ::slow clap::

Man Attempts to Drown His Daughter, Age 4

She wouldn't recite the alphabet, so he picked her up, placed her on the countertop, and pushed her head into a bowl of water.

He'd just been awarded custody of the little girl, too.

Terrible.

Oh, Grand

PeTA continues to grab attention for its issues by exploiting women.

I have no idea who Nia Long is, I'll be frank, but I'm glad to see PeTA is continuing to value animals over women so much.

I grabbed this photo over at Photoshop Disasters, who put it up because of the awful 'shop job done on putting in the subway, but also because PeTA is aggravating.

I'm more concerned that they chose a photo of Ms. Long that was not entirely artfully arranged. They have a couple spots to cover up, and by coincidence the two are almost vertically aligned, so the art department decides to put in a pole to preserve modesty.

"It's a subway, right? There are poles in the subway cars to hang on to, right? So who'll notice this?" I imagine they said.

Except it's right in front of the doors, and the way they've put it in makes her look like a pole dancer.

While they were busy airbrushing out all her moles and her belly, couldn't they just have covered over her naughty bits?

Nope, it's easier to try and evoke sexy times than put in a bit more work.

And who wears fur? Are straight men and gay women really the largest consumers of fur? Are there no straight women who buy fur? How is this ad supposed to appeal to them? Where are the naked Bruce Willises and Matt Damons demonstrating their abhorrence for the fur industry?

Shorter Elizabeth Wurtzel

Beauty Fades, Loneliness Is Forever
Prozac Nation's Elizabeth Wurtzel confronts her fear of aging and losing her good looks

I was a prom queen, but now I'm over 40 and I'm a horrible ugly hag and my One True Chance At Happiness threw a half-full bottle of liquor at my head and told me I'd never really be happy without him so it's like some kind of evil fairy godmother has cursed me to be unhappy because I feel guilty about cheating on him.

(Seriously, though, if society tells you the only reason you could possibly be worth anything is if you can win beauty contests, and you proceed to do so, then it must be awful to believe that once you find that one wrinkle or that sole grey hair the only option is a crash-and-burn. See this article at Pandagon for a fairly sympathetic reaction to this column.)

Shorter Sam Schulman

The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage
It isn't going to work.
by Sam Schulman
06/01/2009, Volume 014, Issue 35 [The Weekly Standard]

Nowadays gays get to marry for love. This is entirely unfair to the thousands of years of men and women who had to get married and produce heirs not for love, but for money or land or politics, regardless of their thoughts on the whole procedure. Incidentally, I'm not homophobic, I just don't like to have Them around me*.

*Something that was actually said in my actual earshot several years ago, regarding racism and black people. Oy vey.

It Has Become A Law

No film may be produced in Hollywood in the 21st Century that is not targeted entirely to the 18-to-45 male moviegoer. Don't even try to get your movie produced unless it has at least one big explosion and an extended melee choreography.



So let it be written.

Dell: Stop Digging Now

Dell Computers have launched Della, a website geared towards women.

It tells you how to accessorize with your laptop, reminds you that your laptop can do a lot more than check e-mail, and hosts videos addressing a wide range of topics, from searching online databases for new recipes to a how-to video concerning searching for the best deals in vintage clothing stores.

That hole's six feet deep, Dell. I'd advise you to stop digging.

h/t Correntewire.

Whoops, Forgot the Title 2: The Entitlement

At a town hall meeting in Missouri:

Obama then noted that the real fiscal problem facing the United States is the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid, not the Recovery Act or bank bailouts, which he said are "one-time charges." "If we aren't careful, health care will consume so much of our budget that ultimately we won't be able to do anything else," he warned.

Oh, don't worry, Mr. President. I'm sure we can find enough money in the education budget to cover all of our other expenses for the time being.

As far as "not being able to do anything else," poppycock. Defense spending can only increase, you know. Haven't you learned anything from your time on Capitol Hill?

H/t.

We Both Know It Was A Girl, Back In Bethlehem

I must shake my finger at PZ Myers. He says,

As I'm sure many of you are aware, one of the more superficially off-putting elements of the Catholic church is to walk into one of their buildings and see it decorated with images of writhing, tortured men in loin cloths — it's like stepping into a S&M fantasy, and I'm really not into that (not that there's anything wrong with it, of course, if that's your thing…).

He then says he sees nothing wrong with this, and in fact would encourage the Church to use it:



He got that from here, which provides this description:

Raquel Welch, called by Playboy Magazine the "Most Desired Woman" of the '70s, is captured being crucified while wearing nothing but a loin-cloth on the set of the 1970 film, "Myra Breckenridge." The photo was devised for the poster of "One Million Years BC" and reflected [artist Terry] O'Neill's view that the Sixties were a decade that "crucified" the ideal of womanhood because it valued women only for their sexuality.

Let us not dwell upon the recursive nature that is showing us Raquel Welch in a hide bikini in order to get us to recognize the injustice of looking at Raquel Welch in a hide bikini.

I'm not sure how the "It" girl of the Seventies is supposed to show us anything about the Sixties, but seeing as virgin/whore has been the archetype and largely the sole judgment axis of Woman throughout much of the known world for much of recorded history I don't think the Sixties bear more approbation than average.

And really, PZ, if you can't take men being tortured to death, it's not kosher to accept women being tortured to death, even in hide bikinis.

This Book Is Not Helping

**SQUICK WARNING**

Via Pharyngula, I have run across one of the most horrible books in existence: The Professor and the Dominatrix. The author is a self-professed atheist, and his magnum opus here handily illustrates the fact that atheist does not automatically equal decent human being.

That link above goes to an extensive review of this horrible book. You can read the whole thing, if you're really sure, but to sum up, I'll list a few of the really awful aspects of this book:

1. The Dominatrix of the title isn't a very good one; she meets the Professor and immediately starts talking babies and marriage. They're married after they've known each other a) for a week, and b) twice (hem, hem). The Professor, on the other hand, is no more than a giant Mary Sue and Author Avatar.

2. The Mayor of this little college town is the only black man in the book, and while everyone else talks exactly like a college professor might, Mayor Stereotype speaks like Steppin Fetchit and curses about every other word.

3. Every woman in this book is either a frumpy, ugly old crone who continuously commits the mortal sin of not turning on the Professor, or a ditzy young thing who is simultaneously pure as the driven snow and built like a pr0n star.

4. The murder victims in the scant plot are both gay men; you'd think then the plot would be sympathetic to people of a non-normative sexual orientation; you'd be wrong. The gay slurs are up there with the women and Mayor Remus. Oh, and the text refers to a trans person as "he-she" and "it."

5. The sex scenes. Good lord, the sex scenes. There are only two, which apparently qualify this book as "dripping with sex," in the author's words (oh -- forgot all the sexual evaluations going on in connection with 3. above), and they suck. There are references to "whangs" and the text constantly refers to the Professor's "whang" as "Captain Marvel." Captain Marvel. I'll never be able to look DC in the eye again.

6. And finally, there's the arguments against religious people. This book is full of straw men and women who exist only for the author's abuse. There are author filibusters -- whole chapters of incoherent ranting with no plot or tension, just the author barfing all his pent-up frustrations onto the page. The philosophical climax of the book occurs at a televised debate between the Professor and the Dominatrix and a man-woman team of evangelicals, and it ends when the Prof (an accomplished boxer) goads the other man into attacking him so that the Prof can lay him out flat in as violent a manner as possible. Meanwhile, the Dom rips the other woman's clothes off. And then everybody points and laughs. Oh, and there's a man dressed as Jesus in the audience getting a hand job. Ew.

So, to sum up, this book's author may be a professed atheist, but his book reads like it was written by a right-wing hater, with all the unreconstructed opinions about the value of women and the jabs at gay people.

Being an atheist is a moral-neutral stance; it doesn't automatically make you good or bad. It's your own actions determine that, and this book is dripping with Bad. In the philosophical debate between atheists and theists, this book is absolutely a harm to its professed side, and not any help at all.

Shorter Jeff Emanuel at Red State

Throwing Down the Gauntlet: House GOP Accepts Obama’s Empty Offer to Debate Budget Proposal

Lament, my brothers, for the days have gone down in the west and the courage of man has failed and we can no longer brutally club our political opponents over the head on the floor of the senate, nor can we show our courage on the field of honor by shooting those with whom we disagree; but if only we could, I'd show this Negro President a thing or two!

Seriously, this guy thinks it is a mark of our decadent times that we can regularly have nonviolent disagreements. Oy.

Well, There You Go

Seen at the Orlando Tea Party, March 21, 2009.

So, that's what, 21 days in March, 28 days in February, and 11 days in January, makes 60 days. 60 days to calls of impeachment, and all because they believe that all those banks that failed last summer and fall are Obama's fault.

The truth is, Obama has basically adopted the Bush administration's bailout strategy. I guess it's only okay when it's their guy giving all the money handouts. When our guy does it, he gets compared negatively to Robin Hood, Che, Castro, Mao, etc.

Oh, plus let's not pass this opportunity to link Obama to bin Laden and suggest that the President is going to let the terrorists "win."

Via Correntewire and Media Matters.