| Author | Message | ||
     Sifo |
Anyone care to comment? I've got a friend who owns a music shop. His shop has several awards for being the largest Gibson dealer for several years in a row. (Remember the Gibson/government story?) They did lots of guitar lessons in their shop. They rented their teaching studios out to instructors for lessons. These instructors were not shop employees, and therefore responsible for paying their own income taxes. They all knew this, and did so as required by tax law. One day the shops accounts were seized. First notion of anything going on was bouncing checks. All the bank would tell them was that the IRS had locked their accounts. Of course while these accounts were locked, they were still able to make several cash deposits without any mention of anything going on. So he was told he had to pay numerous years worth of income taxes on these "employees". They were threatening to take his house despite the business assets being a separate incorporation. He was told by his lawyer and accountant to close that business and reincorporate a new business to move forward protecting future income. He did this. They still came after his new business. He had to take a second loan on his house to pay them off after years of fighting it in court. You can't afford to fight the IRS. PERIOD. His "employees" of course tried to get the taxes refunded. These taxes certainly don't need to be paid twice, right? Guess what. They weren't employees of the music company. They were still responsible for their income taxes. IRS gets paid twice. My friend's shop is now a one man operation that only does lessons. No more providing the studios for other instructors. No more sales staff. No more sales. He's just trying to exist until he can start drawing his Social Security checks. His old shop still sits vacant. His new shop is a hole in the wall. | ||
| Sifo |
  | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
If the Democrats yell and scream about something, you can be reasonably sure that the exact opposite is true. Case in point: voter ID laws. The real intent is to allow non-citizens to vote. VOTE HARRY REID OUT OF HIS MAJORITY SENATE POSITION NEXT WEEK. ("Republicans are obstructionists" when it is really the Senate that squelches bills to protect his precious Barry). Jaw-Dropping Study Claims Large Numbers of Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. By Jim Geraghty October 24, 2014 http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/391134 /jaw-dropping-study-claims-large-numbers-non-citiz ens-vote-us-jim-geraghty | ||
| Reindog |
Make this smallest of the small "own it". Obama hates America and he hates Americans. Make him own it starting the upcoming election. Bill Whittle hits another one out of the park. | ||
| Sifo |
This is good enough that I'm going to do a complete C&P. Well worth the read. Refresh your mind on where we came from, and where we are heading. http://straightlinelogic.com/2014/10/26/the-only-i ssue-that-matters-by-robert-gore/ The Only Issue That Matters by Robert Gore Posted on October 26, 2014 | 5 Comments The most radical idea in human history is that might does not make right. For centuries the contrary tenet has held brutal sway. History book are chronicles of rulers and ruled, conquests, empires, and inevitably, failure and collapse. If people’s histories had been written by the forerunners of Howard Zinn, they would have detailed lives of subjugation and misery. The common folks were fodder for their rulers, who exercised first claim on their lives and property. The only checks on power were the occasional insurrection or military defeat, but the new boss was usually the same as the old boss. The printing press was probably the most significant invention in human history. At the time (1439), the concept of individual rights was heresy, treason, or both. Its fragile shoots first poked through during the Reformation and grew during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Europe’s clergy and aristocracy, their entitlements supposedly granted by God, fought the idea ferociously. However, challenges to privilege, along with both intellectual and emotional arguments for individual rights, enjoyed widespread appeal among the subjugated, but increasingly literate (thanks to Gutenberg), masses. The American Revolution was definitely the most significant revolution in human history. Any freshman political science major can point out where actual practice of the Founding Fathers diverged from the stated ideals and aims of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The breathtaking historical departure was that those ideals and aims had been declared as a basis for the colonists’ rebellion and then incorporated into a charter of government. The design— separation of powers, checks and balances, explicit limitations on the government’s power, explicit protection of individual rights—was the product of elaborate compromises among strongly held passions, but no longer would might make right. Might was to be put in service of rights and subordinated to them. By 1835, when Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in America, it was clear to this astute foreign observer that something extraordinary was happening in America. Freedom was breeding a new kind of person—the autonomous and empowered individual, who wanted the government to maintain public order and not do much else. The flow of immigrants from Europe, which would later become a flood from all over the world, recognized an unprecedented opportunity to live their lives and improve their situations almost completely unhindered by the governing power. This was the bedrock of American exceptionalism: freedom and its consequent opportunities. Tocqueville argued that slaves would never be as productive as free workers and that the north’s industrializing economy had already eclipsed the agrarian south’s. Slavery, the most glaring contradiction to our founding ideals, was doomed, and that economic divergence would have ended it if the Civil War had not. As it was, northern industry and transportation systems proved decisive in the war. Freedom and the economics of freedom—capitalism—produced the wonder of the Industrial Revolution. The forty-eight-year period after the Civil War was stunning testament to what a free people could do. It is no exaggeration to say that science, technology, industry, productive capacity, and the average standard of living advanced more in that period than they had during all the centuries prior. The period came to an abrupt end in 1913, when the ratification of the 16th Amendment gave the government the power to levy income taxes and the establishment of the Federal Reserve led to the gradual imposition of fiat money. Over the next one hundred-and-one years the freedom that had worked spectacularly well was abandoned for a grab bag of doomed-to-fail political philosophies. The twentieth century was easily history’s bloodiest, with one particularly malignant doctrine—communism—responsible for an estimated 60 to 100 million deaths. The defining feature of the grab bag was reversion to historical type: might once again made right. Individuals are again subservient to the state, whatever its governing philosophy. They pay taxes; fund vote buying, forced redistribution, corruption, and cronyism; obey arbitrary laws and regulations; fight wars; cower in civil-liberties-stripping fear of whatever their leaders say they should be afraid of, and mouth stale pieties that provide those leaders with a veneer of legitimacy. When your freedom is gone, it doesn’t matter who took it or what “ism” they spout. All you see is the gun. Freedom has one foot in the grave in the US and the eventual coup de grâce will amount to a trivial irrelevance. Perhaps it will be the masters of our police state apparatus going full rogue, some sort of outrage by a group the government labels as terrorist, the threat of an epidemic, or something else, but only the stubbornly myopic do not see the totalitarianism on the horizon. While “freedom” and “liberty” occasionally appear in campaign materials, in actual practice they are kept hidden away, treated as one treats embarrassing photographs from one’s younger days. In the younger days of what used to be our republic (mob rule is the best description of what we have now), an infringement of the people’s liberty could be invoked as an argument against the government’s expansion. Nowadays such invocations are treated as appeals to the lunatic fringe. The 2014 election has shaped up as a content-free contest between the parties to prove which of them dislikes President Obama and his policies more. The Republicans have the natural advantage and the polls indicate they may pick up a Senate majority. This will leave Washington gridlocked, but nothing checks the government’s nonstop, liberty-destroying usurpation of power. Freedom versus coercion and its corollary—the individual versus the state—have been the leitmotifs of history. Whatever else the candidates blather about, restoring the Founders’ towering legacy—liberty, individual rights, subordinated and limited government—is the only issue that matters. By ignoring it, we ensure that our government will end up on the same scrap heap as all those other doomed-to-fail governments. | ||
| Sifo |
 | ||
| Aesquire |
http://globuspallidusxi.blogspot.com/2014/10/obama -is-letting-diseases-enter-united.html The very idea that the President deliberately allowed horrible diseases into our country, killing our children, just for the bribe money that the rich people he meets with to discuss illegal immigrant amnesty, is so absurd that it's silly.... As silly as a Presidential candidate that refuses to allow anyone from the press to see his birth certificate... and still has not. As silly as a President who has proudly announced he won't enforce laws he disagrees with, and will make up laws he wants. We seem to live in silly times... unless your child died of enterovirus. | ||
| Oldog |
Tom: Big yucks on the founding fathers, the missed joke is that at the time of the revolution duels were fought, the FF would have called the pResident would have been called out. IIRC The murder of Alexander Hamilton by Aaron Burr in their famous 1804 duel for some reason I thought Jefferson fought a duel. http://www.artofmanliness.com/2010/03/30/famous-du els-from-american-history/ | ||
| Sifo |
 | ||
| Reindog |
Shrillary seemed to be slurring her words when she made her "corporations and businesses don't create jobs" speech. Did anyone else notice this? | ||
| Hootowl |
I'm finding it harder and harder to take her seriously. | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
This is the way our great Republic will end.  | ||
| Sifo |
    | ||
| Macbuell |
The voter "Calibration" issues are very worrisome and infuriating. | ||
| Reindog |
Hillary is joined at the hip philosophically with the current pResident.  | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's legalize nine million illegals to take the shrinking pool of jobs from these Americans.  | ||
| Reindog |
Real leadership by the most puny President in United States history. The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here The Obama administration's anger is "red-hot" over Israel's settlement policies, and the Netanyahu government openly expresses contempt for Obama's understanding of the Middle East. Profound changes in the relationship may be coming. Jeffrey Goldberg writing in "The Atlantic" Oct 28 2014 The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2 014/10/the-crisis-in-us-israel-relations-is-offici ally-here/382031/?single_page=true | ||
| Sifo |
   | ||
| Blake |
For Tom:  http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/10/28/chicken-wings -and-chips-for-lunch-at-sidwell-friends/ | ||
| Reindog |
pResident Choom is on the left.  | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Reindog |
 | ||
| Blake |
When the ends justify the means., lawlessness. http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/10/29/massive-non-c itizen-voting-uncovered-in-maryland/ Of course anyone who objects is a racist bigot. |
