Weekly Open Thread – Obama’s Economy Edition

Officially, the recession ended two and a half years ago. President Obama tells us the economy has been moving in the right direction since June 2009.

Few will take solace in that statistic. Americans are suffering. For nearly three years, nearly one in 10 have been out of work. Almost double that number are either underemployed—working part time when they would rather be full time—or have simply given up looking.

Weekly Open Thread – The “Filth & Fury” of Occupy Wall Street Edition

Notice how quickly the left’s claimed “neutral” objection to radical politics and lack of compromise and a spirit of revolution has dissipated. Their objection was “neutral,” they maintained, because they weren’t taking a position (they claimed) on the political substance of this or that agenda item; they were just in favor of the supposedly politically-neutral value of incrementalism, bipartisanship, and moderation.

Weekly Open Thread – “Get a Damn Job you Hippie” Edition

After spending two days at the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street campout, I have yet to encounter anybody with a serious platform, or to glean any coherent sense of why they are there. The terminal vagueness which is the hallmark of the demonstration was best articulated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in 2004’s Team America, in which a disgruntled and effusive Tim Robbins puppet complains that, “the corporations sit there in their… in their corporation buildings, and… and, and see, they’re all corporation-y… and they make money.” This is a sentiment I have heard repeatedly from attendees, almost verbatim. It is always accompanied by derisive gestures toward the skyscrapers towering overhead, whose construction, I am informed without irony by the union members who have now got in on the action, is a source of well-paying union jobs.

Weekly Open Thread – Tax The Rich Edition!

If you put a floor at their current marginal tax rate of 35%, the government would obtain $37 billion more dollars. That might sound like a lot, but it amounts to just 2.5% of the 2009 $1.5 trillion deficit (which is the red line shown). If you increase the floor to the pre-Bush-tax-cut marginal rate of 39.6%, the additional revenue grows a bit — to $66 billion, or 4.5% of the year’s deficit.

Conservatism, Health, And Common Sense

Conservatives traditionally resist government intrusion into the home and personal lives of American citizens: Liberals tend to welcome the guiding hand of government into every facet of modern life. This is one of the fundamental differences between Liberalism and Conservatism. During the GOP Debate, Rep. Bachman called Governor Perry on his issuance of an executive order in 2007, requiring all girls in Texas to receive Gardasil unless a waiver was signed by her parents. Gardasil by Merck, prevents infection of the more common strains of human papilloma virus. These particular viruses, once established, can initiate http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/277093/gardasil-and-gop-henry-i-miller, as well as cervical, anal, vulvar, and vaginal cancers. The vaccine Gardasil prevents the infection and consequently prevents the associated diseases.

Weekly Open Thread – Burning Tax Dollars Edition

Earlier today, a few of us Tea Party “sons of bitches” decided to call on the “debunked” progressive propagandists at Media Matters for America (MMFA) to ask them to produce their latest IRS 990 form–the tax document that non-profit organizations are required to file annually with the IRS to maintain their tax-free status.

Unlike other tax-exempt organizations that make their latest IRS filings easily available at their own websites (such as the Media Research Center, for example), MMFA apparently wants the public to find that information for itself. Since the most recent available IRS 990 filing from MMFA covers 2009, we decided to see if they had any more recent information to provide us.