Senate Democrats Vote to Reject Keystone, Elect Bill Cassidy in Runoff
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Morning Jolt November 19, 2014 Senate Democrats Vote to Reject Keystone, Elect Bill Cassidy in Runoff In the end, Senate Democrats really didn’t care whether Senator Mary Landrieu came back to join them or not.
Keep in mind, most of her colleagues voted “no” even with the implied-but-never-quite-explicitly-stated threat of a presidential veto! And they still wouldn’t vote to give Mary Landrieu an alleged “accomplishment” before the runoff! Why are they so disinclined to help her out? What, does she owe them money? Do they owe her money? Democrats voting to build the Keystone Pipeline included Begich, Bennet, Carper, Casey, Donnelly, Hagan, Heitkamp, Landrieu, Manchin, McCaskill, Pryor, Tester, Walsh, and Warner. Begich, Hagan, Pryor, Walsh, and almost certainly Landrieu will not be there next year. If all 54 Republican senators vote for Keystone, that means if all of the above Democrats vote for it again, it will pass with 63 votes. And then President Obama will probably veto it. Dana Perino asks, “Dems are in organizational free fall. NEVER should've taken vote. Why go through the pain & draw so much attention to issue while losing?” The Administration’s $400,000 Contractor Is a Demagogic Extremist Liberal Response to these Gruber quotes was kind of “meh.” It figures that by the time I find a Gruber-saying-shocking-things video, it’s become cliché. Note how often this Obama administration contractor was cited as a “nonpartisan expert.” Now we know he’s the kind of “nonpartisan expert” who thinks that the decision of governors to not expand Medicaid is “just almost awesome in its evilness” -- not merely misguided, foolish, or callous, but evil! -- and that the Republican governors’ desire to hurt the poor is driven in part by racial reasons. The guy’s understanding of half the country is on par with the typical Daily Kos poster, and yet this is the man the administration relied on to overhaul the entire U.S. health-care system. Jonah is too modest to quote himself, but he had an epic brief rant on Special Report the other night: In a lot of ways, this spectacle represents not just everything’s that’s wrong with the Obama administration, it’s everything wrong with liberalism and a lot that’s wrong with America itself. You’ve got this guy who is pretending to be an objective independent analyst, who’s got huge amounts of skin in the game in terms of money he can make off of consulting fees, but also of the prestige being involved and the speeches he could do which haven’t been tallied into these numbers -- anyway, it’s millions of dollars -- being touted around through a transmission belt of liberal journalists, who all are all pretending to be objective analysts too, quoting each other, reaffirming each other, all with the help of the White House which went along with this soup to nuts -- a process which this guy says was all about lies and misleading the American people. And then when caught about it, the same administration tries to dismiss him as if he was just some sort of random White House intruder. The whole thing stinks. Al Sharpton Owes $4.5 Million in Unpaid State and Federal Taxes What does it take to get a levy on Al Sharpton’s income? Mr. Sharpton has regularly sidestepped the sorts of obligations most people see as inevitable, like taxes, rent, and other bills. Records reviewed by The New York Times show more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses. And though he said in recent interviews that he was paying both down, his balance with the state, at least, has actually grown in recent years. His National Action Network appears to have been sustained for years by not paying federal payroll taxes on its employees. With the tax liability outstanding, Mr. Sharpton traveled first class and collected a sizable salary, the kind of practice by nonprofit groups that the United States Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration recently characterized as “abusive,” or “potentially criminal” if the failure to turn over or collect taxes is willful. Mr. Sharpton and the National Action Network have repeatedly failed to pay travel agencies, hotels and landlords. He has leaned on the generosity of friends and sometimes even the organization, intermingling its finances with his own to cover his daughters’ private school tuition. Why is the IRS coming down on these tiny tea-party groups like a ton of bricks, and just shrugging at a seven-figure tax bill left unpaid for years? Revelations like this confirm the suspicions of millions of Americans that the tax laws are only for the little people. A member of the protected class -- like the guy who meets with the president regularly and who has a show on MSNBC -- doesn’t have to pay taxes. A lien is not a levy. A lien secures the government’s interest in your property when you don’t pay your tax debt. A levy actually takes the property to pay the tax debt. If you don’t pay or make arrangements to settle your tax debt, the IRS can levy, seize and sell any type of real or personal property that you own or have an interest in. What’s stopping millions of Americans from declaring next April, “I’ll pay my taxes after Al Sharpton pays his?” ADDENDA: Frank J. Fleming, in his new book, Punch Your Inner Hippie: Cut Your Hair, Get a Job, and Make America Awesome Again: Is the United States itself in decline now? Some would say so. Look at what America was in the past: We chased out the British, became the most powerful nation in the world, defeated the Nazis, invented nuclear weapons, and landed on the moon. And what have we done lately? Well, our phones get new features every year. Look at what Americans were able to achieve in the past when they had relatively little, then think of what they could do with our technology and advantages. B the end of the year, there would be giant robots stomping through the cities of our enemies, even the poorest citizens would have jetpacks and laser guns, and we’d have an ultralibertarian moon colony. So why aren’t we doing that? Whatever happened to our country that the highest an American ever aims to achieve now is beating the next level in Candy Crush? I’ll tell you why: hippies. Whiny, smelly hippies who do nothing but sit around and whine, expecting everyone else to do the work for them. They are the bane of civilization. And what do you do with hippies? Can you reason with them? Of course not, because whining isn’t real speech and can’t be refuted with reason. So what can you do with them? There’s only one thing that can be done: Yell, “Shut up, hippie!” and punch them in the face like a common mountain lion. Finally, GQ names Michael Sam – the former Ram and Cowboy defensive end now with no NFL team – as one if its Men of the Year. But they’re totally not judging him by a different, lesser standard than anyone else!
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