Tax Them Rich Blood Suckers!

Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview and was asked about Israel's occupation of Arab lands -- his response was "It's our land."

The reporter (CNN or the like) was stunned -- read below "It's our land..."

It's important information since Israel doesn't get fair and accurate reporting from the media and facts tend to get lost in the jumble of daily events. (See 1 below.)

If you see what your you want to see the problem is you might not get what you want. (See 2 below.)

Humorless liberals at least know how to dance according to Peter Hoekstra. (See 3 below.)

Obama seems to have chosen to prove how tough he is by calling for the sending of more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Obama previously said he would also be willing to bomb Pakistan for providing various safe havens for Taliban, al Qaeda and other assorted radical terrorists who are attacking our troops and then filtering back into Pakistan. More evidence of Obama's foreign policy judgment and expertise.

And when it comes to increasing the tax on the rich, Obama really shows excellent judgment. The rich "blood suckers" just don't pay their fair share. Tooday's Wall Street Journal lead editorial presents a chart showing 1%, who earned over $388,806 in 2006, "only" paid 44% of the government's tax take while earning 22% of all the government's income. So Obama, go get some more blood out of those turnips!

What is also disturbing is that more and more citizens do not pay income taxes though they do pay FICA taxes if they work. Soon, only a shrinking % of Americans will pay income taxes. Is it legitimate to ask what interest non-payers will they have in the kind of government we have? Will only the wealthy care because they will be the only ones who have skin in the game?

Since there are more on the bottom of the income tax ladder, Populism has an appealing ring and eliminating their taxes and taking it from the rich make sense if you want to play the "fair" game like liberals. Of course, if you want to have a nation that competes, creates economic opportunities and challenges capital investment then liberals and Obama have their head up their a--. (See 4 below.)

Let's face it, Obama is deemed to have more charisma in his finger than probably McCain has in his entire body and thus it is no surprise Obama is receiving gushing coverage. Furthermore, he is the new kid, "literally," on the block and has not been over-exposed and still remains an unknown.

On the other hand, Obama's change message is as empty as the rear of a movie set so more exposure might ultimately become his undoing. Of course that begs the question of whether voters are discerning. (See 5 below.)

Dick


1) "Crash Course on the Arab Israeli Conflict."

Here are overlooked facts in the current Middle East situation.
These were compiled by a Christian university professor.

BRIEF FACTS ON THE ISRAELI CONFLICT TODAY....


1. Nationhood and Jerusalem. Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C.E. Two thousand years before the rise of Islam.
2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E., the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.
4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 C.E. Lasted no more than 22 years.
5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.
7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.
9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
10 The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.
11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.
12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.
13. The Arab - Israeli Conflict: The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.
14. The P.L.O.'s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.
15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.
16. The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.
17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.
18. The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.
19. The U.N. Was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
20. The U.N. Was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like a policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
These are incredible times. We have to ask what our role should be.
What will we tell our grandchildren we did when there was a turning point in Jewish destiny, an opportunity to make a difference?

2) People see in Obama what they want to see - that's a blessing and a curse
By Gary Younge

As the US Democratic candidate heads towards Europe, liberals refer to him as if he represents a second coming

Last Tuesday a 25-year-old white student was wandering around Union Square in New York when she was set upon by four black teenage girls who pushed her, pulled out her earphones, and spat in her face. She was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Obama is my slave" that she had bought from Apollo Braun's Lower East Side store in Manhattan.

This isn't the first controversial T-shirt Braun has printed about the Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. His body of work includes such slogans as "Jews Against Obama", "Obama = Hitler" and "Who Killed Obama?" - which he told New York's Metro was his most popular yet.

When questioned about the message that he is putting out, Braun insists these are not his views but those of the rest of America. "For a lot of people, when they see Obama, they see a slave. People think America is not ready for a black president," he said. Not people like him, he says, insisting that Obama's race is "the only thing I like about him. He opens the door for other minorities" - but "ordinary Wasps", with whom, it turns out, Braun has more in common than he cares to admit. "I can't stand Obama," he says, comparing him to Hitler, because "he is a Muslim".

Obama is not a Muslim. Nonetheless, according to a recent Pew research survey, 12% of Americans still believe that he is. Another 10% say they have "heard different things". This is why the New Yorker cartoon portraying Obama as a flag-burning terrorist wasn't that funny. For satire to work, it has to be edgy. It fails when it misjudges where the edge is. When, according to another survey, one in five Democrats with a negative opinion of Obama believes he is a Muslim, we are not talking isolated pockets but mainstream public opinion.

"It's hard to ignore what you hear when everybody you know is saying it," Jim Peterman, from Findlay, Ohio, told the Washington Post recently, having heard various accounts of Obama's lack of patriotism and extreme Islamic views. "These are good people, smart people, so can they really all be wrong?"

"The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe," wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."

Herein lies both Obama's greatest asset and biggest problem. In the past six months, it has become patently clear people see in him whatever they want to see. After being told his parents' race and nationality, more than half (55%) of white people said he was biracial while two-thirds of African-Americans said he was black, according to a Zogby poll. A New York Times poll last week showed two-thirds of black people believe he is very patriotic while one in five whites believe he is not very patriotic.

The division is not just racial but ideological. Liberals refer to him as though he represents a second coming. The left sees him as a disappointment waiting to happen. Hillary Clinton's team tried to paint him as a condescending sexist. Jesse Jackson wants to cut his nuts off.

These contradictions are arguably true of all politicians, but they seem truer of Obama than most. He must be the only "radical Islamist" whose biggest scandal to date has arisen from membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ. Depending on what Kool-Aid you have been drinking, when it comes to Obama your glass is either half full, half empty or overflowing, or you've smashed it lest anybody else imbibes its poison.

People come to Obama with extraordinary amounts of baggage and dump it at his door. For the most part their responses to him tell you far more about them than they do about him.

And so it is that his world tour heads to Europe, to what most predict will be a lively and rapturous reception from huge and hopeful crowds. Germany's Der Spiegel magazine has referred to him as the messiah. It is not difficult to see why. The damage George Bush has done to the world's view of America is both pervasive and profound. In a global survey of 27 countries conducted by Pew in 2000, 25 had a favourable view of America. Last month, in a similar survey of 24 countries, that number was down to seven.

On the world stage, America's misfortune has become Obama's opportunity. Most Europeans see him not just as Bush's likely successor but as his absolute negation - the anti-Bush. Where the current president is belligerent, parochial, indifferent and oafish, Obama is conciliatory, worldly, curious and refined. When it comes to the forthcoming elections, 23 of those 24 nations preferred Obama to John McCain.

Europeans think they are going to see Kennedy. The difference is that when Kennedy arrived in Europe in 1963, he had been president for three years - Obama is still trying to get elected, and Europeans don't get to vote. Indeed, the intense interest in the elections and enthusiasm for Obama in Europe reveals a real geopolitical weakness.

The past seven years have shown European governments able to frustrate America's excesses but not to thwart them. The issue is not solely that Europe has failed to present an effective challenge to America - a question of power - but that it has yet to come up with a coherent ideological alternative to it: a question of ideas.

America is nowhere near as excited about Obama as Europe is. So Europeans are left rooting on the sidelines in the hope that middle America (which is where most elections are decided) will make a better choice about who it thinks should run the world than it did last time. For Europeans, Obama's appearance has the palliative effect of methadone - taking the edge off a long-term dependency.

In Obama they see a paradigm shift. But if he wins, what they will get, in the words of the former president Warren Harding, is a "return to normalcy". Obama is not a radical, he is a mainstream Democrat - a party that in any other western nation would find itself on the right on foreign policy, the centre on economic policy, the centre-left on social policy.

When it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush and much better than McCain. That takes him a long way from the parlous place where America is now. But his current platform will still leave America a considerable distance from where most Europeans who come out to greet him would like it to be.

This would matter more if they thought their own leaders could do any better. But Obama's other asset right now is the pathetic state of European leadership. He arrives in a continent whose unifying project has been stalled by the Irish and is based in a country that is falling apart - Belgium.

With the exception of Angela Merkel, riding high on folksy popularity, he will meet leaders (Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy) who are not much more popular than Bush. So Obama's arrival gives Europeans a chance to be passionate about politics - a feeling they have not had for a long time. In Obama, they pine for something they have singularly failed to produce - a politician who inspires them and a politics of hope.

3) The Democrats' Baghdad Two-Step
By Peter Hoekstra

It's hard not to have heard about the positive developments in Iraq lately. On Friday, the White House announced that President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had reached agreement on a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last Wednesday that "security is unquestionably and remarkably better." Iraqi security forces recently took responsibility for a 10th province and expect to assume responsibility for all 18 of the country's provinces by year-end. There have been virtually no sectarian killings in 10 weeks. The Iraqi government has made important progress in political reconciliation. Regional neighbors are reestablishing embassies in Baghdad, and some of Iraq's creditors have begun to forgive the enormous debts incurred by Saddam Hussein's regime.

How have Democrats reacted to these developments? Have they reveled in the news that U.S. casualties have plummeted? Have they praised the achievements for which our troops have fought so hard? Have they congratulated the Iraqi government for progress in political reconciliation?

Not exactly.

Last Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to ignore recent gains and instead criticized Bush and Maliki for pushing a "vague" plan to withdraw U.S. troops. Addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual convention last month, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave major foreign policy speeches. Neither even mentioned Iraq. Last Tuesday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, the leading foreign policy expert among Democrats in Congress, ignored the achievements made in Iraq and the importance of promoting stability there when he said: "If John [McCain] wants to know where the bad guys live, come back with me to Afghanistan. We know where they reside. And it's not in Iraq."

Why are the Democrats in denial about recent gains in Iraq? Unfortunately, it appears that they realize that progress is being made and want to change the subject to some other policy they can use to attack the president. Indeed, they are so opposed to acknowledging America's hard-won achievements that in a May 28 interview Pelosi credited "the goodwill of the Iranians" for "some of the success of the surge. . . . They decided in Basra when the fighting would end." As Sen. Joe Lieberman noted in a speech last year, "Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus's new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq."

Over the past few years, Pelosi and Reid have taken full advantage of every piece of bad news in Iraq to attack the Bush administration. Whenever American fatalities went up or there were major terrorist attacks, they ran to microphones to denounce the war as a hopeless failure. Al-Qaeda took a similar approach, issuing audio and video messages from Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, statements that threatened more U.S. casualties and described their plans to drive America from Iraq so they could make it the center of their crazed fantasy of creating a radical Islamic global caliphate.

Sen. Barack Obama's (current) position on Iraq is hard to nail down. He still favors the same arbitrary 16-month withdrawal timetable he promoted when violence in Iraq was at a high point. After insisting for months that the troop surge was doomed to fail, Obama now credits it with some security improvements while simultaneously claiming in a speech last week that the surge did not meet all of its benchmarks and was too expensive. Setting aside Obama's verbal acrobatics on Iraq, his campaign was caught last week trying to purge his earlier harsh criticism of the surge from its Web site.

This is no time for our elected leaders to play games about the successes and challenges in Iraq. Our troops and the Iraqi people need and deserve the recognition and support of all U.S. elected officials for their efforts to stabilize that country. They need to know that we are with them and do not want them to fail.

While there is much still to be done in Iraq, recent events give many reasons for hope. Rather than always focusing on the negative of one front in the battle against radical jihadists, Democratic congressional leaders need to acknowledge success, highlight challenges and lay out a comprehensive long-term strategy to confront, contain and ultimately defeat the threat facing America. Our country cannot be led by naysayers who slide from issue to issue. The responsibilities of leadership go far beyond what Democrats in Congress are demonstrating today.

4) REVIEW & OUTLOOK:Their Fair Share


Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.
[Their Fair Share]

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

CHART:

Top 1% 22% Inc. Sh.
40% Tax Sh.

5% 37% Inc. Sh.
60% Tax Sh.

25 68% Inc. Sh.
86% Tax Sh.

50 88% Inc. Sh.
97% Tax Sh.

Bottom 50% 12% Inc.Sh
3% Tax Sh


Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.

The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.

This is precisely what supply-siders predicted would happen with lower tax rates on capital gains, dividends and income. The economy and earnings would grow faster, which they did; investors would declare more capital gains and companies would pay out more dividends, which they did; the rich would invest less in tax shelters at lower tax rates, so their tax payments would rise, which did happen.

The idea that this has been a giveaway to the rich is a figment of the left's imagination. Taxes paid by millionaire households more than doubled to $274 billion in 2006 from $136 billion in 2003. No President has ever plied more money from the rich than George W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts. These tax payments from the rich explain the very rapid reduction in the budget deficit to 1.9% of GDP in 2006 from 3.5% in 2003.

This year, thanks to the credit mess and slower growth, taxes paid by the rich may fall and the deficit will rise. (The nonstimulating tax rebates will also hurt the deficit.) Mr. Obama proposes to close this deficit by raising tax rates on the rich to their highest levels since the late 1970s. The very groups like the Congressional Budget Office and Tax Policy Center that wrongly predicted that the 2003 investment tax cuts would cost about $1 trillion in lost revenue are now saying that repealing those tax cuts would gain similar amounts. We'll wager it'd gain a lot less.

If Mr. Obama does succeed in raising tax rates on the rich, we'd also wager that the rich share of tax payments would fall. The last time tax rates were as high as the Senator wants them -- the Carter years -- the rich paid only 19% of all income taxes, half of the 40% share they pay today. Why? Because they either worked less, earned less, or they found ways to shelter income from taxes so it was never reported to the IRS as income.

The way to soak the rich is with low tax rates, and last week's IRS data provide more powerful validation of that proposition.

5) Obama orgy
By JOSEPH W. MCQUAID (New Hampshire Union Leader Publisher)


The blatant bias of the major national news media toward Barack Obama is now so overwhelming that it would not be worth noting, except that the election of a President of the United States is involved. It is a propaganda blitz that would make the Kremlin blush.

By election day, we fully expect John McCain to be vilified as a Vietnam-era war criminal and worse. But that is only if the networks and other major media can tear themselves away from their Obama orgy.

A recent report found that since June the nightly newscasts of NBC, CBS, and ABC combined have spent 114 minutes covering Obama. McCain got 48 minutes.

But that was before this week.

The three major television networks are all scheduled to send their nightly news star "anchors'' to follow Obama on his trip to Iraq and the Middle East.

When was the last time you saw ANY of the networks do this with Sen. McCain?

If you can't recall, it is because it hasn't happened. McCain, who knows and understands and is intimately familiar with Iraq and Mideast issues, has been there many times, with little fanfare. It is because he understands these issues that he was able to argue so effectively for the surge that has dramatically improved the Iraqi situation.

The outrageous imbalance in the major media's coverage of the candidates means that the American people are going to have to work doubly hard to make the right choice in these perilous times.




See my latest memo posting at http://dick-meom.blogspot.com/. Updated daily.