Author: Bonfire of the Absurdities

Sen Chuck Schumer (D-NY): Raise taxes on millionaires that don’t live in New York! Commenting on President Obama’s declaration of class warfare “millionaires tax” proposal, Schumer said “$250,000 makes you really rich in Mississippi but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York and there ought to be some kind of scale based on the cost of living on how much you pay.” On the other hand, Chuck, New Yorkers put folks like you in office so they deserve what they get.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the Obama administration will do its utmost to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay before next year’s presidential elections despite political opposition. They ARE the most transparent administration in history because a blind man could see what they’re up to a mile away. They have all the subtlety of a thief who knocks on doors and announces “Burglar!”

AP fact-checks Obama: Secretaries do NOT pay a higher tax rate than billionaires. From the AP article: “This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1% of their income in federal taxes, ….between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15%, …between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5%… between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7%.” Well, to paraphrase candidate Obama in 2008, “It’s not about revenue, it’s about campaign bullcrap.”

Dick Durbin and the fierce urgency of “not now!” Dick Durbin says the Senate will get around to voting on the Obama’s urgent “pass this jobs bill now!” thingy sometime next month. We can tell the Senate Dems really, really, really want to pass this POS, it’s just that in their anxiety to pass it, they don’t want to make any mistakes like accidentally forgetting about it. When nobody’s looking. So please stop looking.

Who’s that ridin’ in that sharp SUV? Why, it’s Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick who recently declared this “Car Free Week!”“ Odd coincidences like this happen all the time in Massachusetts, home of John “Raise Taxes on the rich” Kerry who docked his yacht in Rhode Island to avoid paying his, as well as state Rep. Michael Rodrigues who was spotted buying booze in New Hampshire shortly after voting to raise the Massachusetts tax on same. Must be something in the water up there. Did we mention the late wind power champion Ted Kennedy who fought tooth and nail to keep windmills from being built where he would have to look at them?

“The Real danger to America is not Barack Obama, it is a citizenry capable of entrusting such an inexperienced and incompetent man like Obama with the Presidency.” A perspicacious blog comment, purportedly lifted from a Prague newspaper. If anyone understands the dangers of intellectually, spiritually and economically bankrupt statism, it’s the ex-utopians from behind the Iron Curtain. “It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama Presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their President.” Damn, if only we had newspapers like that here.

CBC Head Cleaver: we’d be marching or something if the failure in the WH weren’t black. “If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching… ” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO.) “There is a less-volatile reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.” We admit we don’t like Obama but it’s because he’s an incompetent, narcissistic, corrupt Chicago pol who’s made all our problems worse, not because he’s black. We did no less when Jimmy Carter was the failure du jour. Not judging a comic book by its cover is the new racism.

Hundreds of villagers in eastern China have held three days of protests at a solar panel plant over pollution fears. Remember the good ole days when green energy was clean and non-polluting? Neither do we… “One 64-year-old villager told the Associated Press that the factory – located close to a school and kindergarten – discharges waste into the river and spews dense smoke out of a dozen chimneys.” Paging Erin Brockovich! How do you say “Earth Day” in Chinese?

No unifying theme to Day of Rage: half the protesters wanted more taxes and more of a welfare state, while the other half wanted to “Decentralize everything.” The protesters agree they all want to blow up capitalism, but can’t make up their minds which side they want the rubble to fall on. A stimulus-sized failure, but it’s not a total loss; we think the woman with the “Dump Obama” poster definitely has talent and a bright future.

The Solyndra scandal… has all the elements of a Chicago City Hall story, except with more zeros. More zeros, including the president and his whole bottom feeding crew. “When the government picks winners and losers, who’s the loser? Just look in the mirror, hold that thought, and tell me later.” Heh. Change for the worse you can believe in.

Barone: Obama acts as America’s “shop steward in chief.” Obama’s partiality to unions is apparently rooted in a conviction that we would be better off if every employee were represented by a union. Unions are Obama’s and the Democrats’ economic dictatorship by proxy. In a fully-unionized America, business would require tacit Democrat approval on all decisions or risk crippling work stoppages until they toed the line. Boeing was the first step on the road to the liberal fascist “utopia.” Wonder if the facility in New Zealand that built John Kerry’s yacht, “Isabel”, was unionized…

A 54-year-old carpenter in Wantage, England, accidentally cut off his own penis while working with a saw, his mother says. We suspect he’s been on the NHS vasectomy waiting list for a couple of decades and finally decided to take matters into his own hands. Unless he’s simply the Barack Obama of carpentry.

Don Surber: Obama’s West Virginia lapel pin looks like the Boo Berry mascot. Perhaps their way of saying they don’t have a ghost of a chance of carrying this state next year.

Obama and the Democrats claim state voter ID laws discriminate against Hispanics, but a poll of those voters in 3 key electoral states show strong support for such laws. As always with the Democrats, it’s not about what the people want, it’s about what the Democrats want to give them. And what the Democrats want to give them is an easy way for the Democrats to use them to steal elections. When they talk, it’s for “the people” but when they act, it’s for them.

New poll says for the first time, Obama’s personal favorability rating is underwater. Just 39 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Obama, while 42 percent view him unfavorably. That’s down from 40/34 in January. This may be the straw poll that broke the donkey’s back. Captain, we can’t re-arrange the deck chairs again, they’re… (glub!) What was the old Monkees’ tune… “Take the last bullet train to Carterville.” The new hit of the fall TV season will Steven Urkel in “Welcome Back, Carter!” We’ve got a trillion of ’em….

GE refutes charges of crony capitalism: “We are not receiving special treatment…” Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner responds:“GE, again, spends more on lobbying than any other company. Its lobbyists include Linda Daschle, whose husband Tom was the Senate Majority Leader and today is a confidant of Obama.” Since GE’s not getting any special treatment, we surmise they’re paying Linda because she’s such fun at the annual picnic. BTW, on the same website is an article “GE, Partner Announce 300 Megawatt Deal for Two Wind Farms in Illinois.” Yep, we gotta admit, wind and solar energy are two business lines absolutely devoid of rent-seeking and crony capitalism. Pardon us.

In a memo to “Sunday Show Producers”, Axelrod complained “Members of the media have focused on the President’s approval ratings as if they existed in a black box.” Yeah, they never acted that way when his ratings were in the 70% range (BTW, shouldn’t that line read “box of color”?) Reading Axelrod’s memo, you’d think if the election were tomorrow, President Bozo would sweep all 57 states. Wonder why ole Serpent Head is advising “PANIC!”, then?

The UK wants to know: “Can a garden hose to the stratosphere really keep the planet cool?” The experiment… is meant as a test of a proposed geoengineering technique for offsetting the warming effects of greenhouse gases. If the balloon and hose can handle the water’s weight and pressure, similar pipes rising 20 kilometers could pump tons of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere. Why don’t they just give Al Gore an enema, feed him a bunch of tacos and point his butt skyward? We would also point out that it may be a lot easier to cool the planet than it will be to warm it back up when they finally figure out this AGW stuff is all Gore-sh*t.

On Sept17, US Day of Rage has peaceable assemblies of people planned in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. “We call on the rest of the nation to join us and occupy Wall Street.” The whole nation will fit in downtown Manhattan? And what are their “demands”? Stuff like We demand satisfaction for the wrongs done to our nation and its people” and “One citizen. One dollar. One vote.” We’d like to throw in a demand for some non-gibberish if we might…

Hollywood’s enthusiasm for Obama wanes: “even devoted Democrats are approaching his re-election campaign with all the enthusiasm of a studio contractually obligated to finance a dubious sequel.” What’s da problem, dahlings? “Too much compromise,” say the country’s leading chiselers and corner-cutters. The irony is that under the type of control-freak totalitarian regime they seem to desire, history suggests they’d be the first ones sent to the gulags… or worse.

Ruh-roh: Obama WH clearing space under the bus for Chief of Staff Daley. “Is there a level of unhappiness with Bill around the White House? Yeah,” said a person close to Obama who spoke on condition of anonymity, like almost all other insiders interviewed for this story. Yup, it’s as predictable as a federally-subsidized green energy company going bankrupt: Bush, Arabs, earthquakes, tsunamis, The Tea Party and now Bill Daley. Obama would be a success if it weren’t for… well, almost everybody.

NYC nanny Mayor Bloomberg predicts riots in the streets if economy doesn’t create more jobs. Just call ’em the “Obamacare riots,” Nanny.

Jimmy Carter endorses Romney for GOP nomination. “I’m not taking a position, but I would be very pleased to see him win the Republican nomination,” Carter said on an interview on MSNBC set to air Thursday night. -Jimmy Carter, a man who has spent the last 30 years answering questions no one asked him. BTW Jimmy, in the future if you want to help a given GOP candidate, you should just say you find his or her positions on the issues reprehensible. Hey, we’re just tryin’ to help.

Dr. Thomas Sowell: To help economy, don’t just do something, STAND THERE!“There was a stock market crash in October 1929 and unemployment shot up to 9% — for one month. Then unemployment started drifting back down until it was 6.3% in June 1930, when the first major federal intervention took place. That was the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill…”Yeah, no Porkulus, no Solyndra, no TARP, no GM bailout, and no opportunity for the pols to grease the palms of favored constituencies.

In Not-so-Great-Britain, kids who use petty jibes are now being treated as thought criminals by education authorities.Over 30,000 British schoolchildren, some as young as three, have had their names registered on a government database and branded “racist” or “homophobic” for using playground insults, infractions that could impact their future careers. Last one out of the UK, turn out the lights. Well, never mind, they already seem to be in the dark there.