Is Cheney out of Prison Yet?

While waiting for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to somehow bring down President Bush, the MSM has been speculating on the other ways they can accomplish Job 1.

So far the investigation of a leak of a non-covert CIA operative's name (which was readily available from IRS sources and society magazines) has not accomplished the "i" word. (impeach Bush) Even conservative pundit, Cal Thomas, has called for his head.

Exhulting over American death #2,000 in Iraq, they have failed to note the passage of the Iraqi constitution, the rebuiilding of Iraq's infrastructure (except to complain that we are rebuilding it when New Orleans is down the drain), or the general revulsion many Arabs are now displaying toward the "insurgents" who blow up children and soft targets.

Let's trot out critics of the "regime" like the former chief of staff for Colin Powell who complains about the President and Vice President "hijacking foreign policy". Wonder who he thinks is supposed to set foreign policy if not the elected leaders of the country? The unelected career (mostly left wing) staffers within the State Department.

Where is Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?

Taxes for 2003

According to the IRS, here's how taxes were paid in 2003:

What	Tax Returns		Adjusted Gross Income		Taxes Paid
How	Number	% of Total	Million $	%of Total	Million $	%of Total
1	64,304,893	50.00%	879,735	13.99%	25,912	3.46%
2	96,457,340	75.00%	2,209,359	35.14%	120,564	16.12%
3	115,748,807	90.00%	3,624,117	57.64%	255,486	34.16%
4	122,179,297	95.00%	4,326,911	68.82%	341,341	45.64%
5	127,323,688	99.00%	5,233,019	83.23%	491,597	65.73%
Total	128,609,786	100.00%	6,287,586	100.00%	747,932	100.00%

Notice that the top 1% paid 256,335 million dollars taxes on 1,054,567 million dollars of income, or 24% of their income, about three times as much as any other bracket. Also note that the part of the total tax paid by the rich was 34.27%. The top 5% paid 54.36% of the total tax bill. So 95% of all tax payers combined paid less in taxes than the top 5%. Who says the rich get all the tax breaks?

Who are You and why are you blogging

Once upon a time, there was a quaint little satire site, called Scrappleface.  As of today, that site has had this many visitors since 21 Sep 2002.  I found that site in the fall of 2004, and began posting there as "Rick".  My first post was full of irony and I was immediately attacked by Mack and Hankmeister.  Camojack and Hawkeye® got it and defended me.  After a while posting as Rick, I noticed others using that name (not surprising - common name) and began posting as Pat'sRick©.  That persona was my true, conservative self.  Since Scrappleface was a humor site, I thought it would be fun to have another identity to post outrageous liberal talking points referenced to original source documents that refuted them.  Someone had posted a few times as "A Random Liberal", so I adopted "Another Random Liberal." 

 

Some of the Scrapplers thought I was actually Liberal Larry, but I did not even know who he was until the Tsunami when I followed a link to his site.  Some Scrapplers attacked Another Random Liberal without following the links.  Others caught on and suggested I was really a conservative in disguise.

 

To avoid confusing people, I created two other personae and allowed them to talk in my posts (Dave and Blarney).

 

Well, one day I decided to visit camojack's site and I wanted to leave him a message that I had been there.  Unfortunately, only registered bloggers could leave a message.  So I created Pat'sRick© Says.  After a while, I thought I might as well post some things.  Then I discovered that Chris Muir allowed folks to reference his political cartoons and I added that to the site.  So here we are.

What is the Important News Today?

16,000+ deaths in this quagmire

 

No proof for Delay Charges

 

Iraqi constitutional Vote.

 

Iraqi "election fraud".

 

Rush Limbaugh opinion piece.

 

Iraqi deaths

 

You pick.   Talk amongst yourselves.

Now That's Funny...

I don't care who you are.

The Race Card

You have no doubt heard about the remarks made by Bill Bennett that aborting black babies would lower the crime rate. You might have thought that Bennett was pro-life before this. However, the so-callled Main Stream media has made it clear that he is a racist Republican (is that redundant?). If you have not yet read the actual remarks, they can be found here.

Larry Elder examines some of the criticism and makes this interesting point:

How does one artfully say that out of a small percentage of America's population -- 13 percent -- blacks account for 37.2 percent of all those arrested for violent crimes, 54.4 percent of all robbery arrestees, and are the known offenders in 51.3 percent of all murders? The murder rate in the city of New Orleans stands at over 7.5 times the national average, and authorities convict only one in four arrested for homicide.

Read the whole article.

I said all that to say this: The TV news coverage of Katrina focused almost exclusively on the poor blacks from New Orleans. Forget the rich black folks and rich or poor white folks who lost all their property in neighboring Mississippi or in Alabama or Florida from the four previous hurricanes. Forget also the welfare mentality that led to the evacuation failure, just blame Bush for his failure to rescue the New Orleans residents.

An eMail circulated last week with the title "Things I learned from watching TV" that skewered the media coverage and some of the absurd events in New Orleans - like people who were "acting out of hunger" stealing large-screen plasma TVs, complaining that the government-provided credit cards were not enough, etc. My son sent it to me and I apparently forwarded it on to others. One of the recipients - a brother in Christ - complained that it was offensive. I had to admit that, if you forgot about the media coverage and focused only on the points in the eMail, you could conclude that the message was attacking black people instead of the New Orleans insanity. I apologized, sincerely. Apparently Bill Bennett is not the only one who made a mistake last week.

Good Speech - er - Article

I received an eMail from a friend with the text of a speech supposedly made by The Chief of Naval Operations (currently Admiral Michael G. Mullen). The heading was simply

In case you haven't seen this yet...it's really good...
CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS SPEECH

I thought it was an excellent speech, but I wanted to cite the date, time and location, so I contacted the Navy for the details. They replied that this was certainly NOT made by Admiral Mullen. Turns out it was not a speech at all. It was an article written by a retired Navy Chief (Petty Officer, that is). Thanks to LT Bill Couch, USN, for directing me to the source. Here are the author's* comments on the eMail confusion.

"Someone had either liked (or disliked) my words enough to copy them into an email, and forward it one or more friends. Perhaps the original forwarder was dazzled by my sterling wit and brilliant logic, and simply could not wait to share them with his or her friends. Or, maybe he or she found my writing disjointed enough or offensive enough to hold up as an object of ridicule. I cannot say, although I will admit to having a personal favorite among those alternatives.

Somewhere along the line, it picked up the headline "Navy Chief Lets Loose a Broadside." So far, so good. I am a retired Navy Chief, and you could certainly argue that I was loosing a broadside. If you haven't read it, "The Wrong Army" is a fairly opinionated piece. (Okay, it's a very opinionated piece.) So that header was appropriate, even if I hadn't chosen it myself.

If the shape shifting had ended there, nothing else would have happened, apart from a lot of people circulating an email from an old Navy Chief. But, after a few hundred bounces, the header of the email became "Navy Chief of Operations Lets Loose a Broadside." Now we were starting to get into the danger zone. Someone could look at that header, and easily conclude that the words that followed were straight from the mouth of the CNO. Not good. But the header of the email wasn't through changing yet. A few hundred bounces later, it had acquired another headline: "Speech by the Chief of Naval Operations." By this time, all mention of retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Jeff Edwards had vanished from the email. It was squarely marked as the work of the Chief of Naval Operations.

Be sure to follow the links above. I am sure you will enjoy reading the original article and the author's commentary.

*
Jeff Edwards is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer, and an Anti-Submarine Warfare Specialist.