George Rebane
[This is the submitted form of my regular Union column that was scheduled to appear the 11aug12 print and online editions of the newspaper. Due to some administrivia at The Union, the column was published in print and online in their 18aug12 editions. The addendum was appended on 10 August 2012.]
To remind us again what an upstanding institution government is, we sample a few from the daily tsunami of lies coming from our elected honorables. You’ll quickly understand why these happenings weren’t prominently reported in the nation’s lamestream media, being left to secondary outlets like Fox, PJMedia, and various blogs and legislator newsletters.
Starting close to home, Sacramento, along with rogue agencies like CARB (California Air Resources Board), is upping the pace of driving our businesses either to other states or into the mud. A prime example of one recently announced departure is XCOR Aerospace now relocating to Midland, Texas due to state taxes and senseless regulatory burdens. Apparently the last straw was Cal EPA marching into their offices to mandate extensive paperwork required to track their use of kerosene. XCOR is developing space systems for commercial orbital operations.
Governor Perry is personally welcoming the company to his state as part of Texas’ overall program to attract fleeing California companies. Besides a long list of other benefits of doing business in Texas, all XCOR employees will receive an automatic 10.25% pay raise – do the math.
But driving out companies is just one ongoing travesty in California’s insane business environment. Assemblyman Dan Logue reports that midnight legislative operations continue with very little or no voter awareness. By 2020 CARB’s implementation of AB32’s carbon cap and tax provision will cost California $60B annually. It will be administered by a new state owned company that will be awarded the contract without need to bid competitively. This sleaze was quietly hidden in SB1018, one of 30 budget related bills rushed through without review in less than 48 hours.
According to Logue “the exemption will allow CARB to use a private third-party corporation to conduct its cap-and-trade auction without having to comply with state laws, called the Bagley-Keene Act, that require state agencies to keep meetings and records open to the public. This is a gross violation of the public's right to know about state agency actions that affect them.”
Meanwhile at the federal level, the Brookings Institution has dropped a mainstream-muffled bomb on the Big Progressive Lie about worker wages and financial mobility. Team Obama’s cornucopia of misinformation has always included the liberal shibboleth about poor and middle class income having declined in recent decades.
Well, Fox unveiled that Brookings’ senior fellow Scott Winship has analyzed CBO published data which shows since 1979 the bottom fifth earners’ real income has increased over 40%, and the middle fifth’s income went up 33%. All quintiles advanced over this period. Also income mobility is alive and well – for example, over 60% in the lowest fifth migrate to one of the higher quintiles.
And there’s more to debunk the class warfare propaganda from the left. It turns out that while people in the bottom two fifths pay almost no federal income taxes, the middle fifth pays 9.4% and the top fifth pays 67.9%, or more than two thirds of all federal income taxes. The average tax rate for the vilified top “one percent” is 28.9%, and for the bottom fifth it is 1%. And according to our Class Warfare Warrior-in-Chief all this is still unfair.
Finally, Team Obama’s latest campaign low is the enlistment of one of Nevada’s political prostitutes, currently also Senate Majority Leader, to charge that candidate Romney paid no taxes for ten years. Harry Reed will reveal neither the source of his information, nor his compensation for entering this unfounded allegation into the Congressional Record from the floor of the Senate.
And when you read this, more obaminations will be in the news, like Romney causing the cancer death of the wife of an employee who worked for a company owned by Bain Capital. The White House continues to embrace this claim made nationally by a leftwing PAC. When your record stinks, the only alternative is character assassination of your opponent.
It is now being widely suggested that Governor Romney and President Obama make a trade. Romney will release ten years of tax filings if Obama will let Americans see the sealed college records of his trail through Occidental, then Columbia, and finally to Harvard. Neither the Wall Street Journal nor prominent classmate Wayne Allyn Root have been able to find very much about Barack Obama at Columbia. Should prove interesting, but don’t hold your breath.
George Rebane is an entrepreneur and a retired systems scientist in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on KVMR and Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).
[Addendum] For the record, this column is submitted to The Union on the Thursday before its publication on the following Saturday. A theme, detected early and reported assiduously in these pages, is that the Obama administration, starting with its leader, has been the most untruthful and prevaricating activity of our federal government in recent memory. (And mine goes back quite a bit.) This lying cohort has now taken its modus operandi into the 2012 presidential campaign, a strong point made in the above column.
My understanding and interpretation of President Obama’s ideology and character is often taken by a klatch of liberal readers as somehow being unique and shared by no one in the more reasonable streams of public discourse. Citing published evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, their accusations have remained unchanged – another prominent aspect of the liberal mind.
In this context I was heartened to see the leading editorial in the 10aug12 WSJ that made clear my stance on Barack Obama and his minions has, perhaps, been overly reserved. From that piece we read that “the challenge is finding anything his campaign says is true.” The editorial begins with –
President Obama spent his formative years in academia, so he's no doubt familiar with postmodernism, the literary theory that rejects objective reality and insists instead that everything is a matter of interpretation and relative "truth." At any rate he's running the first postmodern Presidential campaign, now organized almost exclusively around allegations about his opponent that bear no relation to the observable universe.
After an analysis of the now notorious Obama campaign ads and recorded statements of lying staffers, this telling point is worth pondering –
The point is that more than any President we can recall, Mr. Obama isn't trying to persuade voters that he deserves to stay in office because of his philosophy, record or positive vision for the country. Rather, his case is that he deserves re-election because Mr. Romney is worse, and he is so very much worse because of things that were invented in the West Wing but are detached from reality. … The entire theory of the Obama campaign seems to be that the more outrageous the claim the better, because the more you repeat it the more the media will talk about it, and the lie will achieve a kind legendary truth.
Both Lenin and Stalin demonstrated, and so taught two generations of communist tyrants, that even the most egregious of lies metamorphose into ‘truth’ and ‘accepted wisdom’ when streamed continuously into weak and weakened minds.
[12aug12 update] The Long Lie just keeps getting longer and longer. This week's big whopper is Team Obama and the Dems trumpeting that Romney's choice of running mate Ryan now guarantees that they "will end Medicare as we know it". That is exactly the Alinsky180 tactic touted by Socialist Saul himself in his Rules for Radicals. It is Obamacare that ends Medicare as we know it, and that is now law in black and white. Post-modernism is a terrible side effect of collectivist thought. More here.
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