It’s Wednesday, July 11th, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!

First up on the mid-week edition, Marc Thiessen describes….

Obama’s tax triple axel

Mitt Romney is under fire for flip-flopping when he declared that the individual mandate is a tax, after a campaign adviser said it was not. In a front-page story, The New York Times wrote that Romney’s statement “prompted renewed criticism that he was willing to adjust his views for political expediency.” Bill Burton of the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA opined on what he called “Romney’s ideological gymnastics.”

With all respect, if anyone has “adjusted his views for political expediency” or engaged in “ideological gymnastics” in the debate over the individual mandate, it is Barack Obama.

When Congress was considering Obamacare, the president steadfastly denied that the penalty for not owning health insurance was a tax. As he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos at the time, “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance, is absolutely not a tax increase … My critics say everything is a tax increase … I absolutely reject that notion.”

But when it came time to defend Obamacare in court, the president suddenly reversed course and authorized his lawyers to argue that the individual mandate is, in fact, a tax. In the lower courts, Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal declared that the provision “appears in the Internal Revenue Code and operates as a tax. It is projected to raise billions of dollars in revenue each year … [The] provision is a tax in both administration and effect.” (emphasis added).

Then before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli declared in his brief that the “provision will plainly be ‘productive of some revenue’ and thus satisfies a key attribute of taxation.” The mandate, he added, “is valid not only as a tax in its own right, but also as an adjunct to the income tax” (emphasis added).

When Chief Justice John Roberts asked Verrilli during oral arguments if Congress “thought of it as a tax, if they defended it under the tax power, why didn’t they say it was a tax?” the solicitor general replied, “They might have thought, your Honor, that calling it as they did would make it more effective in its objective, but it is in the Internal Revenue Code, it is collected by the IRS on April 15th.”

Translation: If Obama and congressional Democrats had called it a tax, it would not have passed.

Now, Obama is changing positions once again — declaring it is a penalty, not a tax. Which begs the question: If it isn’t a tax, as he now claims, why did he have his lawyers tell the Supreme Court it was? Apparently, Obama thought calling it a tax “would be more effective in its objective” — getting the court to declare the individual mandate constitutional.

The plain fact is Obama lied; the only question is whether it was to the American people or the Supreme Court. This much is certain: If Obama had not declared the mandate a tax in his arguments before the high court, the justices would have declared it unconstitutional — and probably would have struck down Obamacare in its entirety. (A purported fact which is far from certain; only a idiot or a coward could have seen Obamascare as anything but unconstitutional.  We leave it to you to determine which option best suits John Roberts.)

So to review: When the individual mandate was before the Congress, Obama argued it was not a tax. Then when it was before the Supreme Court, he argued that it was a tax. And now that the issue is before the American people, he is once again arguing that it is not a tax.

That’s not a flip-flop — it’s a triple-axel.

And that is not the full extent of Obama’s “ideological gymnastics” on the individual mandate. During the 2008 Democratic primary, Obama vigorously opposed the mandate — citing none other than the example of Romneycare in Massachusetts, which he now upholds as a model. In a CNN debate, Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for advocating a mandate, declaring:

John Roberts must have missed this clip!

He even released an ad which declared: “Hillary Clinton’s attacking, but what’s she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t.”

So Obama was for the individual mandate before he was against it. He declared it wasn’t a tax, then it was, then it wasn’t again. He made one argument in the Supreme Court, and now makes the opposite argument in the court of public opinion.

Remind me again why we are debating whether Mitt Romney changed positions?

None of this absolves Romney, who is rightly being criticized for his failure to immediately seize on the Supreme Court’s ruling that the individual mandate is a tax and go after the president for breaking his pledge not to raise middle class taxes. This shows that Romney’s first instinct is to defend Romneycare rather than go after Obamacare. But Obama and his supporters should be careful attacking Romney for flip-flopping on the issue. Compared to the president, Romney has been a paragon of consistency — and that is saying something.

Unfortunately for the GOP, none of what it says is good, either for Romney or his chances of winning back the White House.

In a related item from the WSJ, Bret Stephens describes what, absent an abrupt change in course, you can expect to see coming to a town, city, county, state and country near you….and that right soon:

The Entitlement State—and Zombies

How to become a country, or a continent, of democratic serfs.

When is an economic crisis more than just an economic crisis? When is it also a political crisis? And when is it something else altogether: social, demographic, institutional, moral, intellectual—in short, civilizational?

The euro zone’s troubles shouldn’t be difficult to understand: Pair overspending governments with over-regulated economies and sooner or later the Continent was bound to lose the confidence of the markets.

Normally, such a crisis could be resolved by slashing corporate and marginal tax rates and red tape in order to encourage investment, enterprise and risk-taking. Instead, European policy makers have pursued every conceivable fix, from serial bailouts to a banking union, in order to circumvent having to address the core problems. As a result, the crisis continues to worsen: In Spain, for instance, bank-deposit flight has only gathered pace since last month’s $125 billion bank bailout.

So Europe’s predicament is more than just economic. What about the politics? Why can’t Europe’s leaders just tackle the problems the way Margaret Thatcher did in the 1980s, under the clarifying banner, “There is no alternative”? It’s not as if voters are giving politicians a pass, having thrown out incumbents from Athens to Dublin. Nor is it that the “wrong” parties are in power: The French just installed a Socialist in the Élysée, but Spain and Greece have elected conservatives and Italy’s prime minister is a nonpartisan technocrat.

Yet François Hollande, Mariano Rajoy, Antonis Samaras and Mario Monti are guaranteed failures, just like the men they replaced. This partly reflects the men themselves.

But it mainly reflects the ideological assumptions they share, the pan-European institutions in which they operate and the electorates they represent—that is, the totality of contemporary European civilization. European leaders will not cure what ails their economies because the people who voted them into office are addicted to what ails those economies.

In other words, they are addicted to entitlements. These aren’t only the entitlements as most Americans understand them, from Social Security to food stamps and corporate welfare. It’s also “free” medical care, “free” university education, 35-hour work weeks, guaranteed vacations, de facto job tenure. Try to modify any of this, as various European leaders have discovered in recent years, and you’ll have mass demonstrations, crippling strikes and old-fashioned rioting.

With the exception of Mrs. Thatcher during the coal miners’ strike of 1984-85, no modern European leader has been able to stand up to the pressure. That’s a testament to the Iron Lady’s political guts, and to the gutlessness of would-be reformers like Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi.

Mainly, however, it’s a testament to the zombifying power of entitlements. It’s sometimes said that modern Europeans aren’t willing to fight for anything anymore. But that’s not true: Every time an entitlement is even slightly at risk—whether it’s raising the retirement age to 62 from 60 in France or tinkering with the legal architecture that guarantees jobs for life in Italy—Europeans go right to the barricades.

That’s not just because they are defending a financial benefit. They are also defending a way of being and a state of mind: a conviction that it’s up to somebody else to provide for their well-being; a terror of what might happen should that somebody else fail to provide.

So the typical European looks to government to afford his living, and the typical European government looks to the EU, or the IMF, or the ECB, or Berlin to afford theirs. Even now, as the accumulation of national bankruptcies threatens collective bankruptcy, the entire focus of European policy making rests on how to pool diminished resources in a fiscal union rather than attempt to restore economic vigor. It’s like the film “I Am Legend,” only this time the hordes of the undead speak a Romance language, and the Will Smith character is played by Angela Merkel.

Observing this situation, Americans might suppose that we are still a long way from Europe. But consider this: As of the first quarter of 2010, 48.5% of Americans lived in a household that received some form of government assistance. That’s up from 44.4% when the financial crisis began in 2008, and up from around 30% just 30 years ago. In the meantime, 49.5% of Americans paid no federal income tax as of 2009, up from 34.1% when George W.Bush took office.

Once ObamaCare kicks in, the percentage of takers will move north of 50% (if it hasn’t already), and we will become a nation of modern zombies—or, if you prefer, democratic serfs. Don’t console yourself with the hope that things can be turned around with a different president, or once the failures of the entitlement state become manifest. Incentives matter, but not as much as habits do. And a habit of dependency, as any addict knows, will sooner drive a man to degradation than to reform.

Thomas Jefferson had it right: “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”  Any question whatsoever November’s our last chance?!?

Next up, it’s Your Tax Dollars at Work, courtesy of a man and an organization useful as a….

Kofi Touts Tehran

The U.N. envoy to Syria finds another dictator he can do business with.

When Kofi Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, the then-Secretary General was lauded by the Norwegian Committee for emphasizing his organization’s “obligations with regards to human rights.” This was not intended ironically.

Mr. Annan won the prize having already praised Saddam Hussein, in 1998, as a man of “courage, wisdom, flexibility,” with whom he could “do business.” Now he’s in Tehran finding new despots to praise in his role as the U.N.’s Special Envoy on Syria. “I think Iran can play a positive role” in ending the crisis in Syria, Mr. Annan told reporters, standing alongside the Iranian foreign minister. “So let’s work together to bring peace and stability to Syria.”

Mazal tov, Kofi. Meanwhile, the role Iran is currently playing in Syria involves sending snipers and tactical advisers from the terrorist Quds Force to assist Bashar Assad in murdering opponents of his regime. Other assistance is believed to include cash transfers to pay Assad’s army, unarmed drones to monitor protestors from the air, electronic monitoring tools to track the opposition online, as well as rifles, ammunition and other military equipment.

No, seriously….the American taxpayer actually foots the bill for my bullsh*t!

We guess it’s possible that behind closed doors Mr. Annan is demanding that his Iranian hosts start behaving differently. Somehow we doubt it. Before his arrival in Tehran, Mr. Annan had paid a visit to Damascus, where he touted a “step-by-step” peace proposal put forward by Assad to “end the violence.”

So far, “step-by-step” in Syria has meant city by city, town by town, massacre by massacre. So it will continue while the men Mr. Annan likes to do business with remain in power.

We live for the day when the scoundrels and charlatans who’ve perpetrated this scam upon the world will be called to account.  If not in this life, than certainly in the next.

Since we’re on the subject of scoundrels and charlatans, we turn now to Tales From the Darkside, where the WSJ informs us the Department of Injustice’s version of race-baiter Al Sharpton is at it again:

Holder’s Jim Crow Politics

The AG says Voter ID laws are ‘poll taxes.’

Some of our liberal friends were a tad upset when we wrote last month that Attorney General Eric Holder was using the voter ID issue to stir up racial incitement. But maybe they should complain to Mr. Holder, who can’t seem to liberate himself from a Jim Crow-era political mindset.

Speaking to the NAACP in Houston on Tuesday, Mr. Holder assailed the Texas law that requires voters to show some identification, using terms redolent of Deep South racism before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them—and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them,” he said. “We call those poll taxes.”

The nation’s first black Attorney General knows exactly what he is doing by citing the fee that some Southern states used after Reconstruction to disenfranchise blacks. Poll taxes were made illegal by the 24th Amendment in 1964. Yet faced with the prospect of a close re-election battle, and fading support from independents, Team Obama is trying to rekindle its 2008 coalition by using the race card to drive up black voter turnout. Texas and Florida, both with GOP Governors, are the election-year foil.

Mr. Holder knows his charge is buncombe. The Texas law stipulates that voters can use several kinds of ID to vote, including a driver’s license, passport, a U.S. military ID and (this being Texas) a handgun permit. As for the “poll tax” canard, the law says the Texas Department of Public Safety will issue a free Election Identification Card if requested.

The AG knows all this, or should know it, because it is contained in a January 12 letter from the Texas Director of Elections to the Justice Department. He also knows, or should know before he throws around racially incendiary language, that the poll tax charge was raised and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court when it upheld a similar Indiana voter ID law in 2009. The charge was also rejected by a lower federal court in Georgia.

Mr. Holder’s wallowing in a Jim Crow metaphor to score political points is a discredit to his department, to the rule of law, and to the nonracist country that 45 years after the Voting Rights Act made him its chief law enforcement officer.

At the risk of seeming repetitive all over again, let’s review the everyday activities requiring the possession of a photo-ID by every American, regardless of color:

The way we see it, absent the existence of photo-ID’s in the ‘Hood, Colt-45, Cadillac and ACE Cash Express would all be out of business.  Whether all the ID’s are genuine is another story.

In a related item, here’s today’s installment of the “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” segment, courtesy today of Bill Meisen and The Weekly Standard:

DNC Chief Urges Romney to Release Tax Returns, but Won’t Release Her Own

The Democratic National Committee chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is in Boston today to hold an event to urge Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to release his tax returns. “Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz will join Massachusetts Democratic Party Chair John Walsh to discuss former Governor Mitt Romney’s history of fighting transparency amid new reports that the Republican presidential candidate has secret bank accounts in foreign tax havens,” a Democratic National Committee press release states.

The goal for Wasserman Schultz is clear: To get Romney to release tax returns and other financial documents. But the irony of today’s event is rich: Debbie Wasserman Schultz has refused–and continues to refuse–to release her own tax returns. 

In April, around Tax Day, Wasserman Schultz’s Republican congressional opponent, Karen Harrington of Florida, requested the DNC chair release her tax returns. “This week millions of taxpaying Americans will fulfill their requirement of filing their tax returns by paying any and all taxes due to the federal government,” Harrington’s campaign said in a statement. “Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been asking Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to release his 2011 tax return even after Governor Romney released his 2010 tax return.”

The statement continued:

“Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s request of Governor Romney to release his tax returns screams of hypocrisy, because to the best of our knowledge, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz has never released a single tax return of her own. As a member of Congress, she is required to release a yearly ‘financial disclosure,’ this yearly disclosure is not a tax return.

“While asking for Governor Romney to release his past tax returns, and In keeping with the spirit of President Obama’s call for ‘full transparency,’ we ask Congressman Wasserman Schultz to release her own tax returns.”

The hypocrisy here is clear: Wasserman Schultz still has not released her own tax returns, but she continues to campaign for Mitt Romney to release his.

Along with The Obamao’s college transcripts.  Sure DWS is hypocritical; after all, hypocrisy is synonymous with modern Liberalism.  But we fault Romney for not releasing his tax returns in the first place; like….what?  His campaign couldn’t see this issue coming?!?  More and more, Romney’s campaign look less like the juggernaut that nuked Newt and more and more like a revival of Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour.

They seem to have taken a cue from the 2001 Ravens, believing the best offense is a good defense, a strategy which may work in the NFL, but is over-matched by a team which not only cheats, but has the referees on their side.

The MSM paints Romney as a rich elitist out of touch with Middle America; so while a wide swath of the U.S. suffers without power in a searing heat wave, Mitt vacations in New Hampshire, making certain to provide plenty of photo-ops….

….to prove their point.  With the election less than four months away, wouldn’t Mitt’s time have been better spent on the ground in battleground state like Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia, sweating it out while commiserating with the unwashed masses?  Come November 7, one way or the other, the Romney family can enjoy all the vacations they want; you know….like the Obamas!

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, we’ll call it a day with this oldie but goodie from Carl Polizzi:

As Trinity so eloquently put it….

Magoo