The Profound Arrogant Ignorance and Stupidity of Liberals in Charge

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The recent Twitter kerfuffle between Matt Drudge and the Obama/media/academic complex over the ObamaCare tax demonstrates in plain view and without question something many of us have known for years: while the organized left insist that they are the only ones smart enough to run the world, they remain astonishingly ignorant of how it works. They’re even ignorant of how the most fundamental parts of laws that they champion operate.

In case you missed it, Drudge tweeted, “Just paid the Obamacare penalty for not ‘getting covered’… I’M CALLING IT A LIBERTY TAX” shortly after filing his first quarterly installment for 2014 as a self-employed person. Apparently unaware of how self-employed people pay taxes – which is neither new nor a secret – liberals at the White House, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, and the National Journal all responded immediately by calling Drudge either a liar or ignorant, or both. After all, the liberal reasoning went, Drudge could not possibly have paid a cent toward his 2014 ObamaCare “penalty” because it’s not 2015 yet.

Yes, these wizards who would organize everything and everyone lack even a cursory familiarity with the most basic of tax realities.

What is it Bill Engvall says? Oh yeah: “Here’s your sign.” These liberals really didn’t need Engvall’s sign at all. They tweeted their own “I’m stupid” signs. Some wrote full-fledged low-information articles, including TPM’s Dylan Scott and the HuffPo’s Jeffrey Young.

In none of these attacks on Drudge did it occur to these media maestros how self-employed people are impacted by the tax ramifications of ObamaCare. If Drudge figures he’ll owe, say, ten million in federal income taxes for 2014 (it’s probably a lot more), he is required to send in a quarter of that now. He would also be compelled to include charming little IRS add-ons in his payment, like the ObamaCare penalty. Or is it a fee? A tax, maybe? Whatever John Roberts decided to call it, Drudge and other self-employed quarterly filers have indeed started paying it.

Read more from this story HERE.

‘Special Consideration’ for ‘Non-Christian’ Job Applicants?

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Photo Credit: Eve Edelheit/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMAPRESS.comA provision in a Michigan teachers’ union contract calling for “special consideration” to be given to “minority” job applicants including “those of the non-Christian faith” was removed by the Ferndale School District this week after the language was identified as a violation of the Federal Civil Rights Act.

Michigan Capitol Confidential reported on the union contract which, for teachers applying for promotions to vacant positions, read: “Special consideration shall be given to women and/or minorit[ies] defined as: Native American, Asian American, Latino, African American and those of the non-Christian faith.”

On both the state and federal level, the Civil Rights Act prohibits religious discrimination in employment. Consequently, it is illegal to ask job applicants about their religious affiliation—a law violated by the “non-Christian” language in the teachers’ union contract.

According to The Detroit News, the decades-old contract was revised after the discriminatory language was brought to the district’s attention. Ferndale Schools spokeswoman Shelley Rose acknowledged, “nobody was really aware of” the language, which “was there much to our embarrassment.”

“Please note that the district does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion or other related issues,” Rose affirmed.

This story was produced by The Foundry’s news team. Nothing here should be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Heritage Foundation.

This article originally appeared at Heritage.com and is re-published in full with the Heritage Foundation’s permission.

America in Decline

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Photo Credit: American Thinker When Barack Obama was running for president he promised, some say threatened, to fundamentally change America. The doubters now say he has fundamentally ruined America. Whichever way one views it, America is in serious decline.

For a president that promised to reduce the national debt, Obama has added a massive seven trillion dollars to that debt. Under his presidency, America has accumulated as much new debt as it did in its first 227 years.

He heads an Administration that produces food stamps, pries into people’s private lives, and sets government agencies against political opponents. Obama is following the guidebook of Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals,” and is putting Alinsky’s primer into practice from the White House. The results of his experiment are devastating.

Under Obama, prices and taxes rose while take home pay fell 7%. Government hand-outs increased dramatically as the national debt has exploded. Recent estimates put 50 million Americans on food stamps, and millions without healthcare.

Obama, the community organizer, preferred social justice over a robust market place, but, under his presidency, people are worse off today than they were back in 2009 when he promised them change. By the end of the first quarter of 2014 America had six million people not only unemployed but also not even looking for jobs, the vast majority under the age of 55. This implies they had given up all hope of finding work. More than forty million Americans lived below the poverty line.

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Thomas Frank: When Clinton, Obama Sold ‘Hope,’ They Sold Out Rank-and-File Democrats

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What’s the Matter With Kansas? author Thomas Frank believes the matter with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as presidential campaigners was that they spent too much time “selling tidy homilies” about “hope” and too little advocating ideas such as single-payer health care. Frank stated his case Sunday in his latest weekly column for the liberal online magazine Salon.

Frank suggests that all the non-ideological rhetoric of hope from Clinton and Obama presaged the sort of lefty-disappointing policies they’ve often yielded (e.g., “Clinton’s deregulations [and] Obama’s spying program”). In that regard, he comments, they’re typical of Democrats over the past three-plus decades:

…Maybe [‘hope’] and these two presidents’ fecklessness actually complement and explain one another. Maybe ‘hope’ is the ideal philosophical doctrine for a party determined to dump its old constituents and chart a brave new course in a marketized world. As a slogan, ‘hope’ is vague and ethereal…but perhaps that is what makes it the consummate brand identity for a party that so often triangulates away the concerns of its rank and file…

Moreover, declares Frank, “this particular platitude is not harmless…To describe politics in terms of ‘hope’…allows [Democrats] to sell us out over and over.”

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Limbaugh: Drudge Shines Light on Ignorant Media

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RUSH: I think the mainstream media is pig-ignorant of practically every discipline except party discipline. Now, here’s basically what happened. Matt Drudge is a self-employed small businessman.

As a result, Matt Drudge pays himself.

He does not have an employer. Therefore, he does not the get paychecks that contain all kinds of withholding for taxes and Medicare and FICA, Social Security, and whatever else. He has to pay all of his taxes separately and independently because they’re not deducted. As such, as a small businessman, Matt Drudge and millions of others just like him — including your harmless, lovable little fuzzball host — pay our taxes every quarter.

We have to pay what are called quarterly estimates. This is what Matt Drudge does, and it can get a little complicated. April 15th, the first payment is due. June the 15th, the second payment is due. September 15th, the third payment is due. And on January 15th of the next year, the fourth and final payment is due. Therefore, the first payment for the 2015 income tax year, Matt Drudge has to pay it on April the 15th, as does everybody else who files quarterly estimates.

This simple fact is something that the smartest (by reputation) mainstream media reporters simply cannot understand and cannot get their arms around. Matt Drudge sent out a tweet on Friday in which he said that his first quarterly estimate coming up in April he will be paying his Obamacare penalty for not having insurance. In his tweet, he called it “a liberty tax,” and the media jumped all over him!

They called him a liar. They told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. Mainstream media reporters! The White House jumped all over Drudge with their agents on Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the mainstream media. They said that Drudge was lying to embarrass Obama, that Drudge didn’t know what he was talking about, that Drudge was stupid and that you don’t have to pay your Obamacare penalty until 2015 because it’s been delayed for a year.

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Sinkhole of Bureaucracy

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Photo Credit: Todd Lindeman and David FahrentholdThe trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag.

Behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file cabinets and people in business casual. About 230 feet below the surface, there is easy-listening music playing at somebody’s desk.

This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does.

Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.

But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.

Read more from this story HERE.

Religion Is Your Business

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Photo Credit: National Review Religious freedom used to mean that religion was none of the government’s business. Now it is being changed to mean that religion is none of your business.

Pundits such as law professor Adam Winkler insist that the Supreme Court should rule against the Hahn and Green families and their businesses in next week’s Obamacare cases. Their theory is that if you engage in business, religion is not “essential” to your work. Instead, you can pursue only “profit.”

Says who? Not American law or any authority that Winkler or the government can cite. Winkler simply asserts that religion and business don’t belong together; therefore, family businesses have no right to pursue religion. Winkler even ignores Hobby Lobby’s co-plaintiff in this case, Mardel, a Christian-bookstore business.

Every relevant legal authority contradicts Winkler’s view that religion can have no place in business. The laws of all 50 states and the District of Columbia explicitly allow businesses to pursue all lawful purposes. Religion is still lawful in America, however much some may lament it.

No Supreme Court case says that when a family engages in business, it cannot also pursue its religious beliefs. Instead, whenever the high court gets close to this question, it repeatedly rules that groups such as Jewish merchants and Amish farmers exercise religion while simultaneously pursuing profit, and that they can therefore bring religious-freedom claims. This doesn’t mean that the businesses always win their claims, but it does mean that religion can be exercised in business.

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Is Obama Too Busy to be President?

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerIs Barack Obama simply too busy to be Chief Executive of the United States? Apparently. One of the primary functions of the president is to keep the nation safe, to preserve it from its enemies. To do that effectively, one would actually have to maintain something of a consistent level of attention to the moving pieces that directly influence how future events will unfold.

None other than the truly sycophantic thinks for a second that President Obama cares a whit for anything that does not involve fundamentally altering the social composition of this country. Or golf. During the five-plus years that we have been without a real president, meaning one who actually was aware of all aspects of the position and tried, even just a little, to perform them, everything that was predicted to occur during his tenure has materialized. We are weaker, less respected, less feared, less liked and, well, just less. No surprise there, really. Conservatives had this guy figured out early in the first campaign, and they were spot on. No record, no experience, no consistency, no integrity, no background, no evidence of morals, no normal friends or associates, and no supporters who cared more about their country than about their silly self-congratulation over electing the first black man who seemed just like them: unserious.

If we assume that the president is even half as smart as we’ve been told he is, which would still make him the smartest person ever to live, you’d think he would have picked up some skills along the way, or gained some firsthand experience that might come in handy. You know, maybe how to read the tea leaves to foresee the bad things that could happen if you take a certain action, or what might happen if you decide to take no action at all when action is necessary. Perhaps you’d think that someone that smart would be open to what more informed people in fields like intelligence and foreign relations have to say, and would use his smarts to discern which advice seemed most sage to plot his course, and ours. He could still claim credit for the successful final decision, after all, which is really all that matters.

But you’d be wrong. In every single crisis that has arisen since the beginning of Obama’s reign of error, he has had something else to do, something that was so much more important than the grenade going off behind him that he just could not find the time to address the crisis of the moment. The celebrity and the trappings of the position have always been vastly more important to this man than the responsibilities, so much so that when faced with the choice of focusing on something hard requiring judgment and decisiveness, and giving in to something easy and self-indulgent, he always goes with easy and self-indulgent.

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Why Does Air Force Academy Encourage Atheism, Prosecute Christianity?

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Photo Credit: Fox News There appears to be a double-standard at the Air Force Academy.

The Academy is defending its promotion of an atheist event just a week after a Christian cadet was pressured into removing a Bible verse from his personal white board because it allegedly offended non-Christian cadets.

“Ask An Atheist Day” was sponsored by The Freethinkers Club, an Academy approved cadet club. The event was advertised all week on Academy bulletin screens and an official email sent to the Cadet Wing. An invitation was also issued by a cadet to the entire Cadet Wing assembly on Tuesday.

As I reported last week, a cadet “voluntarily” removed a Bible verse he had written on a white board hanging outside his dorm room. “I have been crucified with Christ therefore I no longer live, but Christ lives in me,” the verse from Galatians 2:20 read.

That verse led to a formal complaint from Mikey Weinstein, of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Exactly two hours and nine minutes after the complaint was filed, the Bible verse was erased.

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Obama’s Paper-Tiger Presidency

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Photo Credit: National Review Most Americans who are dissatisfied with Barack Obama’s leadership are thinking about the poor economy and the misbegotten health-care law. That disillusionment is justified — if tardy. But the foreign-policy failures of this administration are likely to be far more consequential, lasting, and possibly catastrophic.

What we are seeing is the collapse of American influence in the world.

Permitting people like Obama, Clinton, Hagel, and Kerry to deal with the brutal realities of world politics is like putting Richard Simmons into the ring with Muhammad Ali.

On Sunday, reflecting an innocence that really ought to be prosecutable, John Kerry announced that the U.S. would impose sanctions on Russia if it annexes Crimea and continues to threaten the rest of Ukraine. But, he hastened to add: “We hope President Putin will recognize that none of what we’re saying is meant as a threat, it’s not meant in a personal way.”

Frankly, credible threats might restrain Putin, but it’s way too late for that. By threatening Syria on the use of chemical weapons and then collapsing like a cheap tent when Bashar Assad called Obama’s bluff, the president turned himself into a paper tiger. John Kerry’s blatant groveling to Putin — his obvious fear of offending the little Moscow thug — is a new standard of cravenness.

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