Still, it wasn’t a bad weekend weather-wise. However the lake is still iced over though we are seeing some open water here and there.
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From the “Just When I thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this howler from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).
In true tax-and-tax-and-tax-and-spend fashion, Wyden has put forth the idea to tax unrealized capital gains on an annual basis, meaning rather than taxing capital gains when finally paid out, he would have the government tax them every year whether or not they are paid out. In other words, you wouldn’t have to sell off your stocks in order for the government to tax your theoretical capital gains, and they would do it every year. That the idea is unworkable, unwieldy, and would be expensive as hell to implement and maintain hasn’t crossed the Senator’s mind. Oor if it has he really doesn’t care because it’s not about collecting more revenue, but about punishing investors. (That investors include things like pension funds and retirement accounts seems to have escaped the Senator’s notice.)
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Another item from the “Just When I thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department is AOC’s unthinking slam against Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s (R-TX) tweet in regards to Ilhan Omar’s diminishment of the actions of Muslim terrorists on 9-11. Then again, most of what AOC does is unthinking, driven by feels and her Marxist indoctrination. Is it any wonder she’s known as Occasional Cortex?
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Paul Craig Roberts opines that America is no longer a nation.
The America in which I grew up and lived my early adult life was a nation. Over the course of my life I have watched my country turn into a Tower of Babel. Homogeneity and shared values permitted us to understand one another. This doesn’t mean that there was uniformity or that things were perfect. A Baptist wasn’t a Catholic. A WASP was not a black laborer. A female was not a male. Blacks and poor whites had a hard time becoming middle class, but it could be done. It was possible for middle class people to become “well off,” but difficult to become rich. Immigration was controlled, and the reduction of inflows had helped the Irish and Italians to integrate into society.As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.
Police were helpful and didn’t burst into homes with guns blazing or rough you up on traffic stops. On important issues, compromises could be reached and reforms implemented. English was the language. If you telephoned a service provider, utility, or bank, you quickly were connected to a real person capable of handling every aspect of whatever you were calling about. Today you wait through the Spanish language option for the robo-voice listing the options that might have something to do with the reason for your call. The companies save money and make profits by imposing their service costs on customers.
Technology seems to have worsened the functionality of society. Diversity and multiculturalism definitely have. It used to be that taking or giving offense was something that good manners prevented. Today members of those groups that are entitled to be offended are ready to take offense at any excuse. Today it is easy for a white person and a male to give offense without intending or even knowing that what he did or said was offensive.
(H/T Knuckledraggin’ My Life Away)
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I thought the possibility that President Trump would consider having illegal immigrants dropped off in sanctuary cities would be poetic justice. (It’s so much better than ‘social justice’ which has absolutely nothing to do with actual justice.)
When then-Senator Harry Reid exercised the ‘nuclear’ option in the US Senate, the Democrats chose to ignore that the rules change he made would some under the sway of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Now that so many blue cities have decided they wouldn’t help ICE by detaining illegal aliens if they were arrested for other crimes, and in some cases worked against ICE by obstructing them in the performance of their duties, it seems only fitting that they now be made to live by the rules they themselves have created. They may also come under the sway of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It would serve them right if all the illegals seeking asylum were dropped of in all of those nice sanctuary cities. Let them take care of them if they care so much about them.
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Despite the fact that this is about a year old, it lessen the message: What White Privilege Lessons Did To My High School.
The story boils down to this: students were called into a mandatory assembly, topic unknown. A ‘panel’ of experts spent time talking to them about diversity and the evils of white privilege. At the beginning of the ‘indoctrination’ the kids were a group of high school students. At the end they were no longer high school students, but oppressors and the oppressed. Unity amongst the student body no longer existed. It was whites oppressing everyone else. Comradery was replaced by anger, recriminations, and incipient hatred.
All these ‘diversity’ experts managed to do was divide students, foster anger and hatred, and then leave, feeling they had “done something” even though that something was damaging and racially charged. No one came away better off from that indoctrination. No one. And these assholes see this as a positive.
That whirring sound you hear? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spinning in his grave now that all of his work is being undone all in the name of ‘equality’.
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If the media didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
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I always thought nonconformity was a paradox. This is why.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformists who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform to with nonconformity. – Eric HofferI was something of a nonconformist nonconformist during my high school years. Everyone had long hair and wore bellbottom jeans. My hair was quite short, and I wore what are now called boot cut jeans, and either work boots or ‘cowboy’ boots. I had more than a few of my fellow students comment about my “giving in to the Man” and I usually countered with something along the line of “So you want me to be different, same as you?” They usually didn’t know what to make of that and that was fine by me.
(H/T Moonbattery)
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One would think that state Democrats would learn the lesson from previous years and not go for ‘crazy’, but you’d be wrong. In this case the New Hampshire Democrat majority legislature decided they absolutely needed to increase state spending by a whopping 13% and boost state taxes and fees by almost 17%, ignoring the facts that closely controlled state spending increases and tax cuts have done more to help the economy of my home state recover quickly from the Obama years and have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the entire nation. But they felt the uncontrollable urge to undo all of that and try to bring back the bad old days of the Obama economy, and smiling while they sabotaged the New Hampshire Advantage.
The question is whether or not our GOP governor will wield his veto pen and kill off the Democrats plans to damage our economy and more heavily burden the taxpayers of our state in order to make themselves feel better about themselves for having done “something”. That kind of something we don’t need.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice is thinning, work on getting boats ready for the summer has started, and where I’m hoping the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout will be on the lake in 4 weeks.