Vice-President from party that put people in chains accuses presidential candidate of party that took people out of chains of wanting to put people in chains.

Erick Erickson has a fine post on Joe Biden's batshit claim that Romney wants to put black people back in chains.

Except:

In fairness to Vice President Biden, I supposed I should have a full post for our collective crazy uncle in the attic turned Vice President. The man from Delaware claimed that Republicans want to put people back in chains. Considering there is only one group of people ever put in chains in this country, it is clear he was race baiting...

Inciting racial animosity for political gain has been the Democratic playbook since the Democrats were, well, not to put too fine a point on it, putting black people in chains.

'Inciting racial animosity' is a fine synopsis of Democrat Party politics, from the antebellum South through today. I think it is a mistake to think that all pro-slavery pro-KKK pro-Jim Crow pro-lynching Democrat pols personally hated blacks. Many did, undoubtedly, but personal hatred presupposes a modicum of conviction, however heinous.

But the Democrat party has never been, and is not now, a party of conviction. It is a party of opportunism, embracing slave owners and Grand Kleagles and lynch mobs and Black Panthers and Jesse Jackson with open arms.

The Democratic Party is the party of race-baiting. It is the thread that runs from Preston Brooks through  Nathan Bedford Forrest to George Wallace to Al Sharpton to Joe Biden. What unites Democrats through the past two centuries is the use of race hate and fear for political gain. It is race-baiting, not the particular race bated, that really matters to Democrats.

Democrats are equal opportunity opportunists. 

The Church of the Gesu

The mother church of the Jesuits, in Rome.

Architecture is a mirror of the soul. 

"Paul Ryan represent[s] Obama's most horrifying nightmare: math."

I love iowahawk. 

Hauser's Law

An interesting observation by W. Kurt Hauser, an investment economist who 15 years ago pointed out a surprising fact: the federal revenue from taxes in the U.S. has been remarkably constant at 19.5%-- give or take a couple percent-- of GDP each year since 1950. This is despite substantial increases and decreases in the top tax rates, which ranged from 91% to 35%.

When the top marginal tax rate is 90%, the government takes in 19.5% of GDP. When the top marginal tax rate is 28%, the government takes in 19.5% of GDP.

What Hauser's law means is that raising or lowering taxes at the federal level has no impact on federal tax revenue. When taxes are raised, people find ways to not pay taxes. When taxes are lowered, people pay more taxes. In the end, it's a wash.

What does influence federal tax revenue is the GDP. Nineteen-point-five percent of a bigger pie is more federal revenue. A vibrant economy brings in more tax revenue.

The government does better when, and only when, the people who work do better. What a surprise.

So how do we increase GDP? Of course, the most effective way to increase economic activity is to cut taxes, which, as Hauser points out with actual data (not just theory), does not alter the percent of GDP the government collects in tax revenues. Increasing economic production by lowering tax rates brings more money into the federal coffers.

In case you missed it:

Increasing economic production by lowering tax rates brings more money into the federal coffers.

You might ask: why isn't this simple fact-- tax rates don't change the percent of GDP that the government collects in taxes-- widely known? Thank the lefty mainstream media for burying this inconvenient truth. But a recent political event may change just what the MSM can shove down the memory hole.

With Romney's nomination of Paul Ryan, expect Hauser's law fact, and a host of other simple facts, to be at the center of the presidential campaign this year.

This election will be about facts.

Are "suppressed" voters without ID receiving government money-- without ID?

Democrats are howling that laws to ensure that votes are legally cast are "voter suppression". They insist that there are large numbers of voters-- poor people mainly-- who don't have ID and who will not exercise their right to vote if they are required to show ID.

Which raises this question:

Do these mostly poor ID-less voters receive government benefits? Housing assistance, welfare checks, food stamps, and any of hundreds of government benefits intended to help the needy? It's a safe bet that most of the potentially "suppressed" ID-less voters do receive some kind of government assistance for some things.

If some poor people who get government services lack ID to vote, it means that they get government money despite lack of ID. If you lack ID to vote, you lack ID to get government services. Do they just walk into a government office and demand and get cash, without reliable documentation of their identity? Are Democrats admitting that we don't know who they are when we give them money?

Is this really how we dispense taxpayer money to the poor? Anonymously?

The reason why the media will turn off Paul Ryan's microphone

Take a trip down memory lane, and watch Paul Ryan hand President Obama his head in a panel discussion at the White House Healthcare Summit in the run-up to Obamacare.

"Hiding spending does not reduce spending".

Ryan is a very smart and eloquent man. He gets it, and he knows how to explain it. If he did any more damage to Obama at this roundtable, the Secret Service would have jumped him. He's a serious threat to the socialist hacks running Washington.

The mainstream media has a big job on its hands. It will have to demonize Ryan (he kills kids, starves old ladies, enjoys the suffering of the poor, vivisects puppies... ) while at the same time not letting people hear exactly what he says.

They'll need to do two things:

1) They will minimize unfettered exposure of Ryan to the public. They will try very hard not to let him speak unimpeded.

2) When they can't silence him, they will edit his speech. They will use snippets carefully edited to misrepresent his proposals. The media has had plenty of practice lately with fraudulent editing-- altering the Zimmerman 911 tape in order to purposefully stir up race hate is a fine example-- so slandering Ryan and sabotaging our national discussion on the relationship between our government and our people shouldn't be too hard.

Ryan is a serious threat to the elites in media and government. They will stop at nothing to stop him.

Should be interesting. 

"... the lethal stupidity of its pseudopods."

Jerry Bower observes how Americans are rebelling against the Big Government leviathan.

Excerpt:

It’s not civil disobedience that I’m talking about. It’s the opposite: Civil disobedience is meant to be noticed. It is a price paid in the hope of creating social change. What I’m talking about is not based on hope; in fact, it has given up much hope on social change. It thinks the government is a colossal amoeba twitching mindlessly in response to tiny pinpricks of pain from an endless army of micro-brained interest groups. The point is not to teach the amoeba nor to guide it, but simply to stay away from the lethal stupidity of its pseudopods. 

The amoeba does not get smarter but it does get hungrier and bigger. On the other hand, we get smarter. More and more of our life takes place outside of the amoeba’s reach: in the privacy of our own homes, or in capital accounts in other nations, or in the fastest growing amoeba avoidance zone ever created, cyberspace. We revolt decision by decision, transaction by transaction, because we believe deep down that most of what government tells us to do is at bottom illegitimate.

The harvest of  the mindless colossal amoeba-- socialism-- is underway in Greece and Spain and the collapsing economies and civic cultures of Europe.

From the standpoint of the socialists, the chaos that socialism causes is a feature, not a bug. Poverty and chaos and hate are the oxygen of the left.

The left feeds on poverty and envy and violent contagion, on the "lethal stupidity of it's pseudopods".