The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Panic in the Hamptons: Tax-Hike Talk Inspires ‘Fire Sale’ on Mansions

Posted on | December 5, 2012 | 18 Comments

Static calculation meets dynamic reaction:

Hamptons homeowners have launched a selling spree, offering fire sale prices to get rid of their properties before higher capital gains tax rates are expected to kick in Jan. 1.
Top brokers expect more than 30 closings on big-ticket properties priced from $1 million to $25 million.
“There is a frenzy here right now,” said Enzo Morabito, a long-time Hamptons-based broker with Douglas Elliman. “People know they save money if they sell now. I have very willing sellers and hot buyers who want to take advantage of the low interest rates that might go away next year as well.”Morabito reported eight closings on transactions involving his team before New Year’s Day, including a $14.9 million estate in Water Mill and a $6.9 million mega-mansion in Bridgehampton.
“They know they lose money if they wait till next year,” he said.
Capital gains taxes are expected to rise during negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff” as lawmakers close a yawning budget gap. The rate may rise as high as 39% on short-term investments, but is expected to jump about 5% on long-term gains.

Some people are so stupid (we call them “Democrats”) as to think that their soak-the-rich tax plans are aiming at fixed targets. However, tax policy provides incentives for action, and the desire of the rich to protect their assets and income against exorbitant taxation will inevitably result in action that falsifies any “rosy scenario” projection of how much revenue could be gained by such measures. There are always unintended consequences to liberal policies that counteract (and often completely negate) whatever positive results are achieved.

Democrats like to talk about the need for government “investments” in infrastructure. Too often, this consists of paving a road with good intentions, without regard for the proverbial destination.

 

Category: Economics, Taxes

‘Outreach to the MSM Community’

Posted on | December 5, 2012 | 14 Comments

Listen to internet radio with Fidelis Radio on Blog Talk Radio

 

Last week, I was interviewed by Rebecca Diserio of Fidelis Radio Network and Monday, Becca Lower posted a transcript of the first half of the interview. Tuesday, Becca posted the second half of the transcript, including this:

[Republicans] have people whose expertise — supposedly — is media, right? And these people are called media consultants. Meanwhile on the left, they have people who are experts on the media who are called “network news anchors.” People who are called “Pulitzer prize-winning journalists.” People whose job titles include “Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Post.”
The problem is that this disconnect between the conservative movement and the Republican Party and mainstream journalism — how much of this can we blame on liberals, and how much of it is the fault of the Republican Party itself?

This is something that conservatives, who believe in personal responsibility, should take seriously: If we all agree that media bias is a problem — and I believe we do — shouldn’t we ask why the Republican Party has been so ineffective in addressing this problem? The GOP spends millions annually on “media consultants,” and what do they have to show for it? Isn’t it irresponsible to scapegoat the media as a means of exculpating Republicans? Doesn’t the GOP’s consistent failure in this regard suggest that maybe it’s time to try new strategies? The interview continues:

In too many cases, I think, the idea of a Republican press operation is to make sure that nobody in the press corps ever gets close to the candidate. . . . This idea of treating the press as the enemy, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
And you know, people have talked about outreach: “We need to outreach to the Hispanic community, we need to outreach to the black community.” Well, how about this? We need to outreach to the MSM community. Because there are probably a few — God bless them, most of them are to the left of Lenin in their politics — but there are a few of them, there still are a few people in there who care about real facts, who care about budget projections that involve actual numbers, people who actually care about economic reality . . .

Please read the whole thing at Becca Lower’s blog and don’t forget to show your appreciation by hitting Becca’s tip jar — I did.

 


Category: Media Bias, Republicans

A Shot Of Marco Rubio

Posted on | December 5, 2012 | Comments Off on A Shot Of Marco Rubio

by Smitty

Via Byron York, Marco Rubio’s Jack Kemp Dinner speech.

Category: Uncategorized

‘Like Hell’

Posted on | December 4, 2012 | 6 Comments

John Hoge has shared his thoughts on today’s decision in the Virginia case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. When I met Mr. Hoge today for the first time, I told him that his services in documenting the legal proceedings in the case had earned him a special invitation to attend Blog Bash at CPAC. From a National Bloggers Club press release:

“We are profoundly discouraged that Aaron Walker has been denied the opportunity to prove his case,” said Ali A. Akbar, President of the National Bloggers Club and a target of the online harassment himself. “We’ll solicit donations and launch new efforts to protect free speech from thugs like Brett Kimberlin.”
“Stop shining light on Brett Kimberlin’s efforts to suppress free speech? Like hell.”

Read the whole thing.

Category: Uncategorized

Let EGAD Times Roll

Posted on | December 4, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Even Greater American Depression:

via Nice Deb

Category: Uncategorized

GOP To Palin: “‘Go’ Wobbly?”

Posted on | December 4, 2012 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Emphasis mine:

C’mon Now, GOP, Don’t Go Wobbly on Us
by Sarah Palin on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 12:10pm
Please read and pass along this article. We send good conservatives to D.C. to fulfill the promises they made to the electorate, and yet when they stay true to their word the permanent political class in their own party punishes them. This won’t be forgotten come 2014. Right now the GOP establishment is more concerned about the opinion of the media and the Georgetown cocktail circuit than they are “we the people” who hired them. For all this new talk of how the GOP needs a “populist movement,” it would do them good to remember they already have one; it’s called the Tea Party movement, and it won for them the majority they now enjoy in the House.

– Sarah Palin

A related Twitter hash.

Just for the sake of argument, let me posit that John Boehner is NOT a sellout, a tool, a double agent, a doddering buffoon, a sad little throne-sniffer, a spineless sycophant, a Ruling Class meat puppet, and an obsequious piece of work.

Instead, let us assert that there is some sort of method to his madness, with some plan forthcoming:

When that fullness

waxeth timely, friend,

why, then, fancy

whispering the formulation?

Update: Belvedere rounds it up nicely, recalling a gag that I omitted from this post earlier. Let this be known as the “Day of the Short Teaspoons”.

Category: Uncategorized

WALKER V. KIMBERLIN: DISMISSED

Posted on | December 4, 2012 | 83 Comments

MANASSAS, Virginia
Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Richard B. Potter has just dismissed Aaron Walker’s civil lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert. Will have further details momentarily.

UPDATE: Today’s hearing began shortly after 11 a.m. and was over by noon. Several preliminary motions had been consolidated into one hearing, and the motion heard first was Kimberlin’s motion to dismiss. Clearly, Judge Potter had already decided to grant Kimberlin’s motion, but went through the formality of a hearing.

Acting as his own attorney, Kimberlin argued first, and showed a disposition to argue the facts of the case rather than to argue law.  Walker’s attorney Dan Backer objected to this, and his objection was upheld, Judge Potter ordering Kimberlin to stick to the law. Backer briefly countered each of Kimberlin’s points, and then Kimberlin was given an opportunity to respond, once again arguing facts more than law.

Then Judge Potter called a 10-minute recess and returned to read a decision — dismissing the case — that quite obviously took a lot longer than 10 minutes to write. In other words, the judge’s decision was written in advance of the hearing.

UPDATE II: John Hoge is here at the McDonald’s where I’m filing this. My co-blogger Wombat is here, as is Walker’s attorney, Dan Backer, who is obviously disappointed. Particularly disturbing was that Kimberlin never complied with discovery requests in the case, while Walker did — and Kimberlin used documents supplied by Walker to argue that the case was without merit, while Walker never got the opportunity to depose witnesses in the case.

“The precedent set here is just terrible,” Backer said, talking about how Judge Potter ignored Kimberlin’s violation of court orders to seal the discovery materials. “Why should anyone comply with discovery?”

Backer discussed the possibility of appeals in either the federal suit in Maryland or the Virginia suit, but for today it’s a complete bummer.

UPDATE III: Da Tech Guy writes that “the big story is not so much the details but the emboldening of some very bad characters.” It’s actually worse than that: It’s not just bad characters, but bad behavior that have been emboldened. Why shouldn’t everyone with a grudge resort to the methods Kimberlin & Co. employed against Walker?

The targeting of political bloggers, the cyberstalking and harassment, are all now acceptable tactics for which there is evidently no legal recourse. Thanks, Judge Potter.

UPDATE IV: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks!




 


Category: The Kimberlin Files

Ideology, Personalities and Competence

Posted on | December 4, 2012 | 29 Comments

Last week, I was a guest on “The Rebecca Diserio Show,” and Becca Lower has been kind enough to transcribe the first half of the interview here. We were talking about Saxby Chambliss and I compared it to the situation with Charlie Crist in 2009-2010:

Now, I’m all in favor of electing a Republican majority in the Senate. But the idea that the way to do that is to abandon principles, to muddle the difference between Republicans and Democrats on key issues. Well . . . if that worked out so well in the past, you might think of, I don’t know, the administration of President Dole, you know… It just doesn’t work as practical politics. Never mind that it represents a cowardly abandonment of firm principle.
The problem is, if you go back to 1964, the simple title of Phyllis Schafly’s book: A Choice, Not an Echo. You have to offer the voters an alternative to the party in power, or else the opposition has no reason to exist.

The idea that it’s “smart” to be moderate ignores this basic reality of politics. Successful opposition politics is about highlighting the failures of the party in power and offering a principled alternative. It’s not so much about individual politicians as it is about building a movement.

One of the most insightful things I’ve ever heard about politics was from Stephen Gordon, who worked on the 2008 Ron Paul campaign. Gordo said, “The Ron Paul movement wasn’t about Ron Paul, it was about a movement.” When the Tea Party movement was at full strength, it was like that: People didn’t care so much about candidates or personalities as they cared about the movement itself. But after 2010, the presidential campaign got a lot of people distracted by personalities, and the Tea Party energy was dissipated as a result. Something else from the interview:

Rebecca, a basic problem, something that we saw in the aftermath of this election. You remember the meltdown of the ORCA system, correct? . . . Well, what we learned in the wake of this was that the people who had been put in charge of this basic, very important too l– technological tool – to get out the vote and to report get out the vote efforts, they didn’t understand the technology they were using.
Okay, this was just shocking. It was incompetence. And we have a problem, that people in the Republican party whose job it is to talk about the media don’t know anything about the media. You hear people talking about demographics who don’t know anything about demographics. And you have people talking about culture who don’t know anything about culture.

The Republican Party has a shortage of basic competence. There is too much cliqueishness, too much Old Boy-ism, where who you know is more important than what you know, and the catastrophic failure of ORCA was the tip of the iceberg in that regard.

Some people have tried to isolate this to the Romney campaign, to say that Romney and his aides were uniquely unqualified, but the fact is, they were much more competent than any of their rivals for the GOP nomination and, overall, ran a pretty good campaign. The fact that Republican Senate candidates generally fared worse than Romney argues against the “blame Romney” excuse. The GOP’s problems are a lot more pervasive and complex than just one candidate or campaign.

Read the rest of the interview at Becca Lower’s blog, and you can listen to the audio here:

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Category: Conservatism 101, Election 2012
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