Category Archives: Cabinet
Bystander President
Reagan was the Teflon president. He had an easy charm and nothing bad seemed to stick. Obama is the bystander president. He reads about bad things that happen on his watch as if they had nothing to do with him. He’s just like you and me, sitting at the bar madder’n hell. Except he gets to go on TV and complain. At least I get to draw a cartoon.
Dumb Wars
Barack Obama called George Bush’s war in Iraq a dumb war. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, doesn’t think his old boss’s own war was so bright either. He says Obama “sort of lost his way”. Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, has said pretty much the same thing. He didn’t think the president “believed in his own strategy”.
Dumb
Speaking of believing in your own strategy, how come these two guys didn’t speak up when it would have made a difference? They both have books to peddle now. They may not be loyal, but they’re not dumb.
Economic Patriotism
President Obama’s favorite billionaire is making a run for the border. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway will finance Burger King’s purchase of Canadian donut dynamo, Tim Hortons.
Economic Patriotism
As a Canadian operation, Burger King will still have to pay US corporate taxes on earnings inside the United States. But earnings outside the US will only be taxed at the rate of the country where they occur. US companies have to pay taxes in the countries where they operate and also must pay IRS the difference between those rates and the US rate. The Obama administration calls this economic patriotism.
Burger King’s move is called a tax “inversion”. Matt Levine gives a great explanation in this Bloomberg article.
The US corporate rate, including state and local taxes comes to about 40%. That’s the highest in the world outside the Islamic State jizya. Roberto A. Ferdman provides a nice chart in the Washington Post showing the tax rates of the 34 OECD countries.
The nominal corporate tax rate in the U.S., which combines national, state, and city-level tax rates, is nearly 40 percent—the highest across all 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries. Canada’s, by comparison, is just over 26 percent.
Nixon Impeachment Advice
Judge Napolitano says, “the government is out of control”.
President Obama has taken to taunting Congress about impeaching him. Speaker Boehner says impeachment is off the table.
Nixon
August 7 is the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation under the threat of impeachment. An 18 minute gap was discovered in a Watergate phone tape transcribed by Rosemary Woods. Lois Lerner has a two year gap in IRS emails.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley says, “Obama is the president Nixon always wanted to be”. Tricky Dickey overachieved just by being himself according to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. He says Nixon’s “southern strategy” turned the Republicans into a party of racists and homophobes.
No comment from the grave of Senate constitutionalist Robert Byrd.
Update: Here’s George Will on Nixon’s lawless activities 40 years ago. He wanted to use IRS to go after his enemies but didn’t trust the top people there.
Update update: Charles Krauthammer calls Obama’s plan to grant amnesty to 5 million illegals impeachment bait (nice picture):
Such a calculation — amnesty-by-fiat to deliberately court impeachment — is breathtakingly cynical. But clever. After all, there is no danger of impeachment succeeding. There will never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. But talking it up is a political bonanza for Democrats, stirring up an otherwise listless and dispirited base. Last Monday alone the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised more than $1 million from anti-impeachment direct mail.
Kerry, Qatar, Hamas, and Turkey
Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Saudis want Hamas out and Fatah in in Gaza. So what did John Kerry do? He met with Islamist Turkey and Qatar to come up with a cease fire agreement that keeps Hamas in power and its rockets and tunnels intact. The Israeli cabinet unanimously rejected the deal. Israel has Hamas on the ropes. Hammas is without friends – save for Turkey and Qatar – which is why Krauthammer called Kerry Hamas’s lawyer.
Here’s David Harsanyi in The Federalist:
Perhaps because of tragic loss of life, the United States would rather see a ceasefire than Hamas dealt a mortal blow. And that is almost certainly one of the reasons Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.
Thomas Sowell , looking way back, says ” ‘Cease-fire” and “negotiations” are magic words to “the international community.” But just what do cease-fires actually accomplish?”
In the short run, they save some lives. But in the long run they cost far more lives, by lowering the cost of aggression…
At one time, launching a military attack on another nation risked not only retaliation but annihilation. When Carthage attacked Rome, that was the end of Carthage.
Looks like mutual assured destruction all around is the key to world peace.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius calls this Kerry’s big blunder:
Kerry’s error has been to put so much emphasis on achieving a quick halt to the bloodshed that he has solidified the role of Hamas, the intractable, unpopular Islamist group that leads Gaza, along with the two hard-line Islamist nations that are its key supporters, Qatar and Turkey. In the process, he has undercut not simply the Israelis but also the Egyptians and the Fatah movement that runs the Palestinian Authority, all of which want to see an end to Hamas rule in Gaza.
The State Department’s response to Kerry criticism? Well, this is “not the way allies treat each other.”
