TEN DOLLAR4WAYS snuck in a birthday. It was yesterday and I forgot to wish him happiness on his special day. I should smack myself with a Cat 'o' nine tails for being negligent, but I don't have a Cat 'o' nine tails. I have cats, yes, but they generally don't like it when I try to substitute them for an actual Cat 'o' nine tails.
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Drones are real. They come in sizes we can see clearly, like a glidder against the sky. They come as small as a an obese bumblebee.I'm not going to get into this subject at this time.
This moring, though, Jere Van Dyk was on the morning news. While working for the New York Times, Jere lived with the Mujahideen as the battled agaiinst the Soviet Army i Afghaistan. That was in 1981. In 2008, he was catured by the Taliban. He has written a book about that experience. I haven't read that bok, not yet.
This morning, Van Dyk, who is surrently a consultant to CS News, told of the time he was to meet with some high ranking members of the taliban and he culd hear a drone overhead. What should he fear? The Taliban or the drone, the enemy or the good guys - the Americans and their allies?
Well, Jere, climb a rickity ladder and stick your hand in a hornets' nest and you might fall or get stung, or both. You voluntarily put yourself in danger. You knew there would be some risks. Whatever one thinks of drones, I don't think your voice should turn the tide. I doubt the drones were targeting you, but if you had your butt in a war zone, you gotta think maybe your ass could be shot off.
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From the Wichita Eagle Opinion Line:
"Saying more gun laws are unnecessary until we enforce current ones is like saying it is time to stop putting up stop signs until the people who ignore the current ones are ticketed."
Rand Paul is throwing a filibuster Party in the Senate. He was quoted on the nightly news with Brian Williams, saying; No American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime.
If convicted, then we can kill them with a drone?
Jesus - Cross
Mary Surratt - Hanging
Julius and Ethel Goldberg - Electric
Chair Gary Gilmore - Firing squad J
ohnnie Baston -Lethal injection
I wonder who will be the first convicted felon to be legally executed by a drone?
Brothers Charles and David Koch, are worth $34 billion each. When George Walker Bush came to office, each brother was worth about $2 billion. They were worth about $5 billion each in 2005, and $25 billion each in 2011. It takes money to make money.
They deserve what they have. They dig their own oil wells.
Yeah, right!
Feeling sad. It's been six years today since a good friend killed himself. I lost another friend to suicidide on Jan. 1, 2011. The snow has melted, except where it was piled in high in varios parking lots around rown.
The brown grass looks at the worse for the salt and mud scooped up by the snow plows. My back door neighbor's house looks forlorn. My friend Darrel built it for his parents. His father died a year and a half after the house was built. His mother lived there another quarter of a century before she died.
Soon after, Darrel and his wife moved to that house. Later their daughter and a granddaughter moved in with them. Eventually, all four of them died at home, in that house. One of them, Darrel's wife, died in my arms, in the driveway, as Darrel and I were attempting to get her from her wheelchair into a car so we could take her to the hospital. Two houses south of me, an elderly neighbor died during the night. I found her body the next morning.
In almost 30 years at this location, I have lost 7 friends and neighbors to death within the space of 4 houses distance from my own. Since I've lived here, my mom and step-dad died. They lived in Mesa, Arizona. My sister, then my neice, died in Topeka. One of my business partners died in 2002.
I've lost several pets while I've lived here.
I sometimes cry when I'm alone.
In a recent poll, 42% of Kansas Republicans said they would vote for Kansas Senator Pat Roberts to be re-elected. However, 34% think the man is not conservative enough.
OP-ED: HAPPY BIRTHAT FEDERAL INCOME TAX> Let’s part like it’s 1913.
On the 100th birthday of the income tax, writes columnist Kevin Horrigan (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) we are a nation that reviles the income tax instead of acknowledging what we owe to it and insisting that it become as fair and simple as it was, say, in 1913.
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
— The 16th Amendment
Last Monday marked the 100th anniversary of the day that U.S. Secretary of State Philander C. Knox took pen in hand and affirmed that the 16th Amendment, having been passed by Congress and ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states, was part of the U.S. Constitution.
The income tax is 100 years old. Got any big plans to celebrate? Probably not.
The First Amendment has a lot of fans. The Second Amendment is huge. The 13th Amendment was a star on Oscar night. Chicks dig the 19th. We’ll drink to the 22nd, which overturned the 18th. But few people love No. 16, which is strange, considering how much we all benefit from it.
From the air we breathe and the water we drink to the security we feel at night, from the teachers in the classroom to the meat on the table to the airplanes that do not crash, from FEMA and CIA, FBI and BATF and dozens of other acronym agencies and programs, taxes — as Justice Holmes observed — are what we pay for civilized society.
Most Americans will admit that, albeit grudgingly. We’d just rather that somebody else pay a bigger share. The late Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long, D-La., put it best: “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.”
It’s amazing to realize, but the passage of the 16th Amendment wasn’t even close. Lincoln had briefly imposed an income tax to pay for the Civil War. Congress passed a 2-percent tax in 1894, but the Supreme Court threw it out two years later.
So the only way to get one on the books was to amend the Constitution. It passed the Congress in July 1909 and whizzed through legislatures in Southern and Western states. People were ticked off.
Harvard historian Jill Lepore, in a short history of the income tax published in The New Yorker last November, wrote, “The tax was intended to answer populist rage at the growing divide between the rich and the poor.”
A panic that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 had created a deep recession. Congress created the Federal Reserve to shore up failing banks. People thrown out of work were outraged that the richest 1 percent of households held more than a third of the nation’s wealth.
Imagine that: 1 percent of taxpayers holding a third of wealth — land, stocks, bonds, art, savings accounts, jewels, cars, boats, the whole kaboodle.
Today it’s 43 percent. The next-richest 4 percent hold another 29 percent of the wealth. That’s 5 percent of households controlling 72 percent of the nation’s wealth.
And what have we got for public outrage? Anti-tax crusaders. Tea-party Republicans. We’ve got people chained to the oars in one of those “Ben-Hur” Roman galleys, rooting for Caesar.
How is it that the Americans of 1913 were so much smarter than Americans of 2013? My theory: We’ve got a better quality of not-rich now than we did back then. We’ve got television and the Internet to distract us and delude us, consumer fripperies to appease us and social-safety net programs to preserve us from the worst effects of income inequality.
We see a guy on TV settling into a leather seat on his Gulfstream-V, we identify with that guy, not the people who pump the fuel or empty the toilets or serve the drinks. We are an aspirational people, not a realistic one. It’s part of our charm.
Also: We are easily bamboozled.
Lepore’s piece in The New Yorker recounts the long effort that began with Andrew Mellon, Treasury secretary under three Republican presidents, to convince Americans that the income tax was the spawn of Satan. She recounts the long effort by Robert B. Dresser, the Grover Norquist of his day, to repeal the “Marxist” 16th Amendment. She describes the brilliant Republican strategy, quickly adopted by Democrats, of describing Americans as “taxpayers” instead of “citizens,” pitting them against “tax-eaters.”
So on the 100th birthday of the income tax, we are a nation that reviles the income tax instead of acknowledging what we owe to it and insisting that it become as fair and simple as it was, say, in 1913.
You know who should celebrate the tax’s birthday? Republicans. Lepore quotes the late liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that by defusing populist rage and giving wealthy Americans the right to say, “See, we’re paying our share,” even if they aren’t, the income tax might have saved capitalism.
“Conservatives ought to build a statue to it,” he wrote.
Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Readers may write to him at: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 900 North Tucker Blvd., St. Louis, Mo. 63101, or email him at khorrigan@post-dispatch.com.
I submitted these three opinions to the local paper. Maybe they will publish one of them.
1. As we all know, Gremlins are melting polar ice. Maybe we should build a water pipeline to Wichita. It could go from Santa’s workshop, meet up with the Keystone XL oil pipeline in Hardesty, then run parallel to that line until it gets near Wichita.
2. We wouldn’t have a water problem if Rick Perry and Sam Brownback would just hold a prayer vigil. I don’t know why I always have to have the greats ideas.
3. A Wichita Eagle headline states: “Gay marriage case offers court many options.” Shouldn’t the only option be equality?
Today’s opinions include:
“Mister, we could use a man like Archie Bunker again.”
“The situation is popeless.”
“I hope the next pope chooses the name Bob. I would trust a Pope Bob.”
The headlines for toady’s Wichita Eagle, include the mention of the Kansas legislative decisions.
First, Senators have agreed to require drug tests of welfare and unemployment recipients suspects of using illegal substances, sending those who fail to treatment and job training. Democrats forced a successful vote to include lawmakers in such tests. The bill now goes before the Kansas House.
Second, A House committee has endorsed a plan to shield Kansas guns and ammunition from federal gun-control measures. Federal officers who tried to intervene could be arrested. A proposal to let licensed Kansans carry concealed guns into more public buildings is also still alive.
Thirdly, The Senate has adopted a proposal to let voters decide on a constitutional amendment preventing (Kansas) courts from ordering lawmakers to spend more money on schools; it still must go to the House. Gov. Sam Brownback’s plan to hold back third-graders who can’t pass reading tests failed in committee.
We have already decided that we must teach alternative theories about Global Warming. I agree with Cartoonist Richard Crowson on this issue.
I also wonder if the cartoon below refers to the United State or to Kansas. Both Capitol Buildings seem to be rather non-essential at this point in time.
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