When the Democrats aren’t cheating on their taxes like Charlie Rangel or forgetting to pay them like Timothy Geithner, they’re busy lambasting Republicans for actually paying theirs—albeit at a rate unsatisfactory to them.

In yet another fantastic display of hypocrisy, the liberal mainstream media spent the week attacking Governor Mitt Romney for having a 15% tax rate.  Since the media is loath to engage in any actual investigative journalism when it comes to the Democrats, I decided to do a little of my own.  Here’s what I found.

Start with Senator John Kerry who is among the 400 richest Americans thanks to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s, inheritance.  Their last publicly released tax returns in 2003 revealed that they paid a rate of 13.4% on a declared income of $5.5 million. This from the man who, just last year, tried to avoid half a million dollars in taxes by anchoring his yacht in Rhode Island rather than Massachusetts. Estimates pin Kerry’s net worth somewhere between $700 million and $3.2 billion compared to Romney’s lower net worth of $202 million.

Take a look at former Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards’s 2003 tax returns, and you’ll find that he paid an astonishingly low rate of 5.1%.  Seems a bit low for a man with a net worth hovering around $54.7 million.

But, of course, Kerry and Edwards’ income tax rates were protected under lock and key by the mainstream media during the 2004 presidential race against President George W. Bush.   Speaking of Bush, you’ll also never hear anyone mention the fact that he paid a rate of 27.7% in the same year.

Tax rates aside, in yet another attempt to make something out of nothing, the media has been reporting relentlessly on Romney donating millions in cash and stocks to the Mormon Church, as if tithing to one’s church is somehow a negative.  Thanks to donations like Romney’s, the Mormon Church is able to sustain a large philanthropic network and send young men on two year missions that provide extensive humanitarian aid to a countless number of people in need.  If you call that bad, I’d hate to see what you call good.

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With members of the mainstream media now hurling charges of using racially coded language against GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, Big Government has uncovered a private memorandum written over three decades ago that offers a unique glimpse into Mr. Gingrich’s longstanding attitudes about race.

The private memo, dated July 1, 1980, was written by Mr. Gingrich on his official House of Representatives stationery and was sent to then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, Bill Casey, who would later become President Reagan’s CIA Director.

In the memo, Mr. Gingrich urges Governor Reagan’s campaign to reconsider its decision not to speak to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Convention.

“This is a great opportunity to prove that a conservative Republican can speak to the hearts and pocketbooks of Black Americans,” Gingrich urged in the memo.

The memorandum goes on to explain that a decision not to speak at the NAACP convention would insult African American voters and be a “tragedy” for the nation:

Many middle class Black Americans who would vote for Reagan will be insulted by his non-attendance.  I urge you to schedule the speech and talk about Kemp’s Inner City Jobs Bill, which Kilpatrick and George Will have both endorsed as acceptably conservative.

Failure to attend the NAACP convention will be a tragedy for Gov. Reagan and the country.  Symbolic events are vital.  Thank you for considering this.

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Big Government has obtained exclusive excerpts of a book scheduled to be released next month, which outline problems with the federal government’s handling of the drug war.

The book, The Border Challenge, authored by T. Michael Andrews, a former adviser at the Dept. of Homeland Security’s counternarcotics office, is scheduled to be released in bookstores in early February.

Andrews has suggestions for how federal drug enforcement agencies can reshape their strategies along America’s northern and southern borders, and he explains how government bureaucracy and shifting goals have made winning the drug war impossible thus far.

“One of the problems with having so many offices in the federal government directed at a common cause is direction and leadership,” Andrews wrote. “The scope of bureaucracy can be overwhelming. If one department wants to take a different policy direction from another, this could lead to an immediate bureaucratic tie-up and in some cases pushback among the many agencies.”

According to Andrews, bureaucracy comes from partisan politics, lack of consistent focus, and jurisdictional conflicts within competing law enforcement agencies that are not working together.

“One of the problems we always had–even today, I’m sad to say, are that there are still problems between the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement),” he said during an exclusive interview conducted from his home in northern Virginia.

“Those are really the two agencies that have drug enforcement power. ICE is charged with stopping any and all contraband coming into the United States under Title 18, and the DEA is charged with both domestic and international drug enforcement under Title 21.”

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Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on the Iowa caucus in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. He writes in “As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa” that the Iowa caucus often doesn’t decide who wins the primary, let alone the general election.

Iowa Republican caucuses have a poor record in choosing their party’s nominees. In the five presidential nominating cycles with active Iowa Republican caucus competition, the Hawkeye State has voted for the eventual Republican nominee only twice—in 1996 for Bob Dole, in 2000 for George W. Bush—and only once was the Iowa winner elected president.

Part of the issue Barone notes is just how few Republicans actually participate.

In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses [in 2008]. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians—a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

By contrast, in the 2010, over 600,000 Iowa Republicans voted in the general election and more than 200,000 voted in the gubernatorial primary. This year fewer Republicans will vote in the Iowa caucus, despite a deeply unpopular incumbent Democratic party.

Why are so few Republicans showing up to vote in Iowa? Perhaps it’s because the Iowa Republican caucus is for insiders.

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JOE BIDEN:  [handing President phone]  Axelrod calling from Chicago, Boss.  He sounds pissed.

OBAMA:  Hey Axe!  Whassup?

No, I don’t know who leaked our decision to abandon blue collar whites.  Soon’s we find the S.O.B., we’ll dress him up like a banker and drop him into the middle of an OWS protest.

You’re kidding.  We gotta reverse course because word got out?

Okay, I understand: you want me and Joe to be regular people for a while.  Suggestions?

Avoid Camp David.  Fine.  Too rustic for my taste, anyway.  Anything else?

Wait until after the election to eminent domain Lafayette Square and build a White House pitch and putt complex?  No problem.  That it?

What?!  Aw, c’mon, man!  You can’t be serious.  That would demean the office of the Presidency.

All right, all right, I’ll do it.  Yeah, we’ll brainstorm more ideas, too.  Okay, later. [hangs up]

BIDEN:  Chief?

OBAMA:  First thing tomorrow, Joe, you and I begin hanging new drapery in the East Room.

JAY CARNEY:  I’ll alert the networks to have camera crews in place by 10:00 a.m., sir.

BILL DALEY:  Your 9:00 o’clock tee time with Tiger at Congressional, Mr. President?  I’ll call him and canc. …

OBAMA:  Ixnay!  SNL’s Fred Armisen owes me big for resuscitating his career.  Request his presence here at dawn in work clothes and cap.   Jay, don’t give the signal to start taping until Fred and Joe are atop their ladders.  No close ups.

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Gov. Rick Perry took the Republican field by storm when he announced his candidacy in August. As a matter of fact, he seemed unbeatable. He did this by bringing in something the rest of the field was desperately lacking – swagger. He was a gun totting cowboy who was unapologetic about his pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-Christian roots. And when he talked, citizens in the heartland heard the voice of someone who loved America as much as they did.

However, since those first weeks following his entrance into the race Perry has lost traction and appeared at times as weak as he once did strong. But as of late, he seems to have found himself and especially this week, has come out swinging at business as usual in Washington, Obama’s failures in intelligence gathering and border security, and the ongoing saga of Fast and Furious.

Of the business as usual crowd in DC, Perry spent time in Iowa talking about “creating a part-time Congress, ending lifetime appointments for federal judges and shuttering dysfunctional agencies.” These things are in perfect harmony with what Perry was telling Americans back in August, when he could do no wrong, and when he promised to make Washington as inconsequential in our lives as possible.

The Texas Gov. has also been right on the mark in his criticism of Obama.

Regarding Obama’s refusal to allow our military and special agents (covert and otherwise) to interrogate captured terrorists in way that gets results—in a way similar to those allowed for a time by President George W. Bush—Perry said:

We’ve really failed … in our ability to collect intelligence around the world. This administration in particular has been an absolute failure when it comes to expending the dollars and supporting the CIA and the military intelligence around the world to be able to draw in that intelligence that is going to be truly able to allow us to keep the next terrorist attack from happening on American soil.

This is a crucial point. Since Obama took office, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Bush have all born witness to the success of the enhanced interrogation techniques that Obama refuses to employ for fear of offending our enemy. Perry is right on when he says that we are missing crucial intelligence at this point in time.

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The Congressional “Super Committee” tasked with cutting the debt has failed. Good. Embrace the joy of failure. Sometimes failure works out for the best. Because in this case “failure” leads to the Holy Grail: $1.2 Trillion in forced spending cuts. That’s the best thing that could have ever come out of this unconstitutional “Super Committee.”

Congress is now forced to accept automatic across the board cuts to spending- including defense spending. This is what the GOP should have been aiming for from day one. Play out the clock and force $1.2 Trillion in spending cuts.

But our GOP friends never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They are scared, spineless weaklings. They are actually panicking because there wasn’t a compromise that raised taxes. Could they possibly be this dumb?

The GOP had the perfect campaign message tailor-made for a 2012 landslide. “The GOP stands for smaller government, lower taxes, less spending. Obama is for bigger government, higher taxes, more spending.” The same simple clear contrast that led to a historic Tea Party landslide in 2010. All they had to do was play out the clock and let the spending cuts take effect.

Instead the GOP “super committee” members were so scared of actually forcing real, honest-to-goodness, spending cuts that they desperately tried all last week to compromise with Democrats. They practically begged Democrats to increase taxes on the wealthy (by taking away deductions). The GOP was anxious to sell out every small business owner, homeowner, and GOP contributor in America. Listen carefully- it was the GOP who offered a deal based on Obama’s philosophy to punish successful Americans for their hard work, sacrifice, and financial risk-taking.

Republicans offered a deal to Democrats that included only slightly larger spending cuts versus tax increases. And guess where all the tax increases were aimed- at wealthy taxpayers. Even as GOP Presidential contenders lied to our faces during televised debates, all agreeing they would not even accept a deal of 10-to-1 spending cuts versus tax increases, the GOP Super Committee members attempted to sell out the entire conservative base for close to 1-to-1.

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As radical progressives continue to strengthen their grip on the #OccupyWallStreet mob, they’ve looked to activists of yesteryear to glean some advice and guidance.  The #OccupyChicago crowd has unsurprisingly turned to domestic terrorist-turned-university professor-turned huggable grandpa Bill Ayers.

Ayers appeared at a recent “teach in” at #OccupyChicago and regaled his audience with stories of meeting with the Vietnamese to tut-tut about his “American revolution.”

He theorized whether or not the police – you know, the pigs that protesters are attacking from coast-to-coast – are indeed a part of the 99%.  They’re not if they attack us, he mused.

But then, in typical leftist fashion, he wondered why we have jails at all.  “Let’s abolish the prisons. That freaks people out,” he told his audience.

“But then somebody immediately says, ‘What about John Wayne Gacy…?’ Okay, one cell.  Who else…who else.  Alright, I’ll give you George Bush,” he said to his giggling admirers.

The more the #Occupy crowd embraces radicals and retired terrorists, the less chance they have of being respected for anything they say.  But I honestly don’t think they’re seeking validity in the sense of a political debate.

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While Obama tours the country promoting his personal donation plan, the Republican Presidential hopefuls are in a pitched battle for the nomination and arguing which tax simplification plan is best. Threatened with the possibility of rate cuts, the Media and politicians trot out the usual suspects of lies about tax hikes and tax cuts.  This is a battle Republicans must win and, to do so, they need to expose those lies.

Keep in mind that the battle between those who create wealth and those that want to redistribute it, mainly politicians, is as old as civilization itself.  We read of tax battles and even reform in every age, like Urukagina’s tax reductions in Babylonia/Sumer in 2350 BC.  Equally venerable are the constant set of demagogic lies by those against tax cuts and simplification.  It is important to note that politicians like complicated tax codes and high tax rates because they control those rates and dispense the loopholes and regulations that complicate the tax code.  Tax simplification means they lose power.  As a result, resistance to tax reform is more often the rule than reform. As for the lies, they abound, so let’s consider just a few:

Lie # 1: Tax cuts cause deficits/Tax hikes balance the budget.  The Media and the Left often say that the Reagan and Bush tax cuts led to deficits while Clinton’s tax hikes led to a balanced budget. In truth, according to the IRS, federal tax revenues rose dramatically after the overall Reagan tax cuts/reforms (98%) and the Bush tax cuts (a record $700+ billion). This is just as they did after the Harding/Coolidge cuts (61% revenue increase) and after the Kennedy/Johnson cuts (62% revenue increase).  Those are the four major income tax reductions we have had since the inception of the income tax in 1913 and every time revenues rose after they were in place – every time.

So did the tax rate cut cause a deficit? The lie, of course, is to blame the revenue gathering mechanism (tax code/rate cut) instead of the revenue spending mechanism, i.e. Congress/Presidents.  The spenders kept spending – often at an accelerated rate when they saw the new revenues.  Thus, the fault for continuing deficits lies not with tax rate cuts, which produced higher revenues, but with politicians who spent too much.

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“I’ll tell you a secret. I got some money and I should be taxed more.”

That’s what an #OccupyWallStreet protester told Republican presidential candidate and former two-term Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) as he toured Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on the evening of Tuesday, October 18.

“I actually inherited money when George W. Bush decided to have no estate tax,” the protester continues, “and I think that is totally outrageous. So I decided to keep 20 percent for myself and give 80 percent away. But I think if we rely on the kindness of strangers that the poor will keep getting screwed, so civil libertarians don’t work for me for the poor.”

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Ten years ago at this exact time I was standing in my pajamas in my living room with tears streaming down my face, my hair a wreck. I was a 21-year-old newlywed and mother. My months-old infant sat in a bouncy seat, fascinated by his fists. My sobs startled him; he jolted in his seat, looked for my face, smiled and cooed, which made me cry harder.

The dichotomy of such innocence in my living room and the terror and evil unfolding on my television broke me in ways that I will never be able to explain. I wept for every single person as though they were cherished members of my own family. I wanted to reach through the television to make it stop, to catch the people jumping and falling with my hands.

As the second tower fell, the realization of what our country faced and what we would have to do as a nation hit me.

I had identified myself as a liberal my entire life, until this day. I had an early midlife crisis when I was around 19 years-old, when I began to think that I didn’t actually believe in the principles with which I was raised. I was raised by a very big southern Democrat union family. I was indoctrinated by years of pop-culture, educational bias, and family mantra. It was the only way. I did not vote for George W. Bush. I supported Gore. Even as I began to shed the beliefs of a Democrat, one thing remained: I still felt that America had a problem with the “military complex.” The only reason people were hostile to us, I surmised, was because they were intimidated by our military. I thought Bush was representative of this and it was the reason I didn’t support him.

That belief was blown to hell on 9/11.

“Thank God George Bush is president,” I blurted out in the middle of a furious sob. My husband, who was born wearing a Reagan shirt, looked at me with wide-eyed wonderment.

How foolish I had been.

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I chose to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 by running throughout Manhattan, on a 14-mile route that took me from the East Village down to Ground Zero, up to the Central Park Reservoir, and back down through Midtown.

The day started with a brilliant blue sky, almost like the sky of that Tuesday ten years ago. The flags on the Brooklyn Bridge were at half-mast in the early morning.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Paul Bonicelli to discuss Dick Cheney’s new book, In My Time, how it portrays other members of George W. Bush’s administration and what it means for Cheney’s legacy.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

In My Time on Amazon
Condoleezza Rice: Cheney attacked ‘my integrity’
Powell says Cheney taking ‘cheap shots’ in book
Dick Cheney book reveals George W. Bush administration’s internal battles
Lightning Rod
Dick Cheney’s book is different and it’s because he’s the author
Paul Bonicelli’s work at Foreign Policy Magazine
Paul Bonicelli at Regent University

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Astronauts are stranded on the space station. America’s once-mighty Space Shuttle fleet has been disassembled and mothballed with nothing to replace it. The Russians, once the inferior player in the space race, is the only hope left to rescue the stranded astronauts. No, this isn’t the treatment to a B-list summer movie — it is playing out before our eyes.

It never had to be this way. When historians look back on the American space program over the past 5 years, they are bound to scratch their heads and wonder, “what on Earth happened?” Where were our bold strokes of genius that propelled us to the Moon, created a fleet of shuttles that were the workhorses of space — where was the leadership that ensured America’s technological dominance in the world? Why did we throw in the towel?

With President Obama allowing the Space Shuttle program to die and laying off thousands who worked lifetimes solidifying its success, we had to turn to our old rivals – the Russians. This week, the Russians launched a Soyuz rocket filled with supplies bound for the space station. The rocket exploded scattering smoldering debris for miles. The Soyuz is the world’s last chance to travel into space. Yes, a rocket designed in 1966 is our last modern operating manned space vehicle. Pathetic.

It was President George W. Bush that realized the shuttles had run their course, and he set a date to replace the program. Instead of the low-orbiting shuttle, America would build the world’s largest and most powerful rocket to return to the Moon, build a base there to launch more ambitious missions — go to Mars, where the presence of ice indicates the ingredients of alien life. But, when Atlantis rolled to a stop at Kennedy Space Center, we had no way forward. Obama cancelled the Bush plan, and no one was quite sure where we were headed. The only certainty is that we would layoff over 4,000 unique and highly trained American space experts – in both the public and private sector.  America’s space program is a metaphor for much of what ails the nation, the President left us listless and adrift with no plan to move forward.

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Obama finally got something right. Can you believe it? In a recent interview, Obama said he is confident we will not enter a double dip recession. Brilliant Sherlock. No, we are not entering a double dip. That is because we never left the first dip. Only Obama could get something so right, because he is so wrong.

While Obama, Fed Chief Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner, and various other Obama economists, lackeys and socialist cabal members drone on about double dip, or not to double dip, common folks on Main Street understand that there has never been a recovery.

The continuing Great Recession started on Bush’s watch in 2007 and has never ended. Like Herbert Hoover, another Republican President who panicked, and failing Capitalism 101, abandoned fiscal conservative principles, George W. Bush turned to big government to “save us.” And as usual, the more government tries to save us, the worse it gets. So Bush channeled Hoover, starting the bailouts, stimulus, and insane levels of spending and government intervention.

Then, just when you thought it could not get any worse, along came Obama with his “Axis of Evil” game plan. What is the “Axis of Evil,” you ask? It is the principles to which Obama’s life is dedicated: Taxation, Regulation, Government Strangulation, Unionization and Litigation.

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Kinky Friedman in The Daily Beast:

Rick Perry has never lost an election; I’ve never won one. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world. On the other hand, I’ve long been friends with Bill Clinton and George W., and Rick Perry and I, though at times bitter adversaries, have remained friends as well. It’s not always easy to maintain friendships with politicians. To paraphrase Charles Lamb, you have to work at it like some men toil after virtue.

I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm. He is not only a good sport, he is a good, kindhearted man, and he once sat in on drums with ZZ Top. A guy like that can’t be all bad. When I ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006, the Crips and the Bloods ganged up on me. When I lost, I drove off in a 1937 Snit, refusing to concede to Perry. Three days later Rick called to give me a gracious little pep talk, effectively talking me down from jumping off the bridge of my nose. Very few others were calling at that time, by the way. Such is the nature of winning and losing and politicians and life. You might call what Rick did an act of random kindness. Yet in my mind it made him more than a politician, more than a musician; it made him a mensch.

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Until recently, the bookstore at the University of Tennessee sold breath mints in little boxes that had a photograph of Obama on the outside, with the caption: “This is Change? DisappointMINTS”

Talk about honest marketing.

Apparently, the bookstore sold similar mints when George W. Bush was president (the caption on the package then read: “National EmbarssMINTS”).

Anyway, although it was okay for the bookstore to sell “EmbarassMINTS,” Tennessee Representative Joe Armstrong decided it was not okay to sell the “DisappointMINTS.” Thus, after receiving a complaint from one student who was offended by the mints, he personally went into the UT bookstore and told them to pull the mints.

(In case you haven’t figured it out, Armstrong is a Democrat.)

On what grounds did Armstrong do this? On the grounds that the First Amendment doesn’t protect mints, because they’re not “educational” (according to Armstrong). But what Armstrong doesn’t realize is that these mints have become quite educational, inasmuch they drew him out of his hole just long enough to show us how very much the left despises free speech and free expression.

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Our country is in crisis. Not the kind of crisis liberals invent out of mid air but the kind that results from the implementation of their policies and brings a country to its knees (and proves the president a rank amateur and many of the legislators unsuited for office). We are in debt, we have an energy crisis, we have high unemployment, and we’re more worried about whether our enemies think we’re nice that we are with crushing them with our military might.

In a word: times are crazy.

Yet in the middle of all this, I can honestly say I’m still glad John McCain lost.

If you think I’m wrong, just think back to last week, when we were praying conservatives in the House would stand their ground instead of giving in to the establishment and voting for Speaker Boehner’s bill. For standing on their principles, McCain referred to them as “hobbits” and said that theirs “is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.”

For the record, does he not know how much better off we’d be if Angle and O’Donnell had won? (Who wouldn’t trade ten McCains for one Angle and one O’Donnell?)

Please keep in mind that McCain spent every waking moment of his 2010 Senate re-election campaign appealing to the Tea Party for support, claiming he has always been conservative, and campaigning for Angle and other Tea Party candidates.

Yes – he campaigned for her. (He’s as fake as a Milli Vanilli song.)

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A recent “infographic” released by the White House tries to assign the blame for our massive debt and deficits to former President Bush and Republican Congresses.  However, the graphic conveniently omits President Obama’s record and his plans for the fiscal future of our country.  If the President had his way and his Fiscal Year 2012 budget proposal was enacted, here is what a comparison of the increase in public debt would look like:

As the graph above shows, the debt held by the public increased $2.4 trillion between 2000 and 2008, from $3.4 trillion to $5.8 trillion.  Under President Obama’s budget proposal, the debt held by the public is projected to increase $6.1 trillion between 2008 and 2012, from $5.8 trillion to $11.9 trillion.

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The Talmud says: “One should not extravagantly distribute more than one fifth of one’s income to charity.” Are the sages saying there’s a ceiling cap on giving charity? Yes they are, because if everyone were to give too much away there would be too many mouths to feed.

If you have been getting information from the mainstream media you may think tea partiers are forcing Republicans in Congress to; cut the budget so much people will be forced to push grandma’s wheelchair off a cliff or, are trying force the country into default guaranteeing Obama won’t be reelected.

Not true! It’s all about not having too many mouths to feed.

The debt ceiling’s the congressionally approved amount the federal government can borrow. The ceiling is currently set at $14.294 trillion. The country’s debt hit that figure on May 16 and we are currently approaching $14.6 trillion in debt. Thanks to some “re-arranging,” the Treasury Department says we won’t “run out of money” until August 2.

The MSM and progressive politicians report if the debt ceiling isn’t raised by August 2, a biblical-type disaster will occur, wrath of God type stuff; fire and brimstone falling from the skies! Rivers boiling! Earthquakes, volcanoes, Human sacrifice, nothing but Dennis Kuchinich speeches on your TV set … mass hysteria (that premise is false)!

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