The title says it all

I have had my differences with Dick Morris over the years, but the title of his latest column absolutely nails it.

In Obama Soaks the Rich: Churches, Day Care, Homeless Shelters, Soup Kitchens he takes on the Messiah’s brilliant plan to reduce charitable donation deductions:

President Obama’s glib assertion that his reduction in tax deductions will not reduce donations is absurd. His pathetic defense at his press conference — that he would still give a $100 dollar check even if he got $11 less of tax deduction from it was both disingenuous and beside the point.

And his comment that his reduced deduction would only affect 1 percent or 2 percent of the nation misses the point that it is these folks who are doing almost half of the donating.

In 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, 4 million taxpayers had adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or more. They comprised 3 percent of the tax returns, made 31 percent of the income, but donated 44 percent of all charitable contributions. Together, they provided charity with $81 billion in that year. (emph added)

I worked for The Salvation Army for 20 years and I can tell you from firsthand experience that those large donors play a critical role in the ability of the Army to provide the myriad of services to the poor and downtrodden that the Messiah claims to care so much about.  If those who are well off significantly reduce their donations, which is an obvious and easily foreseeable result of the proposed tax change, the Army and other groups like it providing those services are going to be even more hard pressed to come up with necessary funding than they are already.

Morris goes on to identify the likely real motive behind this:

It is totally dishonest for Obama to pretend that his curtailment of these deductions won’t hurt the poor. It will most directly impact them since most of the charities Obama is hurting focus on helping the impoverished.

This proposal is not about saving money. It is about controlling it — by, in effect, transferring at least $11 billion a year from private philanthropy to government spending, Obama empowers the public sector at the expense of the voluntary one.

President Obama’s recommended reduction in the tax deduction for charitable giving reflects his fundamental belief that only the government can or should help the poor. He wants to keep the impoverished directly dependent on the government — and the Democratic Party — for their daily bread.

The voluntary sector has always been the backbone of compassion in the United States. Our charitable donations dwarf those of any other country. And our system of tax deductions for giving permits us to decide what charities are worthy of our generosity — a decision Obama will transfer to the politicians under his program.

That’s the bottom line… it’s really about power!  Just as liberals can’t trust people to spend their own money “properly”,  so socialists like Obama can’t trust the voluntary sector to spend donations “properly” and only the nanny state knows how it should be done.

George Orwell was stunningly right in his decription of government in 1984… his timeline was just off by 25 years!

Pot, meet kettle

Which way is up?

I see two possibilities: either he doesn’t know what he’s doing and that’s scary or he knows exactly what he’s doing and tanking the economy deliberately and that’s scarier still!

Showing their true colors – Part 2

From The American Thinker blog:

European Hypocrisy in a Nutshell

Clarice Feldman
Europeans who offered to help us close Gitmo with promises to help resettle the prisoners in their countries reportedly are (surprise!) having second thoughts. Tom Maguire especially likes this part of the New York Times article:

The Bush administration often failed when it asked other countries to accept detainees, partly because those requests were usually accompanied by public comments defending the imprisonments by describing the detainees as dangerous terrorists.

The new administration is sending a different message. “We are less vested in trying to prove that these people are rightly held,” the senior State Department official said.

Given that stance by the Obama administration, some European officials say Washington’s focus on sending the detainees to Europe raises many questions.

Germany’s interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has suggested publicly that if Guantánamo detainees pose no security risk, there is no reason the United States should not take them.

Let’s see – if the prisoners are dangerous, Europe doesn’t want them; if they are not dangerous, the US ought to keep or release them.

I think it represents European hypocrisy in a nutshell.

Anyone with any capacity to reason knew the complaints about Gitmo constituted nothing more than cost free America and Bush bashing. If they were dumb to catch on then, here it is.

Showing their true colors

Here is part of the statement recently released by a number of the “poor mistreated” detainees at Gitmo:

“We are terrorists to the bone,” the Guantanamo detainees proclaimed. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and his four comrades consider the charges that they slaughtered nearly 3,000 Americans to be “badges of honor, which we carry with pride.”  In a six-page document released by a military judge, the men swear that America will fall like “the towers on the blessed 9/11 day.”

Jonah Goldberg goes on in The Gitmo Five’s Burn Notice to make a very apt comparison of these vicious men to Heath Ledger’s Joker character in The Dark Knight.

Back to Dark Knight. In that movie, the Joker — brilliantly played by the late Heath Ledger — isn’t interested in mere criminality. In an ingenious scene, he pours gasoline on an enormous pile of cash and sets it ablaze. Why? Because he doesn’t need money. The things he needs — guns, dynamite, gunpowder — he can get cheaply enough. The Joker wants to send the message that he’s not just a criminal, that “everything burns.”

…Of course, we have bad men in prison who aren’t terrorists and who are just as evil, just as unredeemable, just as willing to take pride in the suffering and fear they dole out.

But for these men, it isn’t an ideology. It isn’t a war. It isn’t a sacred cause. The Guantanamo Five aren’t gangsters, and they aren’t criminals. Criminals usually kill people to get cash. Terrorists get money so they can kill people. Criminals do evil to get pleasure. Terrorists eschew worldly pleasure to do evil. Bank robbers may strap bombs to themselves, but they do it to terrorize tellers into handing over the money. Terrorists skip that part and go straight to blowing themselves up.

These are the people that the bleeding hearts want to put into our regular criminal justice system and give them all the protections of not just the Geneva Convention, but, ultimately, the rights and protections of the US Constitution they are hellbound to destroy.  I seem to remember a rather liberal Supreme Court justice with enough sense to comment that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

Too bad so many of his current disciples don’t seem to understand that!

The Inconvenient Truth

Victor Davis Hanson has another excellent article today demonstrating what it might have sounded like if Obama had actually been honest with the American people before the election about what he truly was going to do once in office.

See Now Obama Tells Us.