Interesting Places on the Intertubes

A roundup and link dump, all in one!  So you won’t have to!

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity

Americans for Tax Reform

The Cato Institute

Go on!

New Taxes Hit 1/1/11

January 1, 2011, will see a massive increase in taxes and reduction in tax breaks, including:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief …

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. …

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes …

Mug tip to Power Line.

Yeah, go on, while you can still afford to do so.

Riehl Warning to the GOP

Dan Riehl warns the establishment GOP:

…

A big part of my thinking in coming to DC was to try and help to create a synergy between the Right on-line and the establishment GOP. I had hoped to forestall anything like an insurgency from the Right by finding common ground. What I didn’t realize is that today’s GOP is interested in no such thing. It can’t hear anyone outside the Beltway echo chamber and isn’t interested in listening to them even if they could.

And I don’t believe today’s Beltway entrenched GOP is going to bring about the kind of change America needs. The leadership is weak, wasteful, misguided and out of sync with the people. The signs are all there, from Dede Scozzafava, to Charlie Crist – and worse.

And even if they reclaim this, or that majority in the fall, we will most likely see the same old politics as usual that so frustrated the Right under Bush. You don’t really believe they are going to repeal ObamaCare and tell millions of people expecting health insurance at taxpayer expense they can’t have it, do you? That will be politically imprudent to our Beltway ensconced GOP.

Illegal immigration? Led by soon to be ex-border cop John McCain, assuming he’s re-elected, they will be calling us racists and haters, again. They have to worry about that Hispanic vote, after all.

… Today’s Republican Party is broken and corrupt. And they are not my friend, any more than they are yours. They are only interested in themselves.

…

Preach it, Dan!

Go on!

New Class from Telos

Well, not a journal I’d usually pick up, but Kenneth Anderson over at the Volokh Conspiracy recommends this article at Telos, and it is an interesting one.  Here’s the first paragraph:

The paradigm of a “new class” originated in socialist Eastern Europe among dissidents and other regime critics as a way to describe the ensconced stratum of managers, technocrats, and ideologues who controlled the levers of power. The rhetorical irony of the phrase depended on the implied contrast with an “old class” as well as the good old class theory of the orthodox Marxism that once served as the established dogma of half the world. The history of class struggle, which had been history altogether, had culminated in the victory of a proletarian class that in turn had ushered in—or was well on its way to ushering in—a classless society. Or so the grand narrative went. To talk of a “new class,” then, conjured up the unquestionable epistemology of class analysis, while simultaneously challenging the notional outcome: instead of the end of the state and classlessness, one was stuck with police states and a new class that, while eminently cooler than the Bolsheviks of yore, still exercised a dictatorship (of the not-proletariat) while skimming off the benefits of unequal power. The phrase turned Marxism against Marxism during those decades when the fall of the Berlin Wall was not even imaginable.

Go on!

The Turtlenecked Hairshirt

DING-DING-DING We have a winner, folks!

I don’t think our prescriptions for a cure would necessarily be the same, but the diagnosis seems spot on to me:

The problem is not the humanities as a discipline (who can blame a discipline?), the problem is its members. We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.

Humanists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dreamworld, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.

Humanism does not deserve to carry the standard for humans, for frankly it despises them.

Read the whole thing, folks.  The man is on a rampage.

Oh, go on!

Quick Politics Link Roundup

Two lists of proposed objectives for conservatives:

The American Spectator

Valley of the Shadow

And On The Issues, which tracks politicians’ records and offers an interesting political graph for each one (and for readers if they want to take their quiz).

Go on!

Random Things Worth Noting

Backwoods Home Magazine – self-reliance is a good set of skills to have.

Dems rule the campus

Police SWAT teams in Maryland and our psycho laws

Update – New Links:

Reason on Economic Suicide

Harvard economist Robert J. Barro: Government spending is no free lunch

Go on.

Collected July 4 TEA Party Links

Re TEA Party

Tea Party Day

PajamasTV’s Coverage

One week to go and not nearly as much hype. Will I go again as media? Or should I make a sign and protest? Methinks I have not protested nearly enough, but I’ll decide when the time comes.

Go on!

Night of the Living (Dead) Government

Horror screenplay writer Andrew Klavan nails it in this funny episode of Klavan on the Culture: Night of the Living Government.

Go on!

America Is Doomed, or, Our Looterocracy

As GM and Chrysler swirl around the drain, California leaps into the sink after them. The decision was made long ago, of course – the voters refusal to raise taxes is quite justified. Tell me, wouldn’t California’s rags to riches to excess to broke make a great movie?

Politicians: the Looter Class. No matter the question their answer is always Give me more, more, more! Well, loot the rich and the rich leave. Game theory has told us that for some time now, and Doc Russia gives an example in the medical profession. The Looter Class: our idiocrats. And, I always thought it was rank hypocrisy that caused Aerosmith to cut the song Eat the Rich. Do they really think, with all their millions and fame, that they are one of us? Please.

America seems to be in some big trouble, and all our leaders are doing is rearranging deck chairs and looting the ship’s silver. We need a new class of politicians. I’m hoping the Tea Parties start raising some, but we aren’t going to be nearly ready to entirely replace the House and 1/3 of the Senate in 2010. We won’t even be close, but that’s what is needed.

Oh.  Go on.  What else are you going to do?