UNBELIEVEABLE: Costly IRS mandate slipped into health bill.

A few wording changes to the tax code’s section 6041 regarding 1099 reporting were slipped into the 2000-page health legislation. The changes will force millions of businesses to issue hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of additional IRS Form 1099s every year. It appears to be a costly, anti-business nightmare.

Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress (emphasis added).

So, if as a retiree, I do a little outside consulting and pay my neighbor a few hundred bucks to upgrade my home computer network, I’ll have to send him - and the IRS - a Form 1099 at the end of the year?

15,000 new IRS agents, coming to a neighborhood near you.

Sheesh.

WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE about this guy?

ABOUT THOSE LOWER INSURANCE COSTS WE PROMISED ....
“[W]hy, barely a month later, are Democrats scrambling to pass a new bill that would impose price controls on insurance?”

More taxes? Or more rationing? Most likely, both.

WE THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS. The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt has a theory:

[D.C. voting rights advocates, g]ays, immigrants, union leaders, budget hawks, campaign finance reformers, environmentalists, free-traders, human rights activists and civil libertarians all have had cause to wonder whether they were right to trust Obama. The list is familiar, but the explanation remains disputed.

My theory: The culprit is less ideology than Obama's fidelity to a strategy he can't, for tactical reasons, publicly acknowledge. Given the hand he was dealt, the evidence suggests he resolved that he had to choose only one domestic and one foreign objective for his first two years in office.

As a firm believer in Occam’s razor, I have a simpler [for the progressives, simpler means less nuanced] theory: all the above are wildly unpopular with the majority of the U.S. electorate.

‘OUTRAGED’ BY THE BEATINGS of University of Maryland students, Washington Post reader D. R. Longway thinks police should wear numbers so they can be identified in videos.

Um, given that 24 ‘students’ were arrested in the post-game ‘celebration,’ perhaps the good Mr. Longway would also be willing to require University of Maryland students wear their university ID numbers so that they can likewise be more easily identified by the police when they’re rioting?

SEE THE USA in your (1935) Chevrolet. For those of us who remember Chevy’s “See the USA” television commercials. This one is particularly interesting personally, since my wife’s grandfather worked on the highway from Marathon to Key West.

EARTH DAY, LEFT AND RIGHT. The New York Times
laments the ‘corporatization’ of Earth Day while the Washington Examiner’s Chris Stirewalt observes (scroll down; 4th item):

Writer Leslie Kaufman offers a lamentation on the corporatization of Earth Day and looks at the ways in which big bad capitalists have found ways to make money on the 40-year-old liberal holiday. It’s a sell out, man.

But there’s money to be made from suckers and as NBC, Pepsi and many others know, there’s a great concentration of suckers inside the environmental movement. If companies can get people to pay extra by slapping an “organic” label on something, even if organic often means more pollution, they’re going to go for it.

Kaufman does not, though, explain why it is that so many environmental groups have been willing to become corporate handmaidens. It’s the money. The huge salaries and expenses at liberal scare groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club have created a dependence on corporate contributions. Like their cousins in the racial grievance business, many environmental groups have become shakedown artists who offer protection for a price.

“Protection for a price” - the Mafia goes legit.

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY and he is PowerPoint.

Duh. Where is Obviousman when you need him?

EXTREME GALT: More American expatriates give up citizenship.

THOMAS SOWELL on misusing history.

DOCTORS LOVE OBAMACARE. A flyer taken from my surgeon’s office last week:

Ask Congress to Keep Doctors for Medicare Patients

Dear Patient,

For a Medicare patient, a doctor can mean everything: independence, hope, and security. Medicare makes it possible. For a doctor, treating our patients is everything. We have cared for many of you covered by Medicare for years. We know many of your children and grandchildren – our patients are family. The last thing we want to do is tell our patients that we can no longer care for them. I want to continue taking care of my Medicare patients – that’s why I became a doctor.

Even though the new health care bill promises to cover more patients, some big problems still exist. The health care bill did not fix Medicare - ;the government’s largest health care program.

Congress must fix Medicare now, so that you and other Medicare patients can have the doctors you need when you’re sick. You deserve to receive the care you’ve been promised. Congress MUST focus on this problem. Congress must finally fix a problem it has been putting off for more than 10 years,

A statewide effort now is underway to collect 1 million signatures. The petition drive is asking Congress to stop the Medicare meltdown so patients can choose their doctors and the doctors can stay in the program. However, due to government regulations, I cannot collect your signature on a petition. So instead, I'm sharing the information with you.

Go to www.ipetitions.com/petition/meltdown. Tell Congress to continue its work. Tell Congress to fix the crumbling foundation of our health care system.

Oh, and I signed the petition.

FIXING CALIFORNIA. Victor Davis Hanson on what it would take:

[W]e would have to close the borders; adopt English immersion in our schools; give up on the salad bowl and return to the melting pot; assimilate, intermarry, and integrate legal immigrants; curb entitlements and use the money to fix infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc.; build 4-5 new damns to store water in wet years; update the canal system; return to old policies barring public employee unions; redo pension contracts; cut about 50,000 from the public employee roles; lower income taxes from 10% to 5% to attract businesses back; cut sales taxes to 7%; curb regulations to allow firms to stay; override court orders now curbing cost-saving options in our prisons by systematic legislation; start creating material wealth from our forests; tap more oil, timber, natural gas, and minerals that we have in abundance; deliver water to the farmland we have; build 3-4 nuclear power plants on the coast; adopt a traditional curriculum in our schools; insist on merit pay for teachers; abolish tenure; encourage not oppose more charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling; give tax breaks to private trade and business schools; reinstitute admission requirements and selectivity at the state university system; take unregistered cars off the road; make UC professors teach a class or two more each year; abolish all racial quotas and preferences in reality rather than in name; build a new all weather east-west state freeway over the Sierra; and on and on.

With a few adjective changes, there’s nothing on the list that doesn’t apply to the U.S.A as a whole and every state within it.

A YEAR AGO the president promised us $100M in budget cuts. Here's what those budget cuts looked like in the context of the 2009 federal budget.

It gives new meaning to the phrase 'a drop in the bucket' doesn't it?

And since then we've had Stimulus II and ObamaCare.

God help us all; Obama sure won't.

WHAT A ‘LARGELY PEACEFUL’ DEMONSTRATION LOOKS LIKE. Hint - it’s not a Tea Party.