Loopholes & Loopheads

The not-quite-in-the-grave-yet Robert Novak does his part today to try and deflect the onrushing Obamanation express by picking up one of the avalanche of golden opportunities that John McCain is ignoring:

How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that John McCain claimed in the first presidential debate September 26 in Oxford, Mississippi, that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were elected president? Obama replied, by “closing tax loopholes.”

Obama was no more specific in the debate, and tax experts doubt that structural changes without increasing taxes can raise anything close to that amount of money. …

Obama has made clear that he would try to roll back President Bush’s tax cuts, but that does not come under the definition of a “loophole.” A loophole consists of a conniving tax attorney discovering a weakness in the Internal Revenue Code or such a weakness intentionally legislated by Congress under the instigation of crafty lobbyists. The only specific tax legislation contained in Obama’s paper would raise the capital gains rate for most shareholders, restore taxation on dividend income to pre-Bush standards and restore the full estate tax.

In other words, B.O. is going to raise EVERY tax that EVERY taxpayer pays through the roof to try and pay for the mammoth gusher of domestic spending he pretends he's going to "defer" in light of the Wall Street "rescue plan" but will tack on after the election.  Or, in still other words, he's going to confiscate more and more of less and less and borrow the rest - in order to "put our economy back on track"!

Yet in the first debate he claimed he's going to "cut taxes for 95% of Americans" (by stealing it from Big Oil, thus driving energy prices, and therefore ALL prices, still higher, more than offsetting another blizzard of token "rebate" checks) and "close loopholes".

Ensign Ed thinks Obama doesn't know a "loophole" from his asshole.  I think he was just tapping the same meaningless rhetorical well that produced the "cutting waste and fraud (and....earmarks)" cliche that Big Government types use when they want to put themselves over as "fiscal conservatives".  And, of course, McCain let him get away with it.

Sailor could have put a nuclear torpedo right in Barry's amidships with a single line:

"Senator Obama talks about closing tax loopholes yielding hundreds of billions of dollars of additional tax revenues.  Does that come from the same line of thinking that prompted him to claim that proper tire inflation on the cars of millions of working class Americans will save billions of barrels of the oil he doesn't want us to drill for in our own country, which would provide millions of new jobs to offset the ones that will be destroyed by the Wall Street financial crisis his party's policies and resistance to regulatory oversight created?"

Instead, we got more blathering about "earmarks".  It's enough to make projectile vomiting seem like a mildly diverting hobby by comparison.

Bidenpropisms used to be another highly diverting hobby, back when it still mattered.  Here's Slow Joe's latest verbal shitfacedness:

Joe Biden honestly believes that the decision in Roe vs. Wade is “as close to a consensus that can exist in a society as heterogeneous as ours.”

Were Ifill not on the take, a decent question would be, "Senator Biden, are you really completely unaware of the raging abortion debate in this country for the past thirty-five years? If this is "consensus," what would "division" look like? By your standards, did this nation have a "mild disagreement" over secession [and slavery] from 1861 to 1865?"

Support for Roe v. Wade has ranged from 62% to 49% since 1973; opposition has ranged from 28% to 48%. One third of Democrats oppose it.

If ANYbody is set up to bludgeon Senator Rogaine about the head and shoulders for this lunatic doggerrell, it's Sarah Baracuda.  Question is, will Gwen Ifill let her - and have her McCainiac handlers told her to let that go "in the spirit of bipartisanship"?