How Looming Tax Hikes Would Hit Typical Families

A variety of tax cuts enacted during the tenures of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama expire at the end of December. Expiring provisions include Bush-era cuts on wage and investment income and cuts for married couples and families with children. Also expiring is a 2 percentage point temporary payroll tax cut.


A look the tax increases facing typical families:

—A married couple with two children and an income of $100,000 would pay $7,935 in income taxes and $5,650 in payroll taxes this year, for a total federal tax burden of $13,585. Next year, they would face income taxes of $11,919 and payroll taxes of $7,650, for a total federal tax burden of $19,569, a total tax increase of $5,984.

CONTINUED:  http://cowboybyte.com/13139/how-looming-tax-hikes-would-hit-typical-families/

Obama's media

April 11, 2011


Have you ever asked yourself the question: How in the world does Barack Hussein Obama get away with the things he does and the decisions he makes without even a peep from the mainstream media?


Obama has sat back and watched the price of gasoline double since he took office; he put 87,000 oil workers in the gulf out of work with an arbitrary stroke of the pen and doubled the national debt without a word of explanation. The press reported nothing more than his brilliance in these matters.

With the help of the wicked witch of San Francisco, he destroyed the best health-care system in the world while ignoring the will of the people. He sent U.S. Air Force equipment and personnel to bomb Libya without congressional approval, and the press heralded him as a great humanitarian. Never mind that half the world believed he should return his Nobel Peace Prize. Where was the critical analysis from the press so essential to a free and open democracy?

Mr. Obama spent hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars taking his wife to New York for "Date Night," wiped out secured creditors at General Motors while pouring billions of dollars into union-thug accounts. He even cracked jokes at the expense of handicapped children from the Special Olympics. All that didn't even raise as much as an eyebrow from the New York Times.

Of course, the press would not think to bring up one of Barack Hussein Obama's BFFs, Jeff Immelt from G.E. Immelt and his company received billions of dollars in loans and tax refunds while creating billions of profit for his corporation. The same crony Mr. Obama appointed to the Economic Recovery Advisory Council and the White House Council on Jobs. The same one! Yet the "journalists" at Time and Newsweek make no mention of the connection. Wouldn't you say there is at least a whiff of conflict of interest in that General Electric and Immelt are big donors to Barack Hussein Obama?

I don't have enough column space to mention the dozens of stupid or nefarious things this president has done without a peep of explanation as to why. Can any of us ever forget our president bowing the the Saudi king or state he had "been to all 57 states." I doubt there is one Marine who will ever forget when Mr. Obama referred to the Marine Corps as the Marine CORPSE. Unless those Marines now serve in the press.

If memory serves, I never saw any scrutiny of the president filling his Cabinet with tax cheats, appointing 32 czars who report only to him or how the president could summarily fire the head of a public company with the simple stroke of the executive pen. Nope, not a mention.

You would think some of the greenie weenies from the left over at the New York Times or MSNBC would have mentioned the inherent hypocrisy of burning 9,000 gallons of jet fuel on Air Force One to plant a tree on Earth Day, wouldn't you? But once again, not a peep.

Of course, who could ever forget the brilliant move of our grand leader when he ordered Air Force One, accompanied by fighter jets, for the famed joy ride, flying so low over downtown Manhattan it caused widespread terror and rekindled very bad memories for its citizens. Now that for sure should have made the headlines, don't you think? It didn't.

So why is he allowed to get away with all of this?

Just ask Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Who could ever forget when Bill Clinton decided to hold Barack Hussein Obama accountable for what were clearly inaccurate statements and flat-out lies. Here is a little excerpt from the town-hall meeting:

BILL CLINTON: "You [Barack Obama] said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution, you said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war, and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004, and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since. Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

He went on to refer to Barack Obama as a kid.

That was the same town hall Mr. Clinton pointed out the slurs Barack Obama directed at Hillary about being the "senator from Punjab." Mr. Clinton was viscerally angry for the lies and distortions and made it clear. He dared to challenge the lack of honesty coming from the upstart from Chicago.

What did that get Mr. Clinton?


The charge of being a racist. How ironic considering many dubbed Clinton our first "black" president. Mr. Clinton was painted with this brush by many Obama worshippers in the press and Team Obama. How dare Clinton attempt to hold the junior senator from Illinois accountable. How dare Clinton raise a standard of honesty against the anointed one. The media had already chosen the next president. Who in the world did Bill Clinton think he was to question the one who walked on water? The chosen bearer of "hope and change"?

Mr. Obama will not be held accountable now or in the future for the same reason everyone in America backed off after that town-hall meeting – including challenger John McCain who would not question Obama for fear of being deemed a racist as well, the most feared smear in America.

As we get closer to the next election, expect to see this Obama tactic reappear.

Just imagine for a moment what George W. Bush would have been put through if he had made the same mistakes or unconstitutional moves. George Bush stopped playing golf when the troops were on the ground. Mr. Obama began. But I won't belabor the point. The double standard exists, and its seems we are all powerless to challenge it.

I only hope this election America becomes color blind to racism. The recent visit with Al Sharpton on the same week Obama launched his 2012 re-election bid was not a coincidence. These events were planned by design – a design that has made this president the "Kevlar President."

Our only hope is America will judge Mr. Obama in November of 2012 by the content of his character and not the color of his skin.


Craig R. Smith is an author, commentator and popular media guest because he instantly engages audiences with his common-sense analyses of local, national and global trends. Serving as CEO of Swiss America for over 25 years, Craig understands that Americans want solid answers to the tough questions and that real leadership begins with servanthood. Craig's most recent book is "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse," which he co-authored with Lowell Ponte. For media interviews please call Bronwin Barilla at 800-950-2428.


http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=285565

Larry Elder

The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush

The WikiLeaks de facto declassification of privileged material makes it case closed: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- and intended to restart his program once the heat was off.


President George W. Bush, in the 2003 State of the Union address, uttered the infamous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson sprang into action and, in an op-ed piece, in effect wrote, "No, the Cheney administration sent me to investigate the allegation -- and I found it without merit."

Put aside that Wilson's CIA-employed wife, not the evil Vice President Dick Cheney -- as Wilson implied -- sent him on the African errand. Put aside that the British still stand by the intelligence on which Bush made the claim. And put aside that the anti-Bush Washington Post, in an editorial, concluded that Wilson had lied about not finding evidence to support the Iraq-in-Africa-for-uranium claim, since he told the CIA the opposite when he reported back from Africa.

Bush claimed that Iraq sought uranium, specifically "yellowcake." What is yellowcake, and why would its presence or attempted acquisition corroborate the nearly unanimous assumption that Saddam possessed WMD?

The Associated Press called yellowcake "the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment" and said that it "also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment."

"Bush and Iraq: Follow the Yellow Cake Road" headlined a euphoric Time magazine July 2003 piece -- written when the Bush administration began backtracking from the Iraq-sought-uranium-from-Africa claim. Time said no yellowcake equals no WMD equals bogus basis for war.

The article led with this ripper: "Is a fib really a fib if the teller is unaware that he is uttering an untruth? That question appears to be the basis of the White House defense, having now admitted a falsehood in President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa."

Time hoisted (the now discredited) Joe Wilson on its shoulders as The Man Who Told the Truth to Power: "Just last weekend, the man sent by the CIA to check out the Niger story broke cover and revealed that he had thoroughly debunked the allegation many months before President Bush repeated it." Never mind that the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Wilson's report "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal" sought by Iraq in Niger.

Let's recap.

Bush, in building the case for war against Iraq, lied to the nation. He falsely claimed that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake from Africa. Time magazine specifically referred to the yellowcake "lie" in accusing Bush of fabricating the case for war. Therefore, were Iraq to have had yellowcake -- an assertion called a "lie" -- it would have confirmed the presence of WMD, giving credence to Bush's declaration of Iraq as a "grave and gathering threat."


But ... there ... was ... yellowcake. This brings us back to WikiLeaks.

Wired magazine's contributing editor Noah Shachtman -- a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution -- researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here's what he found: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House's staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks' newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). ... Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict -- and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq -- on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels -- what even The Associated Press called "the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program": 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: "The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. ... To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam ... would have been too big a risk."

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake -- the WMD Bush supposedly lied about -- a WMD. It was, well, old. It was degraded. It was not what we think of when we think of WMD. Really? Square that with what former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said in April 2004: "There were no weapons of mass destruction." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow goes even further, insisting, against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that "Saddam Hussein was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction"!

Bush, hammered by the insidious "Bush Lied, People Died" mantra, endured one of the most vicious smears against any president in history. He is owed an apology.

When Hollywood makes "The Vindication of George W. Bush," maybe Sean Penn can play the lead.

Subject: If George Bush was an idiot

FOR ALL THE BUSH HATERS & OBAMA LOVERS


Every statement in this email is factual and directly attributable to Barrack Hussein Obama. Every bumble is a matter of record and completely verifiable.

If George W. Bush had doubled the national debt, which had taken more than  two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had criticized a state law that he admitted he never even read, would you think that he is just an ignorant hot head?

If George W. Bush joined the country of Mexico and sued a state in the United States to force that state to continue to allow illegal immigration, would you question his patriotism and wonder who's side he was on?

If George W. Bush had put 87000 workers out of work by arbitrarily placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling because of one company, would you  have agreed?

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a TelePrompTer installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is
really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non- existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the U. S, would you have said that he is clueless?.

If George W. Bush had flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas, would you have thought he was a self important, conceited, & an egotistical jerk?

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to the 5th of May- ("Cinco de Mayo") as "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador, and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?

If George W. Bush's administration had okayed Air Force Two flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get what happened on 9-11?

If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims thru out the midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

If George W. Bush created the position of 32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in America, would you have approved?.

If George W. Bush ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? He's done all this in 18 months-so you'll have more than two years to come up with an answer.

Every statement in this email is factual and directly attributable to Barrack Hussein Obama. Every bumble is a matter of record and completely verifiable.