Actual Death Tax...

...forces postponement of bullshit, Ponzi-scheme, GOP “death tax”.

I have marked this day on my calendar for Two – count ‘em Two! – reasons.

First, the always watchable darrelplant at this site reminds us all of the tragic fact that, as of today, the Global Something-or-other on Whateverthefuck we are Fighting has now lasted longer than the entire American Civil War.

From the day American traitors began shelling Fort Sumter to the day they were brought to book at Appomattox, more time than that has now elapsed between 9/11 and now...

As the first, few rays of light shone into the world marking what no one really realized at the time to be the Dawn of modern, mechanized warfare the Union fought and won a bloody continent-wide war before GPS, Predator Drones, “chatter”, internal combustion, the internet, steel navies, cruise missiles, APCs, air travel of any kind, thermobaric weapons, night vision...

Before America was a Superpower or a Hyperpower...

Before Mark Twain had written Huckleberry Finn...

Before women could vote...

And yet here we are, stranded on the cheap and bleeding to death one teaspoon at a time in the deserts of Iraq by our lethally incompetent leaders, while the man that actually made war on us walks free and easy and laughs and laughs.

Wanna take odds whether or not, if Abraham Lincoln had been President these last sorry and sad four years, Osama Bin Laden’s head would long ago have be on a pike in the Rose Garden?

Conversely, if George McClellan had had a brain-damaged wastrel brother, and that clown had been commander-in-chief, perhaps we would have responded to Fort Sumter by invading Peru. And perhaps four years into the war Jeff Davis would be sitting comfortably in a mansion in Florida, sending mocking letters to White House, while freshly-radicalized Peruvians streamed across the border to fight and die for him under the Stars and Bars.

The second reason I’m marking my date-book is this...

A tax repeal is blown off course
Floyd Norris International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2005
...
Hurricane Katrina may have cost very wealthy Americans a lot of money.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it may have cost their heirs a lot of money.

The cost came not from the direct effect of the disaster. It came because the hurricane's impact on the poor people who remained in New Orleans made it politically unattractive for the Senate to vote on repealing the estate tax this week.

Such a vote is still possible in the congressional session, however, and if that does not pass there is some speculation that a compromise to slash estate tax rates by two-thirds might be approved.

The estate tax affects a surprisingly small number of people. In 2003, the most recent numbers available, just 1.25 percent of all deaths resulted in taxable estates, with most of them paying relatively little. But 505 estates, each worth more than $20 million, paid $5.2 billion, a quarter of the money raised by the estate tax.

...

Repeal will have no impact at all on the vast majority of people, but you wouldn't know that if you lived in a state with a wavering senator.

...
To its supporters, it takes money from those most able to afford it and may discourage an idle rich class composed of those who inherited wealth rather than created it.

But it is also a revenue raiser, and that is important now, with deficits already large before the costs of the disaster on the Gulf Coast are counted.

Repealing the estate tax would reduce government revenue by about $280 billion from 2011 to 2015 - a large part of it from the estates of the superwealthy.

It is to be hoped that when the Senate does take up the bill, advocates will explain why it is a good idea to cut taxes on the very wealthy at a time of great need for many, rather than paint the bill as helping family farmers, few of whom pay the tax now. If that happens, then a real benefit will have come from a disaster

Let’s be very clear: the Estate Tax benefits the same super-ooper-duper wealthy who own a large party of the Republican Party and who feel it is their God Given right to use the rest of the Earth as their ass-floss.

The elimination of the Estate Tax is very simply the philosophy of the GOP writ large: that Government is Evil and needs to be destroyed. Make no mistake, that is the ideology that runs straight through Grover Nordquist, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove and Tim McVeigh.

McVeigh was just too quick on the trigger, and didn’t understand the Big Picture, which is to crash the whole system. To nuke the Federal Government with so much debt and so many tax cuts that it simply collapses...at which point a coalition of fascist oligarchs and Christopath theocrats can simply take over and picnic on the remains of the nation that so many millions have given their lives to protect and build.

What the rank and file Republicans are either too deeply retarded to understand – or secretly approve of – is the fact that the obliteration of the moral and governmental levee between fascism and democracy is not by accident or mistake: That Is The Plan. To build a stupid, loyal base who will knee-jerkedly bark out the phrase “Government is the problem” like the trained seals that they are every time someone suggest that maybe giving tax breaks go billionaires while there are bills to pay and streets to pave is ludicrous.

And now Katrina has kicked open the door on the Big Plan prematurely and shown the world the depraved, crawly horror that the Republican Party calls an ideology.

The most recent and glaring example of the contempt with which the GOP hold America was churned to the surface by Katrina: the complete incompetence at the very top of the government by men who never were qualified to run a fucking thing to begin with, and so ran like maniacs on the single plank of Keeping You Safe. Period.

“Dubya,” the reasoning among the Moderates went, “may be as dumb as a bag of hammer, and I may think that just turning the country over to Ken Lay, James Dobson and assorted Chinese Bankers is a bad thing, but shit, I got me a $600 cash-money tax cut and Dubya’ll damned sure keep me and my whole retarded family safe enough to spend it before his buddies fuck it up forever.”

Turns out, however, the Fucknut-in-Chief in turn appointed his equally mentally underperforming buddies to some REALLY important jobs who, in turn, appointed a whole entourage of fluffers and failed shoe salesmen to the job of keeping your family safe from ruin.

Which, my Moderate pals, is just one of the jillions of chickens coming home to roost for which you have yourselves – and only yourselves -- to blame. After all, YOU anointed as your President the most crave, cowardly and inept man in American political history ever to hold the job, not once but twice. So if you can sleep at night knowing you put a dry-drunk half-wit into the Oval Office, why the fuck shouldn’t he turn right around and slot his own laundry list of fuckups-to-whom-I-owe-favors into one vital position after another.

This is tantamount to putting Rush in charge of guarding your stash of Hillbilly Heroin, and then getting all bent when you come back, it's gone, and he’s passed out in the hot tub, bleeding freely from the nose, with a dozen high-priced Brazilian shemale hookers. Or don’t you get yet that this is a DIRECT consequence of putting people in charge of the government who told you long ago they believe in the destruction of that very government?

The same people who believe that at a time of groaning debt and a disasterous foreign adventure that is bleeding us white...that's the perfect time to drain several hundred billion dollars out of the exchequer and into the pockets of the ludicrously wealthy.

It would be hard to imagine something at a civic level more perverse and irresponsible than that....but thanks the fact that Republicans are being bred with their consciences stillborn these days, the GOP almost got away with it.

And then came Katrina.

What last week showed was how vital government is – competent, fully-funded government.

Last week showed what happens when you are lulled into thinking that stupid people can run things as well as smart people because they have been trained to bleat out the right slogans.

Last week showed that there are vast numbers of people who have been completely abandoned by the social contract. Mind you, deep in their hearts, Neocons shed no more tears for a few thousand poor, dead, black people in NOLA that they shed for a few hundred thousand poor, dead, brown people in Iraqi.

But to see the merciless Neocon calculus of rich and poor being worked out on television in front of several billion people...and then to turn right around and argue that what the dead and abandoned of this country need is LESS help -- what the government needs if FEWER resources -- and that our legislative sweat should be expended stuffing a few more pfennigs into the already packed pockets of the few Americans who would have summoned fleets of private jets and helicopters to get the out of the way of Katrina should they have needed it...well that was just a leeeetle too much bright light and bad P.R. for even the lie-masters who run the GOP to spin into gold.

Perhaps the capacity for Republicans to uncritically gobble down raw feces from their leaders and swear to Almighty God that it's pun'kin pie actually as a limit?

Maybe their widdle tummies are getting full?

So that it the second thing I’m marking on my calendar: that today was the day that the grunting whores of the GOP were actually shamed into postponing the execution of another morally bankrupt ideological milestone on the road to Hell.

And all it took was the complete obliteration of a major American city and the deaths of God knows how many thousands broadcast live on television.