Doctor Frankenstein's social experiments

Senator Harkin of Iowa wants to allow disabled Americans into our armed forces:

[Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa] wants to push [providing disabled individuals with equality under the law] even further, including an amendment in a Senate draft of the annual defense appropriations bill last week that would require the military to study the possibility of allowing disabled individuals to enlist in the military in non-combat and support roles.

“The military now permits individuals to remain on active duty if they acquire a disability while serving their country,” Harkin said during an appropriations hearing July 17. “However, for a person with a similar disability who wants to enlist in the military and be a part of our defense establishment, they would not allow that, even if they needed the same reasonable accommodations.”

The Defense Department already follows federal law mandating “reasonable accommodations” for disabled civilian employees, but no such exceptions are made for enlistees.

“They're not going to be combat people, but we have a lot of people with disabilities who are lawyers who would like to enter the JAG Corps and be a part of our military,” Harkin said. “For every one combat person, there are 10 behind them.”

Meanwhile far from D.C. tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are inundating our borders ever since Obama advertised the big open bar party on the northern side of the border. When you ask who's to blame for the border crisis, all you get is deflection and talking points. The Democrats wanted this. Don't think for one minute that this insanity isn't by design.

Nearly a year before President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis on the border, a team of experts arrived at the Fort Brown patrol station in Brownsville, Tex., and discovered a makeshift transportation depot for a deluge of foreign children.

Thirty Border Patrol agents were assigned in August 2013 to drive the children to off-site showers, wash their clothes and make them sandwiches. As soon as those children were placed in temporary shelters, more arrived. An average of 66 were apprehended each day on the border and more than 24,000 cycled through Texas patrol stations in 2013. In a 41-page report to the Department of Homeland Security, the team from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) raised alarms about the federal government’s capacity to manage a situation that was expected to grow worse.

Meanwhile in your own neighborhoods and at your local orphanage and foster-homes It's apparently the age of inclusion. Queue the hippy music. You want to get married to a consenting adult? Two consenting adults, three? Polygamy? Incest? You want to marry your sister? We don't care! Have a ball!

Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and "unnatural" but is now widely accepted.

He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.

"A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now 'available', not having [a] sexual partner," the judge said.

"If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you'd invariably have, they would say it's unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone."

America's services—schools, welfare programs, emergency medicine, and sundry social services of one kind or another—are sort of like an open bar where the drinks are free for those who're invited. Invitees are permitted to partake of the refreshments at will. The people legally here are welcome. They're expected. They paid the entrance fee, or their parents did. But, what happens when you let legions of party crashers willy-nilly into your open bar? Vandalism, hooliganism, violence, broken furniture, fires, is what you get and worst of all you also run out of booze. A party where the bar-stools are all kindling, the jukebox is smashed, and the open bar has no more booze, is about as entertaining as a quadriplegic prostitute.

I'm blind in one eye. I have been since a car accident that happened when I was twenty years old. The various armed forces wouldn't allow me to sign up with my almost insignificant disability. If you think about it, you only shoot with one eye anyway so what was the big deal? The lesson from 300 is a good place to start.



The key phrase that Leonidas explained to Efialtes was this: "We fight as a single impenetrable unit." If I was a soldier and I failed to see something because of my blindness or failed to catch something that had been thrown to me because of my poor depth perception and either of those sorts of failures caused the death or injury of a fellow soldier or soldiers, then how would those who allowed me to sign up explain their decision?

Our soldiers fight as a single unit. They expect each man to do his job. It doesn't get more life and death than a battlefield, so how can anyone justify allowing our armed forces to be compromised with a bunch of weak links? It therefore baffles me that that our politically correct leaders have sprinkled our military with a selection of weak links.

The way they've sissified basic training is an example of misguided policy makers making fair-seeming decisions with unintended yet terrible consequences. Women, homosexuals, and now disabled will all be handed an M-16 and ushered onto some battlefield, somewhere. What's wrong with that you ask? For those of you who ask "why not?", I'll ask you just this one question. What if the managers of your favorite NFL football team make the decision to put women, transsexuals, and even cripples on the line of scrimmage? Well, are you okay with that? And even if you are, do you think the other players on the team will go for it? They play as a unit. If a weak-link keeps letting the defensive tackles breeze by and the quarterback keeps getting sacked and at some point injured, what then?

What about all these "social experiments" regarding marriage? We hear the phrase "social experiment" all the time and it just sort of flies by without triggering any emotional reflex. Social experiment ... ho-hum ... yawn. Here's a social experiment for you: Get a 45 caliber revolver and load all six chambers. Then carry the gun to your kindergarten son or daughter's classroom and hide it in the toy chest. Are you awake yet? I argue that allowing these "experimental families" the opportunity to adopt someone else's child is as equally insane. Are these people serious? I'm just shaking my head in dismay at what's happening in this country.

Finally, the border situation is on everybody's mind. Tens of thousands of illegals most with children, and even some children all by themselves are pouring across the border. They don't speak English. They don't have any job skills. They aren't properly vaccinated; many harbor deadly diseases; they're hiding within their multicultural throngs a variety of murderers, rapists, drug dealers, thieves, alcoholics, addicts, etc. Dingy Harry wants them here. Obama wants them here. Nancy Pelosi and the entire left side of the political aisle all want them here. Why? Simply for their votes of course. None of these illegals bring anything else with them. They bring hungry bellies, disease, crime, and a vote. If you're voting for the same people these illegals will end up voting for, then this is your mess. You statists and progressivists might as well have shouted "OPEN BAR! COME ON IN!" to every wino in Times Square.

Raise the sales tax again ... why not go ahead and make it 100% now?

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Sources tell WREG-TV the heads of the fire and police associations in Memphis have proposed raising the city sales tax to restore full healthcare benefits. The head of the Memphis Fire Association however told WREG that is not something that will go forward and be proposed to the public.

Current city employees and some retirees will pay 24% more for healthcare, while some retirees will lose their entire insurance subsidy. We are told there has been a proposal for a tax hike by half a cent to 9.75%. That rate would put Memphis equal with several surrounding municipalities which raised their sales tax to fund new schools.

If the proposal were to moved forward, voters would have to approve it. There are estimates the hike could raise more than $45 million per year. A similar change in the sales tax, to fund pre-k, was defeated last November.

The Segal Company, a human resources consulting firm, found the city pension is underfunded by $467 million. That contradicts a report commissioned by the firefighters union which put the number at $301 million and a report done by PricewaterhouseCoopers which put it at $682 million.

As of July 1, the State of Tennessee requires local governments to contribute 100% of the cost, determined by outside agencies, needed to keep their pension funded.

Oh those poor police and fire-fighters! It's possible if I don't take a half-percent pay-cut that they could lose their 100% paid for insurance and pension plans. What an injustice that would be! Never mind that the privately owned company that I work for doesn't even have a pension plan. never mind that my family's insurance plan gets crappier every year, and for this ever-crappier insurance, I pay more and more and more every year. But never mind all of that. Why should my family's suffering have any bearing whatsoever on the city's decision to forcibly extract even more money from my own family's ever tightening budget?

I can tell you from personal experience that everything costs so much more these days than it did just six years ago. I haven't gotten a raise in those six years, so effectively I've already taken a 30% pay-cut. Now they want to make it 30.5%. And the best thing of all is that I have essentially no power at all to affect this decision. It seems like every year the city has another reason to raise the sales tax. In fact it seems like it was just last year when they wanted to raise sales tax to pay for pre-kindergarten.

Guys, I want to talk for a moment about simple math and simple economics for just a minute. I'm sorry if the following explanation gets a little dry and boring but I'll try to be brief.

For simplicity's sake let's take one guy with a family of four making $50,000 per year. After taxes that's $42,617.64. So you say, that's not so bad. 15% off the top for federal tax and social security. In other states there would be state income tax also deducted. But wait! There's less! After subtracting sales tax at 9.25% our seemingly fairly successful middle-class worker takes home only $37,875.00.

People who work for the city of Memphis say...well yes everything costs more. Rent, utilities, food, clothing, utilities, healthcare, everything costs more. So we need more money. Yes, but the city budget is paid for primarily with sales and property taxes. If food costs more then obviously the city gets more sales tax revenue. If a $10.00 ham has a sales tax of $0.92 and the grocery store increases the price of that ham to $15.00, then the sales tax collected is $1.39. This represents a 50% increase in the price of the ham and in the revenue generated from its sale. No matter how much prices rise, the city should still be floating like a boat rising higher no matter how high the waters rise.

Therefore if rent costs more it's because property costs more, meaning ever-higher property tax revenue. If food costs more it means increased sales tax revenue from its sale. If utilities cost more it means the city brings in increased revenue from taxes imposed on utilities. There's a direct one for one increase in revenue vs. prices no matter how much prices rise. Memphis takes the same percentage of money from every resident and visitor who purchases goods and services in the city.

I'm trying to explain that the excuse of inflation to explain raising sales tax is a low-down rotten stinking good-for-nothing excuse and nothing more. If everything costs more then that means the city makes that much more in tax revenue.

So why is there a budget shortfall? Is it perhaps because the city of Memphis promised pie-in-the-sky pensions for every city employee who puts in their 10 years? Is it perhaps because the city of Memphis promised pie-in-the-sky lifetime health-care for every city employee who puts in their 10 years?

A 20 year old man works for the city for 10 years and becomes fully 'vested' which means he qualifies for full retirement benefits from the city. He goes to another city and does the same thing, and another and another. He retires at age 65 with 4 pensions plus his social security benefits. Every year thereafter he'll cost taxpayers considerably more to sit on a couch and watch the TV than he ever did while he was working. Some cities or municipalities require a different period of time to become fully vested but the effect is the same to a greater or lesser degree. Public sector employees frequently if not ubiquitously retire with multiple full-pensions.

If you want to know why cities and states keep increasing the percentage of money they take it's because with advances in medicine—medicine paid for by the tax-payer—retirees live to greater and greater ages. This has an exponentially multiplying effect on city budgets. If people live ten years longer they cost the city double. twenty years longer and they cost the city quadruple.

I have a great solution to this pension problem. Do the same thing health insurance companies do. If you have two policies covering the same person then one takes precedence. The insurance companies may quibble amongst themselves about which policy takes precedence but still and all, only one insurance company pays the bill, not both. Public sector pensions should follow the same rules. You have three public sector pensions? Sorry, but only one will be paying you. In the interests of fairness, that paying pension should at least be the highest paying one. Don't forget you still get Social Security, so cheer up officer Bob.

A Teenager's Letter to Obama

Dear President Barack Obama,

Like you, I’m a superhero. I’ve been watching you, and I think we both have the same superpower.

Unlike you, the problem for me is that nobody realizes this fact.

Maybe everyone should be paying closer attention to me. It’s like I know everything for instance. There’s a word for that—omni-something or other. Omni LOL! Sounds like some 70’s era station-wagon. Like you President Obama, I am also incredibly generous. If I had millions of dollars I’d definitely give away thousands of dollars of it to charitable causes. The problem is that my parents haven’t given me millions of dollars yet.

Even though I know everything, I’m still not doing that well in school because—as usual—my teachers are all stupid. Why should I memorize boring names, titles, dates, facts, figures, etc., when you can look all that stuff up on Google? And also, what good is it to know everything, when professors expect you to dance around reciting boring facts as though you were some kind of monkey dancing to the tune of a peddler’s Hurdy-Gurdy?

I would have been more successful in school if my parents had done more. There were days when dinner totally sucked. How am I supposed to do homework when I’m hungry? There were days when I went to school hungry because the cereal was all gone or the milk was all gone or the pop-tarts were all gone. What, am I supposed to cook eggs or something? Plus, my parents don’t even have a toaster! How am I supposed to toast bread without a toaster? In the oven? Please!

I was all set to be the valedictorian of my high school, you know. There I was in Idaho and everything was perfect. Then, before my tenth grade year, my parents just up and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, because of my dad’s stupid job or something. And because of that I started failing classes.

Teachers here in Memphis, Suckasee, are so stupid. OMG! If you don’t believe me just ask some of my friends. It’s like you ask a simple question and then they have to give you some kind of an hour long lecture that even if anyone could stand to listen to the whole long boring stupid thing, it would totally make no sense at all.

It’s not fair!

All my friends have cars. If my parents had gotten me a car I would have done better in school. Even though I’m a superhero, flying isn’t one of my super powers. Which also isn’t fair by the way. How am I supposed to do all the things I have to do, like get homework done, then eat breakfast, then get ready, then finally, finally—OMG!—make it out to the bus stop before the sun even comes out? It’s like the universe has it in for me. And my parents too! And my stupid school with all its stupid-stupid-stupid teachers.

Did I mention that I have to do chores? I mean, my parents, my school, and all my stupid teachers constantly dump all over me. I’m standing here, holding the entire world on my shoulders—like that Greek Pizza-Pizza guy—and they just keep dumping more and more stuff on me. I’m so sorry world! It turns out that my super power is not doing homework and chores at the speed of light! Take out the garbage. Mow the lawn. Do this do that! OMG! It sucks so totally, so completely totally much that … I’m just over it. You know what I mean? OVER IT!

I had a D in my freshman English class in Idaho. I know that’s not great, but it was passing. In Idaho a 65 is a D. Here in Memphis, Suckasee, you have to have a 70 to pass. I was passing in Idaho but in this craptastic countryass town it’s a fail. So why should I have to repeat it? Why should I bother studying, reading, and doing homework for a class I already passed? Now I’ve taken that same stupid freshman English class three times! They just don’t get it do they? Hello! I already passed!

It really breaks my heart. I could have really been somebody if it wasn’t for everybody else holding me back. Every time I started to get ahead, they pulled me back. It just goes to show that even when you’re a superhero, if they crap on you enough, your life will totally suck.

 So, you’re probably wondering what my super power is? Whenever anything bad happens that seems to be my fault, I have the ability to explain whose fault it really is. My parents call this power of mine making excuses, but President Obama, you and I both know it’s called an explanation.

PS—My freshman English teacher made me write this stupid letter. I hope she’s happy…NOT!

PPS—Edited spellchecked and rewritten literally from beginning-to-end by the stupid parents of this amazingly incredibly intelligent, wise, and awesome high school-soon-to-be-a-dropout superhero.

Obama's 300? Tonight We Dine In Hell!

President Obama said today he is prepared to send up to 300 U.S. military advisers to Iraq to assist in training and advising Iraqi forces as the tense situation in the country continues to escalate.

In a statement in the White House briefing room, Obama said the U.S. is prepared to create joint operation centers between the U.S. and Iraq in Baghdad and northern Iraq.

The president also said the U.S. is taking steps so that it's "prepared to take targeted and precise military action if and when we determine the situation on the ground requires it." The president said he would consult closely with Congress and leaders in Iraq before any decision is made.

Make no mistake Xerxes and his horde are on their way to Baghdad.

And a Little Child Shall Follow Them

Even though it's summertime, a neighborhood elementary school near where I work is open and students are attending a summer program. As I drove at 15 mph through the school zone, I noticed a group of seven young students walking to school. They were of ages from six years old to perhaps nine. The smallest one trailed along a little behind the rest. I noticed her because I couldn't help noticing her. It was already 85° outside, with a heat index nearing ninety. Keep in mind that this was at 7:00 AM. Imagine what it will be like at 2:00 PM when this six-year-old girl has to back walk home? She shuffled along behind the rest, wrapped from head to toe in some kind of Islamic child garb that covered her body and head, allowing only a small portion of her face—including eyes, nose, and mouth to show.

As the other kids jumped and played in their shorts and tee-shirts she was probably thinking how fun it would be to join in. I feel sorry for her. For her it will never get better, only worse. The saddest part of all is that she's one of the lucky ones. She's here in America and going to school. How different her life would have been if her parents hadn't come here.

I wonder if she or her parents understand how lucky they are to be here. I don't know if they are illegals, but let's assume they're here legitimately. They were accepted. They were allowed to come here, to live here, to participate in perhaps the greatest and most successful example of the principle of liberty and freedom in the history of the world. This girl's parents chose to come here, to live here, to raise their child here. Why do they refuse to assimilate here? Why do they choose to handicap and shackle their own precious little girl? It's like an escaped convict after a successful prison break choosing to spend the rest of his life wearing that ball-and-chain. It's insane.

That's the great danger of this whole multiculturalism experiment isn't it? As these minority cultures cling intransigently to their own dress code, their own moral framework, their own language, their own justice system, new arrivals meet up with their cultural peers and these little undigestible hunks of something America should never have swallowed begin to swell and turn worse than noxious. If our own once American once Christian culture wasn't already so frail, so ill, so near death, perhaps we'd be able to regurgitate this evil mass of poison churning away inside our gut. But the way it looks now it's already too late for the ambulance, and the undertaker has his tape-measure out.

A family who swathes their tiny little girl in stifling heavy clothing in the heart of summer is insane. It's not just cruel. It's not just unfair. Cruelty and injustice are a big part of the human experience, but this goes beyond that. They're not doing it because they enjoy causing misery and suffering, they're doing it because their insane parents did it to them, and so on going back for hundreds of years. So what's their problem? Here's the litany:

• Despicable treatment of women as chattel
• Compete disregard for human life
• Blind hatred of other races and creeds
• Homicidal-suicidal monomania regarding their religion
• Obsessive-compulsive washing behavior
• Five times per day kneeling and praying wherever they find themselves.
• Taking an entire month off of work for Ramadan

And then when you throw in the petty difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims and the horrific mass carnage this tiny split caused? I think most sane people reflecting on the facts and ignoring the taqiyya would come to realize that these Muslims are as a people, as a culture, as a religion, irredeemably insane. It's a cycle of violence that is similar to child abuse and pedophilia. As it was done to the mother and father so will it be done to the daughter and son. This cycle of insanity leads backwards into the infamy of time, to the most destructive lunatic who ever lived in the entire history of mankind.

'Cause I'm the sales-tax man, yeah, I'm the sales-tax man

Chart source

Here's an economic fact that a lot of conservatives know, and that a lot of liberals don't: the price of a product is largely dependent upon how much it costs the seller to acquire and at some point finally sell said product with all the attendant expenses, labor, rent, electricity, shipping, etc. When you raise the minimum wage, when you require onerous hoops that must be continually jumped through, when you raise taxes on shippers, raise taxes on fuel, and finally when you sic the EPA on a thousand innocent targets per day, the prices of goods and services are necessarily going to increase accordingly.

For example, when the minimum wage goes up, immediately customers begin to see that the increased cost of labor forces businesses to nudge the prices of their goods and services upward. The only exception to this basic economic principle is the normal method of sales tax collection—which is an unfathomably stupid way of doing business in my opinion. The advertised price of the product offered completely ignores the incipient sales tax that will inevitably be charged.

A grocery shopper sees the price of a product and perhaps mentally adds the required six to eleven percent of the sales tax to the running total he's got in his head, but in all likelihood when all his items are finally rung up and the sales tax is added in, the total is going to surprise him. The customer was quoted one price in the store aisles, on the television, in the weekly circular, but none of that matters because in spite of its promises, the store is going to ask for quite a bit more.

Recently there has been quite a bit of chatter about forcing internet retailers to charge sales tax—and lining up like good little ducklings—quite a few, like Amazon have begun doing so. The big box retailers are funneling beaucoup bucks into the wallets of lobbyists and political campaigns in the pursuit of forcing every retailer—regardless of where they live—to begin charging sales tax.

The Marketplace Fairness Act supporters, a/k/a people who want to tax the internet, say it is just fair. Technically, when you buy something online you, the consumer, are supposed to pay the sales tax. But few, if any, actually do. So the geniuses who support the internet tax have come up with a great idea. They will make the businesses in every state keep up with the sales tax regimes of all the other states. They will force the burden of one state’s tax collection schemes onto the businesses of other states.

Can you imagine this! Small time on-line retailers will be expected to calculate the sales tax of their customers for whatever county, city, and state the customer lives in. There are literally thousands of different sales tax rates across the country, and additionally, to make it even more awesomely fun, different goods and services are taxed within each locality at different rates depending on whether it's a food, or beverage, or candy, or a service, or any of hundreds of different mitigating factors.

The big box retailers already have their cash registers programmed for their particular area, but what about on-line mom and pop operations? Not only would they have to collect the correct amounts from whomever, wherever, for whatever, but they'd also be required to pay those amounts to the proper city county and state, along with the requisite forms and paperwork required by each county city and state.

Okay, perhaps the brick and mortar businesses have a point. They say it's not fair and because of sales tax they will lose business to on-line. Don't forget however. that with on-line sales the customer must usually pay shipping fees which can be substantial.

Less thought about but certainly considered when making an online purchase is the uncertainty factor. At a physical store, customers receive the product at the moment they spend their money, and additionally if the product is broken or not what the customer expected, they can almost always return it for a full refund. However, with on-line sales a lot more trust is required, and it's much more difficult and time-consuming if the customer desires a refund. For these reasons, adding sales tax to on-line retail would unfairly tip the desirability balance much more towards brick and mortar.

When you combine the tax accounting nightmare involved, and the decreased desirability of on-line transactions due to shipping costs and the risks involved in actually receiving a satisfactory product on a timely basis through the mail, small-time retailers will be forced out of business.

Now finally we get to the entire point of this entire blog entry. Retailers are scammed by sales tax because they think it doesn't hurt them. They believe it's a tax paid by the buyer. However, customers spend less at their business because they've already factored in the cost of sales tax so it does hurt the retailer. Customers are scammed by sales tax because they don't see the tax reflected in the advertised price, and are often shocked—even dismayed—at the checkout counter.

Taxes should be paid by the party who receives the money not the party who pays the money. When you put the onus of tax debt on the seller instead of the buyer, all of a sudden all these problems are each solved. It won't matter where on earth the buyer comes from. They call it a sales tax not a purchase tax. Why not really make it that way? Make the tax the sellers responsibility and have the seller reflect the cost of tax in the advertised or "sticker" price.

Wouldn't it be great to go to Wendy's for a Junior Cheeseburger and then pay with your only one-dollar bill? You could even tell them they could keep the penny. Why should retailers be shanghaied into becoming tax-enforcers. Isn't running a business hard enough without throwing that responsibility at them? Sales tax as it exists is the stupidest—or perhaps most dishonest—idea bureaucrats have dreamed up...ever.

Cantor, and Krugman's Conservative Confabulation

According to Krugman, the defeat of Cantor is that long flat tone you hear from the EKG shortly before the sheet is pulled over the body of "Movement Conservatism." Now before you get anxious or confused, you first need to know what Krugman means by "Movement Conservatism." Here’s his definition:

… an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

Well that doesn’t sound like a very flattering description of conservative politics. In the lead in of his article Krugman states that “Movement conservatism dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan, until the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

Allow me to rephrase Paul Krugman’s working thesis: American politics on the right, was controlled by the good old boys—white boys—and their one-percenter sugar-daddies from the time of Ronald Reagan forward. This uber-wealthy elitist racist consortium cleverly managed to win elections by stoking the racialist fears of a white majority terrified of all those dark-skinned bogeymen beating on their drums so menacingly in the jungles of the urban night.

However, according to Krugman, once their elections were secured, the “Movement Conservatism” politicians returned to their real agenda which was merely crony capitalism and unbridled wealth building. In a nutshell, a bunch of poor red-necks and racists crawled out of the woodwork to vote for someone who they thought would back their racist agenda of a return to segregation or perhaps even slavery, but instead of doing their job, these greedy politicians were too busy amassing wealth to be bothered by passing laws which would have put blacks back into chains where we Republicans believe they belong.

One wonders whether Krugman’s conservative confabulation brings him satisfaction or perhaps irritation instead? Is he happy that the goals of the red-necks and racists of the USA are stifled stymied and betrayed by their leaders, or is he irritated that these rich white one-percenters continue to amass great fortunes by cynically manipulating their ignorant constituency?

The breathtaking condescension of this New York Times writer is so over the top that I’m nearly at a loss for words. But not quite. According to Krugman's confabulation, there are only two kinds of Republicans. We’re either stupid hayseed racists who just fell off the turnip truck on the way to Wal-Mart, or we’re evil billionaires with an insatiable thirst for more and more wealth—cue the screaming villagers brandishing torches. It's one or the other.

But wait...there's more!

We don’t know exactly why [Cantor] lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.

Not only do we trailer-dwelling red-neck Republicans want to put blacks back in chains, but we "loathe" all Hispanics. We hate blacks and we loathe Hispanics. I honestly wonder how Paul Krugman turned out the way he did. I don't see how you could grow up in this country honestly having this low an opinion of such a vast multitude of people. So then, my question for Paul Krugman is a simple one: Is it perhaps you Paul Krugman who is in fact the toothless benighted extra-chromosome bearing troglodyte found crawling out of the woodwork, or is it perhaps you Paul Krugman who is in fact the cynical wealth-amassing greedy one-percenter cynically stoking cultural and racial anxiety in your ceaseless quest for more and more wealth?

Is it all of us in our hundreds of millions, who are wrong, or could it perhaps be you Mr. Paul Robin Krugman who is completely 180° bassackwards? I feel sure that I know what Occam would have said ... slice ... He who smelt it, probably dealt it.