A little of this and a little of that, or Fast away the old year passes

Two more days and 2015 will be history. I'm still boggled at the thought that the 21st century has arrived, and already a sixth of it is down the drain.

A hundred years ago we (well, not we, but you know what I mean) were embroiled in World War I and the sinking of the Lusitania was just months away.

Two hundred years ago the Napoleonic Wars, which had lasted from May 1803 until November 1815, ended in Europe. On this side of the pond in America, General (and future President) Andrew Jackson defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans early in 1815. Since 1959, thanks to country singer Johnny Horton, we former colonists remember it this way (2:28).

Three hundred years ago, the French had just lost Louis XIV after a 72-year reign (if Her Majesty reads this blog, there's a new goal for you) and the British were just beginning to get used to George I after the death of Queen Anne of rounded furniture legs fame. Here is a statue of her that stands in front of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

A High Tory political opponent of Queen Anne wrote that "it was fitting she was depicted with her rump to the church, gazing longingly into a wineshop". Except that our president would be gazing at a golf course instead of a wineshop, many Americans know, as they prepare to enter a new year that will see the end of the reign tenure of Barack Obama, just how that Tory felt.

It’s NOT beginning to look a lot like Christmas, plus a 7-year-old’s advice to President Obama

This is a bifurcated post. For those of you in Alabama, that means it has two parts.

Let’s begin.

It’s NOT beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Oh, there’s this:

and this:

and this:

and even this:

but so far there’s not any of this:

The temperature around here has been in the 70s this week. That’s Fahrenheit, kiddies, not Celsius. Let’s not be ridiculous. Global warming hasn’t gone quite that far yet. Although I did read that it was 93 in Brisbane, Australia.

Which brings us to Part 2 of this post.

I also heard on the radio that a father explained to his 7-year-old son, after they both had listened to President Obama speak last Sunday night, what terrorism is and what global warming is. The father happened to mention that Earth’s temperature is expected to rise by two degrees in the next 100 years. The son sat down and wrote two letters to President Obama.

The first letter said, “Don’t be afraid of the bad guys. Just go and fight them.”

The second letter said, “Buy some sunblock.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

Thus ends this bifurcated post. As it is my 87th post of the year, I probably will not make it to 100 posts in 2015. Still, seven or so times a month for a 74-year-old man is pretty darned good, n'est-ce pas?

News Flash: The IRS and President Obama are not your friends

It’s true.

You probably already suspected that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service, the tax collecting arm of the federal government) is not your friend.

Well, neither is President Obama’s healthcare plan, famously dubbed Obamacare by its detractors (real name: The Affordable Care Act).

The Affordable Care Act. HA! And again I say, HA!

Here is a link to a very interesting article at cnsnews.com by Matt Cover.

I hope you were sitting down.

The gist of the article, for those of you who didn’t read it, is that in a final regulation issued this past Wednesday, the Internal Revenus Service (IRS) assumes that the cheapest health insurance plan for a family of four in 2016 will cost $20,000 for the year.

Yes, you read that right.

There will be four tiers of coverage possible under the Affordable Care Act -- Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Bronze is the lowest level.

The figure $20,000 represents the annual premium for Bronze-level coverage.

But wait (as they say in infomercials). You don’t have to buy the coverage. You can choose instead to pay the “penalty” for not having coverage.

The “penalty” for a family of four will be $2,400 payable as part of your income tax for the year.

Yet President Obama continues to insist that he does not want to raise taxes on anyone except the very rich (you know, those nasty millionaires and billionaires whose success just has to have been at your expense). He wouldn’t raise taxes on you.
Not little old you. He’s protecting you, just as he always has done and always will do, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

Balderdash, poppycock, and other expressions of outright disbelief.

To help illustrate the new rules, the IRS has presented examples of different situations families might find themselves in. In the examples, the IRS assumes that families of five who are not insured would need to pay an average of $20,000 per year to purchase a Bronze plan in 2016.

Using the conditions laid out in the regulations, the IRS calculates that a family earning $120,000 per year that did not buy insurance would need to pay a “penalty” (a word the IRS still uses despite the Supreme Court ruling that it is in fact a “tax”) of $2,400 in 2016.

For those wondering how clear the IRS’s clarifications of this new “penalty” rule are, here is one of the actual examples the IRS gives:

“Example 3. Family without minimum essential coverage.

“(i) In 2016, Taxpayers H and J are married and file a joint return. H and J have three children: K, age 21, L, age 15, and M, age 10. No member of the family has minimum essential coverage for any month in 2016. H and J’s household income is $120,000. H and J’s applicable filing threshold is $24,000. The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000.

“(ii) For each month in 2016, under paragraphs (b)(2)(ii) and (b)(2)(iii) of this section, the applicable dollar amount is $2,780 (($695 x 3 adults) + (($695/2) x 2 children)). Under paragraph (b)(2)(i) of this section, the flat dollar amount is $2,085 (the lesser of $2,780 and $2,085 ($695 x 3)). Under paragraph (b)(3) of this section, the excess income amount is $2,400 (($120,000 - $24,000) x 0.025). Therefore, under paragraph (b)(1) of this section, the monthly penalty amount is $200 (the greater of $173.75 ($2,085/12) or $200 ($2,400/12)).

“(iii) The sum of the monthly penalty amounts is $2,400 ($200 x 12). The sum of the monthly national average bronze plan premiums is $20,000 ($20,000/12 x 12). Therefore, under paragraph (a) of this section, the shared responsibility payment imposed on H and J for 2016 is $2,400 (the lesser of $2,400 or $20,000).”

On a side note, I’m glad the IRS cleared up the fact that they arrived at their figure of $20,000 by dividing $20,000 by 12 and then multiplying by 12. I don’t think I could have lived another second without knowing that information.

The last I heard, H and J were considering taking K, L, and M and moving to the Cayman Islands.

Until you decide to read my poems, you will continue getting posts like this one.

The smoking gun?

Forget about President Obama’s birth certificate. The courts have already ruled on that.

But what about his social security number?

Near the very bottom of today’s Drudge Report (a website created by Matt Drudge) was this very interesting link.

As Red Riding Hood once said to the wolf (and only those who have been paying very close attention will understand this), “What big plans you have, Grandma!”

Thank God we still have freedom of speech.

There’s a minor -- well, maybe not so minor -- brouhaha going on in the U.S. right now involving President Barack Obama’s comments the other day about the Supreme Court’s current deliberating over the constitutionality of the 2009 healthcare law that is derisively termed “Obamacare.”

If you’re in another country you may not be aware of it, but here in what Mexicans insist on calling EE UU we are transfixed.

Rush Limbaugh (a radio talk-show host) had a lot to say about it on his program yesterday. Here is the transcript.

The breaks in the transcript are the spots at which commercial advertisements by the sponsors of the radio program were inserted.

Many people think the President overstepped the bounds when he referred to the nine justices of the Supreme Court as “an unelected group of people.”

For those who don't know, the U.S. Constitution specifies three equal branches of government: the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial.

Long may they wave.

What we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.

[start semi-rant mode]

We have just come through the American election of 2010.

The liberals think the conservatives don’t get the message. The conservatives think the liberals don’t get the message. The president thinks the American people don’t get the message. The American people think the president doesn’t get the message. The Democrats think the Republicans don’t get the message. The Republicans think the Democrats don’t get the message. The Libertarians and Tea Party members think no one else gets the message. Everyone thinks he or she is right. It’s the other person, obviously, who is wrong.

Clearly, in the words of Strother Martin in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.

President Obama now says (in an interview aired on November 7, 2010, on the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes) that he doesn’t plan to change his agenda but will attempt to communicate better because people failed to understand his message. My own opinion is that people now understand his message very clearly. Perhaps they didn’t two years ago, but now they do, based not on what he has said but on what he has done. And a very clear majority of the American voting public have firmly rejected it (except in a few apparently very liberal places where people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank managed, astoundingly, to get themselves re-elected). The president, however, seems to care more about what people in other countries think than what the majority of Americans think. We are expected to follow like sheep and accept whatever he has decided is best for us.

I have an announcement, folks: The American system doesn’t work that way. In fact, it works just the other way; he is supposed to do what the American voters want. In what used to be America (that is, according to the U.S. Constitution), the people were in charge. Abraham Lincoln probably phrased it best as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (and just so you know, Abraham Lincoln was not a Democrat; he was the first Republican president.) But right now President Obama does not appear very Abraham Lincolnesque. Instead, he seems to be Strother Martin and the rest of us have become Paul Newman.

Denial, my friends, is not a river in Egypt.

[end semi-rant mode]

If you are a U.S. citizen, whether you agree or disagree with me, I’d love to hear from you. But for this one post, if you are not a U.S. citizen, please follow Archie Bunker’s advice to his wife, Edith, and stifle yourself.

However, if you want to move here and become a citizen of the United States and vote in our elections, I say, in the words of Edith Bunker herself: “I welcome you with open arms.”