RightWave

Y’all know I love the comic strip Mallard Fillmore.  Make sure to check out today’s issue for a good chuckle!

This shocking headline and opening courtesy of the venerable Associated Press:

McCain, Obama offer different visions on taxes
Make more than $250,000 a year? Watch out. Barack Obama wants to raise your income taxes. Social Security taxes, too.

Run a corporation? Lucky you. John McCain wants to cut your business taxes.

Those positions illustrate pieces of two vastly different approaches to the economy, an issue at the forefront of voters’ minds given that the country is teetering on the brink of - if not already in - a recession as gas prices soar and layoffs rise amid a credit crisis and a housing slump.

Obama, the Democrat, seemingly has a traditional liberal outlook of taxing the rich more while having the government help people of more modest means through tax breaks. McCain, the Republican, advocates a classic conservative vision of cutting taxes - many geared toward businesses - to promote competition within a free-market system.

I mean, wow.  Really.  Republicans and Democrats disagree on taxes?   I’m shocked.  Although, I guess, to be fair, this was in question in this election cycle. 

However, this is illustrative of one important point.  Senator McCain should keep this as the story.  He should stop talking about global warming or whatever other “straight talk” he’d like to provide us for the day.  He should keep talking about tax cuts and spending restraint.  He should talk about the expansive growth of government and how to stop it.  At least, I suppose, if he’d like conservatives to get at all excited about him this year.  Guess we’ll see…

With her most recent assertions, Hillary Clinton has sunk to a new low, even by Clintonian standards.

As usual, Peggy Noonan captures this well in her most recent column:

In case you didn’t get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn’t say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.”

If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is — well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

Jonah Goldberg over at The Corner has a great depressing/revealing point on Senator Obama and class warfare and the capital gains tax.

To find out more about the capital gains tax, see Americans for Prosperity Policy Director Phil Kerpen’s work on the issue - and particularly this great op-ed from the WSJ.

 Obama denounces big corporate pay packages

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced huge pay packages for U.S. corporate chiefs on Friday in a drive to convert middle-class anger about the U.S. economy into votes. 

“Some CEOs make more in one day than their workers make in one year,” Obama said, jockeying for position against rival Democrat Hillary Clinton in Indiana, which votes on May 6.

…

Clinton and Republican presidential candidate John McCain also have criticized big payouts for chief executive officers who benefit hugely even when their companies are struggling.

“We’ve seen what happens when CEOs are paid for doing a job no matter how bad a job they’re doing,” Obama said. “We can’t afford to postpone reform any longer.”

I’m not sure where in the Constitution it says that the United States Government should regulate pay for anyone other than employees of the government.  Last time I checked, it’s the job of the shareholders and boards of corporations to make hiring, firing and compensation decisions.  This is nothing more than ugly class warfare rhetoric from the Left (though, sadly, it seems Senator McCain has co-opted it as well), and it’s disgraceful.

I was lucky enough to be at the Media Research Center’s 2008 Gala and Dishonors Awards last night, they showed this GREAT video.

Tired of hearing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, et al., talk about change?  Well, at least we can laugh at them!