I was inspired by this post at Mental Recession and this tweet from Seton Motley. So I made a comic about it.

Then I thought, this would be a good comic for my version of the “Reaction Guys.” So I made this one:

After all, why is it racist to point out that there are more people on food stamps than ever before, including 30 percent of black people in America, but it’s not racist to say that black people are too poor to afford a government ID and would be disenfranchised by voter ID laws?

Mitt released his tax returns today, showing last year he paid $6.2 million in taxes:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax records on Tuesday indicating he will pay $6.2 million in taxes on a total of $42.5 million in income over the years 2010 and 2011.

Bowing to increasing political pressure to provide more detail about his vast wealth, the former private equity executive released tax returns indicating he and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. They expect to pay a 15.4 percent rate when they file their returns for 2011.

Romney’s tax rate is below that of most wage-earning Americans because most of his income, as outlined in more than 500 pages of tax documents, flows from capital gains on investments.

Under the U.S. tax code, capital gains are taxed at 15 percent, compared with a top tax rate of 35 percent for wage earners.

The focus isn’t on the fact he paid more taxes in one year than most Americans will pay in who knows how long. No, the left, as I predicted, is putting the focus on the percentage of what he pays, as you can see from the Huffington Post quote above.
As I said earlier in the month:

Now you tell me, which carries more weight:

or

Mitt should have controlled this as best he could from the beginning, by emphasizing the amount he paid, not the percentage.

Then he could ask incredulous liberals and reporters, “Are you saying that one person paying over $6,000,000 a year isn’t enough? How much do you want?”

I suppose he could still try, but he put the focus on percentages from the beginning.

The United States Congress has not passed a budget in the past 1000 days. Why not?

Harry Reid has had better things to do in the DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED Senate:

A commenter on YouTube makes a good point, which I emphasized in all caps above:

Dear Heritage, you need to modify your video by identifying WHO controlled the Senate (every time you say the word, “Senate.” “…the DEMOCRAT controlled Senate….” This is where we lose our message. We assume everybody is informed like us and know who controls the chamber, but people are very misinformed. This video is great, but should point out the GOP took only xx number of days to pass a budget when they took BACK control of the house in 2011. Thanks for reading.

Exactly.

Speaker John Boehner put out a video about the 1000 day mark also:

Not to be left out, the guys at Misfit Politics made this little soon to be Top Ten hit:

Misfit Politics- 1000 Days (Without Passing a Budget) by Just as Good as Ezra

The debate last night would have bored people who love snore-fests. Mitt was declared the winner, but it really didn’t matter. No one can be influenced when they are put to sleep.

Newt’s usual debate performance was absent also, and today he is blaming it on the prohibition on applause:

In an interview with the morning show “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Gingrich said NBC’s rules amounted to stifling free speech. In what has become a standard line of attack for his anti-establishment campaign, Mr. Gingrich blamed the media for trying to silence a dissenting point of view.

“I wish in retrospect I’d protested when Brian Williams took them out of it because I think it’s wrong,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media, which is what they’ve done in every debate.”

Honestly, I don’t recall any answers from Newt that warranted any standing ovations. But the, with the questions that were asked, it was difficult to get excited about them. Not one question about abortion on the day of the March for Life. Not one question about the TSA on the day a sitting US Senator is detained by the TSA. Not one question on Fast and Furious.

But at least we know where the candidates stand on the Terry Schiavo situation.

Perhaps Newt should have called out Brian Williams et al. for their lack of focusing on what is really affecting the American citizens rather than what they will do if Fidel Castro dies while they are president.

If he had, that would have inspired someone to cheer.

This ban on cheering is yet another reason to vote for Romney, according to Jennifer Rubin, who has never strayed from the Romney camp and has no clue what is in the minds of the average American:

There are, of course, bigger problems with selecting Gingrich based on his debating skill. In a general election, his bread-and- butter — attacking elites and especially media elites — will be useless. Moreover, his incendiary rhetoric about liberals, judges, the president and just about everything else will be a burden and not an asset.

Completely clueless.

A majority of Americans think the media in America is too liberal. Conservatives are tired of candidates who stand and take it rather than fight back against a system clearly bias against them.

American is a conservative country. They are tired of liberalism being forced upon them, whether it’s in the elementary schools or in the court room. They are just as tired of activist classrooms as they are of activist courtrooms.

And in what world would incendiary rhetoric about a political opponent be a burden? In a world where the political opponent has the entire media in his pocket, willing to spin whatever Newt says into a racist “dogwhistle?”

Newt could just attack that as well, because people are tired of being called racist for whatever they do and also want someone willing to stand and say, “ENOUGH!” Someone who will point fingers and say, “You’re part of the problem, and here’s why!”

That’s why Newt gets cheered. He’s what happens after someone says, “I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!”

I have never been a Newt supporter, but given what I have seen from him in the debates, I would be more willing to support someone willing to take a brickbat to the accepted practice of misinformation, overt bias in the media and character assassination than I would someone who was willing to tolerate it. I love it when Newt says, “This is what you are doing and here’s why it won’t work.”

I would enjoy watching Newt shuffle through the media constructs and Obama’s empty Marxist rhetoric like Godzilla walking through downtown Tokyo. And I think a majority of Americans would as well.

Google “Claire McCaskill earmarks.”

You will find links to stories showing a one woman crusade against earmarks, including this gem, which states:

As one of the most fiscally-responsible State Auditors ever to serve the people of Missouri, Claire McCaskill earned a reputation as a tireless fiscal watchdog over Missouri state government. Since 2007, McCaskill has been making good on her pledge to deliver that same fiscally-disciplined, sharp-pencil approach to the federal government as United States Senator from Missouri.

McCaskill Has Never Requested an Earmark. Sen. McCaskill has never requested a single earmark during her time serving in the U.S. Senate. [Citizens Against Government Waste]

The ironic think is, the same Citizens Against Government Waste McCaskill quotes has just nominated her for 2011 Porker of the Year:

CAGW named Sen. McCaskill its September Porker of the Month for suggesting that the United States Postal Service (USPS) could solve its financial problems by starting a new ad campaign. At a September 6, 2011 hearing, Sen. McCaskill stated, “I really believe that if somebody would begin to market the value of sending a written letter to someone you love, you might be surprised [by] how you could stabilize first-class mail.”

Yep, that’s my Senator.

I also think it’s important to take notice of the disingenuous veneer on her “war on earmarks.” While she might not have requested one, she didn’t try to stop these:

On March 23, 2007, McCaskill voted against an amendment to block the inclusion of earmarks in a spending bill.

* On October 18, 2007, McCaskill voted to protect a $2 million earmark to honor Rep. Charles Rangel with a public policy center, a conference center and a library.

* On October 23, 2007, McCaskill voted to kill an amendment to strike $3.7 million in earmarks for the AFL-CIO.

* On March 13, 2008, McCaskill voted against an amendment to redirect over $2 million in earmarks for Berkeley, CA, to the Marines.

* On March 4, 2009, McCaskill voted to preserve earmarks associated with the PMA Group, a corrupt lobbying firm.

* On March 4, 2009, McCaskill voted against an amendment to kill 11 earmarks, which included $200,000 for tattoo removal in California, $1.8 million for manure management research in Iowa and $3.8 million to preserve part of the old Detroit Tigers stadium.

* On March 19, 2009, McCaskill voted against an amendment to kill earmarks for a birthday party in Florida, historic shipwreck exploration and a study of Alexander Hamilton’s boyhood estate in the Virgin Islands.

Congratulations on the nomination, Claire. You earned it.

In 1978, communism in China was the absolute rule of the land. So absolute, there was nothing that was not owned by the collective.

Nothing:

“Back then, even one straw belonged to the group,” says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. “No one owned anything.”

At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: “What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?” Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.

The next three sentences in this NPR article was so shocking for me to read, I stopped and read it again. Not that I disagreed, but was shocked they were printed by NPR:

In theory, the government would take what the collective grew, and would also distribute food to each family. There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says.

“Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.”

That’s exactly what conservatives and libertarians have been saying about communism for as long as I can remember. Leftists who still cling to the idea that communism is good in theory, but just hasn’t been implemented correctly yet can’t get this fact through their collective brains.

But this story from a small farming community in rural communist China shows the power of personal property and profit. The people of the small town of Xiaogang produced very little food, and what was produced, the collective took and redistributed.

Like Yen said above, everyone got the same. From each according to the their ability, to each according to their need.

But the starving citizens of Xiaogang had a crazy idea. It was an idea so dangerous, it had to be discussed in secret. What if they parceled up the land and people got to keep a part of the crops they produced. What if they could profit from their hard work?

They understood that if they were caught, they would most likely be arrested and possibly executed, but they did it anyway.

The results reverberated all the way to the top of the communist party, and changed the entire economy of China:

Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.

“We all secretly competed,” says Yen Jingchang. “Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person.”

It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.

At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.

That huge harvest gave them away. Local officials figured out that the farmers had divided up the land, and word of what had happened in Xiaogang made its way up the Communist Party chain of command.

Yen was dragged in front of the Party, who swore at him. But he was very fortunate, because times were changing in China, and there were people who knew communism was failing. So rather than make an example out the the farmers, they made role models out of them and personal profit entered the Chinese economy:

Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China’s economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

After implementing communism and murdering over 50 million Chinese in an attempt to create the utopian collective Marx and Engels dream up, all China did was drive its people into mud floor huts. It was just a taste of capitalism that changed all that.

Fantastic story and a great example to remember the next time a leftist starts droning on about how “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

It isn’t. That fact has been proven over and over again. And the brave farmers of Xiaogang have proven it once again.

For those who just woke up, Newt Gingrich won the record setting South Carolina primary last night:

South Carolina’s Republican voters set a new primary turnout record Saturday when more than 600,000 of them went to the polls, shattering the previous mark set in 2000.

With 13 precincts still uncounted Sunday morning, 601,166 votes already were recorded, topping 2000′s turnout of 537,101 and well ahead of 2008′s 445,499 voters. Earlier in the week, officials had projected a moderate turnout about equivalent to the 2008 primary.

And the vote totals for the individual candidates were just as intriguing. Saturday’s winner, Newt Gingrich, collected 243,153, and second-place finisher Mitt Romney won 167,280. Both of them exceeded 2008 winner John McCain’s total.

Rick Santorum finished third, with Ron Paul coming in fourth.

The focus now turns to Florida.

I have been working on this video for a while. It was inspired by a graph I saw at Doug Ross’s site. After looking at it, I thought it would make a good video.

This is the result. Let me know what you think in the comments:

Cross posted at Right Wing News.