The Lie of Magic Budgets By D. J. Drummond | via WIZBANG People do not like taxes. Sometimes people resent paying for government at all, but more often people resent paying for things they find morally wrong. Politicians using public money to build monuments to themselves, to advance agendas that the public never voted to support, or to pursue personal interests that conflict with their duty to the nation and the limits of their constitutional powers, are likely to be opposed as autocrats and crooks. So, government lies to the public about taxes and spending. Useless and selfish acts that are likely to get called out, instead get linked to unrelated acts which have broad public support, are given misleading names like ‘stimulus’ to hide their porcine nature, or are otherwise hidden or mislabeled. The time is perfect for a genuine leader, someone with the moral honesty and intellectual capacity to understand when a point of no return is approaching. That’s not to say that some kind of violent revolution is coming. Rather, something of the opposite is already underway, a response of non-compliance in an expanding variety of ways. At some point, government officials need to understand that control is an illusion if the people do not accept their leadership, that the principles under which an official is entrusted with an office require accountability and honesty, without which the officials’ authority is as fictitious as the accounting of his spending.

via Red Sounding blog

LINK: Can Charity be Compelled? Yesterday’s Tea Party got me thinking about the responsibility our elected officials have to those who’ve put them in office. Among the many causes represented at the Tea Parties, the most ubiquitous was that our government is failing in its obligations to the U.S. Constitution and their constituents. My major beef with the current situation is the attitude of members of Congress towards the very people who put them there. There’s a sense of entitlement and superiority that’s wholly unbecoming persons calling themselves “public servants.” Yesterday, I watched Paul Begala sneer down his nose at the people attending the Tea Parties. I read his CNN commentary about the Tea Parties, and was struck by the ignorance he demonstrated about American history, and his distorted sense of patriotism. To Begala, patriotism is paying taxes, and then remaining silent when our elected officials vote “yes” on a 1,000-page, $878 billion piece of legislation, without having read the thing!

Anyone have an extra pitchfork?

24 Protesters target U.S. foreclosed-homes auctioneer

Two dozen people marched outside a Manhattan convention center where Real Estate Disposition Corp was auctioning off several hundred foreclosed homes, chanting and carrying signs reading “Banks get bailed out, people get thrown out.”

But search “tea party protest” in Reuters SEARCH box and you get stories in Sri Lanka, protestors in India, Turkish Armenians, tea farms in Kenya, an upset Rowling on NYT’s review of latest Potter, and Pakistani students sitting in tea shops. But Noooooooo, don’t tell us anything about the American Tax Tea Party protests taking place across the country, the biggest of which was in Fullerton, Taxifornia, where it is reported that nearly 15,000 people gathered to protest the Taxinator’s policies and Washington’s bungling of the economy.