Posts Tagged → Tom Corbett
Shatter that glass ceiling
The so-called “debt ceiling” is a fantasy of a fantasy. It is the undefined, almost whimsical notion that even when the United States citizenry’s representative government has in-effect borrowed trillions more Dollars than The People can ever hope to repay, it is still yet possible to raise that ceiling even further and borrow more, and spend a hell of a lot more, than ever before.
And so we are told in the sternest of tones by DC Beltway bobbleheads like Chuck Todd at NBC, that we must raise this “debt ceiling” or risk going into default. Default! Like our creditors will demand a refund! Which we all know will never, ever happen, because the entire house of cards upon which the planet’s entire interrelated economy is based will come crashing down, to the loss of most, including the communist Chinese, who have the most to lose.
So, default on the debt ceiling is never going to happen. Invoking it is just a scare tactic by DC Beltway banditos to try to screw us citizens out of more money and power. Forget it, let the debt ceiling break. Hell, go ahead and shatter it. Nothing will happen.
Unsurprisingly, massive RINO US House Speaker Kevin “Sweetcheeks” McCarthy has done ye olde reach across the aisle bipartisan BS and agreed to most of what the America-detonating Biden Anarcho-Administration has demanded, in the name of the sacred debt ceiling. Including funding for 87,000 new gun-wielding corrupt IRS agents who will be crawling up my butt and yours looking for loose pennies, and jailing us en masse for penny ante mistakes. And no cutting of the lawless FBI or the rogue DOJ budgets.
The problem with “Republicans” like Kevin McCarthy (and Tom Ridge, Tom Corbett, and 99.9% of the PA GOP here in PA) is that they believe in government first and foremost. They have no problem growing government or in ceding its unaccountable bureaucrats more and ever more power and centralized control over all us citizens. So long as they get a seat at the table and grow their own power and influence, they don’t give a darn about anything else. Shame on all of them. Shame shame shame on all of you fake conservatives.
No, I am wrong. Let me rephrase this. Shame on all of you fake Republican Americans, because you are directly empowering communists destroying America.
Congressman Scott Perry, if you are reading this, please remove Sweetcheeks McCarthy from the Speakership. Cut 80% of the FBI and DOJ budgets. Put your foot down and give these America destroying lowlifes a severe brake check. If they veer off the road and smash the debt ceiling and leave the budget talks a smoking ruin as a result, good; you get extra points. Because American citizens will benefit the most.
Power can corrupt, but some people worship power before they ever get it
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” goes one famous observation.
Here in Pennsylvania we’ve had one long going example of power-mad officials using their office to attack symbols of their political opponents, and we’ve had one recent example of a nudnik mayor whose goal in life was to finally acquire power, and who then flubbed it publicly.
Long-term: Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane dropped a bomb of false accusations and police with guns on Brian Bolus, his wife, his little boy. Bolus had the temerity to be cited by then governor Tom Corbett as a classic example of bootstrap capitalism, an all American kid who did well.
Corbett- Republican, Kane, Democrat. So Kane uses the power of her office to attack Corbett by proxy.
Years later, the AG has nothing, zero, to prosecute Bolus. Brian’s personal effects and titles to his paid-for home and vehicles are not in his possession, and the home video surveillance footage of the day the Gestapo visited his house is somehow missing.
Now why would criminal investigators “lose” the security video footage of their violent, over-the-top raid on a peaceful family? Could it be damning? Ummmm, you know it.
The Bolus attack is an obvious abuse of power by an AG drunk on influence and deep corruption, as if hiring her own sister into a sensitive public service job wasn’t bad enough.
Another reason for Kane to begone. And give back the Bolus family their personal things before ya hit the road, lady.
Short-term: Harrisburg cops terrorize, bully, threaten, harass, intimidate and falsely accused a 75-year-old Marine named Robert Ford on Memorial Day.
Ford’s crime? Wearing his fifty-year-old US Government issue Marine Corps uniform in public, where he had earlier performed Taps at a Memorial Day event. In other words, no crime.
Public outrage against the two Harrisburg keystone kops has grown ever since, with the story hitting media and blogs coast to coast. Officers Moody and O’Connor will not apologize for their unprofessional behavior, but making things worse…neither will Mayor Eric Papenfuse.
Papenfuse has excused the police officers and said they did nothing wrong.
This, from a man who hung around and lauded former anti-police terrorists. This from a man purveying his Yale undergrad degree as proof of his superiority. Apparently Yale doesn’t teach Morality 101, or Papenfuse was just so smart, too smart to take such a course.
So here we have an inexperienced used bookstore owner who used to accuse the police of being criminals, now wallowing in his newfound power, high on power, unable to break out of its grip and just do the right thing.
Yep, power corrupts. Let’s hope our citizenry corrects it.
A Severance Tax, now?
Talk about an addiction to spending other people’s money.
Yesterday in southeast PA, far away from the communities where this issue is most important and the citizens might not be so welcoming, Governor Tom Wolf staked out his position on creating a new 5% “severance tax” on natural gas from the Marcellus shale feature.
Right now, natural gas is selling at historic low prices, especially here in Pennsylvania. The financial incentive to drill more or spend more money to get more gas is very low, and drill rigs have been disappearing from across the region for a year.
The Saudis began dumping oil months ago, in an effort to punish competing oil producers Iran and Russia, with the secondary effect of dropping gasoline prices so low that the natural gas industry got hit from that side, too.
So now is not only a bad time for the gas industry, it is also a time of greatly diminished returns on investment and on royalties received. Scalping 5% off the top of that is punishing to everyone, including gas consumers, who will see their rates increase proportionally.
Here’s the biggest problem with a severance tax: Pennsylvania already has a 3% impact fee on Marcellus gas, and a Corporate Net Income Tax of 9.99% (let’s call it ten percent, OK?). Most of the other gas and oil producing states have no such additional taxes; their severance taxes are the one and only tax their oil and gas producers pay, not the multiple high taxes and fees drillers in PA pay.
Pennsylvania government is therefore already reaping much higher revenue from the gas industry than other gas producing states. That means that the companies doing business here are already burdened much more than elsewhere.
So adding a severance tax now, at this economically bad time, without commensurately lowering other taxes, or the existing Impact Fee, makes no sense. Unless the people promoting this have an infantile view of how America and business work.
And that right there is the problem. Way too many advocates for tax-and-spend policies like an additional severance tax have a Marxist view of business; essentially, to them, business exists to pour money into liberal schemes.
And speaking of spending, who believes that spending more and more and more taxpayer dollars on public schools, public teachers unions, and public teachers’ pensions, actually equates with better education?
So many studies disprove that (see the Mercatus Center), but it is a liberal mantra that taxpayers must spend ever more of their money to support public unions that support political liberals. And both parents of students and taxpayers alike now correctly see that system for what it is – simple, legalized political graft to fund one political party.
Public schools are mostly a disaster, yet teacher’s unions and their political buddies continue to pound on the table for more and more money. Homeowners are essentially now renting their houses from the teacher’s unions, and proposed laws like Act 76 seek to fix that unfair situation by removing the vampire fangs from homeowners and letting the larger society pay for its expenditure.
Going door-to-door for political races year after year, property tax has been the number one issue I have encountered among elderly homeowners. So many of them can no longer afford to pay the taxes on their houses, that they must sell them and move, despite a lifetime of investing in them. This is patently un-American and unfair.
So Tom Wolf is moving in exactly the opposite direction we need on this subject, and instead of trying to fix the tax situation, he seeks to make it worse. To be fair, Wolf campaigned on raising taxes. He just needs to remember that he did not get elected by voters who want higher taxes, they wanted to fire former governor Tom Corbett.
AG Kane exonerates Corbett with backhanded, ironic report
PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane “exonerated” Governor Tom Corbett with the most back-handed investigative report seen in a long time.
While acknowledging that Corbett, previously as AG himself, investigating Jerry Sandusky, did not politicize the Sandusky investigation, Kane still called Corbett’s choices in that investigation “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.”
Without question Penn Staters like me, who have followed the Sandusky debacle from beginning to end, we tend to feel like Penn State’s reputation never was considered by anyone involved. Well, it was the paramount consideration by former PSU president Graham Spanier, at a time when the school’s reputation should not have mattered at all, and the kid victims’s interests should have been advanced immediately and at any cost.
So, too little, too late for Penn State by everyone, including a majority of the PSU trustees, Louis Freeh, and state officials everywhere. If Corbett was guilty of failing to jump to Penn State’s defense, he was in damned good company. Pissed at Corbett? OK, then be pissed at many of the sitting trustees.
But what irks me is to see the most politicized AG in Pennsylvania’s history use the words “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.”
Kane’s behavior in the AG office has been both of those words and much much more.
My favorite misdeed is how she refused to pursue the unethical PA Liquor Control Board members, whose financial misdeeds have been widely reported.
What has not been reported is how her family, Kane Trucking, holds PLCB contracts worth millions of dollars. Kane’s failure to apply the law here could be due to a large financial incentive for her to not rock the PLCB gravy boat. Is anyone investigating THAT?
No. In fact, the establishment media has circled the wagons around Kane, with not one word yet mentioned in print about this ethical lapse of hers. In fact, a fawning, fluffy, cheerful, supportive interview with Kane was posted by the Patriot News two weeks ago, and worse yet, by reporter Charles Thompson, a writer I have long considered one of the last real investigative reporters in Harrisburg. Thompson made no mention of any of Kane’s lapses, or of her pending impeachment, in that unpaid advertising piece run by the Patriot News. She was even photographed laughing away, her head held high, her artificially white teeth flashing for the camera.
While people are still asking if Kane’s report on Corbett’s role as AG has any salience for the governor’s race, what informed citizens want to know, is: Why does it appear that Kathleen Kane is protecting Kane Trucking’s PLCB contracts? Now that is a real public policy question worth asking.