The Ice Flow

By Mary Hannington

"Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

"I know that there are some who say, ‘Let’s just get more money from the higher-income people, let’s just tax them some more', and I understand that’s popular in a lot of people’s minds. But just don’t forget that old Margaret Thatcher line, ‘Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.’ ”

Um, who is running out of money?

Mitt Romney is worth an estimated $190 - $250 million, and of this, $100 million went as a gift to his children and due to some absurd tax law he paid NO gift taxes on this amount. He estimates he’ll pay $3.23 million in federal taxes for 2011, on income of $20.9 million. Romney will have $5.7 million in itemized deductions, including $4 million donated to charity. The bulk of those charitable donations -$2.6 million - went to the Mormon Church.

Outside of the charitable donations $1.7 million was for other itemized deductions meaning property taxes, mortgage interest (if any), all manner of medical expenses and any state or local taxes that would be deducted from income.

Imagine spending almost 2 million on any of these things.

He DID make income, but no doubt that was wiped away by the HUGE amount of itemized deductions and you may call him charitable, but cynic that I am, I’m willing to bet his itemized deductions match what is allowable for his income. In other words, rather than pay a higher tax rate on income he can give the money to charitable groups he supports ie; the church and deduct it instead of paying the government in taxes.

You can estimate 2010 income here:

Romney's 2010 Income

Of course this is 2010, but it looks to me like you can get pretty close to $4 million if one looks at the income categories, speaker’s fees and imagines the amount of interest income (not disclosed) and I'm guessing here, but I imagine his yearly income doesn't fluctuate wildly.

Republicans argue that during earlier years as Romney earned his money he paid taxes at the regular rate, so it is now fair that he should pay less on the money he now earns off that money in the form of capital gains. Kinda like saying "Congratulations! You are now tremendously wealthy. You no longer need to give to your country."

Let’s look at how trickle down theory is working in this case. The Mormon church did well, but will they use the money to help people or to build another church? Or put it toward genealogy research so that they have a database of all our dead relatives and these families can finally be saved?

It is going to take some dough to get all the way back to Adam. Yes, that is their goal.

Romney’s kids did fantastic, but will they use their money to build factories and companies and put people to work? And how many people does Mitt currently employ?

Good accountants for sure!

No doubt lawyers…

And no doubt low-income positions abound in his household – maids, chefs, drivers, greensmen, pool boys, maybe a pilot or two, assistants and what not.

Not much tricklin’ going on here is there?

Meanwhile, the IRS is coming after Ms. 91, who makes .001% of what Mitt Romney does, for back taxes which she probably didn’t file because she has dementia and gets confused. Sure she owes them, but it’s a hardship for her to have to pay the pittance they are after.

And on another note...

Romney’s family traces back to the Pratt family in colonial times. His great grandfather Pratt had three wives and his great, great grandfather had four. This is one of the reasons for the Mexican heritage that Mitt so proudly claims. Both Pratt and Romney families fled, along with other Mormons, to Mexico because the good ole U S of A frowned on polygamy. His great, great grandfather on the Romney side also had two wives.

“…the kingdom of God cannot rise independent of Gentile nations until we produce, manufacture, and make every article of use, convenience or necessity among our people."

These two families are powerful white Mormon families, in both the church and in politics, which both trace back to colonial times and though some of them were born in Mexico it was not necessarily because they dug the place. They operated a Mexican Mission in Chihuahua in order to convert the Mexicans there. In other words, they were there to CHANGE the culture… not embrace it.

In a 1997 article in Time magazine it was estimated that the Mormon Church’s assets were worth 11 billion dollars. "The church owns many for-profit assets including agribusiness, media, insurance, travel and real estate. Deseret Management Corp., the company through which the church holds almost all its commercial assets, is one of the largest owners of farm and ranchland in the country, including 49 for-profit parcels in addition to the Deseret Ranch. Besides the Bonneville International chain and Beneficial Life, the church owns a 52% holding in ZCMI, Utah's largest department-store chain." These provide over $600 million in income, in addition to this, in 1996 the church brought in $5.2 billion in tithes.

Mitt's mamma used to sing American anthems and according to Mitt he LOVES this country, perhaps that is because his family and the church want to own it one day.

If I had $17 million after taxes and $100 million in the bank? My mind reels with the thoughts... I could build schools, I could give people housing, I could adopt children, I could, I could, I could... why don't they?

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington
Vagabond Guru

Because religious groups see abortions as murder they see ANYTHING that has to do with abortion as not being for the public good and therefore not qualified for federal funding, tax credits or subsidies DESPITE the fact that their churches DO receive federal funding, tax credits and subsidies, but I'm not here to argue separation of church and state. Just pointin' it out. With HR3 they seek to block women from buying insurance that covers these procedures EVEN if it save lives.

As a secular person I could argue that these churches do no public good as well. Catholic priests molest and abuse boys, televangelist’s enrich themselves and fool the public with fake healings, Muslim women are made to adhere to strict laws, Hindu widows, in a practice known as sutee, are burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyres and despite being outlawed outright in 1987 the practice continues today, a Catholic hospital in Arizona recently lost its affiliation with the church and a nun that worked there was excommunicated because they aborted a baby to save the mother’s life… I’m not making this shit up!

The Catholic Bishop there called it scandalous.

Then there are the little things Christians did like burning women at the stake as witches and the CRUSADES!

23 states in this country sell “Choose Life” license plates and donate the money to pro-life groups. Can you imagine the ruckus if this were reversed?

Abortions were merely a misdemeanor in this country (following English law) unless performed after the mother could feel the child (the quickening) when they were considered a felony. As methods of detecting early pregnancy improved the felony charges were later moved to earlier pregnancies. Those performing abortions were charged and not the women, but it was a difficult case to prove (the pregnancy having been terminated) and it was rarely prosecuted.

According to author Leslie Reagan, "When Abortion Was A Crime", in the early 1900’s as many as 1.2 million illegal abortions a year were being performed (including self-induced). Prior to Roe v. Wade poor women without access to expensive and safe abortion doctors often died at the hands of quacks and many more by using coat hangers or other dangerous methods on themselves in order to terminate pregnancies.

The original opponents of abortion were nativists concerned over the rise in the Catholic birth rate, anti-feminists, who also denied the rights of wives in the bedroom and doctors. Yes, doctors, who were seeking to drive the midwives and homeopaths out of business, yet whom continued to perform the procedures themselves. What they set in motion, however, cost them. Laws were formed that required they not treat a woman for abortion related trauma unless she confess, and in the case of non-married women, not only did she have to cough up the name of the doctor, who performed the procedure, but the father as well. By the 1920’s 15,000 women were dying from botched abortions every year.

Do no public good?

The nativists would be pleased to note that 28% of women receiving abortions today are Catholic and 37% Protestants and more recent estimates have them now running neck and neck.

I live in the 13th District, which encompasses downtown Detroit, Wyandotte, Lincoln Park, Harper Woods and Grosse Pointe Woods. It is presided over by Kwyame’s mommy Caroline Cheeks Kilpatrick (a real nutter), but it is John Conyers, who represents Northwest Detroit, Dearborn and the southwestern suburbs, who stood for me as a member of the House Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitution along with Jerold Nadler, who was at Stuyvesant at the same time Guru was and represents the Upper West side (where I stay when in NYC), down to Battery Park and parts of Brooklyn, where he grew up.

They both made some very cogent points, amongst the arguments by conservatives for HR3, which calls into question primarily federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and who frequently brought up descriptions of OUT OF DATE and no longer used methods of partial birth abortions in an effort to horrify the public. BUT according to the CDC’s 2006 data, the percentage of abortions that would consist of partial birth abortion are small, only 3.7% are performed after 16-20 weeks and only 1.3% are performed after 20 weeks and these are LIFE SAVING procedures. Abortion rates are down to 1.21 million, the same as they were in 1900, from almost 1.6 million in 1988.

According to a 2010 report from the Guttmacher Institute, from 1986 until 1991 teen pregnancies were on the rise, but after this time they steadily declined until 2005. In 2005, for the first time in fourteen years rates began to rise again. Surely this is due to an ever-increasing belief in abstinence education by schools (brought on by the Bush administration) and perhaps parents as well, who in large numbers leave sex education up to the educators.

I read recently that one high school in Memphis, Tennessee has eighty-six pregnant teens attending classes. Eighty-six? It turns out that more than a quarter of the school’s population of girls is pregnant.

So what do school officials do? They hire Girls, Inc., a group that promotes abstinence. Although to be fair the group does mention condoms, their main message is that girls need to learn how to say no. They claim that older male classmates prey on these girls, which in essence takes away the responsibility from these young women and forces it onto the men, when it should be BOTH.

No one “preyed” on me, it was MY decision to have sex, but no one was preaching abstinence either, they weren’t preaching anything, they were ignoring it.

My parents were children of the 40’s and 50’s and were old enough to be my grandparents. Ms. 91 nervously tried to have the “sex talk” with me and had bought me a book on sexuality. Relief spread across her face when I revealed that my best friend’s mother, a social worker, had explained this already.

My sex education at school consisted of a Disney movie in grade school and I distinctly remember Jiminy Cricket and dancing sperm, but can no longer find any reference to this film. Following the sex education movie, Nurse Ball (I swear that was her name) demonstrated the use of the sanitary pad and us girls each were provided with a belt and our very own pad.

When it came time, I was just turning twelve, I dutifully wore the thing for a day before saying, “Fuck this, get me a tampon!” I suppose in the back of my mind I knew that having a period also meant I could get pregnant, there was the book from mom after all, but not ONCE did anyone bring up birth control. I was sexually active early, to the embarrassment of my friends, and was condemned for going too far too fast, but praised for landing a hot guy as a boyfriend and screwing him.

No one suggested I protect myself and apparently the boys were as unaware as I was. When I told my college roommate I was pregnant she was shocked to find that I wasn’t using ANY form of birth control. Like so many teenagers I felt unbreakable – full of curiosity and joie de vivre.

My roommate’s mother was sixteen when she gave birth to her daughter and was a feminist, who worked at Planned Parenthood the group that the passage of HR3 would destroy, she certainly had made sure her daughter was well educated on the topic of sex.

I had read the Hite Report, knew my body and enjoyed the sexual freedom of the times. It never occurred to me, or certainly my parents (they just assumed I wasn’t doing it) that I could become pregnant. I was the product of a white suburban conservative environment and my girlfriends, while they gossiped, rarely discussed their own sexuality. I was rebelling against all of it, but I had no "sisters" to guide me.

It’s horrifying to think of it now!

That first meeting with a Planned Parenthood counselor was incredibly empowering… all the choices I never really knew or thought about, but I entered the meeting already knowing that my decision would be to end the pregnancy.

It wasn’t done cavalierly; I had some VERY good reasons.

And I have since seen what pregnancy can do to a woman.

I have read of a Catholic woman who had 27 children; she was committed to a mental institution.

A friend had three children in rapid succession and fled into homelessness and insanity.

Another has an immune disease and can no longer take part in activities that she once loved without risking death.

According to Catholic doctrine even baby's with Anencephaly (missing parts of the brain, blind, deaf, unconscious and unable to survive outside the womb) should be carried full term, forcing mothers to face the risks of carrying a child only to watch them die.

This not only seems cruel... it's MEDIEVAL!

I had long ago decided to keep my last name even if I married and after delving into genealogy for some years I discovered my brother and I were the last of 7 generations of Scottish Hanningtons that I eventually traced back to Elizabethan England and the name itself goes back to Norman times.

I found a cousin in California, who hails from my Great, Great, Great Aunt Anne, who was a Hannington-Menzies. To my delight that cousin was also the last of that line, who continued to use the hyphenated name and she kept it upon marriage.

It is silly to worry about carrying on a name, I know, but I often wonder if the baby was a boy or a girl… what my life would have been like had I been a mother and there is still a wince, a pang and an empty feeling.

No man can possibly understand this.

And yet the same white men that I saw in that committee meeting are the same white men that spent decades shaming desperate women, who for whatever reason chose to have an abortion. Thousands upon thousands of us lost our lives because of it.

The year after New York legalized abortion the maternal mortality rate dropped by 45% and in the end it was the doctors that led the cry for change. They had seen enough carnage - 5,000 women (poor and mostly black and Hispanic) were dying every year because legal abortions weren't available in their state.

Do we really want to go back to THAT?

Note: Leslie J. Reagan's "When Abortion Was A Crime" won a President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association and is a work of serious scholarship. The remainder of the statistics came from the CDC's studies and those of the Guttmacher Institute, whose reports are cited by both Democrats and Republicans.

For more on federal funding of stem cell research.

Posted by M. Hannington at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington
VagabondGuru.com

Methinks thou doth protest too much!

Shakespeare - Hamlet

Three days ago Michelle Malkin published “The progressive “climate of hate” an illustrated primer 2000-2010” consisting of photos, lists of incidents and videos of supposed leftist hate. Over a ten year period she doesn’t have much to show. People threw cream pies at Anne Coulter. Montel Williams told Michelle Bachmann “…to go ahead slit her wrists.”

What she doesn’t mention is what Bachmann, at an anti-Health Care Reform rally, said, “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.” Nor does she mention that ten tea partiers at this event were arrested for storming one of Nancy Pelosi’s offices and refusing to leave.

"Sandra Bernhard bashing Sarah Palin and cursing her head off with hate warping her crazed face:"

- Michelle Malkin's description of Bernhard telling a Palin joke.

And Coulter? She’s the biggest spewer of hatred around! She calls Senators fags and talks about using a baseball bat on liberals.

Maybe she deserves a few pies in the face.

There is a video of crowds of people in the SF neighborhood called the Castro escorting a group of Christian fundamentalists (I doubt the fundamentalist were there on friendly business) out of the area, a dozen or so works of artists that poked fun at Bush, Palin and McCain (a few with bloody imagery), five Kerry supporters that slashed tires, a slew of folks that stole or defaced Bush/Cheney signs, a fight between two men and a small crowd of tea partiers in which the tea partiers look to be getting in more punches, a woman who pushes a cameraman’s camera away at an immigration law protest, a few celebrity rants, a man that threw tomatoes at Palin, a Black Panther video, filmmaker Michael Enright, who after being embedded with troops in Afghanistan came home and assaulted a NYC Muslim cabbie, and a smattering of vandals and disorderly conduct arrests.

Four days ago Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips sent out an email to say, "The left is coming and will hit us hard on this [the Arizona shooting]. We need to push back harder with the simple truth. The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words," he wrote and was quoted in the. Atlantic. They appear to have listened. Conservatives like Malkin are out in force trying to convince folks that it is the hate speech from the left that spurred on Loughner.

I went looking for leftist hate speech for my article:

Googling GOP

Despite their efforts what I mostly found was pretty mild stuff and some very angry right-wingers, who in spite of my civility (I was doing research not GOP bashing), called me a "piece of shit liberal". One claimed that I was familiar with murder and hate, that it was a part of my ideology. The reasoning here was that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and others were leftist and they committed murder so that makes me a murderous hater too.

They state that Loughner owned a copy of the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf (leftist books they claim), listened to rock ‘n roll and posted a video of a burning flag so he is clearly a pot smoking liberal. His friends said he was in the past. Right?

Yes in 2007 when he was 17 years old and still had friends.

And sorry, no one is going to convince me that Hitler and “Mein Kampf” are somehow liberal!

The flag burning is not so cut and dry either. In the video Loughner is wearing black plastic around his legs, a brown hoodie and a mask. Mark Potak of Southern Poverty Law Center suggests he may be portraying an immigrant burning the flag.

Loughner also shaved his head and seemingly followed the theories of the Sovereign Citizens Movement (see video). This group is an anti-Hispanic and anti-Semitic, Christian right-wing confederacy that believes the federal government has no power over them. They produced Terry Nichols and father and son, Jake and Joseph Kane, who gunned down two officers during a routine traffic stop in May of 2010.

This crime was caught on tape below and far surpasses any violence Malkin could find over a ten year period from the liberal left.

BTW here is the full list of books:

Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

They ALL have themes that concur with beliefs of Sovereign Citizens Movement. Huxley's "Brave New World"? Sleep learning to help create changes in society. Loughner believed and the SCM teach that the government stops your dreams. The Old Man and the Sea, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Farenheit 451, Animal Farm all struggles against power.

“We the Living”?

Nothing says tea party better than Ayn Rand.

Alice and Wonderland and The Phantom Toll booth are both books with word games and jibe with beliefs of government control of grammar.

As far as Malkin goes? I could easily produce a primer for the Right from just 2010, equal in length or longer, that contains far more heinous crimes than pie-throwing and far more disturbing statements than those of Mr. Williams.

Conservatives are complaining that the liberals are using the events in Arizona to fund raise, citing Senator Bernie Sanders’ fundraising newsletter. In a paragraph contained in a four-page letter, he mentions several instances of threatening behavior in Arizona. A bullet through Rep. Raul Grijalva’s office window, Rep. Harry Mitchell has received death threats, Sen. Gabby Giffords' office door was smashed in and then we have a shooting.

Giffords by the way is Jewish.

I have to ask.

Who put the bullet through Grijalva window? Who smashed in Giffords' office door? Who is making death threats to Mitchell? Who is spitting on Barney Frank? And calling Congressmen niggers?

Who said, “I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress. “?

Conservative hero, Sean Hannity on the Hannity and Colmes Show on June 15, 2005.

Our President at the memorial and Democrats are all saying can we please get along?

Conservatives and the Tea Party all seem to be saying….

NO!

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Ice Flow's "Righties" column is coming soon!

Posted by M. Hannington at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)