Want to Exhale? Get a Permit

In keeping with the administration's strategy of relentless accumulation of power, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency today announced its intention to regulate all sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Completely neglecting science in its haste to expand its regulatory footprint, the EPA has taken upon itself the power to end all human life.

Men, women and children produce carbon dioxide with every breath. It is by far the largest gaseous byproduct we all produce.

If the EPA is serious, the need for a "non-point source carbon dioxide emission" permit cannot be far off. After all, the average human exhales nearly two pounds of carbon dioxide a day, or 306,000 tons per day from all of us in the U.S. Obviously, any source that is dumping more than 110 million tons of incredibly threatening material into the atmosphere each year needs strict federal control!

Presumably heavy exercisers, joggers and bicyclists will pay more… which seems fair to me.

So, before you take even one more breath, better beat a path to your nearest federal facility. Be first in line for your permit for life.

Until then, hold that breath.

The Obama legacy looks like it's going to be, "We had to destroy the people in order to save them."

Timothy Geithner, The Soon-to-be Expendable Essential Man

Jonathan Alter, Newsweek's intellectual diva-in-waiting and professional Obama-gusher, last night described Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner as the only person in Washington who fully understands TARP, the bank bailout bill. The good news is that TARP is apparently less complex than the tax code, which Mr. Geithner has admitted to misunderstanding. The bad news is that Mr. Geithner suffers from a sufficiently limited mental capacity as to be unteachable:

1. He seemingly forgot to pay personal payroll taxes due for four years, 2001-2004; until
2. When reminded by IRS auditors, he paid 2003 and 2004, but forgot to pay the earlier years; until
3. After his nomination by President-elect Obama as Secretary with responsibility for the IRS, he paid the taxes due in the earlier years; even though
4. His employer had each year reimbursed him for the taxes that he hadn't paid; even though
5. He certified each year in writing that he had in fact paid the taxes. Four times.

Alter calls this an honest mistake, a description that seems to me to fit any mistake for which one is found out.

Let's see. A tax code written and then ignored for decades by Charles Rangel and then enforced, at least as it applies to others, by Tim Geithner. Wow, how fortunate we are!

In their spare time, Rangel and Geithner will be working with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to spend as quickly as possible more than a trillion borrowed dollars in order to bail out, partially acquire and too likely control corporate levers in the most complex financial system in the world.

No wonder the American dollar has tanked and gold is golden.