I was totally on board with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie when he advised Warren Buffet to just shut up about being under-taxed. As Christie pointed out, if Buffet thinks he’s not paying enough, there’s nothing to stop him from sending an additional check to the Department of the Treasury.

But then I had a brain wave. If it’s really true that the nation is full of guilt-ridden rich people like Buffet, why not give them an opportunity to soothe their consciences without dragging other people into a higher tax bracket?

Under Tom’s Rule, any taxpayer with an anticipated annual income of $1 million or more could opt to pay taxes at a higher rate by signing a Fair Tax Contract with the IRS. This contract would be valid for five years and would be renewable at the taxpayer’s option. If the taxpayer’s income should happen to fall below $1 million for any year during the term of the contract, the normal, non-contractual tax rate would apply instead. Contracting taxpayers would receive a Certificate of Appreciation, signed by the President and suitable for framing, plus a four-color FAIR TAX PATRIOT bumper sticker.

Newt Gingrich never had an idea this good!

Posted by tmg110 at 12:21 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 12 April 2012 9:01 AM EDT

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Had he not been carried off by tuberculoses in 1950, George Orwell would have been 70 years old when Len Dighton’s Bomber was published. And I have no doubt that he’d have read the novel with interest, for one of its principal themes is class conflict in the wartime Royal Air Force.

Bomber makes few concessions to the rosy view of World War II as a heroic saga or a great crusade. Set in June 1943, it describes the progress of a Bomber Command raid on Germany over a period of twenty-four hours. Dighton, who served in the RAF in the late 1940s, has an eye for the small but convincing detail and an ear for the schoolboy jargon of the aircrew—many of them, as he notes, young men barely out of their teens. Some of these men are desperately tired, some are beginning to lose their nerve and all of them are aware that their chances of completing a tour of operations—thirty bombing missions—without being killed or wounded are slight.

Nor do the airmen of Dighton’s fictional bomber squadron constitute a band of brothers. Thanks to the peculiarities of the British class system, there exists a great divide between those who are commissioned officers and those who are enlisted personnel. In the US Army Air Force, all pilots, navigators and bombardiers in a bomber crew were officers. It was assumed that if you were qualified to perform such duties, you were qualified for a commission. Not so in the RAF, where a man could qualify as a pilot yet remain ineligible for a commission. The crew of Creaking Door, the Lancaster bomber that is the focus of the novel’s action, is composed entirely of enlisted men with the rank of sergeant. They regard most officers—their obsequious flight leader in particular—with narrow-eyed suspicion. For their part, many of the officers look down upon the enlisted aircrew as not quite proper chaps.

The raid itself, described by Dighton in great detail, goes badly wrong as a series of accidents and errors direct the attacking bombers away from their intended target—an industrial city in the Ruhr—toward a small, unimportant German town called Altgarten. Struck by 750 bombers, the town is utterly destroyed. (This fictional tragedy is based on several actual incidents, including the accidental bombing of a Czech insane asylum in 1943.)

Bomber portrays the Allied strategic bombing offensive as a simple campaign of mass murder—which of course it was. Having satisfied themselves that Germany’s cities and their populations were legitimate targets, the bomber barons set about destroying them with the single-minded fervor of true believers. Some Allied leaders, Churchill prominent among them, had doubts about area bombing but suppressed them. The airmen who flew the missions knew what they were doing and some experienced qualms, as does Flight Sergeant Lambert, Creaking Door’s pilot. But the machinery of murder rumbled on anyway, almost until the day of Germany’s surrender.

Orwell, touring Germany shortly after the war’s end, wrote that “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.” In its painfully detailed, minute-by-minute reconstruction of the means by which those cities were destroyed, Bomber raises a similar doubt. To defeat Nazi Germany was no doubt an absolute necessity. But the price was high.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:29 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 11 April 2013 9:47 PM EDT

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Len Dighton’s masterpiece, Bomber, does not depict the Second World War in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed in these years of the glorification of the Greatest Generation. Published in 1970, long before the old soldiers began to fade away, this disturbing novel is ultimately based on one grim statistic: During World War II, the Allied strategic bombing offensive killed an estimated 400,000 German civilians, the majority of them in 1943-45.

The strategic bombing offensive against Germany was controversial at the time and remains so today. In the 1920s and 1930s, air power advocates confidently asserted that strategic bombing could rapidly destroy an enemy’s will and capacity to fight by smashing key industries and infrastructure and demoralizing the civilian population. British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin famously asserted that “The bomber will always get through,” and the idea that the next war would begin with a knock-out blow from the air became firmly fixed in the popular imagination.

The doctrine of strategic bombing was enthusiastically embraced by the leaders of the Royal Air Force, which had been made an independent service in 1918. It justified the RAF’s existence and pointed toward a revolution in the art of war that would reduce the Army and Royal Navy to mere adjuncts of the main weapon, the Air.

There were dissenters from the concept of the strategic bombing, Winston Churchill prominent among them. And when war began in 1939 it quickly became apparent that the RAF possessed neither the expertise nor the technology to deliver the aerial knock-out blow. Daylight bombing raids resulted in high losses from German fighters and antiaircraft artillery (flak). Night bombing raids revealed that the RAF was pitifully ill-equipped to locate and bomb targets in darkness.

The Battle of Britain ought to have raised further doubts about the validity of strategic bombing. Despite all its advantages of numerical superiority and possession of bases in close proximity to targets in Britain, the Luftwaffe failed either to paralyze British industry or to demolish the morale of the British people. But with the fall of France, Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill, now prime minister, realized that strategic bombing was his country’s only means of striking back. Great resources were accordingly devoted to the creation of a bomber force capable of delivering on the promises of the interwar air power prophets. With the appointment of the able and energetic Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris to lead it in 1941, RAF Bomber Command was transformed into a powerful weapon of mass destruction.

Along with Churchill’s scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, Harris pressed for the adoption of area bombing by night. Germany’s cities were to be laid in ruins, the objective being to kill and “de-house” German civilians. Cherwell and Harris argued that industrial workers were valid military targets; anyhow, daylight precision bombing would only result in prohibitive casualties. Determined to take the fight to Germany in some way, Churchill fell in with their plan.

Between 1941 and 1943, new and far more capable aircraft, such as the Lancaster and Halifax four-engine bombers, were delivered to Bomber Command’s operational squadrons. New, sophisticated navigational aids were introduced. A specially trained Pathfinder Force was created to locate and mark targets for the bomber stream. By 1943 Bomber Command was a formidable force that posed a deadly threat to Germany’s cities. Meanwhile, the US Eighth Air Force, based in Britain, was adding its weight to the strategic air offensive with daylight bombing raids.

The Germans reacted to this threat with their customary efficiency and by 1943 they were devoting major resources to home air defense. Particularly impressive was the development of a specialized night fighter force. In tandem with the Luftwaffe’s always-efficient flak, radar-directed night fighters with their hard-hitting cannon armament took a heavy toll of RAF bombers.

Bomber is set in mid-1943, with both Bomber Command and the German night fighter force rising to peak efficiency and the killing about to begin in earnest. Having sketched in the historical background, I’ll discuss the novel in my next post.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:46 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 6 April 2012 3:30 PM EDT

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As of today, the Obama super PAC (run by former Obama adviser Bill Burton) has still not returned the $1 million donation it received from the hideous misogynist, Bill Maher. Yet the President's standing with American women has improved of late, if recent polls are to be believed. What to make of it? I can only speculate that women who support Barry's reelection must be suffering from the political equivilent of battered wife syndrome.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:11 AM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 5 April 2012 11:18 AM EDT

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It was quite good fun to watch from the sidelines as President Obama—by his own assessment the most gifted and brilliant individual ever to occupy the American presidency—made a number of notably stupid statements regarding the powers of the federal judiciary.

Obama is understandably worried that the Supreme Court might strike down his signature achievement, Obamacare, in full or in part. Last week’s oral arguments certainly provided him with good grounds for apprehension. So what was his response? It came in two parts.

For starters, the president—who is, you’ll recall, a former law professor—asserted that Obamacare is constitutional because it should be constitutional. Careful observers no doubt noticed the circularity of this argument and perhaps the President himself realized that its logic was less than compelling. So he went on to say that it would be “unprecedented” for the “unelected” high court to strike down as unconstitutional a law passed by a “strong majority” of a "democratically elected" legislature.

 Unprecedented indeed, except for the two hundred-odd times that the Supreme Court has done so since Marbury v. Madison established the principle of judicial review in 1803.

This was a remarkably stupid thing for the President to say—but of course he thinks that most people are too stupid to notice when he’s lying. Or perhaps I’m judging him too harshly, unelected part-time pundit that I am. It could be that Obama was rattled by the course of the oral arguments and simply lashed out at the judiciary. It wouldn’t be the first time in the Age of Barry that a setback provoked such an adolescent temper tantrum.

The President is now trying to walk back his comments. (We're getting to the point where it would be useful to have a keyboard hot key that would type "Obama later explained" with one touch.) On reflection he must have realized that he’d said something that not only made him look dumb but risked antagonizing the justices. It would be just like our narcissistic philosopher-president to assume that other people will behave with same pettiness he displays on a daily basis.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:12 AM EDT

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OK, this is really funny. Keith Olbermann just got fired from Al Gore's Current TV network for breach of contract. His transgressions are said to include excessive absenteeism, sabotaging the network and bad-mouthing Current TV and its management team. In retaliation, Keith has filed a lawsuit against the Goricle.

This meltdown isn’t surprising, really. Olbermann has long been known as a way-too-tightly-wrapped drama queen who doesn't work and play well with others. Fans may recall his abrupt, ill-tempered departure from MSNBC. But here’s what cracks me up: He’s being replaced at Current TV by none other than disgraced former New York governor Elliot Spitzer! I’d call that a low blow except for the fact that Olbermann is such a tool. He deserves the humiliation.

I must say, though, that my opinion of Al Gore has ticked up a notch. That was a malicious zinger, replacing Mr. Hissy Fit with Client Number 9…

Posted by tmg110 at 12:53 PM EDT

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I was down with a sinus infection that rendered me incapable of caring what was going on in the wide world beyond my sickroom. Today, however, I feel much better—and tomorrow I'll no dounbt be in the mood to opine. Watch this space…

Posted by tmg110 at 12:20 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 1 April 2012 12:24 AM EDT

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For the past two years, the Obama Justice Department (if that’s not an oxymoron) has been pursuing a case against a group of extremist militia members in Michigan. In 2008, the FBI planted an informant inside the so-called Hutaree Militia. The anti-government material passed to the FBI by the informant was used by the Justice Department—by then under Attorney General Eric Holder—to build a case that the group was conspiring to rebel against the government. In 2010, the Hutaree Militia was broken up in a series of raids and arrests. Nine members of the group were eventually charged.

Yesterday, however, U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts dismissed most of the charges against seven of the defendants, ruling that group’s expressions of hatred of government authority, extreme though they were, did not rise to the level of sedition. (The FBI investigation uncovered no evidence that the Hutaree Militia was planning actual attacks against the government.) On the contrary, Roberts observed, such speech falls under the protection of the First Amendment.

Given the extreme nature of the Hutaree Militia’s anti-government ranting, the FBI was quite right to monitor the group. But if there was never a specific plot to commit a terrorist act, why bring charges? I have no doubt that the Holder Justice Department was seeking to show its even-handedness: “See? We don’t just pick on Muslim terrorists!” It was a PR stunt, and it backfired.

Was the judge right to rule as she did? Without question—and her legal reasoning applies quite as much to Islamofascist terrorists, environmental extremists, anti-capitalist anarchists, etc. as it does to right-wing hate groups. At a time when free speech is under attack from all quarters—though particularly from the Left—Judge Roberts’ ringing endorsement of the First Amendment is particularly welcome.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:33 AM EDT

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Well, well. Progressives took a victory lap after gathering sufficient signatures to force a recall election in Wisconsin. Their target: Scott Walker, the state’s Republican governor, reviled by the Left for his successful campaign to reign in the power of the state’s greedy public-sector unions. Walker’s foes have been pretty confident that the recall election, likely to be held in June, would go their way.

Unfortunately for their hopes, a new poll conducted by Marquette University shows Walker with a small lead over both of his likely Democratic challengers. (A primary will be held in May to select a Democratic candidate to run against Walker in the recall election.) And while opinion about the governor remains sharply divided, he enjoys a 50% approval rating. In short, Walker seems likely to survive the recall. Looks like the comrades have overplayed their hand.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:49 AM EDT

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We have a tie today between “journalistic ethics” and “judicial ethics.”

In this post on “Contentions,” the Commentary blog, Alana Goodman tells how 25 Gannett Wisconsin Media journalists, including seven at the Green Bay Press-Gazette violated Gannett’s journalistic ethics standards by signing the recall petition against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. This interesting tidbit of information came to light after the paper ran a story relating how some two dozen Wisconsin judges violated judicial standards of conduct by signing the recall petition.

But really, all of these people are progressives, so why are we talking about something as fifteen-minutes-ago as ethics? All that matters is results—correct, comrades?

Posted by tmg110 at 4:04 PM EDT

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