Q: Does Obamacare Impose a 3.8 Percent "Sales Tax" on Your Home?

Well contra the article linked the answer is Yes. The only good news is that most people won't be hit with it...for now.

We've been flooded with queries about this one ever since the health care bill became law. At the last minute, Democratic lawmakers decided on a new 3.8 percent tax on the net investment income of high-income persons. But the claim that this would amount to a $15,200 tax on the sale of a typical $400,000 home is utterly false.

The truth is that only a tiny percentage of home sellers will pay the tax. First of all, only those with incomes over $200,000 a year ($250,000 for married couples filing jointly) will be subject to it. And even for those who have such high incomes, the tax still won't apply to the first $250,000 on profits from the sale of a personal residence - or to the first $500,000 in the case of a married couple selling their home.

But if you own vacation or investment property though, look out:

The Internal Revenue Service says that to qualify for the $250,000/$500,000 exclusion, a seller must have owned the home and lived there as the seller's "main home" for at least two years out of the five years prior to the sale.

Obamacare just gets better and better doesn't it.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:17 PM | Comments (762)
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It's longer than the usual review, so I'm putting it all below the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:10 PM | Comments (1018)
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A good soldier and a useful idiot.

ources tell CBS News that Rice is the likely nominee because of the way she has performed regarding the situations with Iran and North Korea. She could face pushback from Republicans over what she knew about the Benghazi Consulate terror attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

...

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that it would be a mistake for Obama to nominate anyone that was involved with the “Benghazi debacle.”

“I’m not entertaining promoting anybody that I think was involved with the Benghazi debacle. We need to get to the bottom of it,” [Lindsey] Graham told CBS News. “The president has a lot of leeway with me and others when it comes to making appointments, but I’m not going to promote somebody who I think has misled the country or is either incompetent. That’s my view of Susan Rice.”

By the way: It is important that we get Petraeus under oath. The speculation is that he desperately wants to get out of testifying -- because he lied last time. But not under oath. At least I hear this briefing was just a briefing and not sworn testimony.

He doesn't want to have to repeat his claims about there being intelligence supporting the "spontaneous protest" narrative under oath.

Update: Bill Kristol just mentioned the theory that Petraeus lied. In fact, he seems to think it is more well-established than a mere "theory." He suggests maybe Petraeus thought he was Helping National Security by lying, rather than just Helping Obama.

Um, I don't care.

Krauthammer is talking about the affair being held over Petraeus' head to encourage his compliance in the cover-up.

Posted by: Ace at 02:38 PM | Comments (205)
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Jonathan Martin of Politico has been pushing that line -- shock of shocks. Nolte rebuts him some. So did AllahPundit.

Here's a quote from liberal hack Jonathan Martin:

GOP officials have chalked up their electoral thumping to everything from the countryÂ’s changing demographics to an ill-timed hurricane and failed voter turn-out system, but a cadre of Republicans under 50 believes the partyÂ’s problem is even more fundamental.

The party is suffering from Pauline Kaelism.

Kael was The New Yorker movie critic who famously said in the wake of Richard M. NixonÂ’s 49-state landslide in 1972 that she knew only one person who voted for Nixon.

Now, many young Republicans worry, they are the ones in the hermetically sealed bubble — except it’s not confined to geography but rather a self-selected media universe in which only their own views are reinforced and an alternate reality is reflected…

In this reassuring conservative pocket universe, Rasmussen polls are gospel, the Benghazi controversy is worse than Watergate, “Fair and Balanced” isn’t just marketing and Dick Morris is a political seer.

The liberal media cannot actually win on non-factual points, as they are supposed to be in the fact business. Not the opinion business. They actually are in the opinion business, but they're not supposed to be.

They cannot "win" an "argument" over raising taxes, or gay marriage, or abortion, even though they would really, really like to. These things are generally not matters of fact. There are some facts to be argued about in each case, but the facts are just selected to prove a belief. It's really the belief that comes first; the facts are secondary.

But the media wishes to win these arguments.

What they do instead is push proxies for the real arguments they wish to win. For example, the media covers the living hell out of every conservative sex scandal, and every conservative money scandal. They try to draw "larger lessons" from such things.

They do not cover Democratic scandals with anything close to the same level of flood-the-zone enthusiasm, and do not attempt to draw "larger lessons" of politics from these scandals. The only larger lessons to be are entirely human ones. Bill Clinton's sex scandals were his own; no larger lessons about the Democratic Party could be drawn. Cold Cash Jefferson's freezer full of bribes was just one man's failing. Etcetera.

Now, when a Republican falls, that's not really evidence that his policy preferences were wrong. But the media plays it that way.

They can't win on the facts as far as policy. And I'm not just saying "conservative policies are factually correct;" I mean no one can win on basic assumptions and beliefs, really. These aren't fact-dependent questions (or, at least, aren't chiefly so).

Which is why, then, they rush to link Good Facts For Democrats for Vindications of Democratic Policy. And, of course, Bad Facts for Republicans to Repudiations of Republican Policy.

This is what this whole "Should we have foreseen this?" argument is about, as usual. The election was very close -- just 2%. Only a few presidential elections in all of American history were closer.

But the media now has a Good Fact for Democrats. So what do they do? They attempt to link this fact to Democratic policies -- their policies are based on facts and science and numbers and things that liberal reporters are entirely ignorant of, but which they approve of, in the abstract. See, the Democrats are rational and reasonable and we know this because they won a 2-point-margin election. They knew they were going to win. That proves they're smarter, and more rational, and they Love Science (from afar-- sometimes they read the review of Malcolm Gladstone book in the New York Times Review of Books and isn't he sort of science-y?).

Republicans, on the other hand, thought they were going to win, and they were wrong wrong wrong, which proves, like everything else about them, that they are Anti-Science and Anti-Reason and think that the energy crisis can be fixed if we just all love Jesus enough and are basically dumb, crude, and crazy.

Note what we're talking about here.

The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots in a very close Super Bowl this past year, in a game most people thought was a toss-up. A game which most people thought would come down to execution and the last few plays (and it did).

Are the people who thought the Patriots would win crazy? Anti-science? Too Jesusy to understand football?

Were those who predicted a Giants win geniuses? Their heads Full of Math?

No. It was a tossup game, and some people guessed one thing, and some people guessed another. There was evidence to support the idea that the Patriots were a stronger team (they performed better all during the season, had a better W-L record) and there was evidence to support the idea that the Giants would win (they had suddenly come alive late in the season and made people sit up and wonder Where the hell has that team been all season? had the Smell of Destiny about them).

Kind of like the 2012 election, no?

But if anyone seriously attempted to turn his correct guess into a general proof of his Complete Interdisciplinary Mastery of All Fields, we'd call him an idiot and a fool. And if the tried to claim an incorrect guess was proof that Patriots fans were all stupid and anti-science, we'd call him a lunatic.

We'd say he was a sad troll trying to turn something trivial -- a guess about the outcome of a close toss-up contest -- into evidence of something large. Like the fat loser at the bar who still wants to talk about the time he won Trivia Night six years ago.

One last thing -- if liberals all "knew this would happen" (which proves they Love Science), why did I see so many damn articles like this before the election?

Things We Didn't Know: I don't think liberals knew in advance that ORCA would fail, or that the 2012 electorate would be about as non-white as 2008, or that Republicans would actually turn out only at the same low levels as in 2008.

Or that a lethal hurricane would suddenly give Obama the chance to put down the golf club and pick up his spiffy leather jacket.

These things did in fact happen, and they're what turned the election (among a few other things).

But I didn't predict the last five minutes of the Giants-Patriots game, and neither did the media, or liberals generally, predict the specifics of this very, very narrow election.

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Comments (393)
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They say this helped "at the margins." As Obama won at the margins-- just barely won by two points -- this may have been critical.

Among the several things I'm not sure about is this: Did we get beaten at a strategic level, or merely the tactical? Do we have to completely change our principles and policies, or merely get our acts together with data mining, micro-targeting, and

It was called “the Optimizer,” and, strategists for President Obama say it is how he beat a better-financed Republican opposition in the advertising war.

Culling never-before-used data about viewing habits, and combining it with more personal information about the voters the campaign was trying to reach and persuade than was ever before available, the system allowed Mr. ObamaÂ’s team to direct advertising with a previously unheard-of level of efficiency, strategists from both sides agree.

“Future campaigns ignore the targeting strategy of the Obama campaign of 2012 at their peril,” said Ken Goldstein, the president of Kantar Media/CMAG, a media monitoring firm that tracked and analyzed political advertising for both campaigns. “This was an unprecedented marrying of detailed information on viewing habits and political predispositions.”

...

And in the days since the election new details are emerging about just how outmatched the Republicans were on the technology side, prompting a partywide re-examination of how to avoid a repeat and regain the once-fearsome tactical advantages they held in the era of President George W. Bush.

...

With so much more time to prepare, Mr. Obama’s polling and “analytics” department collected so much information about the electorate that it knew far more about which sorts of voters were going to turn out — and where — than the Romney campaign and most public pollsters.

And that carried over into their TV purchases. They shifted resources from the costliest sort of advertising (early prime, news) that reached high-information, very reliable voters, and instead targeted low-information, less reliable voters on Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon and TVLand, a cable network that just plays old reruns.

The article doesn't say this, but reading between the lines, the Obama campaign assumed that reliable voters would show up, and that high-information voters would make up their minds based on the large amount of non-TV-ad inputs they already had, and instead played largely for those who knew so little their minds could be changed by a few TV ads.

Posted by: Ace at 11:02 AM | Comments (589)
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Jindal makes the case for a blend of fiscal conservatism with a dash of populism:

“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal told POLITICO in a 45-minute telephone interview. “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”

Rand Paul wants a pathway to citizenship for illegals.

He wants to work with liberal Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Republicans to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for pot possession. He wants to carve a compromise immigration plan with an “eventual path” to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a proposal he believes could be palatable to conservatives.

Brett Stephens in the WSJ says we must not only give up being interested in other people's sexual habits, but join the gay marriage movement. And also, learn Spanish.

Fellow conservatives, please stop obsessing about what other adults might be doing in their bedrooms, so long as it's lawful and consensual and doesn't impinge in some obvious way on you. This obsession is socially uncouth, politically counterproductive and, too often, unwittingly revealing.

Also, if gay people wish to lead conventionally bourgeois lives by getting married, that may be lunacy on their part but it's a credit to our values. Channeling passions that cannot be repressed toward socially productive ends is the genius of the American way. The alternative is the tapped foot and the wide stance.

Also, please tone down the abortion extremism. Supporting so-called partial-birth abortions, as too many liberals do, is abortion extremism. But so is opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest, to say nothing of the life of the mother. Democrats did better with a president who wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; Republicans would have done better by adopting former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels's call for a "truce" on social issues.

By the way, what's so awful about Spanish? It's a fine European language with an outstanding literary tradition—Cervantes, Borges, Paz, Vargas Llosa—and it would do you no harm to learn it. Bilingualism is an intellectual virtue, not a deviant sexual practice.

Which reminds me: Can we, as the GOP base, demand an IQ exam as well as a test of basic knowledge from our congressional and presidential candidates? This is not a flippant suggestion: There were at least five Senate seats in this election cycle that might have been occupied by a Republican come January had not the invincible stupidity of the candidate stood in the way.

I'm still trying to figure things out so I mention these as a Quote of the Day sort of thing, without endorsement.

I'll be honest: I thought I understood what was needed to win this election and I may have been very wrong. (I say "may" because it's possible things were just too stacked against us, so it's possible my prescriptions were generally right, but yet still insufficient.)

I keep thinking of that baseball manager: Doesn't anyone here know how to play this game? I'm not sure I can answer yes. Maybe everything I thought was wrong.

I think it's good that people are offering opinions and prescriptions. I suppose we'll have to see who wins the day. I really don't know anymore.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (560)
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But we've got the free birth control pills. Those we definitely have. Those are pure profit. Just put that in the bank and smile about your winnings.

Everything else, though.... not so good.

“I don’t think markets are going down because of Greece, I don’t think markets are going down because of the ‘fiscal cliff’ — because there won’t be a ‘fiscal cliff,’ ” Faber told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “The market is going down because corporate profits will begin to disappoint, the global economy will hardly grow next year or even contract, and that is the reason why stocks, from the highs of September of 1,470 on the S&P, will drop at least 20 percent, in my view.”

...

Faber argued that the “fiscal cliff,” a rise in taxes and automatic spending cuts, would actually involve some minor tax increases in “five years’ time” and some spending cuts “in 100 years.”

...

Faber added: “In a democracy, they’re not going to take the pain, they’re going to kick down the problems and they’re going to get bigger and bigger.”

Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (418)
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The latest entry in "Here's what the GOP should do".

“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything,” Jindal told POLITICO in a 45-minute telephone interview. “We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”

He was just as blunt on how the GOP should speak to voters, criticizing his party for offending and speaking down to much of the electorate.

“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

You mean the voters that thought Mitt Romney was going to outlaw women or something? The "intelligence" of those voters?

“We’re a populist party and we’ve got to make that clear going forward,” he said.

To Jindal, that means improving the quality of education for kids across class and racial lines. The author of a major school reform bill this year, he said education is one example of how government needs to be changed to adapt to the times.

“Let the dollar follow the child instead of making the child follow the dollar,” he said of his policies to support charter, private and home schooling.

...

“You’ve got to give the president’s team credit: They did a very good job portraying the Republican Party as wanting to just preserve the status quo for those who’ve already been successful and burn the bridge behind them,” he acknowledged. “That’s not what we as a party stand for and what we as a party can stand for.”

Jindal also talks about the importance of energy policy and financial regulation going forward. In the broad strokes, he makes sense. Alas, the problems tend to be in the details.

I think Jindal is on the right track and not just because I wrote something similar yesterday, though it helps. The GOP and conservatives use to be the party of ideas and innovation. We lost a lot of that after 8 years of Bush where we went along with a lot of things the conservative movement wasn't very fond of (No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D and a big government approach to domestic security to name a few).

I'm sure we'll get plenty of ideas about getting back to our roots and come up with innovative ideas for the challenges facing the country. What I'm less sure of is whether we'll find someone who can carry the message to the GOP and the wider electorate and even if we can do people want those kinds of solutions or is it too late?

Posted by: DrewM at 07:03 AM | Comments (638)
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• Afghan Commander Ensared In Petraeus Scandal
  
• ABC Denver Accidently Runs A Photoshopped Version Of Petraeus Biography Cover
  
• The New Dark Ages Across Europe
  
• NBC Univseral Lays Of 500. Hahahaha.
  
• Think Tank Sues Treasury Dept. To Make Carbon Tax E-mails Public
  
• German Turns Its Back On The World?
  
• Obama Keeps Holder As AG
  
• This Woman Takes Committed Republican To A New Level
  
• Cornell West Is The Blackest Of Them All. The Rest Of You Are Just Sell Outs
  
• John Kerry For SecDef?
  
• African Democracy Is A Sham
  
• CBS's Nancy Giles: Whites Oppose Abortion To Build Up "The Race"
  
• Instead of Benghazi Hearings, Hillary Heads For Wine Tasting In Australia
  
• Romney Got Zero Votes In Fifty Nine Philly Voting Divisions*
  
• Wes Anderson Submits A Directing Audition Tape For Star Wars VII
  

*fixed

You can follow me or follow me on twitter. I'm cool with either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM | Comments (451)
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Um... so I'm just gonna throw this up now.

Jill Kelley, the woman who was (allegedly) threatened by Gen. Petraeus's squeeze Paula Broadwell and who (apparently) started the FBI investigation that led to Petraeus' ouster, who went to the FBI for help after the threats and then (allegedly) had a relationship with the FBI agent in charge of her own case, who (allegedly) sent her shirtless pics of himself, also (apparently, allegedly) had "compromising" communications with Gen. John Allen, the Big Damn Commander of our war effort in Afghanistan.

You can't even make this shit up. It's not a love triangle. It's a love Pentagon.

Allen, a four-star Marine general, succeeded Petraeus as the top American commander in Afghanistan in July 2011.

The senior official, who discussed the matter only on condition of anonymity because it is under investigation, said Panetta believed it was prudent to launch a Pentagon investigation, although the official would not explain the nature of Allen's problematic communications.

The official said 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents from Allen's communications with Kelley between 2010 and 2012 are under review. He would not say whether they involved sexual matters or whether they are thought to include unauthorized disclosures of classified information. He said he did not know whether Petraeus is mentioned in the emails.

"Gen. Allen disputes that he has engaged in any wrongdoing in this matter," the official said. He said Allen currently is in Washington.

Twenty to thirty THOUSAND pages? I write for a living and I can tell you that I haven't written twenty to thirty thousand pages in my working career. Cheese-and-crackers, that's a damn lot of love letters. I've never liked anyone enough EVER to spend that much time talking to them. Eesh.

The inescapable rule of affairs just ran into the first rule of spycraft. The rule of affairs is that there is never just one. You cheat, that makes you a cheater. It never just happens once.

And the first rule of spycraft is that "Everyone (or every man) has his blond bombshell in a red Ferrari." Translation: every idiot will let his sex drive drive.

Gah. This is breaking just now, so I'm going to have to mull for a while before I can tell you anything else. Gah. Afghanistan. Gah.

Update: Incriminating photos below: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:46 PM | Comments (740)
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