While Rome burns
The Friday Letter / No. 537 / April 21, 2023
Third Sunday of Easter
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Updated with additional information at 10:08 a.m. EDT.
Never mind that the voices screaming loudest for the unabridged right to abortion are the least likely to need one. These are the wildest and most strident haters of our American culture: the LGBTQ crowd, self-loathing and often unattractive single white women, and academics. As demonstrated for the umpteenth time in the midterm elections, they vote. They vote Democrat.
In 2024 they will vote Democrat again, for simple reasons: Government is their god, abortion and sexual mutilation their sacraments.
Unless Republicans get a clue – unlikely given their history – they will extend their loss-win record in 2024.
Donald Trump is waging a war on two fronts to ensure Democrat victory in 2024. He's driving away the conservative voters he will need by making vicious, false claims about Ron DeSantis' congressional voting record. And with his bellicose mouth he's making sure the suburban women he drove away in 2020 and 2022 don't come back.
Repeated polling shows that Trump's obsession with the stolen 2020 election hurts him with the very voters he needs. As we have said so many times, he should leave that battle to surrogates. He should take the high road, and I fear he never will.
The Trump PAC's latest commercial attacking DeSantis is disgusting. Does any thinking person actually believe DeSantis won re-election by 19 points in a high elderly population state by voting to cut Social Security and Medicare?
DeSantis may be creating his own problems, or at least potential ones. He just signed a bill banning abortion after six weeks. Pro-lifers applaud, but there will be political consequences, as anyone familiar with the mid-term elections knows.
As one pro-abortionist noted recently, a woman might not even know she is pregnant at six weeks. Conservatives in red state Florida would say so what, and their Republican-majority legislators agree. But the Dobbs decision that repealed Roe v. Wade, while correct in every way by returning abortion law to the states where the 10th Amendment says it belongs, does carry political landmines.
Democrats capitalized on this in the midterms and pretty much wiped the floor with clueless Republicans.
We saw that happen in Wisconsin, which I incorrectly described last week as a state turning blue, when in fact Republicans won every statewide election this month except one: where abortion was the defining issue.
Fueled by millions of dollars from communist Soros organizations, Democrats flipped the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This could have catastrophic consequences in 2024 after the court – now just another legislative body elected by popular vote – redraws legislative districts to favor Democrats, overturns abortion limits, ends school choice, and reimposes forced union membership.
Worse, the court will magically discover that Wisconsin's voter ID law is unconstitutional. This is what happens when the left controls courts. They cease to rule on the constitutionality of the law. They replace the rule of law with the law of rule.
Voter ID laws are unconstitutional, they will explain, because we say they are.
Republicans must confront this reality whether they like it or not. They can keep losing as they have for the last three elections, or they can figure a way to win elections and then start changing things.
And while DeSantis puts off any presidential announcement while the legislature is in session – a wise choice that shows he has his priorities in proper order – he's running around the country campaigning. The signals are mixed.
DeSantis and the legislature acted on Judaeo-Christian principle in putting limits on abortion. The governor's job isn't done, however, until he sells this message to voters outside of Florida.
Right now Trump is taking a pugil stick to DeSantis with sleazy TV commercials and DeSantis is barely reacting. But don't look to Biden-Media censors to charge Trump with spreading “misinformation.” They bet he will be the easiest to beat.
Republican voters must be frustrated having to watch this self-destruction, fully aware that the Romneyesque national party organization has no plan or desire to change up anything. “Loss with honor” is the motto. On the heels of three straight election disasters, party bigwigs returned the same ineffective leadership to the RNC. Anyone who gives a dime to this organization is a fool.
The frustration is exacerbated by the feeling most of us have deep down that the nation is in such peril that only America's Man on Horseback can save it.
As the late Guy Odom predicted two decades ago in his book by that name, we may be reaching the breaking point where Americans no longer tolerate tyrannical government.
Odom foresaw the arrival of a virtual dictator who will impose marshal law in the short run in order to save the country. It doesn't need to turn out this way. A Republican president can cancel all of Biden's executive orders on Jan. 20, 2025. That would launch a very achievable turnaround.
But if Trump, if he becomes the nominee, can't be made to identify the real, actual enemy within, we are taking a very dangerous chance in nominating him.
Trump has the issues. Continually reminding voters of his accomplishments before and laying out a specific plan for the future, highlighting crime, the border, the China threat, inflation, corruption in government, the breakdown of civility – voters will listen. They are getting plenty tired of his constant attacks on arguably the nation's most successful governor.
The drags on productivity
I am a recovering tax accountant, though not too successful with the 12-step process needed for total remission. I still prepare a few returns for family and old friends, gratis.
Tuesday midnight was notable in two ways. It was the 248th anniversary of the famous mission led by Paul Revere and William Dawes that launched the Revolutionary War, and it was the deadline for paying Caesar his due. (See the connection?)
Now it would have been nice had my friends gotten their information to me a bit earlier, say three months ago. But it is what it is. In reading the instructions for Form 8962, which reconciles advance credits for Obamacare payments with the final yearly bill, I came across the following:
Multiple allocations in the same month.
If a qualified health plan covers individuals in your tax family and individuals in two or more other tax families for 1 or more months, see the rules in Pub. 974 under Allocation of Policy Amounts Among Three or More Taxpayers.
Example. One qualified health plan covers Bret, his spouse Paulette, and their daughter Sophia from January through August, and APTC is paid for the coverage of all three. Bret and Paulette divorce on August 26. Bret and Paulette each file a tax return using a filing status of single. Sophia is claimed as a dependent by her grandfather, Mike. Bret, Paulette, and Mike must allocate the amounts from Form 1095-A for the months of January through August on their tax returns using the worksheets and instructions in Pub. 974 because amounts on Form 1095-A must be allocated among three tax families (Bret’s, Paulette’s, and Mike’s).
Thanks for the clarification.
Form 8962 instructions run 20 pages. This explains why people are forced to pay accountants enormous sums to unravel the gibberish, written by 20-something congressional staffers and lobbyists for the tax preparation industry. The drain on America's productivity is incalculable.
Thank you, Paul Ryan, for delivering on your promise to simplify the tax code in 2017. Remember his “fill it out on a postcard” joke?
Most of the returns I prepare run 12 pages and more, and do not contribute a single dime to the treasury that couldn't be reported on a real, not Paul Ryan imaginary, postcard.
I am hardly the only person enraged by this nonsense. At American Greatness, see Josiah Lippincott's blistering attack on the tax preparation racket, “The Tax Preparation Industry Deserves to Die.”
Short takes on the news
Defections. Elliott Pritt, a freshman delegate in the West Virginia House from the southern coal fields, from Democrat to Republican. A teacher, he is the fourth state legislator since March to bail on the party, following two from Louisiana and one from North Carolina. Democrat Party bigwigs say Pritt started his political career as a member of the Socialist Party USA.
Announcements. Larry Elder, former radio talk show host and candidate for California governor, joins the Republican primary field for president, he told Tucker Carlson Thursday night.
Departures. Dan Bongino, from Fox News, after 10 years, over inability to agree on contract terms.
Dead, but not gone. The Virginia Department of Elections found 18,900 dead voters still on its voter registration rolls, Just the News reports.
Headline of the week
Babylon Bee
“Chicago Mayor Warns That if Local Walmart Locations Close People Will Have Fewer Places to Shoplift”
To contact Steve: stephencombs@substack.com. The Friday Letter is published in the op-ed section of USSA News. Ask your friends to read the Friday Letter and sign up for a free or voluntary paid subscription. It's easy: Just go to fridayletter.us.