Last month, there were two separate but similar opinion columns in the Salisbury Post; one was their own editorial, and the second was from a local college political professor. Both columns criticized state Sen. Thom Goolsby (a Tea Party Republican) for saying that the Moral Monday protests resembled a circus; that the screaming, foot-stomping and disjointed speeches reminded him of clowns, more like Moron Monday. Both columns pointed out that this type of language is totally unacceptable.
“Moral Monday,” as you may know, is being led primarily by the NAACP. So wouldn’t it be fair to also point out that a couple of weeks earlier, the NAACP chairman emeritus, Julian Bond, was on TV calling the Tea Party the Taliban wing of American politics and deserving to be targeted by the IRS?

Besides, I don’t see where Goolsby’s comment that the demonstrators were acting like morons was any worse than President Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in the 2009 arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. The problem with name-calling is that it reveals more about the name-caller than the person on the receiving end. And I don’t remember any criticism when leading Democrats like Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi called the Tea Party un-American and hostage-takers, or when President Obama called Republicans “enemies” (a comment he later recanted).
And was this name-calling incident really the biggest story last month? What about when President Obama claimed he didn’t know anything about the IRS targeting Tea Party groups until he heard it on the news? I’ve known about this for at least a year now, and it was already old news.
Speaking of the IRS, did you read the July 16, 2012, 51-page audit by the Treasury Inspector General? It reported that there’s no way of knowing how much of the $4 billion worth of tax refunds and credits that goes to undocumented immigrants each year is fraudulent, because IRS management has created an environment which discourages tax examiners from identifying questionable applications and eliminated successful processes used to identify questionable fraud patterns and schemes. In just one specific example, the IRS sent refund checks to a single mailing address, where, believe it or not, 24,000 undocumented immigrants apparently received a total of S46 million.
It’s not just money.

According to this report, when the IRS assigns tax ID numbers to undocumented immigrants, whether they have the proper paperwork or not, these IDs are often used to obtain driver’s licenses.

No wonder the Democrats don’t like voter ID laws. Like the IRS, they say there’s no fraud. For many Americans, though, the IRS has become a bullying enforcement arm for the president, much like the Environmental Protection Agency. It rewards supporters, punishes dissenters and spends millions on extravagant parties for themselves.
During the first quarter of 2013, the country’s biggest banks (and their CEOs) earned their largest profits in history. Interest rates are still too low to make loaning money profitable, so why the record profits for the big banks while many hometown banks still struggle? Remember the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act?” It’s the bill that President Obama signed into law back in 2010; he told us this was the most historic shakeup of the regulation of American banks since FDR. I think he’s right. Don’t forget that this administration is still giving $45 billion a month to Wall Street’s financial institutions.
Last year Vice President Joe Biden was giving a speech, and he told the audience that Republicans would “put ya’ll back in chains” if Mitt Romney was elected. Democrats rely on this type of fear-mongering, because no one really expected job growth when President Obama was re-elected. Job gains haven’t even kept pace with population growth. People voted for this president’s second term not because they expected jobs, but because they expected free money and free services for themselves and/or others. Whether this is moral or not isn’t even the issue; the big problem is, as Maggie Thatcher said: “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Steve Pender lives in Rockwell.

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