April Quickies

Cindy Sheehan, who very early on adopted with respect to the war in Iraq a position espoused much later by U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd and Barack Obama – war bad, Bush bad, troops out now – has decided to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to the authoritative San Francisco Chronicle. Ralph Nader popped up in Waterbury to regale the folk there with his shopworn message: Bush bad, Barack bad, McCain bad, corporations bad, Nader good. The people in Waterbury might have been satisfied if Nader, railing against incompetent bureaucrats, had aimed a few of his arrows at the boobs in state government who made it impossible to pass by Waterbury on route 84 in less than four hours. At his best, Nader sounds like Leon Trotsky on hashish crying out to the captains of industry “Get thee to a Gulag”; at his worst he sounds like former president Jimmy Carter, nominated by numerous political watchers as the worst president of the Twentieth century. Has it been that long since Jimmy fouled up the Middle East by assisting in the overthrow of a corrupt Iranian Monarch, thus paving the way for puritanical mullahs and their terrorist confederates? It seems like only yesterday. The internationalists – including Poland but alas not Connecticut – are becoming Lafferites, according to Arthur Laffer, the artist-economist who created the now famous Laffer Curve, that point in the science of economic when liberals stop paying attention. Poland has declared as its top priority a flat tax of 15 percent by 2009, by which time the state of Connecticut, under the direction of its socialist government, will have gone bankrupt. Bulgaria – ferGodsakes – already has instituted a 10 percent flat rate income tax. Kuwait has cut its corporate income tax rate by two thirds. And even Europe’s rusty old socialists have got in on the act. Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez has pledged to cut the country’s corporate income tax by 10 percentage points and totally eliminate Spain’s wealth tax, among the highest in the world, in an evident bid to attract millionaire run out of Connecticut by homegrown retrograde socialists Democrats like congresspersons Mike Lawlor and Don Williams. Finally, as a late April fools joke, President Bush, universally reviled by America’s press, once again good naturedly attended a soiree at which his humor and modesty was heartily cheered by his assassins… And, oh yes, humorist solipsist Colin McEnroe, who in one of his past incarnations used to be a "religious" reporter for the Courant, still despises Catholics and the Pope.