This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Montgomery Co./Maryland

  • 45% of Marylanders are drooling morons

    TSO sent me this link from Rasmussen that says that Martin O’Malley and Robert Erlich are basically statistically tied for the governor’s race in Maryland, that they teeter-totter back and forth weekly. Currently 45% of Maryland voters support O’Malley.

    Those 45% of Maryland voters are the most stupid creatures on the face of the planet, possibly in the universe. How they manage to hit the toilet while seated on it is beyond me. The other half of the State must be holding their hands while they cross the street otherwise their flattened corpses would line the streets. How they drink a glass of water without drowning is a mystery.

    Erlich turned over a surplus to O’Malley when he was voted out in 2006. O’Malley immediately created six-figure income jobs for his political allies and added another 400k people to rolls of medicare and spent Erlich’s legacy to the state in less than six months – and then he went looking for wallets and celebrated raising taxes on every employed taxpayer in the state. Then he raised taxes on every consumer who passed through the State.The state’s education system graduates morons, like Baltimore did when O’Malley was mayor there.

    I read this morning that property owners in Montgomery County have had their property values drop by about half, yet they’re still paying taxes at their home’s 2007 value. Retired folks taking the biggest hit on that one.

    If those 45% of Marylanders aren’t drooling morons, someone explain to me why O’Malley is even in double digits, let alone enjoying the support of nearly half of voters.

  • Obama: Support O’Malley

    O'Malley screws taxpayers

    My BFF Barack Obama sent me an email today asking me to support Marty O’Malley in his re-election bid for the Governor of Maryland;

    Since being elected Governor in 2006, Martin O’Malley has been a true champion for the people of Maryland.

    He has restored a sense of fiscal responsibility and helped the state grow sustainably, expanding access to health care coverage and continuing to improve Maryland’s schools, while also restoring the Chesapeake Bay. His four-year freeze on college tuition brought the cost of higher education within reach of middle-class families.

    Governor O’Malley has a lot more to contribute to your state — and I hope you will do your part to ensure he has four more years to continue his work.

    Yeah, see that picture above? That’s Marty celebrating his “victory” raising taxes on Marylanders after just a year in office. Robert Ehrlich, his predecessor, left O’Malley a $650 million surplus – that’s how O’Malley “restored a sense of fiscal responsibility” by the largest tax increase in Maryland’s history. the increase went to $1.6 billion dollars of new spending. O’Malley threatened to cut essential services to pay for his new spending projects if the legislature didn’t give him the tax increases.

    The Washington Times found $488 million that Maryland paid in welfare money to recipients who hadn’t either supplied their Social Security number or gave the State a false SSN.

    O’Malley then declared it patriotic to pay the additional tax – meanwhile non-patriotic Marylanders fled the state.

    So, O’Malley is matched up against Erlich again this Fall. I almost regret that I can’t vote against O’Malley – but at least I’m out from under his oppressive boot.

    Sorry, Barrack, you can’t count on me.

  • Maryland thugs look for more taxes on consumers

    Three years ago, Republicans Robert Erlich and Michael Steele left their respective offices of Governor and Lt. Governor and turned over a $12 million surplus to Democrat Marty O’Malley (he hates being called Marty, I hear). Within six months, the O’Malley Administration had spent the $12 million, and was busy raising taxes on Marylanders while handing out 6-figure jobs to his friends.

    Still deeply in debt, the Maryland government is seeking alternate taxes they load on the backs of marylanders. The latest is a $.10/ounce tax on alcohol which will drive up the price of a six-pack about $2.40.

    “God knows what it will cost by the time it gets to the consumer,” Milani said. “This isn’t a percentage, like a sales tax. People don’t realize — the guy who drinks a low-end case of beer every Friday night is going to have the same price increase as the guy who drinks premium beer.”

    The tax would apply to every 8 ounces of alcohol — totaling about 55 cents for a bottle of wine and 75 cents on a handle of liquor.

    Maryland government is also looking at mobile traffic cameras since the cash cow of fixed cameras seems to have run dry;

    One camera, on Randolph Road near Rock Creek Trail, caught nearly 12,000 speeders during its first month. A year later, the same camera generated only 2,383 tickets in a month, the report found.

    Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson recently decided to scrap putting fixed cameras in school zones, partly because of low expected revenues from fixed cameras. Instead, he is considering using six to eight mobile cameras.

    Of course, they could have their police officers patrol roads for traffic law violators while the police officers drive from Dunkin’ Donuts to Dunkin’ Donuts – but that’s probably too complex of an idea. I used to drive from one end of Montgomery County to downtown DC every work day and I never in all of those years saw a police officer on patrol. However, I could have written a month’s worth of tickets every day. But, maybe I don’t understand the intricacies of law enforcement – like punishing criminals for bad behavior.

    Especially since it’s just easier to look at each driver as government’s own personal ATM.

  • Woman medevaced from wedding proposal

    The Washington Post tells the story of a man who thought proposing marriage to his girlfriend on the Billy Goat Trail here in Montgomery County, Maryland was a romantic idea. Kinda backfired, though.

    A man took his girlfriend hiking Sunday afternoon on the gorgeous — albeit rocky and rough — Billy Goat Trail, on national parkland near Great Falls. At some point, he popped the question. She said yes.

    As they continued their walk, the woman apparently slipped, fell down a rock face and was injured. With no way to reach her easily, emergency responders used a U.S. Park Police helicopter to pluck her off the path.

    Here’s the WP video of the helicopter extraction of the woman;
    (more…)

  • Why States don’t fight wars

    Jerry920 sent us this article from the Army Times which reports on the efforts of one State Senator of mine in the sorry state of Maryland.

    Sorry? Yes, because they have a long history of being two-faced and populated by morons. They were one of the slave states that remained in the Union during the Civil War having their cake and eating it, too, since the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to them. It was Marylanders that Pinkerton had to protect the new President Lincoln from as he made his way to his first Inauguration. It was Marylanders that hid John Wilkes Boothe until he could cross the Potomac into Virginia. In fact, John Wilkes Booth was a Marylander. Well, you see where I get this intense dislike of my neighbors.

    Back to the article;

    A Maryland state senator is pushing a bill that would require the governor to prevent the mobilization of the state’s National Guard for federal duty unless Congress has authorized the use of military force or issued a declaration of war.

    The bill also would authorize the governor to ask for the return of deployed units in certain circumstances.

    While the sons and daughters of 49 other States fight and die for the security of the chuckleheads of Maryland.

    Madaleno, a Democrat [as if you hadn’t guessed at this point], said he supported the Iraq invasion, although he said he believes there were “serious gaps in how the war was prosecuted after…the first six months.”

    At the same time, he argued, “If we are actually going to be actively engaged in conflicts around the world for a variety of reasons, how do we create a political process that makes sure that the people remain engaged and supportive of the conflicts that we’re in? It shouldn’t just be the executive branch that is solely responsible for that decision-making. We have to create a political process that keeps the public engaged, informed, through their elected representatives.”

    Never mind whether we win or lose, or if we’re secure in our homes – it’s more important that the public remain engaged. It’s all about feelings.

    It’s all a part of the “Bring The Guard Home” Movement which I’ve written about before here. They’re perfectly willing to let other soldiers fight their wars while they feel good about their neighbors sitting out a war at home. There’s probably a movement in your state, too. And Oh, they have the backing of Code Pink, too.

    “By doing it this way, I’m trying to take a slightly different tack than several other states, where they’ve focused solely on the resolution to bring the Guard home from Iraq now,” Madaleno said. “And I’m trying to refocus and broaden the debate a little bit: What are the lessons of this conflict that inform us for the next conflict?”

    This is why States and the US Congress don’t fight wars – they don’t understand that you can’t hamstring your military and the application of military power where and when it’s needed by setting up a series of useless and unnecessary legislative hoops to jump through.

    Jerry asked me about Minnesota – according to National Review;

    The United States Supreme Court settled this question definitively in 1990, when the then-governor of Minnesota complained that Guard troops from that state had been sent to Central America. In that case — Perpich v. Department of Defense — the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the governor of Minnesota had no such authority over the Guard troops, and recognized “the supremacy of federal power in the area of military affairs.”

    Wikipedia concurs. The actual decision says;

    Congress has provided by statute that, in addition to its National Guard, a State may provide and maintain at its own expense a defense force that is exempt from being drafted into the Armed Forces of the United States. See 32 U.S.C. § 109(c). As long as that provision remains in effect, there is no basis for an argument that the federal statutory scheme deprives Minnesota of any constitutional entitlement to a separate militia of its own.

    So they have no legs to stand on. But, it’s just the idea….

  • O’Malley sucks. What was Maryland thinking?

    Today’s Washington Post has the news that Maryland state employees are going to bear the burden of the Martin O’Malley’s misadminstration of state funds.

    For those of you not familiar with Maryland’s recent fiscal history, Republican governor Robert Ehrlich and his Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele turned over more than a billion dollar surplus when they were voted out of office in 2006 and Martin O’Malley took the reins of the State. By the end of 2007, O’Malley was crying “Wolf!” that the State was in danger of cutting public services if he couldn’t raise taxes $1.4 billion.

    In the dead of the night in November last year, O’Malley coerced the legislature into raising taxes under the threat of cuts to public safety services. At the same time, he added 100,000 Marylanders to the State healthcare system. He raised income taxes, corporate income taxes, sales taxes and the tobacco tax.

    A month later, an audit of the welfare system found nearly half-a-billion bucks had been paid to recipients who hadn’t supplied or didn’t have a Social Security number.

    In January, we discovered that O’Malley’s purported “lean budget” in which he had promised to increase year-over-year spending only 4%  actually increased 6% from the year before.

    By March, he had created a new Maryland State Employee pay grade which he awarded to his closest staff along with $600,000 in new salary expenses for taxpayers.

    And now today’s news that Maryland State employees will be furloughed in the coming year to cut state spending;

    Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) today announced a furlough plan under which state employees will lose the equivalent of two to five days of pay by June, an attempt to generate savings in a worsening budget climate.

    The announcement came in advance of a meeting of state panel that is expected to lower state revenue estimates by $415.3 million for the current fiscal year, which ends in June, and $963.5 million for next fiscal year.

    “In the midst of this deepening national recession, there are some difficult decisions before us that we wish we did not have to make,” O’Malley wrote in an email to state employees.

    Yeah, it’s the recession, Marty. It’s not your continued mismanagement of the State’s treasury to buy votes and pay off cronies. We have two more years to suffer this fool, and any working Marylander who votes for him in 2010, no matter who is running against him, should just sign their checks over to O’Malley personally for the remainder of their working lives.

  • Shocker! Tax hikes causes smuggling!

    PH2007111902027.jpg

    Last November, Maryland Governor O’Malley snuck up behind Marylanders and stabbed us in the back with a massive tax hike. Part of that tax hike was a doubling of the cigarette tax. At the time I wrote;

    A pack of cigarettes in Maryland is already nearly $5/pack. Jack it up to $6, you fools – most Marylanders only need to drive a few miles in almost any direction and buy them cheaper. Raising the price $10/carton more makes it much more attractive to buy them out of State. How much revenue ya got then, chump?

    Well, now we get our answer a mere nine months later as reported in the Wall Street Journal;

    Politicians in Annapolis are scratching their heads wondering what happened to all those chain smokers who were supposed to help balance Maryland’s budget. Last year the legislature doubled the cigarette tax to $2 a pack to pay for expanded health-care coverage. Eight months later, cigarette sales have plunged 25% and the state is in fiscal distress again.

    A few pols are pretending to be happy that 30 million fewer cigarette packs have been bought in the state so far this year. As House Majority Leader Kumar Barve put it, fewer people smoking is “a good thing.” Yes, except that Maryland may be losing retail sales more than smokers. Residents of Maryland’s Washington suburbs can shop in nearby Virginia, where the tax is only 30 cents a pack, and save at least $15 per carton.

    The Maryland pols are so afraid this is true that they’ve made it a crime for residents to carry two packs of cigarettes that weren’t purchased in the state. In other words, the state says it’s legal to smoke, so long as you use cigarettes that the government can tax and thus become a financial partner in your bad habit. But if you dare to buy smokes across state lines, you can be fined.

    Um, didn’t I warn you goofballs? Hell, you can even buy cigarettes on line, pay for shipping and it’s still cheaper than cigarettes in Maryland. Not that I do it – I don’t have to. But smuggling is a fact of life that politicians don’t understand. Whenever you make something difficult or expensive to buy, people will always find a way around it. It’s human nature.

    As soon as Maryland’s tax went up, the border with Pennsylvania was dotted with new cigarette shops – the same thing that happened when New York raised it’s cigarette taxes. I was in Delaware a few weeks ago and it’s the same there.

    Too bad O’Malley can’t find a way to tax the American spirit.
    Crossposted at Red Maryland.

  • O’Malley equates paying taxes to patriotism

    The good news is that Maryland Senate actually cut a tax. The bad news is that they raised income taxes on some people to “pay” for the cut. (Washington Post link)

    The Maryland Senate voted 30 to 17 last night to repeal the state’s new tax on computer services and offset the lost revenue with a three-year surcharge on the income of millionaires as well as cuts to transportation projects and state agencies.

    With the House of Delegates expected to follow suit in coming days, the action almost guaranteed that Maryland’s “tech tax” would come off the books before it was to take effect in July.

    So to “offset” their revenue losses, Maryland has decided to put an additional 6.25% income tax increase on folks with over a million dollars of income every year. Now, I see every tax increase (with no attempt to rein in spending) as a personal affront. Someone is losing out, somewhere. It’s $62,500 that could be some other American’s wages for gardening or laundering for the person who makes a million bucks every year. That’s at least one less job in Maryland for every millionaire hit with the tax.

    But Governor O’Malley is very cavalier about it;

    O’Malley told reporters yesterday that he thinks the surcharge is fair. “We’re not going to be shy about asking our fellow citizens who make more than a million dollars a year to pay an additional three-quarters percent,” he said.

    But that’s not all he said. On radio station WMAL this morning on the Grandy and Andy Show, they played the rest of the quote since I don’t have the transcript, I’ll paraphrase; “I think there are enough millionaires in Maryland who are patriotic enough they’ll gladly pay the tax.”

    Now it’s our patriotic duty to hand over our money gladly to the irresponsible clowns in Annapolis who won’t even consider cutting their wasteful spending programs and raise taxes willy-nilly and declare victory over the rich.

    Crossposted at Red Maryland