31 thoughts on “Above The Law”

  1. It’s not just Democratic overreach. This has been an increasing problem for the past several administrations, both Republican and Democratic. As the federal government grows larger and more powerful year by year, it represents a more tempting target for those who would enact their agenda by fiat, both executive and judicial. At the same time, the ever-widening divergence in worldviews in the nation makes compromise less achievable and less palatable. We now have a situation where both left and right wing activists salivate for a House/Senate/White House trifecta so they can run the table on the hapless minority while they hold the reins of power. This is a very real danger to our republic, and it is unfortunately bipartisan.

    1. Let’s just assume you’re right, both parties do it. The difference is that the media will expose such attempts by the GOP and cover up the same for the dems.

    2. Ahhh, compromise. Compromise isn’t a virtue. The details matter. Compromise is one of the reasons we are in the fiscal mess that we are in. Budget compromises have lead to ever increasing budgets because the compromise is always to increase spending. That is how the Republicans have been complicit, by not seeing through the scam.

      We can go back twenty years to the Patriot Act but Republicans largely don’t abuse government power even if they expand it. However, the Patriot Act was used by Democrats to persecute dissidents, influence a domestic Presidential election, and overthrow the government in a series of coups.

      This isn’t a both sides thing as the IRS, DOJ, and intelligence services haven’t been used by Republicans to repress their political opponents. It isn’t even a both sides issue when dealing with shifts in ideology as Republicans haven’t changed much while Democrats want to dictate what you eat, what you drive, the clothes you wear, the racial makeup of society, what religion you can follow, what words you can say, what thoughts you can think, how you cook your food, whether or not you deserve to have AC in summer and heat in winter, and on and on and on.

      The Revolution is continuous. There is no end except in death. How do you compromise with that? I say give them nothing. Stop rolling over. Realize the game being played and act accordingly. This isn’t the 80s.

  2. I’ve gotten to the point where if someone mentions someone “breaking the law” I always ask “Are they being prosecuted?”. The answer is inevitably no, to which I reply what is the point of the law then?

    Seriously, what is the point of laws anymore? Everyone just does whatever! There are -no- consequences. In this day and age an honest man is a chump. What happens when they all wake up to that fact (if they do…)?

    1. “Seriously, what is the point of laws anymore?”

      Try breaking the law(s) yourself; don’t pay your taxes or stop following traffic laws. See how that works out for you.

      1. Traffic laws? What are these traffic laws you refer to? When I get a ticket, I hire a lawyer and plead it down. So far my worst conviction was for improper equipment. I had to pay the lawyer $500 (back in the 1990s), so you can theorize about the original charge. My understanding is, barring political enmity, you can plea bargain any crime, including Murder One. So tell me another one about the point of laws. I need a good laugh. Then I’ll tell you about the time our local PD stopped a guy in a very expensive car with NYC plates and took $180K out of his wallet…

        1. OK I stand corrected William I assume where you live you can run red lights and stop signs with impunity while you’re stinking drunk and nothing will happen to you over and over again except for an occasional slap on the wrist. Thanks for the correction. What not paying taxes? You didn’t mention that.

          1. What part of “tax lawyer” is beyond your apparently rather limited comprehension? As for the rest of your silly comment, I guarantee, if you live anywhere in the US and have a modest amount of money to waste, you can get away with running stop signs and red lights while driving drunk. No slap on the wrist even, just legal fees. Of course, a more usual outcome is, you are hit by the drunk driver running the red light on the cross street. When the light turns green, a sober driver will wait until three cars have run the red going the other way.

        2. Having spent many of my adult years driving in Boston, I can attest that traffic laws, while very similar to other States as written in the book, are in practice, enforced somewhat differently.

          Here we have in practice (and witnessed by yours truly) the advisory stop signal (sign, flashing red or solid red), the advisory one-way street and self-same method for testing oncoming traffic’s bright lights. If not the first cah stopped at a light, the lay on the horn within 1 second of the light turning green rule. The on-ramp with no exit until you are in New Jersey, the 7′-9′ height restriction to the overpasses on Storrow Drive that I prefer to call the “Truck Traps”. Memorial Drive in Cambridge closed to cahs on summer Sundays. The circles and spokes method of street layout as opposed to using a grid (this one in particular, coming from the mid-west, took a few years to understand, and it’s key to understanding Boston driving) and then my all-time favorite, the flashing green light!

          1. My cousin Chuck was a taxi driver in Boston for many years. It was exciting to ride with him! (I am from Boston, originally, though now safe in Sassafras Fork, NC…)

          2. As you well know, a taxi ride in Boston is like running in the Indy 500, in the opposite direction! Your cousin has all my respect in the world.

            I forgot to mention the multi-point intersections, minimum of five, usually seven, drivers on the extreme left in a rotary always *take* the right-of-way, and oh yes, sharing the street with electric street cars, that can cross in front of you whenever they feel like it at a multi-point intersection like Cleveland Circle at rush hour. If the flashing green turns red be prepared for the drawbridge in front of you that spans the Charles River to rise.

          3. David, on a multi-lane traffic circle, the traffic on the innermost lane does have the right of way. The rightmost lane is for those immediately turning right.

          4. That is true, but nevertheless unsettling for those trying to merge into the circle. Especially when they cross lanes to cut you off because they waited until the last second to do so. Hit the brakes to avoid a collision and the car behind you lays on the horn. Like you were supposed to play bumper cars or such. This happens more frequently on small rotaries than the bigger ones. Life in the city I guess. Boston and Massachusetts in general is one of the most highly regulated insurance “markets” in the country. Were it not, the premiums would be so high nobody that drives in Boston would have insurance. As it is if you like one of the three insurance providers there you can keep one of your three insurance providers. Or go without. In theory illegal, in practice… If you are out-of-state, and driving there it is wise to have uninsured motorist coverage and collision on your vehicle.

        3. “Then I’ll tell you about the time our local PD stopped a guy in a very expensive car with NYC plates and took $180K out of his wallet…”

          A $180000 out of his wallet!? That must be some sized wallet. WTF wow what was it diamonds, jewelry, Credit card with a huge limit? I know di-lithium crystals. They are after all worth 300 times there weight in diamonds thousands of times there weight in gold.

          1. All billfolds are wallets, but not all wallets are billfolds. I lost a large post just now, so won’t bother to recreate all of it. Just, a strap of hundred dollar bills is 4 inches thick, and $180K is 18 of them (meaning I could fit that much in my normal business outfit pockets). At the time, the legal limit for currency carrying was $4,999 (I think it’s less now). I know the guy came back with lawyers and got his Ferrari back. I think the cash went to Federal court and I don’t remember the outcome.

        4. Rodney Dangerfield had a great lawyer. He was so good, he once had a rape charge reduced to tailgating….

          1. His wife had a better lawyer. She took him to court claiming he was driving without a seat belt. He counter claimed, saying it was obstructed. They settled in small claims….

          2. Speaking of Rodney Dangerfield, what do people make of the most recent criminal indictment of President Trump?

            I get the “selective prosecution” aspect to this of “everybody walks off with records” and all of that. I also get that just like previous prophesies about an ice-free Arctic summer, there may be a number of half-truths, stretchers, fake news items and exaggerations here.

            If the stories “coming out of Mar-a-Largo” are to believed, and David Chappelle’s take was “I took a lot of stuff home from jobs that I had, but I never, ever, took home ‘work'”, Mr. Trump was acting like the Al Czervik character from “Caddyshack”, inviting his golfing buddies to make paper airplanes out of paper documents of the order-of-battle of our nuclear forces and pitch them at each other in an “all-out nuclear exchange”?

            Can any of this be believed, or is this the Fog of the War on Trump?

      2. Prosecutors have a choice on whether to prosecute someone. This allows them to let some people slide while others face the consequences. For the later, the process is part of the punishment. Eliminate a law and you take a tool for a prosecutor to punish his enemies. That will never do.

        We’re seeing the results of this in many blue states. People can steal, do drugs in public, defecate in public, and commit all sorts of crimes and they never are prosecuted. The laws as written are meaningless when they aren’t enforced.

      3. If I don’t pay taxes the IRS comes after me. If 50 million people in this country don’t pay taxes???

        A scenario I think likely if reparations are pushed at the Federal level.

    2. “Seriously, what is the point of laws anymore?”

      So that when the Progressive Marxists need a reason to fix you, there is always something for them to use.

      A better question is how do we rebuild a high trust society? Look at Russia and Ukraine. Neither are the USSR but are both still consumed by the same societal failings ushered in by Communism. How many centuries did Western Civilization work on due process and law and order? How many decades will it take to destroy that culture? Will it take centuries to rebuild what is destroyed?

      1. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” (Lavrenty Beria?)

        “I could indict a ham sandwich.” (I forget.)

        “First, kill all lawyers.” (Shakespeare.)

        Antiquity lost the rule of law on the Ides of March, 44BC. They never got it back. If this is it for us, probably a similar outcome. I have argued that Marxism is to us what Christianity was to Hellenism.

      2. “How many centuries did Western Civilization work on due process and law and order?”

        From the Magna Carta to the US constitution took about 5 and a half centuries.

  3. I once received a contact letter saying I was being investigated for tax fraud. The IRS suggested I could get up to millions in fines and interest, and if found to be deliberate fraud, prison time. They also said if I just paid the taxes owed (some multiple of my actual income), they’d drop the whole thing. Otherwise, I should show up on a certain date and bring my lawyer. I know extortion when I see it. So, I researched the presented facts, then looked up the relevant tax law, and sent them an 80 page “brief” showing where they went wrong. I also pointed to evidence of fraud on the part of a major banking institution involved. I got back a letter saying, in toto, “Your explanation is accepted.” I bet most people panic and pay up.

  4. Before I retired, my partner and I ran a mom’n’pop tax accountancy for 25 years.

    Personal returns and business returns. Quite a few other stuff. I even did computer repair.

    Bullet points:

    > Nobody wants to pay taxes.
    > Businesses prefer cash, most of which never sees a bank account..
    > Everyone is looking to game the system. They have ‘more important’ needs.
    > The tax code is written by politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and lawyers in such a way that people of money can be protected for a price.
    > The tax code is purposely fuzzy. (see above) There is a spectrum of possible interpretations for most codes.
    > Hire an Enrolled Agent to do your taxes. They’re expensive but are your best defense against the IRS. They are licensed, treated by the IRS as almost one of their own, and afforded latitudes in code interpretations worth the money. They can represent you in tax court if things ever get that far.
    > Hire one early in the year so they can help keep you under the IRS’s radar.
    > Enrolled agents are smart enough to know you aren’t telling them everything. They put lipstick on your pig because you’re paying them to.
    > It’s a light shade of lipstick.
    > IRS can’t audit everyone. Be aware that if an EA thinks you’re engaging in illegal, unethical activities they will turn your ass in instantly to protect their IRS license and corresponding income.
    > Everyone is trying to game the system. I repeat myself.

  5. One more bullet point:

    >IRS is well aware that small businesses are operated mostly as money laundering, tax avoidance schemes. They don’t have the budget to go after all the small fish. Wonder why they wanted way more IRS employees recently?

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