Taxes Suck

President Barack Obama signed a bill into law Friday banning the federal government from using the terms “Negro” and “Oriental,” making the official terms African-American and Asian-American.… passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate earlier this year.… American Indians will now be referred to as Native Americans…

It might be the world's most expensive gas station — not to mention a gross misuse of taxpayer money, according to a top government watchdog. The Department of Defense spent $43 million to build a gas station in Afghanistan that should have cost roughly $500,000…

The bluebird of bitterness collects some cartoons for IRS pay day.

…The IRS belatedly told Congress it may have lost some of Ms. Lerner’s emails after her computer crashed, and asserted that the backup tapes didn’t exist.

But under questioning from Mr. Chaffetz, Mr. Camus said it took him only two weeks to track down the backup tapes, and when he asked the IRS depository for them, the workers there said they’d never been contacted by the agency itself. …

Under Stockman’s bill, “The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Act,” taxpayers who do not provide documents requested by the IRS can claim one of the following reasons:

1. The dog ate my tax receipts
2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3. Traded documents for five terrorists
4. Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5. Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6. Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7. Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8. Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9. Was short on toilet paper while camping
10. At this point, what difference does it make?

As we all know, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is totally about innovation. Just ask patent trolls like Patent Group LLC or Select Retrieval … or the company they sued, Build.com. Or American entrepreneurs who are redirecting $30 billion a year from research and development to patent defense.

Nathan Myrvold would probably agree.

That’s why it makes perfect sense that the first satellite office in the USPTO’s entire 220 years of existence is opening in Detroit, Michigan.

[Photos of the US Secretary of State doing somber business in Columbia. H/t Beef at Moonbattery.]

A senior government official resigned Monday after a report concluded her agency improperly paid for an 'over-the-top' training session near Las Vegas that allegedly featured a mind reader, a clown, a comedian, bicycle giveaways and lavish after-hour receptions in resort suites for federal workers.

The White House accepted General Services Administration chief Martha Johnson's resignation after she dismissed two deputies and suspended other career federal employees over the $820,000 conference.

The 300-person event at the M Resort Spa and Casino in Henderson, Nevada, included $3,200 for a mind reader, $6,300 on commemorative coin sets, and $75,000 on a training exercise to build a bicycle in 2010.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the promises grew from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. To put that in context, consider that the total value of companies traded on U.S. stock markets is $13.1 trillion, based on the Wilshire 5000 index, and the value of the equity in U.S. taxpayers’ homes, according to Freddie Mac, is $6.2 trillion. Said another way, there is not enough wealth in America to meet those promises. If the government followed corporate accounting rules, that $2.9 trillion increase would be added to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011 that has been widely reported. And a $4.2 trillion deficit is something that Americans need to know about....

Twelve state and local water agencies in Southern California are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its arbitrary decision last July to double the size of the habitat for a small algae-eating fish known as the Santa Ana Sucker. Wielding the all-purpose Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's no-explanation decision plants a Godzilla-sized footprint over local efforts to conserve the fish and its environment. But worse, it will cut water supplies for up to 3 million citizens in Southern California's Inland Empire region, raising water prices and straining water supplies elsewhere all in the name of "conservation." It's nothing but a power grab that will leave a new round of economic and environmental wreckage.

President Obama unleashed his inner Alinskyite on Wednesday, storming out of a meeting with Congressional leaders and White House staff after threatening the GOP House Leader Eric Cantor with a parting "Eric, don't call my bluff." Presidential it wasn't, and loyalists in the MSM immediately began to spread covering smoke from Obama allies like Harry Reid blaming the GOP Leader for refusing to be filibustered or bullied in the long series of pointless meetings arranged by a desperate president to try and change a political dynamic that sees his approval rating plummeting in poll after poll. [h/t to Cuz BD http://twitter.com/#!/brandondutcher/statuses/91917856811393024]

The Wall Street Journal by Jim DeMint & Olympia Snowe: Before we consider saddling our children with even more debt, we must enact significant spending cuts and enforceable caps on future spending. For the long term, to prevent both this Congress and its successors from hijacking the promise of American prosperity, we also need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, like the one we and all 47 Senate Republicans have introduced. ... The last time the Senate considered a balanced budget amendment was on March 4, 1997—and it failed to pass by one vote. On that day 14 years ago, the nation's outstanding debt was $5.36 trillion. Today it is $14.3 trillion, or nearly three times that amount. [Unfortunately, if the balance doesn't include some limits on spending, it really doesn't matter. They'll just keep raising taxes....]

China has dropped 97 percent of its holdings in U.S. Treasury bills, decreasing its ownership of the short-term U.S. government securities from a peak of $210.4 billion in May 2009 to $5.69 billion in March 2011