Orrin Hatch: The wealthy are being unfairly abused

IF YOU'VE ever been t0 Utah, you would agree that it offers the visitor some dazzling sights like the other-worldly Bryce Canyon. But, alas, it continues to offer us a 77-year-old stiff-collared Republican senator named Orrin Hatch who carefully chooses his words with tweezers. He's also a conservative's conservative who never met a billionaire that he didn't like (Nor a TV camera, but that's another story). His latest foray into the twilight zone of taxes asserts that the upper 1 percent of wealthy taxpayers are getting screwed by paying 38 pct. of the total federal income tax. On the other hand, he believes that the poor ought to pay more to help us balance the budget. In his view, expressed on the Senate floor, the poor and middle class get a generous benefit from Social Security while ''the top 1 percent of the so-called wealthy pay 38 pct of the income tax."

So-called???? Until now, I and a lot of other folks had figured millionaires and billionaires to be unequivocally wealthy without wondering why anybody would decide to qualify it.

Correct me, but the reason the high rollers pay a larger volume of the total is that they make more money than people standing in line for employment today. But it's easy to dismiss the fellow for standing up for his crowd. He's been wrong before. None other than Justice Clarence Thomas has noted that it was Hatch who was responsible for his appointment to the bench.

Political cash flow: the land of milk and...money.

THERE IS SO much cash flowing this election season that it would be reasonable to refer to America as the land of milk and money. By all accounts there will be a greater transfer of dollars to campaign jackpots than what Americans have spent on sexier abs the past year.

For this record high-finance moment in American history, we can thank the Republican appointees to the Supreme Court who said in the Citizens United (!) case that it would be OK with them no matter how much corporate and union money is spent. Even though they pretended not to discriminate between the white-collar and blue-collar contributors , they didn't get to the high court by being total dummies about who helped put them in their lifetime jobs. Offhand, can you think of any union presidents who are billionaires?

The decision did raise a little curiosity about Clarence Thomas, who unsurprisingly rubber-stamped the 5-4 Republican majority while his wife Virginia was bragging that her right-wing Liberty Central movement would be bigger than the Tea Party. Her anguished cry is that President Obama is a tyrannical leftist, a notion that must have at least casually influenced Clarence to vote the way he did. There are days when being a strict conservative is more persuasive than being a strict constitutionalist.

The justices also were aware that not one of them would be summarily laid off from his seat on the bench during a downturn in the economy. Nobody else can safely make that statement these days.

Some of us had a little trouble understanding George W. Bush when he talked with such enthusiasm about turning the country into an ownership society. How could we have known that he was setting into motion the Supreme Court decision that would allow the fat cats to own a politician for no more than airfare and a comfortable hotel room? When the probable next Speaker of the House (John Boehner) can enjoy pleasure flights to Shangri-la for golf and a 5-star hotel, courtesy of this lobby (R. J. Reynolds) or that one, that's as good a definition of corporate ownership as you'll find. Guys like Boehner are so certain that they are a perfect fit for today's political culture that they see no reason to apologize for their odd behavior.

We're told that outfits like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is spending everything but the kids' lunch money on the elections , is merely protecting American business from Barack Obama's invasive tax policies that soak 2 pct. of the wealthiest Americans. Wall Streeters, meantime, are outraged that anyone would consider government restraints on the highly suspect way that they pocket their profits and bonuses. The news these days, however, tells a completely different story about the Ninjas on Wall Street who managed to cripple the economy with sour subprime mortgages without even reading the documents that drove hundreds of thousands of Americans from their homes. And these are the same perps who are putting up millions to return Republicans to power in the House of Representatives?

Obama is shattering the American Dream of a a no-tax society, or at least one that can be gamed in a way that the gap between rich and middle class/poor continues to widen.

Columnist Gail Collins was so fascinated by the money flying out of the bloated piggy bank of Linda McMahon. the Republican senate nominee in Connecticut, that she had to wonder why McMahon didn't give every voter a car instead.

Yeah, every vote is important, but not quite as important as another cushy golf outing among friends for Boehner et al.

Oh, skip the milk. We are now, without challenge, solely the land of money.

Yes, Virginia, there's plenty of dough to go around

Justice Clarence Thomas is one of the strict constructionists on the US. Supreme Court who voted to open the floodgates for corporate political contributions. Meanwhile, his wife Virginia , an activist in the Tea Party movement, was busy constructing a nonprofit lobbying group called Liberty Central that will be eligible to receive corporate money for her mission to promote "liberty" and slam President Obama's "hard-left agenda." She told the Los Angeles Times: "I adore all the new citizen patriots who are rising up across the country." And the Tea Partiers have told us who the unpatriotic ones are. If we don't already know, she says, Liberty Central will be issuing score cards to keep us all up to date. Will she call it "America's Enemies List"?