Watch

Attended both Republican and Brian Hermanson's Watch Party last night. He won Republican primary for Kay-Noble County DA. Congratulations, Brian. And Thanks, Mark Gibson, for the many years of service and all the sticky problems you solved for us with folks who wouldn't pay their hotel bills, etc. over the years.

I guess we are getting out of business at the right time. According to http://www.foxbusiness.com/ the new Financial Reform Act is going to make all venders subject to 1099's on next year's taxes. I suppose for somebody who has never run his own business, this is foggy information. Well up to now, only contractors who perform services for over $600 have been required to recieve 1099 statements. Now any vendor, like the business your hotel buys toilet paper from, or the parts suppliers a repair business buys from must be 1099'd. So a typical small business run by a friend of mine estimates the number of 1099's his accountant sends out might go from 10 to 200. Oh, but there's more! When someone receives a 1099 they check to make sure the amount is precisely what they received, else you are in trouble in an IRS audit. How you account revenue (dividing it into goods and services) might not match how your payer thinks it might alot and you will both have to agree on the precise amount. What we have in the new law is a phenomenal headache for businesses. So much so, that Wall Street Journal doubts that the IRS could force compliance! And the heaviest burden will be with small businesses, like a guy working out of his pickup truck, who can't afford an entire department to check the numbers.

Also in another article by Fox Business, the SEC will no longer have to comply with Freedom Of Information Act. I guess they don't want any more stories about bureaucrats looking at porn on federal computers. But the serious part is that lack of disclosure in financial regulation is precisely how dictators take over their country's economies. Skullduggery is hidden.

The destruction of small business with the intent to consolidate the economy into large unionized firms, the takeover of business (GM and Chrysler) by stiff-arming the rightful creditors, the aim to bring about partial socialism that can be controlled by a central bureaucracy--these are primary techniques of fascism ( or union-ism, Italian -- Mussolini). I have to admit that the historian in me is sometimes just sick over oblivious Americans who don't have European or Latin American experience and don't think USA could ever be taken over by dictatorship. We shall see. Certainly if Obama is merely a do-gooding leftist, he is setting us up for the dictator to come. And yet I am heartened that so many like me are expressing dire concerns over the turn of events these last two years. How many times has someone said to me, "If we don't do something this fall, this may be America's last free election." Maybe it is time, if you have never been involved, to get active in politics. Otherwise you just have to watch.