insignificant thoughts

A wealthy Florida polo club founder has adopted his longtime adult girlfriend in what attorneys believe may be a legal maneuver to protect his financial assets as he faces a trial for a drunk driving incident that killed a 23-year-old.

John Goodman, 48, formally adopted Heather Laruso Hutchins, 42, in October 2011. The couple started dating in 2009. Goodman is the founder of the International Polo Club Palm Beach in Wellington, Fla.

West Palm Beach Judge Glenn Kelley wrote in a court order that the twists in the case “border on the surreal and take the Court into a legal twilight zone.”

“The Defendant has effectively diverted a significant portion of the assets of the children’s trust to a person with whom he is intimately involved at a time when his personal assets are largely at risk in this case,” the judge wrote.

Goodman is being sued by Lili and William Wilson for the wrongful death of their son Scott Patrick Wilson, who come home from college for his sister’s birthday, and died in a car crash on Feb. 12, 2010.

While everyone is all up in arms, the question is, “Is this legitimate?” And the answer? Why not? It’s no more “slick” than having lots of kids to get the increased stipend from the government every month.

This is the problem when the law sticks its nose into every aspect of our lives. We end up with smart people who know how to get out from under it in the manner that would provide the least amount of friction, and that’s what he’s doing here, and it appears as he’s doing so within the confines of the myriad of laws and loopholes.

Oh wait, what loopholes? Well, clearly this sort of thing can be done for taxation purposes, which brings up my consistent argument of why we need to set the rate at 17% for everyone and abolish all loopholes and deductions. Then you couldn’t set up trusts to avoid taxation in the first place, and this wouldn’t be happening.

Funny how everything ties together in a free society unencumbered by governmental meddling, isn’t it?

The Sitch: You’ve accepted a sleepover invite for your daughter, not realizing that only her pal’s divorced dad will be home. You’re not OK with it. What to do?

The Solution: “Call and say ‘I’m sorry, and this is about me and not you, but I just don’t feel comfortable with a man supervising an overnighter,’ ” says Paone. Offer to host the girls at your place instead, if you can, or ask to turn the sleepover into a “late-over,” where your daughter stays only till bedtime. In the future, always ask who’ll be on duty before you say yes to a sleepover.

Why do we allow this continuous slandering of men to continue like this? Honestly, this is downright disgusting advice from a downright disgusting magazine.

Imagine if the question were “I’m not comfortable with my daughter hanging out around her friend’s whore mother.” Do you think we would just be talking about concern for a child, or would “advocacy groups” be losing their minds?

If you want a case of clear bias, the Washington D.C. affiliate of CBS will surely fill the bill for its bias against pro-life supporters. On January 23 the DC affiliate featured on its website a photo slide show of pictures taken at the March for Life rally held annually at the nation’s capitol. Curiously, though, there wasn’t a single photo of any pro-lifers. Instead, the photo essay featured only photos of abortion-supporting protesters who stood on the sidelines taunting the pro-life marchers.

The photo slide show initially featured seven photos of abortion supporters, such as one of marchers holding signs saying “Family Planning Saves Lives Worldwide,” one featuring women holding signs saying that abortion should be kept legal, and another showing a woman sporting an abortion on demand sticker.

Upwards of 50,000 pro-life supporters turned out in the DC cold to participate in the March for Life, yet apparently CBS could only find the small handful of pro-abortion supporters to photograph.

Yet another example of the mainstream media purposefully ignoring the March for Life. The Washington Post has already come clean on its biased coverage of the event, and CBS has since updated that slideshow to reflect the 50,000 marchers better than the people protesting that march.

It continues to astound me the lengths the media will go through to ignore the pro-life movement in this country.

At least they tried to make it look like people were jumping into the tiny pool…

The 2012 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination should, once and for all, end the myth that the GOP is the party of limited government, free markets and personal liberty. I submit it is instructive to look at the records of the three remaining GOP candidates not named “Paul.”

The following bullet points were excerpted verbatim from Reason.com’s candidate profiles. Yes, I have cherry picked items inconsistent with limited government, free markets and personal liberty. Yes, these same profiles mention positions of each candidate that are consistent with limited government, free markets and personal liberty.

It’s a good thing he didn’t include Paul in that roundup; no one likes a merciless slaughter and beating.

Foxconn may employ tens of thousands of Chinese laborers to build the iPhone, but the vast majority of the labor costs associated with making an iPhone is spent right here in the States. In fact, only $10 per iPhone goes to paying workers abroad.

According to Forbes:

A report written by three U.S. professors showed that only about “$10 or less in direct labor wages goes into an iPhone or iPad is paid to Chinese workers.” The report points out that while Apple products — including components — are manufactured in China, the primary benefits go to the U.S. economy because Apple continues to keep most of its product design, software development, product management, marketing and other high-wage functions in the U.S., not China. China’s role is more of an assembler.

In other words, the only part of making an iPhone that is done abroad is the grunt work of actually screwing it all together. All of the high-paying, educated jobs involved in designing, engineering, marketing and selling the thing stay right here in the good old U.S.A.

That one ain’t gonna sit well with the populists.

Remember when Don Imus saw his cushy CBS Radio and MSNBC career go up in smoke in 2007 when he tried very early one morning to make one of his fake-misanthropic jokes about the Rutgers women’s basketball team being “nappy-headed hoes”? Black activists demanded his firing. Advertisers fled. The corporate suits, appalled and fearful of the terrible publicity, canned him.

But if you’re a black rapper, terms like this advance your career. The female rapper Nicki Minaj has a very hot new video called “Stupid Hoe.” She uses that same term to snap at other women – “We ship platinum, them b—es are shipping wood / Them nappy headed hoes, but my kitchen good.” (Don’t hurt your brain trying to make sense of it.)  Minaj even threw the N-word in the lyrics: “How you gon’ be the stunt double to the nigga monkey?”

The video broke YouTube records by clocking up 4.8 million views in its first 24 hours on the site and 11 million over the weekend. But outrage from our elites? Hello? Anyone? So far, the silence is deafening from America’s major race-card players.

During the entire Don Imus mess, many of us who supported him pointed out the voluminous hypocrisy of those claiming that the word “hoe” is both racist and out of place were horrified at how the simple use of the word “hoe” could be swung into a racist term.

Hell, I even begged to know what those girls were listening to on the iPods. What uplifting soul-elevating stuff were they taking in before games? Surely they wouldn’t listen to any of the urban tunes that came to popularize the word “hoe” in the first place, right?

We may never know, but I can bet at least a few of those outraged girls listen to Nicki Minaj without any feelings of inferiority. Of course, she’s black. And a woman.

Which, of course, makes it all okay.

Capital gains taxes and dividend taxes are both forms of double taxation. That income already is hit by the 35 percent corporate income tax. So the real tax rate for people like Mitt Romney is closer to 45 percent. And if you add the death tax to the equation, the effective tax rate begins to approach 60 percent.  Here’s a simply analogy. Imagine you make $50,000 per year and your employer withholds $5,000 for personal income tax. How would you feel if the IRS then told you that your income was $45,000 and you had to pay full tax on that amount, and that you weren’t allowed to count the $5,000 withholding when you filled out your 1040 form? You would be outraged, correctly yelling and screaming that you should be allowed to count those withheld tax payments.  Welcome to the world of double taxation.

What do Capital Gains taxes look like beyond the last part, the 15% we keep hearing about? That’s what they look like.

Honestly, only an idiot believes that the 15% paid by the last end of the Capital Gains tax line is the only tax paid on that money, but then again you don’t have to be a genius to be a commentator on an issue any more. Hell, you don’t even have to be accurate.

Disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner used campaign money to hire private investigators to chase down his lie about his now-notorious crotch-shot tweet.

Weiner paid T&M Protective Services of Manhattan $13,290 for “legal services” in the fourth quarter of 2011, financial statements filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission reveal.

Sources told the Daily News, however, that Weiner hired T&M — a firm loaded with former NYPD sleuths — when he was in full spin mode over the controversy that eventually led to his resignation.

You know what the most interesting part of this is? John Edwards continues to face charges and a trial over his improper use of campaign funds. How is Weiner getting out of this so easy, particularly since he was a federal candidate as well?

Why is he not being held up to the same standards?