BK - I always love that "forced on them" argument. As if the government forces people to accept benefits. If Mr. Buffet felt so strongly about it, he is free to pay as much as he would like to the government and then simply fail to file a claim for refund. If he doesn't file a refund claim for any excess payments, he eventually loses the ability to do so and the government keeps the money. Many people seek refunds too late - and are denied those refunds by courts even if they did in fact over pay their taxes.

If Mr. Williamson is going to invoke ancient history to tar Democratic filibuster efforts, perhaps he should also mention his own magazine's positions on civil rights.

"But I'm not dredging up the ancient past."

LOL, yet you bring up a speech from 1964.

The same year your magazine wrote this:

"For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. "

Might wanna avoid bringing up the civil rights movement when your organization was REALLY on the wrong side of it.

You know, the same side as Byrd.

"All but six Republicans in the Senate supported the Civil Rights Act, while about a third of Democrats — who held a large majority — voted against it, including the Klan recruiter who would remain the dean of Senate Democrats until his death in 2010."

Of course, you realize that pointing this out is racist! Klansman/Exalted Senatorial Cyclops Robert K. Byrd was never a Klansman/Exalted Senatorial Cyclops! No Democrat ever supported slavery! The Solid South with its lynchings and Jim Crow laws was Solid Republican since the Civil War! And Oceana has always been at war with Euras-, ah, Eastasia.

It's probably worth pointing out that, in today's Republican party, all those Republican senators who voted for the Civil Rights Act would be primaried by the Tea Party. Everyone of them was a RINO.

And yet Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That would be the same Barry Goldwater that was considered the cornerstone of the modern conservative movement. And of course this magazine also opposed it, for the very good reason that it was a vast expansion of Federal power not only over state governments, and local governments, but right into the homes and businesses of individuals.

Byrd, whatever his past or whenever it occurred, demonstrated and lived contrition and change. This is ironic. The length of time in the Senate post-Civil Rights Act that Williamson counts as evidence for his dishonest argument is actually evidence against it, and evidence to prove the hard-line reactionary bigotry of the entire slate of Republican former Democrat bigots from the archetypal Thurmond up to the archetypal modern version, Trent Lott. By staying a democrat and living the change, and staying elected, Byrd changed an enormous number of minds. He supported many laws to liberalize civil rights since he opposed the CRA. Lott, and the rest of the GOP southern strategists (that is to say, everybody in 2010) have done the opposite: hardened the bigots, given them hope that their ideas about race (and the attendant ideas about immigration, Christian Dominion, wealth and taxes, and a bunch of other related political position) will rise again; that their gut instinct about Barack Obama is correct and therefore that it's reasonable and valuable to hate him and to supply that hatred with reasons and evidence (however tortured) after the fact; that if the laws do not conform to their impulses regarding Muslims or Wikileaks or torture that those laws then should be changed using the power that they conveniently have; in short that they are infallible vessels of the will of Jesus and of the People and so law and time and empathy and compassion do not apply to them and should be scorned as weakness.
And it hardens them to what should be done in the future, too: establish a fair and equitable society by setting tax rates that require the most wealthy to pay more; end the barriers to full citizenship and acceptance for gay and lesbian citizens, which would have the secondary effect of drying up the rationale that underlies violence and discrimination against those people who did nothing to deserve it; acknowledge that immigration is not a simple question and recognize the inherent Christian value (and the clear economic value) in supporting paths to citizenship for young non-citizens in the DREAM act; supporting Obamacare (the perfect moniker, by the same token--it will be viewed by later generations as a compliment); and not being such a bunch of nasty, dishonest, sneaky, oily jerkwads.
So by all means, remember that Byrd was a democrat who filibustered the Civil Rights Act. Beyond the conniving poltroonery of the argument is the truly American idea that we grow and change, that the nation is a reflection of its people, that the ideals are optimistic.

ice9