Vin Suprynowicz

For decades, according to deathbed testimony, the IRS made engineer Andrew Stack’s life a living hell, repeatedly seizing so much of his accrued assets as to leave him with virtually nothing for his retirement.

On Feb. 18, Stack, 53, set fire to his own house and then flew his single-engine plane into an office building that houses Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin, Texas.

Stack, who died, left behind a message posted on his Web site, detailing the tax collectors’ actions, with particular attention to “Section 1706: Treatment of Certain Technical Personnel.”

The FBI ordered the page taken down shortly thereafter. So much for the sanctity of deathbed testimony, when it conflicts with the desire of our internal army to protect their fellow worker drones.

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The cyclical nature of life is reassuring. We are less afraid of the privations of winter because we’re assured the spring will come again.

Similarly, those who claim expertise in such matters — those currently encouraging us to buy stocks and government bonds, for example — insist that the market always comes back. Given a little time, everything will be the same as it was.

Because this is reassuring, we cross our fingers and hope they’re right. But they’re wrong. Not the assertion that some specific companies and stock issues will again prosper and that some people will again grow rich. Of course there will always be “winners” — especially when government bestows on itself the power to choose who shall (their rich friends) and who shall not (you) be “bailed out.” No: I refer to the part about “things being the same.”

A cartel of private bankers was given control over our money in 1913, in defiance of the wisdom of Andy Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Frank “Pal of Stalin” Roosevelt ended the convertibility — heck, the private ownership — of gold in 1933. But everything was fine again in the 1950s and ‘60s, right? Then, after the ongoing devaluation of the dollar by the Federal Reserve forced Lyndon Johnson to also end the convertibility of paper dollars into silver in 1964, we had some tough times in the 1970s, but everything came roaring back in the ’80s and ’90s … right?

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In North Las Vegas, as in most places, the recession is causing tax revenues to fall. The city has undergone five rounds of budget trims since December, 2008, and now aims to cut an additional $33.4 million from planned spending to make it through fiscal year 2011. So the city announced this month it might have to cut as many as 273 jobs — 21 of them from the Fire Department.

Needless to day, the unionized fireman aren’t taking that lying down.

Instead, to generate more hours of work and thus justify their highly paid jobs, the firemen now seek to drive emergency patients to local hospitals — and bill them for this service — rather than turning them over to private ambulance companies for transport.

The change would produce revenue for the city and “hopefully prevent the loss of some of our fire service folks,” says Fire Chief Al Gillespie.

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Back in 1963, one Ernesto Arturo Miranda was arrested for robbery in Arizona. While in custody he confessed to raping an 18-year-old woman two days before his arrest. He was convicted on the more serious charge.

But in 1966 the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, threw out the confession — and with it the conviction — holding that Miranda’s questioning had been coercive, and that he had not been specifically advised that he had a right to remain silent until he had talked to a lawyer.

Miranda was later convicted in a new trial, anyway. But police all across America were left puzzled and amazed by a newly discovered “right” that no one had known about for the first 177 years of the republic’s history — the right of newly arrested suspects to have their confessions thrown out unless they had been “read their Miranda rights” before being asked “Did you do it?”

Did the cops noisily demand new legislation, “narrowing” and seeking to do end-runs around the high court’s ruling?

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Back in 2007, Washington state voters approved Initiative 960, which barred any state tax increase from being OK’d without a two-thirds vote of their state Legislature.

Liberal lawmakers, who refuse to set any maximum limit on the taxes working stiffs should be required to pay, complained that was a hard standard to meet.

“Democratic lawmakers plan to increase taxes,” you see, “to balance the state’s $2.6 billion budget deficit, but they don’t have enough members to get a two-thirds vote in either the Senate or House,” The Associated Press reports.

Oh, noooo.

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About one third of the way into his State of the Union speech on Jan. 27, President Barack Obama said an astonishing thing. He said: “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future. …”

I know my head snapped upright. I can only imagine the kind of head-scratching and quizzical scowling at their neighbors that must have occurred among those who have been lining up at the trough, planning to make millions off government boondoggles justified by the “Man-made Global Warming” scam.

“What the heck did he just say? First they dump ‘global warming” for the easier-to-hedge ‘climate change,’ which can mean anything. Now he claims it’s all about ‘clean energy’ and that you should agree even if you don’t buy into ‘man-made climate change’?”

What happened? Only a year ago, falling back to such a “last line of defense” would have been unthinkable for a global warming true believer like Mr. Obama. Aren’t we taught “The science is settled; there’s no more room for debate”? That “To be a global warming denier is little better than to be a Holocaust denier?” That those who refuse to believe our consumption of fossil fuels plays a major role in an ongoing, desperately destructive global warming trend are the equivalent of “flat-earthers”?

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Although President Barack Obama “expressed interest” in the idea last summer, “the White House staff reviewing funding options never embraced the idea” of a punitive tax on sugared soft drinks, the Chicago Tribune now reports. A key congressional committee, “after initially seeming receptive, ended up refusing to consider it.”

Why? “Several minority advocacy groups, including some committed to fighting obesity, lined up against the tax after years of receiving financial support from the (soft drink) industry,” report Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger of the Tribune Washington Bureau.

Ah: the usual bad guy, then — corporate lobbyists.

And when the tax seemed like such a natural to the nanny-staters!

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President Barack Obama said some interesting things in his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech. They’re interesting not so much because they’re lies (we all know that, to determine whether a lawyer or politician is lying, you merely watch to see if their lips move) but because the political class — the kind of people who field lobbyists in Washington and file lawsuits for the ACLU and edit major American newspapers — were so confident that these utterances were lies that they simply ignored what might otherwise have been some earthshaking developments.

For instance, the president said, according to the White House’s prepared transcript: “We should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system — to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation.”

I agree with that. I suspect Jim Gilchrist of the border-watching Minutemen could happily agree with that. The only people I can assure you don’t agree with those words are Barack Obama and his liberal cohorts in Congress.

The words are designed to convince an unsophisticated rube — the kind of person out in televisionland who believes the president speaks plain English and means what he says — that Mr. Obama wants to “secure our borders.” How would we do that? Since trained military personnel are expensive and currently mostly busy overseas, the most cost-effective way to “secure the border” would be to use a reliable, century-old technology.

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Charlie Mitchener, the Las Vegas business owner who was handcuffed and disarmed after presenting a concealed weapons permit along with his drivers license to a police officer responding to a burglary call at his place of business Jan. 3 (see my column of Jan. 10), has provided me with his Jan. 19 follow-up letter to the Metro Police Department.

Mr. Mitchener says he decided to write lest his “silence may put someone else at risk. …

“Shortly before 5 a.m. Jan 3, the alarms in my office sounded and notified TSI, our security provider, that a break-in had occurred,” Charlie Mitchener writes. “They … dispatched a security guard.

“My wife, Peggy, and I arrived at the office about 5:15 a.m.; the security officer had arrived just before us. … The security officer informed us that he had called Metro and they told him not to enter the building. …

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The observation was repeated often enough before Barack Obama’s 2008 election that few can claim not to have been warned: When Democrats including Mr. Obama promise an open, centrist, “bi-partisan” administration where Republicans, free-marketers, Constitutionalists and their ideas will be “welcome at the table,” what they really mean is:

“Those guys are welcome to prove how ‘moderate’ they are, to win accolades from our chained pets at Newsweek and the Post and the Times, praising how they’ve ‘grown in office’ by voting for our far-left agenda, so long as they smile and keep their mouths shut. Otherwise they’re the ‘Irrelevant Party of No.’”

Denounce Republicans all you want for being half-hearted fans (at best) of lower taxes and limited government. Most of them surely deserve it. (Just try to get one to come out for again making our dollars out of silver, while briskly shutting down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Federal Reserve, the ATF, and every other federal agency and program devised since 1910.)

But if there were any “openness” in the current White House or Democratic congressional majorities, you’d think by now they’d be saying, “OK, we don’t really LIKE Republicans, but if the goal is to create jobs, the truth is all this ‘stimulus spending’ stuff has sure been a bust. Wonder if the GOP might not be onto something with their idea to slash the very taxes and regulations — yes ‘on the rich’ — that make it ever more expensive and cumbersome for a private employer to add more workers? Come to think of it, isn’t that what Kennedy did in 1961? And didn’t it work again, back in the 1980s?”

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