Tax Time; leisure and politics.

View 720 Thursday, April 12, 2012

I have spent two days doing the taxes. The rules have changed to make it harder, or at least TurboTax says they have. I now have to list every charitable donation one a t a time rather than just attaching a copy of the ledger page on which my donations are listed and referencing that, which I have been doing for thirty years or more. That’s annoying. Other things are annoying as well.

While the Black Panthers and others are cheering that Zimmerman has been charged with murder, I have yet to find an attorney who believes the charge will lead to a conviction. Of course given racial aspects it may be that it can’t lead to an acquittal ,either, at which point the political pressure will be on to get Zimmerman charged with a federal crime. Once a special prosecutor was appointed it was well nigh inevitable that Zimmerman would be charged, even though the local DA declined. Given the political pressures including attention from the White House it was likely that the charge would be murder. The question becomes one of motive. Talk shows have made much of Zimmerman’s eleven 911 calls, but in fact 11 calls in five years isn’t all that excessive for a neighborhood watch activist. Two 911 calls/year about suspicious persons in this neighborhood wouldn’t be considered all that excessive; we have had several warnings about teams who ring the doorbell, and if there is no answer try the door and assume they have 40 seconds to grab anything they can find. There are perfectly legitimate magazine sales teams, and there are others who may not be. I have no idea of the conditions in Mr. Zimmerman’s gated community, but given that he was apparently the unofficial ‘captain’ of the neighborhood watch there I’m not sure that 2 calls a year would not be justified.

It’s now time for Romney to make his case on why he should be President. We’ll see how he does. Meanwhile the White House has got into the kerfuffle over whether Ann Romney ever worked in her life, as if raising children doesn’t count. When I was young, “women’s liberation” meant that mothers wouldn’t have to work outside the home. Things seem to have changed a lot since then. Of course it is now said that Hillary Rosen wasn’t speaking for the White House although she has been a more frequent visitor than many Cabinet ministers and is or was until today considered a good source of information about the President’s views. Hillart Rosen is a political strategist for the Democratic Party. Rosen’s remarks seem to have riled some women. She’s now a legitimate target for nearly anyone. It will all pass.

For thousands of years men were expected to provide for the household and women were expected to manage it. And in Memphis when I was growing up, most of the city commissions that actually ran the city were dominated by married women. There might be a figurehead man chairman, but everyone understood that the power rested with the commissioners, just about every one of them married, educated, and upper middle class. They had the time and interest to participate in self government. And of course most church committees and charitable functions were run by married women who had the time to participate in these associations. That’s not modern, of course. And surely we’re so much more civilized now and the children are so much more civilized since all that changed.

The Greeks thought that leisure was important because without it there was not time to study philosophy and participate in politics. Hillary Rosen says that Ann Romney shouldn’t comment on politics because she has leisure. Perhaps she hasn’t thought that through, but it in effect what she said.

I have to return to my taxes. I am not likely to be rational about much of anything until this is over.

The good news is that I have enough to pay the taxes. The less pleasant news is that I might have to run the summer pledge drive a  bit earlier than I had planned; we’ll see.