Steve Sailer's IQ estimates of presidential candidates:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/joan-didions-1966-clue-on-obamas-iq.html

• John F. Kerry 115-120
• John F. Kennedy 119
• George W. Bush 120-125
• Barack Obama ~125
• John McCain 133
• Al Gore 133-134
• Richard Nixon 143

I wouldn't have thought McCain would have scored so high due to his U.S. Naval Academy class ranking, but I think there is a lot of math knowledge required to become a pilot beyond what is common for the general population.  George W. Bush and his father were also a pilots.

No, I don't think Internet and other mail-order purchases should be taxed by states, unless perhaps you are buying the item from inside your own state.

To me being a conservative quite often means "Standing Athwart History, Shouting 'Stop!'"

This is often the best argument against homosexual marriage, legalized gambling and pot, do-gooder environmental strangles, and every other crazy idea that liberals evacuate from their Marxist little minds on a daily basis.

You might find my argument unreasonable, but I just want things back the way they were.  Why must the government always wish to tax and kill off everything?

Besides taxes are extremely difficult to banish.  It took 108 years for the Feds to get rid the Spanish-American War telephone tax.  It could take that long or longer to completely kill off Obamacare.

Some of your statements appear to be incorrect under the assumption that all states treat all sales taxes in the very exact same manner.

I'm no expert.  I just hate big government and taxes.

The two National Review editorials seem to explain the issue well:

http://www.nationalreview.com/content/without-representation

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346567/misnamed-marketplace-fairness-act

"We wonder if it has occurred to the GOP that if it has any chance of recruiting new supporters from the younger generations, among whom it is notably lagging, then its best bet is likely to be among young entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, and small-business operators -- traditional Republican constituencies that are very much attached to the online economy.  If the Republican party cannot be counted on to be on the side of economic innovation and entrepreneurship, then what does it have to recommend itself?"

If the Republican Party wants to turn itself into Lars Ulrich crying over Napster and become a complete joke, go ahead.

If today's conservatives can't rally behind the original American freedom cry of "No taxation without representation!", then I really don't know what to tell you.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2009/05/22/levin-to-female-caller-i-dont-know-why-your-hus/150425

So Mark Levin is not everyone's taste.

I find the MSNBC line-up more disgusting.

Chris Matthews calling every Republican sentence as code for racist.

Lawrence O'Donnell mocking and trying to pick fights with Mitt Romney's son.

Ed Schultz calling conservative women sluts.

Levin immediately concluded the call with some cold NIMBYism facts.

More than half of the Republicans from Arkansas support the tax increase due to Wal-Mart's lobbying.

This is how conservatives get rewarded for supporting Wal-Mart and other big business all these years.

If I don't pay a sales tax to California, the citizens of California will have to be punished.  Why should the non-citizens of a conservative state be punished for what one-party brain-dead Democrat states do? 

This seems like taxation without representation to me.

These states have to learn to change.  They just can't increase all their state hotel taxes 300% just to gorge the non-citizens.

"God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes.  If they don't do that, they have no useful function." -- Robert Novak

I just want taxes to be low -- and government to be small.

I'd rather have low taxes of one type (or several types) than high taxes of one type (or several types).

There is nothing magic about a sales taxes. 

Sales taxes are also the gateway to VAT taxes and are a regressive tax.

(I never thought the US would ever have to worry about VAT taxes until Obama and the Democrats took power after the financial crisis.)

Hong Kong was once described by Milton Friedman as the world's greatest experiment in laissez-faire capitalism.

I don't think Hong Kong (Communist China) has ever had a sales tax, although I think they have had some maximum corporate and income taxes as high as 15% to 16.5%.

I guess I'll get to buy more Hong Kong and non-US stuff on ebay once the government tries to crush the American sellers.

How the Mark Levin call actually ended was the following:

"Mark, you’re so rude.  I’m not rude.  You think this is a joke.  He can just shut the…  and bring them over here.  Yeah.  We’ll bring them (Gitmo terrorists) to Westchester, New York (home of the caller) right in my neighborhood.  Right lady?  No!"

It's standard shock jock type stuff.  Don Imus used to do similar stuff all the time and liberals would flock to his show -- until he jokingly used the phrase "nappy-headed hos" to describe the Rutgers basketball team.

Liberals know that they could be attacked when they call his show.

Humor varies from person to person. 

I used to receive e-mails from people with lots of off-color humor.  It seems that different people find different things funny.

Modern American society prefers a moronic and neutered man as shown on television sitcoms and commercials.  This just isn't Mark's style. 

Do Mark Levin's "What are you wearing jokes?" also offend?

Actually he wondered why the caller's husband didn't put a gun to his temple.  Do you think the mother-in-law jokes where the mother-in-law dies are also completely humorless? 

Salesperson: "I see you've decided on a king-size (bed)."

Dan Conner: "No.  We'll take that double."

Salesperson: "And for the lady? ...  I'll just, uh, go write it up, then. "

Roseanne Conner: "Way to defend my honor there, Dan."

Dan: "It was a shot at me, dear."

Roseanne: (Pause) "Good one."

As Harry Shearer said on Uncommon Knowledge, we seem to always have taboos but the subject's keep changing.

Next everyone will be telling me that Adam Smith supports this tax increase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith_%28politician%29

There's been a congressman named Adam Smith for the pass 16 years?

I remember that the last year or two that I was a renter, my tax person insisted that I send a special document to my landlord confirming my rent or something.  Heck, my landlord was a farmer who was wounded at least twice in Korea.  He wasn’t going to fill out any more forms.  He even refused to give people his proper mailing address.  (“They’ve changed my mailing addresses so many times that I told the post office that I wasn’t going to change it anymore.  I sticking with this one.”)

The only time in my entire life I remember paying the state tax, at least voluntarily, for a mail order item was about 20 years ago when I ordered one of Michael Barone's The Almanac of American Politics.  The order form stated that residents of Missouri must pay the state tax, so I had to call the local chamber of commerce, the local library, and the Missouri Secretary of State's office who I think finally figured out the additional book cost after about 5 or 10 minutes. 

Ha!  I'm going to buy all my groceries and common every-day items from a different state over the Internet?  (Well, I suppose if the local combined state and local tax was 25% or 50% or something, but I don't see that happening.)

So you're saying the death of a tax is something you fear?

I think the older politicians also aren't as idealistic to think that black markets do not exist. 

For example, when was the last time you gathered up all the proper social security tax information from a lawn care person, plumber, or maid who wished to be paid in cash to make sure they paid all of their social security taxes.  If cabinet secretary nominees like Zoë Baird could not be bothered to do this, what chance do you think that the typical person is going to do this.

1.  If you have to pay more money, that's a tax increase.  I guess they'll need the extra money to pay for the extra tax collectors and investigators.

Does the economy suck enough already under the Obamacare burdens?

2.  It's not a "cheat on taxes".  It was essentially a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, but now even young Republicans are stampeding to increase your taxes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota

Modern feel-good fairness and turning even more money over to the government are usually loopy liberal ideas.  Freedom from excessive taxes and states rights are usually conservative ideas.

3.  It seems to be only the young and naive that think that one magic law is going to solve all of these problems.  No Obamacare-type loopholes in this bill?

Republican for more taxes?  I hope they all get primary opponents.

Aaron Schock, elected at age 27.  Yeah, the table-cloth shirt was about the only photo I could find of him wearing a shirt and not trying to do a Matthew McConaughey impression.

I think Kristi Noem is riding the horse due to her 27 traffic citations.

Sorry, but tax-raisers, job destroyers, lobbyist lovers, and crony-capitalism suck-ups  are the enemy in my book.

The state governments don't even seem to care about this bill.  It's the big businesses like Wal-Mart and Amazon that want it, so that they can more easily crush their competition.

"According to the Tax Foundation, there are 9,646 tax jurisdictions in the United States, creating the kind of complexity that would frighten any small business.  'How can we possibly know the tax rates in [those] jurisdictions?' said Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. 'In one jurisdiction, cotton candy is food; in another it’s entertainment or candy.' ...  Internet merchants 'put a lot lesser load on a local infrastructure' than a corporation like Target or Walmart. Big corporations not only have multiple storefronts, but they serve employees and their children with roads, sewers, schools, and other buildings."  blog.heritage.org

Joe Lieberman is a conservative Democrat?  You mean like Pat Moynihan?  Since when did these guys ever vote for an issue that was conservative? They would be more liberal than an ordinary "liberal Democrat" in some places.

I think part of the problem is that there are conservatives that often only care about one single issue. Would John Podhoretz be tempted to call Chuck Hagel a RINO or something similar?  Perhaps.  I don't see any problem with that.

I think the problem is when conservatives want to control other conservatives through political correctness-type speech codes.  So somebody called you a RINO because you attacked their most-treasured political issue.  Big deal.  Block him from your twitter or facebook thingees and move on.  If too many conservatives are attacking you, perhaps you should reexamine your position a bit and try to address their concerns.