Do you know what the word "income" means? My large Webster's dictionary is able to provide a clear and comprehensive definition in a mere 52 words. The shortest definition the Internal Revenue Service could provide in response to my request for its definition was 140 words - but the word income was included 10 times, missing the point that you do not include the word to be defined as part of the definition. Last week, I was in a meeting with some of the nation's best and most experienced tax lawyers and tax economists, several of whom had served in the Treasury, and, again, there was the general lament that the tax code is so complex it is beyond their understanding and repair. Those who claim that the government will be able to get a lot more tax revenue by increasing tax rates on the rich live in a fantasy world.

Barack Hussein Obama visited the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, today (4/20) in an apparent effort to mitigate the harm he did by making public the so-called "secret torture memos" which described in explicit detail the coercive interrogation techniques CIA officers used to obtain information from captured al Qaeda bigwigs. Release of the memoranda -- which were written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel or OLC between 2002 and 2005 -- was strongly opposed by the four previous CIA directors (two appointed by President George W. Bush, two appointed by President Clinton).  The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, did not object to the release in principle, but said the memoranda should have been heavily censored before being made public. The release of the memoranda means that we are unlikely ever again to get valuable information from terror suspects, because now our enemies know the precise lengths to which our interrogators are willing to go to coerce information, and that those limits stop well short of actually causing the terror suspect injury. Did Mr. Obama release the CIA memos for the purpose of achieving this result?

We can raise a full glass of your favorite adult beverage to all the Tea Party participants - and to the one group of Americans the Zerocrats despise above all others:  our soldiers in the US military. All of us want to raise our glass the highest this week to the Navy SEALs who popped those three Somali pirates.  And I'm sure you want to hear the real story of what happened.   Especially because there is a revoltingly opportunistic and cowardly side to it.  Guess which side Zero is on. Why, for example, did it take SEAL Team Six (aka DEVGRU, Navy Special Warfare Development Group, the Navy's equivalent of Delta Force) over 36 hours to get to the scene? Because Zero refused to authorize the SEAL deployment for those 36 hours, during which the OSC - the on scene commander, Cmdr. Frank Castellano of the USS Bainbridge - repeatedly requested them.

When will the next round of inflation hit, and how can we protect ourselves? Many economists and commentators, including yours truly, have warned about the potential of a new round of high inflation due to the great expansion of government spending. But does an increase in government spending necessarily translate into higher inflation? The answer is "no," but it most often does, and this is why.  It's also why we are headed for the doom of Jimmy Carter's stagflation -- high unemployment and economic stagnation combined with high inflation -- on steroids.

"The White House said the president is unaware of the tea parties and will hold his own event today," ABC's Dan Harris reported on the "Good Morning America" program the morning of April 15. This was, of course, a preposterous lie.  Mr. Obama may not approve of the Tea Party phenomenon, but he had to be aware of an event that drew hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of cities across the country.  But if the president is as clueless as his aides represented him to be to Mr. Harris, let's hope his foreign intelligence is better than his domestic intelligence is. The person most responsible for gathering domestic intelligence is the director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona who was a U.S. attorney before that.  She is not only wholly unqualified, she has now descended into creepy racism.

In American custody in Iraq are two Iranian terrorists, Ali Musa Daqduq and Qayis Khazali. Both were captured in Iraq in the spring of 2007, following the bloody attack in Karbala in which five American soldiers were murdered.  U.S. military forces in Iraq discovered that both of them were working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force.  The British want them released.  They want them exchanged for Brits being held hostage in Iran.  Those hostages are used to blackmail their country into doing things it might not otherwise do.  Knowing all this about the Brits, one has to wonder to what extent we, too, are being blackmailed by the mullahs.  There are now four Americans held hostage now in Iran, the most well-known being Roxana Saberi, and two in North Korea.

Ahh, Friday.  Here in the US, folks say TGIF.  Our British cousins, however, say THITWA - thank heavens it's the weekend again.  Time to settle in to a quiet corner booth in the HFR Saloon with a pint of Theakston's Old Peculier real ale, and enjoy reading a good British newspaper, the London Telegraph. Particularly today (4/10), as the Brits simply unload on Zero, giving him a new nickname, President Pantywaist.  Calling him "the new surrender monkey" for his performance at the G20, they note his Europe trip is "the most successful foreign policy tour since Napoleon's retreat from Moscow." And you thought he was losing popularity on our side of the Pond. *** Let's stay overseas for awhile. Some good things are happening.