Are you absolutely sure you paid the exact amount of income tax you owed last year -- not too much and not too little? I am willing to bet the vast majority of those reading this paid either too much or too little -- not because they intended to but because the tax code is so complex it is almost impossible to know precisely the right number. As Americans sit down to file their taxes before the infamous April 15 deadline, most will feel some anxiety and many will feel trapped - trapped in a system they cannot understand, nor can they obtain the help that will fairly represent them against the government or protect them against having their hard earned monies misspent. At this moment, some in Congress are on a rant about the unsupported claim that more than $300 billion in taxes due last year were not collected, and demanding even more coercive measures. Why is there not equal outrage in Congress about all the Americans who pay too much each year because they cannot understand, or the IRS has made it too costly to obtain, the deductions to which they are legally entitled?

I have just sent the following letter to a friend in the White House who asked for informed suggestions regarding Tony Snow's recurrence of cancer.  Many TTPers have expressed their concern for Tony and are praying for him.  Here is an initial series of suggestions for him.   Dear Tim, A close friend of mine for many years is a medical researcher whose IQ was unable to be measured by MIT as it was so far above 200.  Here is what he suggests for Tony, as supplementing the treatment from his physicians. Go to this website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the National Institutes of Health:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/.   In the PubMed search box, enter in the specific medical name of the type of cancer Tony has as determined by the pathology report, plus "treatment," plus "immune" or "immunity," plus "experimental" or "adjuvant."

The Jade Steps Chapter Thirty-One:  The Spanish Phoenix By nightfall, the expedition reached the town of Xaltepec on the far side of the valley.  It was deserted, and everyone had to forage for food.  Malinali tried to clean the bloody gashes on Cortez's head and the deep wound in his left hand, but Cortez shook his head.  "To a man, all of us are wounded, exhausted, and hungry," he told her.  "Organize help for them, tend to them... then you may have all night to tend to me." When Malinali returned, she found Cortez fast asleep.  At dawn the next morning, she tried to clean and bandage him as best she could, but he was anxious to get underway.  "Our only hope of safety lies in those mountains of Tlaxcala," he said, as he gazed at them looming above Xaltepec.  Slowly, slowly, the expedition trudged up into the mountains to the Tlaxcalan frontier fortress town of Hueyotlipan (way-oat-lee-pahn). There to greet them were King Xicotencatl, Chief Maxixcatzin, and Commander Chichimecatecle. "Malinche!  Malinche!" they cried out when they saw Cortez.  Chief Maxixcatzin threw his arms around him.  "How grieved we are at your misfortunes, and the number of our own people who have been killed with yours," he told Cortez through Malinali.  "We warned you not to trust the Mesheeka, but you went to their city and did not believe us.  Now all we can do is help with your wounds and give you rest and food.  Here you are home."

Why do non-Americans so dislike Americans or, at least, the American government?  Could part of the reason be because the U.S. State Department appears to think its mission is to be rude, insulting and condescending? This month, the State Department has set a new record by managing to insult the citizens of 123 different lands at one time in the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: Volume II, Money Laundering and Financial Crimes. The 450-page report discusses what other countries are doing to reduce money laundering and financial crimes, which is fine. But then the authors go on gratuitously lecturing each of the countries by name about how they could do things "better." The Report, produced by the global nannies and nags at State, is filled with endless demands that other countries do a better job enforcing their laws, pass more laws, sign more international treaties and engage in some practices that would be illegal and unconstitutional in the U.S.    Some examples:

Two female explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, planned a trek across the Arctic Ocean earlier this month to highlight the dangers of global warming.  They had to call the expedition off because it was too cold. "One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times," Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition, told the Associated Press. "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Ms. Atwood acknowledged.  "One of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability," she said. Uh, Ms. Atwood, one thing people who haven't drunk the Kool Aid can predict is that it'll be mighty cold in the Arctic in winter. (Jack Wheeler, who has been to the North Pole 21 times, told me he fell out of his chair laughing at this news item.  "What ditzes," he observed.) The Jim Jones of this Kool Aid testified on Capitol Hill last Wednesday. 

The Democrat Party is in thrall, we're told, of the mighty power of the Moonbat Left, with its millions of passionate adherents all ruthlessly organized via MoveOn.org to bring doom to any politician who dares oppose them. Their strength would literally be on parade, they boasted, in the nation's capital in a glorious resurrection of the left's finest moment of anti-war protest forty years ago.   More than a hundred thousand of them would march on the Pentagon, humbling their arrogant warmongering government over Iraq as their parents and grandparents once did over Vietnam. Why they chose March 17, 2007 as the "40th Anniversary" of the legendary-to-them March on the Pentagon is mysterious, as the latter took place on October 21, 1967. On that October day 40 years ago, well over 100,000 lefties, cheered on by Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, and Abbie Hoffman, marched from the Lincoln Memorial over Memorial Bridge and down to the Pentagon, where they were met by 2,500 armed Army soldiers. Lefty author Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, The Armies of the Night, which however poorly and egomaniacally written, won a Pulitzer Prize.  No one, not even as awful a writer as Mailer, is going to write a book about the pathetic fizzle of this last Saturday.  What a bust.