Sorta one or the other?

I was generally wondering about Angle’s hysteria about estate taxes, so I emailed our family tax and estate attorney, asking if it was anything we should be concerned about here at Rancho Maven … should the unexpected happen.

Uh, not being gazillion-aires, ‘no’ was the answer. In other words, our due diligence in protecting our estate should do the trick and ‘pay off’ adequately.

First of all, as the RG-J notes, it doesn’t kick in until your estate reaches the $ONE MILLION DOLLAR mark. With the recent decline in home values many of us now have estates that look more like the Grapes of Wrath than Park Avenue these days. Secondly, anybody with even close to that amount of money is a complete idiot if they haven’t sat down with a tax attorney and planned for the uh, unexpected. That person deserves to lose it, and their estate will be better spent paying for Estate Planning for Dummies books.

The following, from Who Rules America, by G. William Domhoff, Dept. of Sociology, University of California at Santa Cruz, is very enlightening. The number of Americans who might actually have to worry about estate taxes is miniscule. The issue is being used by cynical pols like Sharron Angle to frighten her unenlightened Tea Party supporters.

“Figures on inheritance tell much the same story. According to a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, only 1.6% of Americans receive $100,000 or more in inheritance.

“I think that’s a decision we’ll make in February or March,” Gingrich said on “Fox News Sunday” of a presidential run. “This is a very hard family decision because it’s such a deep commitment and it is so absorbing.” Newt Gingrich

Oh, promise me that you’ll consult one of your families, Newt. I’ll even try to help you decide which one - the wife with breast cancer that you were cheating on, or …. these things can become confusing, even for a ‘practicing’ Roman Catholic.

For Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont and former DNC Chair, to come out supporting Gingrich, saying that he would add ‘intellectual’ depth to a Republican primary is rather like saying Mengele added dimension to the Nazi medical program.

What is Howard Dean smoking?

Kenny Guinn, the two term Republican governor of Nevada fell off the roof of his home in Las Vegas, Nevada while attempting some repairs. Guinn was the last Republican that I voted for. Hear that? I do vote for Republicans when they’re as decent as Kenny Guinn was. They don’t make Republicans like that anymore.

Guinn was the only governor in recent memory that had guts enough to be realistic about the budgetary needs for Nevada. He put forth the largest tax increase in the states history. For that he left office with an astounding 66% approval rating. He also declined to support Jim ‘No taxes’ Gibbons, who later won. Jim is going out with an embarassing approval rating of a negative percent. I jest, although it isn’t really very funny.

Republican who taxed is beloved. Republican who is a stubborn anti-tax horses’ behind is hated. You’d think Nevada Republicans would get a clue here.

Daniel Schorr, that familiar and authoritative voice on NPR, doing news analysis, passed today at age 93. I hung on his every word, for common sense, historical perspective and the last vestige of the Edward R. Murrow style of journalistic excellence.

Daniel Schorr rose above the likes of Andrew Breibart with quiet grace, integrity and a wealth of real world experience that few could ever hope to match.

With Breibart, Americans get cheesy, manufactured stories like the one that nearly took down a woman of integrity - Shirley Sherrod. There’s a world of difference there, and we are the poorer for it as consumers of reliable information. Kudos to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal for taking a deep breath and swinging back to the rational side of the truth meter - finally calling Breibart out for his obvious fraud. Hell, even Ann Coulter - long the right’s reigning queen of ‘the truth is what I say it is’  - said the heavily edited video was a sham. But you can still find Patrick Buchannan tap dancing around the facts, as a Breibart apologist.

This was as fine a piece of recent political journalism as the RGJ has done for a while, and I commend them for their efforts. It may be too little, too late to pull print back from the precipice of irrelevance, but I’d like to think they’ll all go down fighting the good fight. This type of in-depth reporting is where print journalism shines a big bright light. This you can take out in the hammock under a tree and peruse, mull it over good and hard.

This is where I’d normally give you the link to the RGJ story. If I could. If the RGJ could put the big story on the website for all to see - since it was important enough to emblazon the front page with -  without my fiddling around with passwords or a useless ‘search’. A boss of mine in the advertising agency back in the day, used to tell me “never put barriers in the way of a customer getting to the product.”

Okay. Now I’ll quit ranting.

If this story doesn’t give you - the rational person - pause, then nothing will. But the RGJ makes the good point that we’d all be very unwise to underestimate the grandmother from Tonopah, as she goes door to door selling grandmother-hood, the flag, a dash of Second Amendment hysteria and a pinch of that old timey delusional religious fever thrown in. When even the most stalwart of GOP, pro-business types can’t sign on to her wagon train, that should tell everybody sumpthin’.

Unfortunately, it only tells the true believers that guys like Mayor Bob Cashell have been converted to the dark side of the Harry Reid force, and soon, Che Guevera’s likeness will be up at City Hall.

Sheesh. The lunatics are loose.

Damn. It was good.

We were late getting lunch and the hunger pangs were happening. As I told you in my last post, I’ve gotta get out of the rut and start really trying other places. Mr. Maven and I had been to Vivoli Trattoria a couple times before and I left it ambivalent. The first visit was a nice surprise, the second left us cold- it was just ‘off’ somehow.

Our schedules being what they are, we are often late lunch types. This being the case, we tend to frequent places where that never seems to be a problem. They still have the soup, the servers haven’t evaporated to the nether regions, and even more important - you, the customer, are still treated with every bit of the same regard as had you dropped in during the more exciting peak times. I’ve gotten up and walked out of places where that wasn’t the case.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

Yikes. We were the only customers at Vivoli this afternoon. I don’t like that. It makes me feel on display in a creepy sense. This has been the case another time we came to Vivoli. They just don’t seem to do much of a mid-afternoon business, unlike Truckee Bar and Grill on Moana and Lakeside, where a steady supply of ‘regulars’ keep things interesting through off-peak hours. This is the location, in a small strip type mall. TRBG has a lot of apartments nearby to supply patrons for the bar and slots.

The waiter was right on top of things, and seated us toward the back so we didn’t feel like we were in a fishbowl. He remarked to my query about slow business, saying that they were doing some catering up at the Reno-Tahoe Open golf tourney, and perhaps that had drawn off some business. Hmmm. Maybe. But he smoothly seated us, and had water, bruschetta with an olive tapenade, and our drinks right out while we perused the menu.

Although I was thinking about a salad or antipasti, I was surprised - and very impressed - that they offered Brunch on Saturday and Sunday until 4 p.m. How very civilized. They must have known I was coming in.