Effective January 1, 2013 every real estate transaction will add another cost to the seller via a 3.8% tax on the selling price. As if selling a home these days wasn’t challenging enough, the feds have tacked on yet another seemingly incomprehensible charge to floundering homeowners attempting to financially unencumber themselves.

Here’s how it works; every $100,000 on a home sale will cost the seller an additional $3800 in tax, and this is part of the healthcare bill. Go ahead and fact check it, but it’s there, buried deeply in the new and improved healthcare plan.

I can’t wait to hear the rationale attempting to validate how real estate is remotely related to healthcare.

How much would you be willing to pay to an incredible breakfast, the best morning meal you’ve ever had in your life? How does $25 sound, about right? No? A bit over the top for you, huh? But how can the business owner possibly stay in business if he/she cuts the price of the meal?

Apparently, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is doing their part to help stimulate the economy and recently served $16 muffins at a morning gathering. Of course, when queried about the outrageous cost of the muffins, the spokesperson quickly defended the expenditure by saying there were plenty of $15 muffins available for the attendees.

Seriously, what’s the cost of a muffin in the grocery store, about $.50 if you buy a fresh one in the deli section, or a couple of bucks if you purchase any number of  pre-packaged varieties. And if you go into most restaurants and order a muffin the cost will probably be somewhere around the $1.50 mark. But a $16 muffin would be darn challenging to find anywhere in the real world. Then again, Washington isn’t the real world, or at least not the part of it reserved for the administration insiders and various departments and agencies.

The fact that the DOJ nonchalantly forked over $16 a pop for muffins during a routine meeting is not only absurd, but downright arrogant and mindless. So based on their muffin payout one might presume that a typical cup of coffee sold in one of the nations most popular establishments, Starbucks, would bring about $10 which is about five times the going price of a cup of regular morning brew.

I suppose one could also ask, “Why hasn’t the First Lady spoken out about this muffinfest? She’s allegedly a health purveyor and these high calorie, ultra-sugary $16 muffins can’t possibly fit into her rigid dietary routine, the one she’s aggressively attempting to sell to the masses.

Oh well, it’s only our tax $$, and we sure wouldn’t want to see those hard working bureaucrats experience a sugar/caffeine slump and fail to produce another daily pound of rules and regulations that add even more oversight on our daily lives.

San Francisco voters will decide this fall whether or not to make it a crime to circumcise male children.Seriously, don’t they have more important things to worry about up there?

If the proposal is passed, anyone convicted of circumcising a baby boy could be fined up to $1,000 and sentenced to a year in prison. This is lunacy even for the Northern California nuts and twigs.

The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports that US hospitals perform this procedure about 1.2 million times each year. factually, San Francisco is the most childless major city in America, but even so it’s hard to imagine that voters would approve an outright egregious infringement on parental rights.

The historically solid health benefits of circumcision are clear and can be found on the Mayo Clinic website. One of the most notable confirmations is that circumcised men and boys typically experience a reduced risk of urinary tract infections, penile cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases. Circumcision also facilitates genital hygiene.

Regardless of the overwhelming evidence supporting this procedure, circumcision is something that people can and do disagree on. But the fanatics that are attempting to criminalize it. The ballot initiative in San Francisco is pushed by a conglomerate of self-described “intactivists,” a bunch of political crusaders that are admittedly obsessed with the preservation of foreskins. These fanatics call their initiative the “MGM bill.” The initials stand for “male genital mutilation,” an outright erroneous phrase intended to link the safe and medically unobjectionable procedure of male circumcision with the frightful cruelty of female genital mutilation. It’s literally an apples and oranges argument.

The potential good news is that nearly all California ballot issues fail to gain approval. Surely they will once again prove that even in the land of lunacy there are occasional glimmers of common sense and logic.