Selling a house? Papers, please

Taxes are through the roof, with more in the works. And they're so complex, many citizens can no longer safely fill out their tax forms without paid, professional help.

They're inspecting our cars -- and urging us on the radio to turn in our neighbors over a puff of smoke -- even though on-board computers reliably keep cars running vastly cleaner than 40 years ago, while city buses, the biggest polluters per passenger mile, go unchallenged. They're regulating how big our toilet tanks can be and what light bulbs we can use.

And now the Obama administration wants Americans to have their homes inspected for "energy efficiency" before they're allowed to sell them. Honest.

The Department of Energy announced Thursday that it has finalized new and higher energy-efficiency standards for several classes of appliances as required under the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Energy Secretary Steven Chu says these changes will prevent 164 million metric tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, a fraction of a billionth of the atmosphere, so insignificant that it wouldn't matter even if human-generated carbon dioxide caused global warming and even if infinitessimal global warming was bad.

Think you can wait and buy the new appliances as your old ones wear out? What the law actually states is that from now on, if you want to sell your home, you'll need to replace your perfectly good water heater, and lots of other electrical devices in your home, before you're allowed to complete a legal sale. In essence, the Obama administration now proposes to force us to register our homes, just as we do our cars, and get them inspected by an authorized agent of the federal government prior to sale.

For details, homeowners might want to actually read the cap-and-trade energy tax bill that passed the Lesser Soviet -- er, the House of Representatives -- last June, and which President Obama is shortly expected to try to ram through the U.S. Senate.

And you thought buying or selling a house was already tricky.

Devices subject to energy inspection and certification will include microwaves, kitchen ranges, lighting, heating, air-conditioning and water-heating equipment, clothes washers, small electric motors and pool heaters.

Yet the ruling elite and their pets in the mainstream media continue to scratch their heads in puzzlement over the Tea Party movement, complaining they can't figure out what these folks object to, settling by default on the bizarre conclusion that -- because everyone loves government and no one could seriously contend we have too much of it -- the protesters can't be anything but violent racists who object to having a black president.

Yeah. That must be it.