The investigation is over and the suspect has confessed. Ted Stevens is the secret holder of S. 2590, a bill to create a searchable database of government contracts that would be accessable by the public. The Stevens staffer who confirmed his guilt flailed about and offered this convoluted explaination.
Aaron Saunders, spokesperson for Stevens, said Coburn was informed two weeks ago that his boss had concerns about the bill. Namely, Stevens is concerned that the bill would create more bureaucracy. He wants to see a cost-benefit analysis.
Saunders said there was nothing secret about what Stevens did.
?Senator Stevens has always preferred to handle this at the staff level or member to member,? Saunders said. ?He doesn?t like running to the blogosphere or the media.?
?Our reticence in getting out there is that Stevens doesn?t want to be in the media attacking Coburn,? Saunders said. ?He has never addressed legislative concerns in the media. It is just not the way the senator has ever operated.?
Ha. What Senator Stevens didn’t want to be seen “attacking” in the media was not Senator Coburn, but rather what is sure to be a popular bill in the eyes of a public fed up with unaccountable porking by the likes of Ted Stevens. Nor does his concern over a cost-benefit analysis hold an credibility. There’s no indication whatsoever that eliminating or reducing bureaucracy has even been a concern of Ted Stevens.
Frankly, I’m a bit surpised he’s even heard of a cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps he looked it up on this “series of tubes” some of us call the interwebbernet.
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A lower court ruling that found Constitutional limits to what the government could count as “income” for tax purpose may lead to broad tax reform.
. . .Murphy argued that just as compensation for physical injuries only makes one whole after a loss, the same is true of awards for emotional distress, as well. In short, it is not income within the meaning of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. The appeals court agreed and ruled that her award for emotional distress is not income and therefore not taxable.
Tax experts immediately recognized the far-reaching implications of the Murphy decision for other areas of tax law. Tax protesters have long argued that the 16th Amendment did not grant the federal government the power to tax every single receipt that it deems to be income. Yet in practice, that is what the Internal Revenue Service does.
. . .Given the logic of the Murphy decision, it is quite possible that the risk-free, inflation-adjusted rate of interest could also be excluded from taxation on constitutional grounds. Following through that logic consistently would revolutionize taxation and eventually lead to a pure consumption tax, which most economists today favor.
Serious tax reform is long overdue, so hopefully this ruling can lead to a real effort to straighten out the dangerous and wasteful income tax system we currently use. I believe the FairTax – a national consumption tax offering a wide range of benefits over the current, complicated tax system – is the answer.
From the Compendium Files: Why we need tax reform.
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The class-warfare artists have been out in force, as they always are under Republican presidents, as of late. The usual cries of “rich getting richer while the poor get poorer” can be heard, often followed by moaning about “handouts and tax cuts for the rich”. They usually cap off this nonsense shake with a topping of “the middle class is shrinking”. As Cato-at-Liberty reports, it turns out they are right on that last point, though not in the manner they think.
If we define the middle class as households earning between $35,000 and $75,000 a year, the middle class in America remains a huge demographic group. According to the Census report, Table A-1, the middle class made up 33.3 percent of U.S. households in 2005. That share is indeed somewhat smaller than in 1980, when 38.2 percent of households earned between $35,000 and $75,000 a year in real (inflation-adjusted) 2005 dollars.
Aha, so the middle class really is shrinking if not exactly disappearing, the alarmists might respond. But the Census numbers also show that over the past 25 years, the share of U.S. households earning less than $35,000 a year has also shrunk, from 44.5 percent in 1980 to 38.4 percent in 2005. Meanwhile, the share of households earning more than $75,000 a year has jumped from 17.4 percent to 28.3 percent.
In other words, if the middle class in America has shrunk, it is only because so many formerly middle-class households have moved to the upper-income brackets, while a significant number of households previously in the lower brackets have moved up to the middle class and beyond.
Chalk up another victory for supply-siders.
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I don’t know if I would go that far, but Britain has a serious problem with home grown jihadists.
In an article on Islamists headlined “Kashmir on the Thames”, the New Republic painted Britain’s Muslim communities as a breeding ground for violent extremism.
Citing recent opinion poll evidence suggesting that one in four British Muslims believed that last year’s London Tube bombings were justified, the magazine said: “In the wake of this month’s high-profile arrests, it can now be argued that the biggest threat to US security emanates not from Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather from Great Britain, our closest ally.”
. . .Many have been appalled both by the existence of enthusiastic jihadis in British cities and by the call from some of their leaders for a change in the country’s foreign policy.
Other publications and the think-tanks that shape public debate in America have also issued stern criticism both of Britain’s Muslims and of the Government. Nile Gardiner, of the Right-wing Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Telegraph yesterday that Americans were coming to view Britain as “a hornet’s nest of Islamic extremists” and thought it posed ”a direct security threat to the US”.
“Conventional wisdom” has it that terrorism is the result of poverty, oppression or indoctrination. While all these may play a part, they cannot explain how free British muslims – neither poor, oppressed nor subjected to constant jihadist propaganda – can themselves, in such significant numbers, sympathize with the jihadist agenda. They desire the overthrow of free constitutions to be replaced with the Islamic law of Sharia. We are at war with an idealogy that exists across the globe and grows within our own backyards. We cannot afford to continue to ignore these domestic threats.
Hat tip: Jihad Watch
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Plame and the ‘Bush Lied’ Meme
. . .No indictments have been brought on the charge Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate, because it is clear there was no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The act applies only to those who are operating under cover overseas, or who have done so within five years of the disclosure of their identities. Ms. Plame had been manning a desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. for longer than that.
Mr. Isikoff and Mr. Corn disclose that it was then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who disclosed Ms. Plame’s identity to Bob Novak, which is not exactly news to those who have been following the case. But Mr. Isikoff and Mr. Corn provide details which reflect poorly on Mr. Armitage, Mr. Fitzgerald, and the journalists who knew the truth at the time.
. . .Mr. Fitzgerald knew in his first few days on the job that Mr. Armitage was the leaker; that the leak was inadvertent, and that the Intelligence Identities Act hadn’t been violated. Yet he has persisted in a sham prosecution.
This is a perfect example of the kind of witch hunt “investigations” we can expect if Nancy Pelosi and her band of merry idiots stumble into power in November.
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Shopping for Support Down the Wrong Aisle
Once upon a time, smart Democrats defended globalization, open trade and the companies that thrive within this system. They were wary of tethering themselves to an anti-trade labor movement that represents a dwindling fraction of the electorate. They understood the danger in bashing corporations: Voters don’t hate corporations, because many of them work for one.
. . .To see the difference between then and now, just look at the Clintons. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hillary Clinton sat on Wal-Mart’s board; and when Sam Walton died in 1992, Bill Clinton lauded him as “a wonderful family man and one of the greatest citizens in the history of the state of Arkansas.” Campaigning in the New Hampshire primary that year, Bill Clinton came proudly to the rescue of a local company called American Brush Co. by helping it become a Wal-Mart supplier.
Times change. Last year Hillary Clinton returned a campaign contribution from Wal-Mart, even though she had no compunction in banking a check from Jerry Springer. The nation’s most successful retailer, which has seized the opportunities created by globalization to boost the buying power of ordinary Americans, is now seen as too toxic to touch. But a trash-talking TV host is acceptable. . .
I suggest reading the entire article, but I wanted to highlight two paragraphs I found particularly important:
The truth is that none of these Democrats can resist dumb economic populism. Even though we are not in a recession, and even though the presidential primaries are more than a year away, the DLC crowd is pandering shamelessly to the left of the party — perhaps in the knowledge that the grocery workers union, which launched the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, is strong in the key state of Iowa.
For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart’s customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families’ food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart’s price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government’s $33 billion food-stamp program.
Liberal policies hurt, rather than help, average Americans. Unfortunately, it’s also true that liberalism survives by emotional, rather than logical, appeal.
Hat tip: Club for Growth
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Police investigate Scottish soccer player who makes *gasp* a religious gesture.
. . .Celtic goalkeeper Artur Boruc was cautioned after complaints were made about his behaviour at Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow in front of Ranger’s fans.
Strathclyde Police investigated claims that Boruc, 26, angered a section of the home support after allegedly making the religious gesture at the start of the second half of the game on February 12.
. . .”On this occasion, the actions included a combination of behaviour before a crowd in the charged atmosphere of an Old Firm match which provoked alarm and crowd trouble and as such constituted a breach of the peace.
This is where runaway liberalism, intolerance disguised as tolerance, leads.
Hat tip: Tongue Tied
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Captors Release FOX News Journalists Kidnapped in Gaza.
He recounted how he and Wiig were pulled out of their car on August 14 and taken at gunpoint into another car. The kidnappers blindfolded them and handcuffed their hands behind their backs with plastic ties. They were then transferred to another car and driven to a building that they later learned was a garage.
“We were pushed down onto the dirt-covered concrete floor and we were forced to lie face down with our handcuffs on,” Centanni said.
“Olaf was in the same room with me. Our shoulders were wrenched back, very painful.”
Both of the men were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint, Centanni said.
This seems a decent metaphor for the larger war. The Jihadists wish to “kidnap” the west, force us to convert (or accept dhimmitude), then “release” us…into the rule of the Caliph and subject to Sharia, of course.
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Shelby Steele, author of “White Guilt”, offers much needed sanity and perspective on Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.
Leave a commentThe simple back-and-forth of war can create the illusion that both sides have a legitimate point to make even when this is not so, and it is clear that Hezbollah’s cause has greatly benefited from war’s “equalizing” effect. This Shiite militia seems to have known that merely fighting Israel would gain legitimacy for its cause. A cease-fire would make it a “partner” in peace. The Goliath Israeli military would make it a David whose passion proved the truth of its cause. But amid all the drama of this war there has been very little talk of exactly what Hezbollah’s cause is.
And, of course, it is not just Hezbollah’s cause. There is Hamas, one more in a family of politicized terrorist groups spread across the Muslim world. Beyond these more conventional groups there is the free-floating and world-wide terrorism of groups like al Qaeda. In Europe, there are cells of self-invented middle-class terrorists living modern lives by day and plotting attacks on modernity by night. And around these cells there is often a nourishing atmosphere of fellow traveling. Then there are the radical nation-states in league with terrorism, Iran and Syria most prominent among them. From nations on the verge of nuclear weapons to isolated individuals–take the recent Seattle shootings–Islamic militancy grounded in hatred of Israel and America has become the Muslim world’s most animating idea. Why?
I don’t believe it is because of the reasons usually cited–Israeli and American “outrages.” No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this. Yet every Israeli land-for-peace gesture has been met with a return volley of suicide bombers and rockets. Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood. And Hezbollah launched the current war from territory Israel had relinquished six years earlier.
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Kofi Annan enlightens us on how to tackle that pesky little problem of global jihad.
United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, said that disarming Hezbollah “is not going to be done by force.”
And what does the good secretary general propose to use instead? Telekinesis? Voodoo? Let’s find out.
“Disarmament of Hezbollah has to be achieved through negotiation, and an internal Lebanese consensus, a political process, for which the new Unifil (United Nations force in southern Lebanon) is not, and cannot be, a substitute,” he said Friday at a press conference in Brussels after an emergency meeting with the EU foreign ministers to discuss the EU troops contribution to the force.
Negotiation. . .an interesting choice. Nuanced. I would have went with voodoo, personally. Higher probability of success and all that.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
