Category: Issues of the Day

10 ways to blow your tax rebate

Mark Morford has some spending suggestions for those of you receiving the hush money tax rebate. Several are funny. My favorite:

One share of Google. Hey, it’s the most powerful company on Earth. It belches up bits of Microsoft after an organic tofu and wakame salad lunch in its massive world-class floating cafeteria in the sky. Why not buy a tiny crumb of the company that already owns a large piece of you and everything you do and play with and think about and log into every single day? Sort of like buying back a tiny, digitized, bitmapped, rebranded, YouTubed, Street Viewed piece of your own exhausted soul. Neat!

Best line of the late night

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

Tom Friedman

Is he stupid or just full of it?

Uncapping the payroll tax reveals still another cultural misstep by Sen. Obama. He apparently has a difficult time understanding that nowadays, a veteran fireman or a veteran cop, married to a veteran schoolteacher, will make well over $100,000. In fact, they can make close to $200,000. Yet Obama still wants to go ahead and tax both the first and last payroll dollar of this group at a very high marginal tax rate by uncapping the Social Security (FICA) tax.

Larry Kudlow, The Corner on National Review Online

The salaries are questionable, but regardless of that fiction, since when did FICA become a joint tax?

The cap (currently $102,000) is on individual wages.

Via Eschaton.

Horton Hears a Misogynist

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar takes exception to the sexism in Horton Hears a Who (the film).

What’s especially insidious here isn’t just that the subplot was written and approved and filmed, but that since the movie has come out, there hasn’t been a popular outcry about it. That we don’t even ask why, in the years it took to make the movie, no one along the line said, “This isn’t a good message to send to our kids.” Is it because sexism is so ingrained in our society that we don’t even flinch at it when it’s shoved in our faces?

Go read what he has to say.

And click here to see a mighty big rocking chair!

Taxes

In the 1950s and early 1960s the top tax rate — on taxable incomes over $400,000 — was 91%.

Ninety. One.

[Caveat: $400,000 in 1960 dollars would be about $2,800,000 in 2007 dollars.]

The Revenue Act of 1964 reduced the top rate to 70%.

Today’s top rate is 35%.

Best line of the day

. . . But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. “Oh, yes,” he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?”

“Lung cancer?” I offer.

“No. No. Because I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, ‘Colon.'”. . . .

From an article in the August 2006 Rolling Stone.

Best line of the morning, so far

“ABC: Bush admits he authorized torture. Believe it or not, it gets worse from there”

FARK.com

Here’s the worse from ABC News:

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Worst. President. Ever.

Plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Library have been released

The library will include:

  • The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction and looks like a disaster.
  • The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can’t remember anything you see or hear.
  • The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t have to even show up.
  • The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
  • The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
  • The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room (which no one has been able to find).
  • The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you go back for a second, third, fourth, & sometimes fifth tour.
  • The Dick Cheney Room, in an undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery.
  • The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy (or just steal) an election.
  • The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
  • An entire floor devoted to a 1/64 scale model of the President’s ego.

Thanks to Debby for the scoop.

A Lesson In Watching Out What You Wish For

An excellent look at China and the upcoming Olympics from Functional Ambivalent. Good stuff.

An excerpt:

The Chinese wanted the Summer Games for the same reason everyone else does: the P.R. value of having everyone in the world stop by when the house is clean and the kids are in their Sunday best. The Chinese government promised, in effect, to not be itself — abandoning it’s longstanding policy of horrifying oppression and cruelty in pursuit of a perfect society. Landing the games was a triumph, but I wonder now if there aren’t a few high in the bureaucracy massaging their foreheads and asking themselves, “What were we thinking?”

You can fool some of the people all of the time

NewMexiKen posted this just a year ago but I enjoyed reading it again and thought you might too.

In 1938, wallet manufacturer the E. H. Ferree company in Lockport, New York decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was inserted in each wallet. Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher.The wallet was sold by Woolworth stores and other department stores all over the country. Even though the card was only half the size of a real card, was printed all in red, and had the word “specimen” written across the face, many purchasers of the wallet adopted the SSN as their own. In the peak year of 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda’s number. SSA acted to eliminate the problem by voiding the number and publicizing that it was incorrect to use it. (Mrs. Whitcher was given a new number.) However, the number continued to be used for many years. In all, over 40,000 people reported this as their SSN. As late as 1977, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN “issued by Woolworth.”

Interesting Facts About Social Security Numbers at Money, Matter, and More Musings

The 40,000 are the same sort of people that some politicians would have manage their own social security investments.

Poll: Obama Receives High Marks for Race Speech

Suprisingly encouraging news about the American people, though note the huge caveat in the first line.

A new national poll released Friday showed voters who heard or read about Barack Obama’s speech on his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and race relations, broadly approved of it.

Seven in 10 said he did a good job talking about race relations and as many said he did a good job explaining his relationship with Reverend Wright, according to a CBS News poll conducted Thursday.

More than six in 10, moreover, said they mostly agreed with what he said about race relations in this country, including a broad majority of Democrats and independents, but fewer — four in 10 — Republicans.

The Caucus

Those “who heard or read about” the speech. What percentage do you suppose that is? The article doesn’t provide this essential information. And overall the issue has hurt him — the fraction who say Obama could unite the country had dropped from two-thirds to one-half.

Passport files

George H.W. Bush fired the assistant secretary of state responsible for passports (Consular Affairs) when Bill Clinton’s passport file was sought inappropriately during the 1992 presidential election campaign. I remember because I inventoried the contents of the fired woman’s desk to determine what was hers and what was ours (she wasn’t even allowed to enter the building). Many are appointed by the president, few have the distinction of being fired.

It will be interesting to see if the current circumstances are political, and if so if Jr. will act as appropriately as his father did.

Sad but fascinating

At the Freakonomics Blog Ian Ayres tells about a study into tipping habits. An excerpt:

1. African-American cab drivers, on average, were tipped approximately one-third less than white cab drivers.

2. African-American and Hispanic passengers tipped approximately one-half the amount white passengers tipped.

African-American passengers also seemed to participate in the racial discrimination against African-American drivers. While African-American passengers generally tipped less, on average they also tipped black drivers approximately one-third less than they tipped white drivers.

Guess who?

Who do you think said this?

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

The answer is Mike Huckabee on “Morning Joe.” Transcript via Daily Kos.