Category: Issues of the Day

An income tax was first collected during the Civil War from 1862 to 1872. During the administration of President Grover Cleveland, the federal government again levied an income tax, enacted by Congress in 1894. However, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional the following year. Supporters of an income tax were forced then to embark on the lengthy process of amending the Constitution. Not until the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913 was Congress given the power “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census of enumeration.”

Library of Congress

Congress is working on permanently repealing the Federal estate tax so that ne’er-do-wells like Paris Hilton and the Wal-Mart heir Elizabeth Paige Laurie who paid to have her college papers written can keep their “inheritances.” As a point of reference you can calculate what your heirs might have to pay if the tax were simply left as is.

Pointer and Paris Hilton idea via Hesiod at The American Street.

The federal estate tax was assessed on less than one percent of the estates of people who died last year.

In caustic and unusually personal testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Carl W. Ford Jr., who was assistant secretary for intelligence and research, said Mr. Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” who “abuses his authority with little people” …

The New York Times

Really? A person like that? A “kiss-up, kick-down” personality at the State Department? What a shock.

A lone Army reservist accused of holding seven Mexican nationals at gunpoint this week at a desolate Arizona rest stop has renewed concerns about vigilante justice and violence along the Arizona-Mexico border.

The arrest of Sgt. Patrick Haab, 24, comes as various civilian groups embark on self-described border-patrol missions to target undocumented workers and help stop the flow of illegal immigration along the busiest illegal crossing on the Southwest border.

Haab, an Iraq war veteran, was apparently acting on his own when sheriff’s deputies say he saw seven men pile into a sport utility vehicle on Interstate 8 and ordered them to lie on the ground or be shot. But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said his actions were dangerous and illegal, underscoring the risks posed by citizens patrolling the border and taking the law into their own hands.

“Even law enforcement has to have probable cause before taking people out of their cars and telling them to lie on the ground. . . . He threatened to kill them,” Arpaio said. “He did not have the right to do what he did. How did he know they were illegal aliens?”

The Arizona Republic

“No Place to Hide” — its title taken from George W. Bush’s post-9/11 warning to terrorists — is all the more damning because of its fair-mindedness. O’Harrow notes that many consumers find it convenient to be in a marketing dossier that knows their personal preferences, habits, income, professional and sexual activity, entertainment and travel interests and foibles. These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. “Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,” O’Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, “they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.”

From a book review by William Safire in The New York Times

Charles P. Pierce writing at American Prospect Online:

There are mice in my attic. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the mice seem to be a lot smarter than I am, and self-sacrificing, too. I have laid traps up there like I was Jacques Marquette around the Great Lakes, for pity’s sake, and I only ever catch one of them. One of them always gives himself up, and then the rest of them go back to kicking the stupid human’s ass for another month.

I can hear them, late at night, toasting their fallen comrades. I think they’re building a monument to them out of some old bowling shirts I’ve got lying around up there. At this very moment, there’s probably a famous anchormouse scribbling away at a lengthy tome, explaining how these mice are the greatest mice who ever lived.

I admire these mice for a number of their fine qualities, but I want them gone and, frankly, I’m obviously not up to the task. I need an expert. Somebody who’s got some experience ridding people of pests.

I need Tom DeLay.

You see, I like our new full-service congressional majority. Going to the halls of Congress is like going to Wal-Mart these days. Steroids making you feel bad about baseball? Sporting Goods in Aisle 7. Tough medical decisions bothering you? Try Housewares. Other people’s business? Throughout the store.

Continue the column at American Prospect Online.

From Time Magazine — The 2005 Time 100:

Leaders & Revolutionaires
George Bush
Condoleezza Rice
Bill Clinton
Barack Obama
Bill Frist
Donald Rumsfeld
Mark Malloch Brown
Gordon Brown
Ali Husaini Sistani
Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi
Hu Jintao
Kim Jong Il
Manmohan Singh
Thabo Mbeki
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Mahmoud Abbas
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ariel Sharon
Javier Solana
John Howard
Chen Shui-bian
Hugo Chavez

Artists & Entertainers
Clint Eastwood
Michael Moore
Hilary Swank
Quentin Tarantino
Dan Brown
Dave Eggers
Marc Cherry
John Elderfield
Kanye West
Jon Stewart
Alicia Keys
Jamie Foxx
Johnny Depp
Art Spiegelman
The Halo Team
Ann Coulter
Hayao Miyazaki
Ziyi Zhang
Juanes
Miuccia Prada
Marc Newson
Santiago Calatrava
Alice Munro
Cornelia Funke

Builders & Titans
Steve Jobs
The Google Guys
Lee Scott
Meg Whitman
Martha Stewart
Craig Newmark
Jay-Z
Amy Domini
Reed Hastings
Bram Cohen
Martin Sorrell
John Bond
Howard Stringer
Katsuaki Watanabe
Noél Forgeard
Anne Lauvergeon
Ren Zhengfei
Lee Kun Hee
Roman Abramovich
The BlackBerry Guys
Rupert Murdoch

Scientists & Thinkers
Jeffrey Sachs
Malcolm Gladwell
Robert Klein
Andrew Weil
Burt Rutan
Karl Rove
Rick Warren
Brian Atwater
Mitchell Baker
Timothy Garton Ash
Natan Sharansky
Abdolkarim Soroush
Peter Singer
Richard Pound
Lee Kuan Yew
Larry Summers

Heroes & Icons
Bill Gates
Oprah Winfrey
LeBron James
Eliot Spitzer
Melissa Etheridge
The Dalai Lama
Nelson Mandela
Viktor Yushchenko
Dina Astita
Hania Mufti
Wangari Maathai
Mary Robinson
Lubna Olayan
Ellen MacArthur
John Stott
Michael Schumacher
Stephen Lewis

As The Daily Show has noted, did you realize that right now while we are between popes, no one on earth is infallible?

Medal of Honor – Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith. See his photo; read the citation.

Thanks to the superb Functional Ambivalent for the pointer and link.

From The Santa Fe New Mexican:

It’s a quandary every parent faces. When do you talk to your children about sex? What do you say? Is middle school too late?

New Mexico Health Secretary Michelle Lujan Grisham announced Friday her decision to target $500,000 in federal sexual-abstinence education funding toward elementary-school students, because national research suggests that abstinence programs work best among students who have not yet had sex.

Maybe it’s time Dora had some condoms in that backpack of hers.

The Transportation Security Administration, once the flagship agency in the nation’s $20 billion effort to protect air travelers, is now slated for dismantling.

From The Washington Post

US CODE: Title 4, Chapter 1, § 7: Position and manner of display:

(m) The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day. On Memorial Day the flag should be displayed at half-staff until noon only, then raised to the top of the staff. By order of the President, the flag shall be flown at half-staff upon the death of principal figures of the United States Government and the Governor of a State, territory, or possession, as a mark of respect to their memory. In the event of the death of other officials or foreign dignitaries, the flag is to be displayed at half-staff according to Presidential instructions or orders, or in accordance with recognized customs or practices not inconsistent with law. In the event of the death of a present or former official of the government of any State, territory, or possession of the United States, the Governor of that State, territory, or possession may proclaim that the National flag shall be flown at half-staff. The flag shall be flown at half-staff 30 days from the death of the President or a former President; 10 days from the day of death of the Vice President, the Chief Justice or a retired Chief Justice of the United States, or the Speaker of the House of Representatives; from the day of death until interment of an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a Secretary of an executive or military department, a former Vice President, or the Governor of a State, territory, or possession; and on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress. The flag shall be flown at half-staff on Peace Officers Memorial Day, unless that day is also Armed Forces Day. As used in this subsection—

(1) the term “half-staff” means the position of the flag when it is one-half the distance between the top and bottom of the staff;
(2) the term “executive or military department” means any agency listed under sections 101 and 102 of title 5, United States Code; and
(3) the term “Member of Congress” means a Senator, a Representative, a Delegate, or the Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico.

In case you were wondering:

As a mark of respect for His Holiness Pope John Paul II, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset on the day of his interment. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

From White House Proclamation

Many countries around the world did the same.

It appears, by the way, the many locations that display the U.S. flag didn’t get the memo. I’ve seen it at full mast nearly as often as not this week.

Report from The Arizona Daily Star:

In the first few days of the Minuteman Project, volunteers have been slowing illegal immigration into the Naco area. They’ve accomplished that with the help of an unlikely ally: Mexico.

Eager to avoid confrontations between volunteers and its people, Mexico is sweeping the area south of the Minuteman Project clear of migrants. …

What Minuteman volunteers have succeeded in doing is setting off false alarms by tripping ground sensors on the border, [Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame] said.

“We’re having to work around them instead of concentrating on the actual border where we need to work,” Adame said.

From an assessment of Pope John Paul II by Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times:

But Mr. [James] Carroll’s most forceful point is one that nearly all of television’s elegies have obscured in all their effort to cast John Paul II as, above all, a rock star.

In short, he said the pope was always suspicious about-and often contemptuous of-the very basis of American life. As Mr. Carroll put it, “He’s profoundly suspicious of democracy.”

Mr. Carroll continued, “He’s a man of tremendous modern sensibility, capable of being at home with rock musicians and young people, and yet he has staked everything on protecting a view of the church that has it roots in the Middle Ages.”

Excerpt from an editorial in Scientific American:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Of course, the editorial was published April First.

Pointer from Paul Krugman

The death of the Pope is not an event that makes NewMexiKen sad. John Paul lived a long and, by any measure, successful life, rising to the very top of his profession. His role in eliminating communism in eastern Europe ensures him a highly regarded place in history. He is loved, if the TV cameras are to be believed, by millions and respected by millions more. And, if there is a heaven, surely we have no reason to think Karol Wojtyla wasn’t welcomed there yesterday.

So, it seems to me his death should be a time for joy rather than mourning.

Or am I just weird?

This will end in tragedy:

TOMBSTONE – Faye Leedy cornered a burly man standing guard outside the white-walled headquarters for the Minuteman Project, ogling his T-shirt with a look of pure envy.

Leedy, a 73-year-old volunteer for a much-hyped civilian border patrol effort that starts in Tombstone today, read the writing, in old-fashioned Western script, out loud: “Undocumented Border Patrol Agent.”

“Oh, I gotta have one of those,” she said with a chuckle.

Leedy, a Sierra Vista retiree, is among an unlikely bunch of self-appointed border police set to descend on Cochise County to “assist” the U.S. Border Patrol in keeping undocumented immigrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

From The Arizona Republic

Even The Arizona Republic, not exactly the bastion of so-called liberal media, thinks the Republicans are out of control.

Duck. Hide. Or run for cover if you’re anywhere near the Legislature.

Some of our Republican lawmakers are throwing monkey wrenches right and left.

Well, to the right, anyway.

Now that conservative Republicans have an edge at the Legislature, they can’t resist trying to gum up projects and agencies that are humming along just fine, thanks.

…

Every legislative session sees its share of misguided proposals. But this year they have gone so far that you have to wonder, what’s next?

Take the asphalt away from the Department of Transportation?

Make the Highway Patrol go on foot?

Save overhead by merging Game and Fish with the Department of Gaming?

Functional Ambivalent has an exceptionally insightful post on the coming war between Libertarian Republicans who believe that business should be allowed to do pretty much whatever it wants, and Theocratic Republicans, who want to use government to enforce a single interpretation of the Bible. An excerpt:

So now we have something called a “pharmacists’ rights movement.” This movement seeks to protect the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions they don’t approve of. Laws proposed in several states make it difficult or impossible for pharmacy operators to fire pharmacists who won’t do thier jobs, so long as theyr’e not doing their jobs out of a deeply held, conservative Christianity.

You can’t protect just one religious group, under the law, so any success at protecting Theocratic pharmacists will inevitably broaden to protect lots of other deeply-held beliefs. Vegitarians working at grocery stores, for example, could refuse to let people buy meat. Sporting goods store clerks could refuse to sell bullets to hunters and car salesmen could, with impunity, refuse to sell gas-guzzlers when what everyone really should be buying is gas-electric hybrids. Let’s let everyone anywhere enforce their own morality in any business environment, and take away the businesses ability to cope with these rogue moralists!

From a report in the Miami Herald:

A federally funded watchdog group is investigating the recent deaths of four disabled Floridians amid an aggressive campaign by the state to cut millions of dollars from programs that provide medical care for disabled people in community settings.

Two developmentally disabled adults who lived in group homes in Brandon, and two others under the care of The ARC in St. Lucie County, have died since October 2004, a month after the state required the operator of the two Brandon group homes to change the way residents received nursing care.

A woman at one Brandon home developed such a severe infection at the site of her feeding tube that she has been hospitalized in intensive care since Feb. 13.

Link via Discourse.net

While none of the doctors are really involved in stem cell therapy, it was discussed at great length by each of them. Perhaps one of the few agreements between these experts is that stem cell research is currently at the experimental stage and is years away from being accepted either medically or politically. It would not appear from the testimony that this is a viable treatment option at this time.

Florida Judge Greer’s 2002 Order

But could it be in the future? Aren’t the people and organizations (and politicians) that protest the removal of the feeding tube the same as those opposing stem cell research?

Pointer and idea from Hesiod at The American Street.

Congressional leaders have insisted their only motivation in getting involved in the Terri Schiavo case was saving a life. But Americans aren’t buying that argument, a CBS News poll finds.

An overwhelming 82 percent of the public believes the Congress and President should stay out of the matter.

Just 13 percent of those polled think Congress intervened in the case out of concern for Schiavo, while 74 percent think it was all about politics. Of those polled, 66 percent said the tube should not be inserted compared to 27 percent who want it restored. The issue has generated strong feelings, with 78 percent of those polled — wheter for either side of the issue — saying they have strong feelings.

Public approval of Congress has suffered as a result; at 34 percent, it is the lowest it has been since 1997, dropping from 41 percent last month. Now at 43 percent, President Bush’s approval rating is also lower than it was a month ago.

CBS News

What I’m wondering is where they found 13% who don’t think it was politically motivated.

If heaven is a better place, why not let her go?

“The United Nations says more than 1.1 billion people around the world lack safe water and 2.4 billion have no access to sanitation, leading to over 3 million deaths every year.”

ABC News