"When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Thomas Jefferson.

Snips from a couple of articles I read this morning...the big picture isn't getting any better as we roll past 1984 into the new century...

td


"Maryland State Trooper David Uhler pulled over motorcyclist Anthony Graber for speeding and reckless driving. Graber had a video camera mounted to his helmet that was recording at the time of the stop. Uhler, dressed in street clothes, emerged from his unmarked car with gun drawn, yelling. Graber was given only a traffic ticket, but he was miffed at Uhler’s behavior. So he posted the video on YouTube. Days later, Maryland State Police conducted an early-morning raid on Graber’s home, held Graber and his parents for 90 minutes, confiscated computer equipment, arrested him, and took him to jail."
...

"Maryland is one of 12 states with a wiretapping law that requires consent from all parties to a conversation for someone to legally record it. But in 10 of those 12 states, including Maryland, the statute says a violation occurs only when the offended party has a reasonable expectation that the conversation is private."
...

"Civil liberties advocates argue that on-duty police officers, like people attending city council meetings or walking down a public street, do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. For Graber to be convicted under Maryland’s wiretapping law, a prosecutor would have to argue that Uhler—a police officer who had pulled over a motorist, drawn his gun, and yelled at the guy on the side of a busy highway—had a reasonable expectation that the encounter would remain private."

Read the full article:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras


"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless."
...

"And this is all supposed to be the other way around: it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy. Yet we've reversed that dynamic almost completely. And even with 9/11 now 9 years behind us, the trends continue only in one direction.

Read the full article:
"The government's one-way mirror - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

Unraveling the Tax-Cut Deal - Newsweek

Exra Klein

"It was a confusing week.

But it was also a clarifying one. The deal, which sees Republicans giving the White House about $300 billion in stimulus in return for the White House giving Republicans about $130 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, laid bare some realities of how Washington works—and doesn’t work—right now. It’s worth going through them one by one."

Read the whole unravelling here:
Klein: Unraveling the Tax-Cut Deal - Newsweek:

Andy Kroll, How the Oligarchs Took America

"Never before has the United States looked so much like a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich."

How did we get here? How did a middle-class-heavy nation transform itself into an oligarchy? You'll find answers to these questions in Winner-Take-All Politics, a revelatory new book by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The authors treat the present figures we have on American wealth and poverty as a crime scene littered with clues and suspects, dead-ends and alibis.

Unlike so many pundits, politicians, and academics, Hacker and Pierson resist blaming the usual suspects: globalization, the rise of an information-based economy, and the demise of manufacturing. The culprit in their crime drama is American politics itself over the last three decades. The clues to understanding the rise of an American oligarchy, they believe, won’t be found in New York or New Delhi, but on Capitol Hill, along Pennsylvania Avenue, and around K Street, that haven in a heartless world for Washington’s lobbyists.

"Step by step and debate by debate," they write, "America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefitted the few at the expense of the many."

Read the full article here --
Andy Kroll, How the Oligarchs Took America | TomDispatch:

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. Bureau of Mother Jones and an associate editor at TomDispatch.com.

There Will Be Blood -

"The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming."

There Will Be Blood - Krugman:

Too Good to Check - NYTimes.com

On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day.

Too Good to Check -

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: November 16, 2010

Stewart rally's point -- don't divide us - CNN.com

"Obama: At Least He Isn't James Buchanan [and, by the way] Hitler was Hitler"

Read the rest here: CNN.com:

Give Obama a Break - NYTimes.com

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Give Obama a Break - NYTimes.com

Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down - NYTimes.com

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: October 26, 2010

The gist excerpted :

Let’s have more tax cuts, unlinked to any specific spending cuts and while we’re still fighting two wars — because that worked so well during the Bush years to make our economy strong and our deficit small. Let’s immediately cut government spending, instead of phasing cuts in gradually, while we’re still mired in a recession — because that worked so well in the Great Depression. Let’s roll back financial regulation — because we’ve learned from experience that Wall Street can police itself and average Americans will never have to bail it out.

Read the rest here:
Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down - NYTimes.com

The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell - By FRANK RICH - October 2, 2010

Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organization (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

However much these corporate contributors may share the Tea Party minions’ antipathy toward President Obama, their economic interests hardly overlap. The rank and file Tea Partiers say they oppose government spending and deficits. The billionaires have no problem with federal spending as long as the pork is corporate pork. They, like most Republican leaders in 2008, supported the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout. They also don’t mind deficits as long as they get their outsize cut of the red ink — $3.8 trillion worth if all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

Read the rest here: Op-Ed Columnist - The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Their Moon Shot and Ours - NYTimes.com

Thomas Friedman...

China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.

This contrast is not good. I was recently at a Washington Nationals baseball game. While waiting for a hot dog, I overheard the conversation behind me. A management consultant for a big national firm was telling his colleagues that his job was to “market products to the Department of Homeland Security.” I thought to myself: “Oh, my! Inventing studies about terrorist threats and selling them to the U.S. government, is that an industry now?”

We’re out of balance — the balance between security and prosperity. We need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let’s start with electric cars.

Read the whole article here:
Op-Ed Columnist - Their Moon Shot and Ours - NYTimes.com

Downhill With the G.O.P. - Krugman

I can't help it, Krugman nails it time after time...
td

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

[According to the “Pledge to America” ] everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

Op-Ed Columnist - Downhill With the G.O.P. - NYTimes.com

The Great Divergence In Pictures: A visual guide to income inequality.

Aside from the caption I put on it, I'll just let this one stand on it's own. 
td

And you're still voting Republican?

 

 The Great Divergence In Pictures: A visual guide to income inequality.

Krugman - Things Could Be Worse - NYTimes.com

Krugman deserves another posting...
td

"It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination."

Op-Ed Columnist - Things Could Be Worse - NYTimes.com:

Higher Taxes: Will The Republicans Cry Wolf Again? - Forbes.com

Bruce Bartlett, 02.27.09, 12:01 AM EST

History, hypocrisy and Obama's first budget.

"Yesterday, President Obama issued his first detailed budget. Among its most controversial proposals is a significant increase in taxes, especially on those with upper incomes. Obama also proposes a cap-and-trade system to reduce pollution that is in essence a broad-based energy tax.

Republicans will undoubtedly make extravagant claims about the detrimental economic effect of these higher taxes. When one hears these claims, however, it is worth remembering that they said the same things in years past and none of their dire predictions came to pass.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, Ronald Reagan proposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history as part of a budget deal to get the federal deficit under control. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was signed into law on Sept. 3, and most of its provisions took effect on Jan. 1, 1983.

During debate on TEFRA, many conservatives predicted economic disaster. They argued that raising taxes in the midst of a severe recession was exactly the wrong thing to do. "Every school child knows you don't raise taxes in a recession unless you want to make it worse," The Wall Street Journal's editorial page warned. Said Rep. Newt Gingrich, "I think it will make the economy sicker." The Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. said it had "no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants."

Looking at the data, however, it is very hard to see any evidence that TEFRA had a negative effect on growth. Indeed, one could easily make a case that its enactment stimulated growth. As one can see, the economy's growth rates after TEFRA took effect were among the fastest in history.
The unemployment rate also peaked just before TEFRA took effect at 10.8% in December 1982. Throughout 1983, it fell steadily to 8.3% by year's end. The unemployment rate continue to fall through 1984, reaching 7.3% by December.

In 1993, Bill Clinton proposed another major tax increase. Perhaps because it was initiated by a Democrat, conservatives were even more convinced that it would bring about economic disaster. In an Aug. 3, 1993, media fact sheet, John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis predicted the following results from the higher taxes: Capital formation would be reduced by $1.76 trillion through 1998, 1.34 million fewer jobs would be created and the real GDP growth rate would be 0.4% lower than it otherwise would have been.
An examination of the data, however, shows that this forecast was totally wrong in every respect. The following table shows what happened after the 1993 tax increase was signed into law on Aug. 10.

Year/Quarter	Real GDP Growth	Gross Private Domestic Investment
1993 III	2.1%	0.0%
1993 IV	5.5%	22.3%
1994 I	4.1%	18.3%
1994 II	5.3%	25.5%
1994 III	2.3%	-6.9%
1994 IV	4.8%	19.9%

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis
The unemployment rate was at 6.8% when the law was signed and fell steadily thereafter, reaching 5.5% by the end of 1994. By Clinton's second term, the economy was booming to such an extent that the federal government began running large budget surpluses.
Of course, past experience doesn't necessarily tell us what will happen in the future. Maybe this time, the conservative scaremongers will be right, and higher taxes will abort recovery and bring on a sharp economic setback such as happened in 1937."
snip...
As the table below demonstrates, Reagan signed into law major tax increases every year of his presidency after the first. By the end of his presidency, he took back half of the 1981 tax cut in the form of higher taxes. And it should also be noted that when confronted with a crisis in Social Security in 1983, Reagan endorsed a rescue plan drafted by Alan Greenspan that consisted almost entirely of higher taxes.
Legislated Tax Changes by Ronald Reagan as of 1988

Tax Cuts	Billions of Dollars
Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981	-264.4
Interest and Dividends Tax Compliance Act of 1983	-1.8
Federal Employees' Retirement System Act of 1986	-0.2
Tax Reform Act of 1986	-8.9
Total Cumulative Tax Cuts	-275.3

Tax Increases	Billions of Dollars
Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982	+57.3
Highway Revenue Act of 1982	+4.9
Social Security Amendments of 1983	+24.6
Railroad Retirement Revenue Act of 1983	+1.2
Deficit Reduction Act of 1984	+25.4
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985	+2.9
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985	+2.4
Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986	+0.6
Continuing Resolution for 1987	+2.8
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987	+8.6
Continuing Resolution for 1988	+2.0
Total Cumulative Tax Increases	+132.7

Source: Office of Management and Budget, FY1990 budget
Many of the same Republicans who today complain about Obama's spending voted for every pork-barrel project proposed by any Republican during the years they controlled Congress, as well as voting for a vast expansion of Medicare spending in 2003 when the program was already bankrupt.
Among those voting to further bankrupt Medicare were such self-proclaimed protectors of the public purse as House Republican Leader John Boehner, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee Ranking Republican Paul Ryan. When they complain about Obama's spending, they should be reminded that their vote to expand Medicare added $17.2 trillion to the nation's long-term indebtedness, according to the latest report by Medicare's trustees (Table III.C23).


Read the rest here at Forbes: Higher Taxes: Will The Republicans Cry Wolf Again? - Forbes.com:

Bartlett, an economist and former Reagan administration official (a former Treasury Department economist) and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.
 

Op-Ed Columnist - Bush Tax Cuts - Now That’s Rich - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist
Now That’s Rich
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 22, 2010

"We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

snip...

Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

snip...

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.
And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.
No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience."


Read the whole editorial here:
Op-Ed Columnist - Bush Tax Cuts - Now That’s Rich - NYTimes.com:

Sufis - The Muslims in the Middle - NYTimes.com

This is for those blathering idiots who are screaming about "the mosque" in New York City. I hope and I wish they had some inkling, and tried to understand the world and religions a bit, but I increasingly see them as willingly, proudly, ignorant, stuck with whatever knowledge they'd managed to accumulate perhaps by the end of high school, and unwilling to let another thought in to change it. I am disgusted with that portion of my fellow Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and spout talking-point drivel and bumper-sticker slogans and imagine themselves as somehow 'participating' in intelligent, civil society. -- td

By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Published: August 16, 2010

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.
Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

...snip...

"Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination."

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

...snip...

While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

...snip...

Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

...Please, read the whole article:
Op-Ed Contributor - Sufis - The Muslims in the Middle - NYTimes.com:

Krugman - Attacking Social Security - NYTimes.com

Krugman again...sorry, he's good...
td

"Social Security turned 75 last week. It should have been a joyous occasion, a time to celebrate a program that has brought dignity and decency to the lives of older Americans.
>snip...
Social Security’s attackers claim that they’re concerned about the program’s financial future. But their math doesn’t add up, and their hostility isn’t really about dollars and cents. Instead, it’s about ideology and posturing. And underneath it all is ignorance of or indifference to the realities of life for many Americans.
>snip...
Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come.
>snip...
What’s really going on here? Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic."

Read the whole article here:
Op-Ed Columnist - Attacking Social Security - NYTimes.com:

Op-Ed Contributor - How to prepare for the next major sun blast. - NYTimes.com

Can we PLEASE buy the insurance...
or we may end up as hippie back-to-the-lander's, and incur a large cost getting back on grid afterward...
hmm...maybe that's a good thing...it might drive more individual/local solar installations... ;^) td

____
Op-Ed Contributor - How to prepare for the next major sun blast. - NYTimes.com

Without aggressive preparation, we run the risk of a disaster magnitudes greater than Hurricane Katrina. Little or no electricity means little or no telecommunications, refrigeration, clean water or fuel. Basic law enforcement and national security could be compromised.

Fortunately, there are several defenses against solar storms. The most important are grid-level surge suppressors, which are essentially giant versions of the devices we use at home to protect computers. There are some 5,000 vulnerable transformers in North America; at $50,000 for each suppressor, we could protect the grid for about $250 million.

Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow the White House to require utilities to put grid-protection measures in place, then recoup the costs from customers. Unfortunately, the companion bill in the Senate contains no such provision.

It’s not a lost cause, though; lawmakers can still insert the grid-protection language during conference. If they don’t, there could be trouble soon: the next period of heavy solar activity will be in late 2012. Having gone unprepared for one recent natural disaster, we would make a grave mistake not to get ready for the next.

Lawrence E. Joseph is the author of “Aftermath: A Guide to Preparing for and Surviving Apocalypse 2012.
____

Six Months to Go Until The Largest Tax Hikes in History

Six Months to Go Until The Largest Tax Hikes in History:

"In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:"

I got this fwd from an old friend, it's getting wide circulation on the right, and I just had to spend some time collecting some citations debunking it. Click the link to read it, I'm not posting it here. - td

In this undocumented blog post first published by accountant Ryan Ellis on Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at http://atr.org/six-months-untilbr-largest-tax-hikes-a5171 there are several plain mistakes, many deliberately misleading statements, and no citations or support at all. Ellis is a conservative blogger/tax accountant.

One is the claim that

>Starting in 2011,

>(next year folks), your W-2 tax form sent by your employer will be increased to

>show the

>value of whatever health insurance you are given by the company.

You will now be

>required to pay taxes on a large sum of money that you have never seen.

Nah, they'll list it, but it is NOT taxable,

Factcheck.com has a direct rebuttal:

http://www.factcheck.org/...

Notice the wording- "2/3's of profits will be taxed". Notice it doesn't say 2/3's of small business owners wil be taxed.

http://pewsocialtrends.org/...

According to the Current Population Survey data, the median annual personal income of self-employed workers in 2008 was $35,357, while the median for wage and salaried workers is $35,000.

Similarly, the Pew Research survey asked respondents for their overall family incomes -- a total that includes the earnings of spouses -- and found that the median family incomes of the self-employed and other workers are identical: $62,500.

The self employed are not making significantly more than other people. Likewise only a few of them would be affected by the >$250k tax hike.

and Politifact has a list evaluating various other statements about taxes on both sides of the fence

http://www.politifact.com/...

Here's one pertinent to this post that is plainly false:

"Should Democrats get their way, every income tax bracket will increase on Jan. 1, 2011. Every single one." Mike Pence

If the tax cuts were to expire with no Congressional intervention, the pre-2001 tax brackets would spring back to life. Here's how the tax brackets would look on a before-and-after basis for married couples filing jointly based on their incomes. For simplicity, we're ignoring modest adjustments for inflation. Tax brackets for other categories such as individual filers broadly follow the same pattern.

• Up to $16,750: Rises from 10 percent to 15 percent

• From $16,751 to $58,200: Stays same at 15 percent, but entire bracket pays 5 percent additional on the first $16,750

• From $58,201 to $68,000: Rises from 15 percent to 28 percent

• From $68,001 to $137,300: Rises from 25 percent to 28 percent

• From $137,301 to $209,250: Rises from 28 percent to 31 percent

• From $209,251 to $373,650: Rises from 33 percent to 36 percent

• $373,651 and up: Rises from 35 percent to 39.6 percent

So on this point, Pence is correct, assuming Congress does nothing.

• Do Democrats want every tax bracket to rise, as Pence suggests? In a word, no.

For many months, Democratic officials have consistently said that they intend to let only the tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals lapse. The cutoff they usually suggest is $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

Here's a quick pair of visuals in an article by Ezra Kline at the Washington Post, but he pulls the charts from the Wall Street Journal...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/30/AR2010073002671.html

This chart from the Wall Street Journal demonstrates that not only do low-, middle- and even upper-middle-class people not suffer under President Obama's proposed tax changes, they actually benefit relative to if the Bush tax cuts were extended in full:

Unfortunately, this does not include the effect of letting the Bush tax cuts expire in their entirety, which CBO projections show would deal with much of the deficit problem in the medium to long term. Luckily, the Tax Foundation has crunched those numbers as well. Here's the WSJ graph modified to include the effect of letting the tax cuts expire as planned. S = single, M = married, *E indicates the number of earners in the household, and *C indicates the number of children:

The pattern here is fairly simple.Letting all the tax cuts expire produces the highest tax burden of the three for every group except the very rich, who pay the most under Obama's plan. Below the $300,000-a-year group, the lowest burden comes from the Obama tax proposals, while above that group it comes from extending the Bush tax cuts. Extending the cuts in their entirety, then, would primarily benefit high earners, while the Obama plan both raises rates on very high earners, relative to the status quo, and reduces the burden of low- and middle-income taxpayers. (my bold - td)

Catastrophic Thinking: How to Ensure Oil Spill Disasters Do Not Happen Again: Scientific American

"The oilmen were drilling deep below the Gulf of Mexico when a rise of pressure from natural gas blew out the wellhead. A safety device intended to seal the well failed, and tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day began to shoot up into the Gulf waters. Engineers tried stopping the flow with mud and junk and lowering a cap over the leak. They spent months digging relief wells to plug the hole. Eventually they stanched the flow, but it took the better part of a year and contaminated the waters with millions of barrels of crude. Fisheries had to close, birds and other wildlife perished, and vast lengths of coastline were soiled."

That catastrophe happened in 1979, when the Ixtoc 1 drilling rig sank. The parallels between its demise and the Deepwater Horizon disaster that began in April are chilling. We do not know how the ongoing story will end, and we may never be certain what happened in the ocean depths. That two events 30 years apart have followed nearly the same script shows we—not just the oil industry but the entire nation—have failed to address the underlying reasons for these debacles."

Read the rest here:
Catastrophic Thinking: How to Ensure Oil Spill Disasters Do Not Happen Again: Scientific American:

Slashdot Politics Story | WikiLeaks Publishes Afghan War Secrets

A point I've argued in the past -- why are we fighting and dying when we can simply buy them...?

"According to the CIA World Fact Book:

* Population: 29,121,286
* GDP (Per capita:) $800 (2009 est.)

So now, expenditure over six years (Jan 2004 - Dec 2009) is $300,000,000,000.00 divided by six is around $50,000,000,000.00 per year

Per capita is $1,716.96 or more than double the GDP per capita of the country!

I would think that the US would get better resultsif the money was simply given to each inhabitant, the $800 they already make plus $1,700 from the US, would triple the GDP per capita, no small feat."

Read the rest>>>

Slashdot Politics Story | WikiLeaks Publishes Afghan War Secrets:

6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America | | AlterNet

So...

"It seems that you can look at a chart of almost anything and right around 1981 or soon after you'll see the chart make a sharp change in direction, and probably not in a good way. And I really do mean almost anything, from economics to trade to infrastructure to ... well almost anything. I spent some time looking for charts of things, and here are just a few examples. In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.

Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then.

Look at the influence of these entrenched interests on our current deficits, for example. Obviously conservative policies of tax cuts and military spending increases caused the massive deficits. But entrenched interests use their wealth and power to keep us from making needed changes. The facts are here, plain as the noses on our faces. The ability to fight it eludes us. Will we step up and do something to reverse the disaster caused by the Reagan Revolution or not?"

Nah, probably not.

But what it just ONE person got up and told 3 other people (or blogged about it and told almost nobody, but...)
and those 3 people told 3 others...
and they told 3 others...
pretty soon there'd be a MOVEMENT...
Nah.

(apologies to Arlow)


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6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America | | AlterNet:

Economics and Politics - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

July 19, 2010, 1:45 pm
The Bush Deficit Bamboozle

OK, even by contemporary standards, this is rich: the official Republican stance is now apparently that Bush left behind a budget that was in pretty good shape. Mitch McConnell:

The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.

They really do think that we’re idiots.

So, that 3.2 percent number comes from here (pdf). Where’s the bamboozle? Let me count the ways.

First, they’re hoping that you won’t know that standard budget data is presented for fiscal years, which start on October 1 of the previous calendar year. So this isn’t the “last year of the Bush administration” — they’ve conveniently lopped off everything that happened post-Lehman — TARP and all.

----
Read the rest here:
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Economics and Politics - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science -- Gleick et al. 328 (5979): 689 -- Science

From "Science"

The signatories are all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences but are not speaking on its behalf.
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Letters

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet. Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

Read the rest of the letter here...

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science -- Gleick et al. 328 (5979): 689 -- Science

t r u t h o u t | Cut Wall Street Out! How States Can Finance Their Own Economic Recovery

This is an article that sat in my drafts since last October.  It's a bit of a long read, and no fireworks, just some interesting information.   "The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919, specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men."

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The sole state to actually gain jobs is an unlikely candidate for the distinction: North Dakota. North Dakota is also one of only two states expected to meet their budgets in 2010. (The other is Montana.) North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000 people, largely located in cold and isolated farming communities. Yet, since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56 percent, personal income has grown 43 percent and wages have grown 34 percent. The state not only has no funding problems, but this year it has a budget surplus of $1.3 billion, the largest it has ever had.

Why is North Dakota doing so well, when other states are suffering the ravages of a deepening credit crisis? Its secret may be that it has its own credit machine. North Dakota is the only state in the Union to own its own bank. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919, specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. The bank's stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota.

 
t r u t h o u t | Cut Wall Street Out! How States Can Finance Their Own Economic Recovery

Computer model predicts the spread of the BP oil spill after one year

Researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have produced an animated computer simulation that shows the potential spread of the oil over a period of 360 days from when the spill started.

Computer model predicts the spread of the BP oil spill after one year

The Oil Drum | Natural Oil Seeps and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster: A Comparison of Magnitudes

FYI -
This thing is not a small deal. Don't let greenwashing hide the fact that:

The Deepwater Horizon site releases 3 to 12 times the oil per day compared to that released by natural seeps across the entire Gulf of Mexico.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6552#comment-641971

Editorial - A Climate Change Corrective - NYTimes.com

This follows up on a previous post I made about the scientific method, and lay-peoples understanding of it.
It works. It's self correcting -- one of the thing that bothers people is that scientific findings change...they're based on best info, and new info changes previous thinking...for the better. For all it's apparent inconsistencies, it's the best analytical tool we have for making intelligent decisions about complex problems.

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From the article...

On Wednesday, a panel in Britain concluded that scientists whose e-mail had been hacked late last year had not, as critics alleged, distorted scientific evidence to prove that global warming was occurring and that human beings were primarily responsible. It was the fifth such review of hundreds of e-mail exchanges among some of the world’s most prominent climatologists.
...
Climate skeptics pounced on them as evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate research to support predetermined ideas about global warming.
...
The panel found no such conspiracy.
...
Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming.

Nahh, I doubt it....



Editorial - A Climate Change Corrective - NYTimes.com

The biggest problem we face: the transition off of fossil fuels.

Here's the gist of McKibben's article
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***********


Bill McKibben, Author, Deep Economy and The End of Nature, co-founder, 350.org
Posted: June 9, 2010 04:15 PM

When a well started spewing oil off Santa Barbara in 1969, it spurred the first Earth Day, which in turn launched the environmental movement and a fundamental questioning of the balance between humans and the rest of nature. It turned out, in other words, to be a real Moment.

It makes one wonder if there really shouldn't be a little more depth to the endless coverage of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf. Yes, the obvious story is important: There's oil spewing out, BP has demonstrated infuriating nonchalance, shrimpers are watching the sheen wash up on the coastal marshes, etc. This all needs to be covered, and is being covered with the incredible agonizing boredom that only 24-hour cable channels can bring to any issue.

* Satellite data has shown that Arctic ice is now melting even faster than in the record year of 2007.

* NASA has released new statistics showing that the past 12 months were the warmest on record and that 2010 is almost certain to set the title for the warmest calendar year yet.

All of these, it seems to me, could be considered parts of the Deepwater Horizon story because they demonstrate that fossil fuel is everywhere dirty. They change the political question from "is Obama angry enough" to "can Obama lead a credible fight for real energy and climate legislation?" More to the point, they connect with the mood of existential despair and anger that the oil spill has set off across the country. People are sad and bitter only in part because they see those pelicans oiled; mostly, they sense correctly that our leaders have yet to deal with what is clearly the biggest problem we face: the transition off of fossil fuels.

The questions that the Gulf spill raises, in other words, go well beyond: How big an idiot is Tony Hayward? What will happen to the tourist economy of the Gulf? How cool is James Cameron's minisub? The questions are more like: How out of balance with the natural world are we? And what would it require to get back in balance?

You'd need to interview not just oil execs and colorful shrimpers, but nature writers, solar pioneers and psychologists.

There's nothing pat about what's going on in the Gulf. It's the most vivid sign we've yet had that we are running into the kind of limits that people started talking about way back at that first Earth Day. But its meaning risks disappearing beneath the endless stories about Top Hat and Junk Shot. BP's great victory will come if it need merely confess to technical overreach and pay a few billion in fines -- if that happens, it can get back to making serious money, and the planet can get back to burning.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-mckibben/missing-the-real-drama-of_b_606562.html

t r u t h o u t | Robert Reich | Why Obama Should Take Over BP’s Operations in the Gulf of Mexico

"The Obama administration keeps saying BP is in charge because BP has the equipment and expertise necessary to do what’s necessary. But under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public’s interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public. As a result, the public continues to worry that a private for-profit corporation is responsible for stopping a public tragedy."

t r u t h o u t | Robert Reich | Why Obama Should Take Over BP’s Operations in the Gulf of Mexico:

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science -- Gleick et al. 328 (5979): 689 -- Science

If the masses understood the scientific method, they'd understand why their doubts about peer reviewed scientific conclusions are unfounded.

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"Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of 'well-established theories' and are often spoken of as 'facts.'"

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science -- Gleick et al. 328 (5979): 689 -- Science: