A Comedy of Tax Errors

Make no mistake about it: Tim Geithner made mistakes. (Snip) Grassley asked what software he used to prepare his taxes. "These are my responsibility, not the tax software's responsibility," Geithner replied, "but I used TurboTax." A future Treasury secretary using TurboTax? The mistakes were multiplying.
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[not funny: how do we tell our children what's right and wrong when this guy is likely to be confirmed as head tax guy - despite intentionally cheating on his taxes. Character is critical - when did we forget that?

There's still time {they vote Monday}, tell 'em:

"Character is critical - Do Not Confirm Geithner"


Whitehouse: mailto:president@whitehouse.gov
Senate-Reid: http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...

and as always, pass it on...

Face of Defense: Mother, Daughter Enlist in Army Reserve

Altoon, like many parents, was concerned about the possibility of Megan deploying to a combat zone.

After learning about the Army Reserve, Altoon, a postal carrier in Fremont, decided that she, too, would become a soldier.

Mother and daughter enlisted in the same military occupational specialty -- computer information specialist -- and were assigned to the same unit, the 351st Civil Affairs Command in Mountain View, Calif.

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Iraqi Scouts Are Back

[HT:GP]
Originally formed in 1954 and silenced during the reign of former President Saddam Hussein, the voices of the Iraqi Boy Scouts are rising once again. The new Iraqi Scouts have been meeting for seven months now. Technology has allowed these young men to talk with their American counterparts back in Texas and Georgia through a video conference.

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Obama Outlaws Legal Interrogation Methods, With An Out

This particular Executive Order proclaims that the only interrogation methods to be used on detainees in the War on Terror are those found in the Army Field Manual . As media reports are already starting to show, that's a bit problematic:

The executive order says everyone in custody should be questioned under the Army Field Manual, which is intended for honorable combatants, meaning POWs in a military conflict. The rule would prevent trained interrogators at the CIA from using lawful interrogation techniques against terrorists who have been trained to withstand Army Field Manual techniques.

So by this order, Obama is not outlawing so-called torture of detainees, but preventing the use by our national security apparatus of certain legal interrogation techniques that have kept us safe for the past 7+ years...

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Islamic Terrorists Forming Cells In America

Hezbollah could be one of the first security challenges faced by the new Obama administration. An official government report concludes the Iranian-backed Islamic terror group has been forming sleeper cells throughout the United States that could become operational. The report estimates Hezbollah could become a much more potent national security threat by 2014.

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U.S. Intercepts Iranian Arms-Smuggling Ship

U.S. defense officials say a Navy vessel that is part of the new piracy task force intercepted and searched an Iranian-owned ship that officials feared was carrying arms to Hamas.

Two defense officials say the Cypriot-flagged commercial vessel was tracked by a U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea over the weekend. One official says it was boarded with the consent of the vessel's crew on Monday and Tuesday.

The search turned up ammunition that included artillery shells. But one official said that since Hamas is not known to use artillery, officials are now uncertain who the intended recipient was. They're asking Egypt to do another search when the ship arrives in port.

Israeli officials said they believe the ship was headed for Hezbollah, not Hamas.

[oh well, false alarm then]

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The dangerous illusion of independent terrorists

Since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the world has completely misconceived the age of terror.

The radical increase in the lethality, range, political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored by states.

Sometimes they are the instruments of states and at other times they make strategic alliances with states.

A terrorist group operating without any state sponsorship is an infinitely less dangerous outfit than a terrorist group operating with the co-operation of even the most ramshackle state.

However, states not only co-operate with terrorists, in many cases they direct and even found the terrorists...

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No room for Jews in the West Bank

There will be no room for Jews or settlements in the West Bank because their presence there will always be an obstacle to peace with Israel, Ahmed Qurei, head of the Palestinian Authority 'negotiating' team, said at the weekend...

[the West Bank; you know, part of the 1/3 of land ceded to Jews by the UN (2/3 to Arabs) which Jordan 'annexed', and the world did nothing]

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Likely National Security Advisor Suggested NATO Forces For West Bank

Jerusalem - The man widely reported to be the leading candidate to become President-elect Obama’s national security advisor has reportedly proposed putting NATO forces in the West Bank in place of Israeli security forces – an idea that makes some Israelis uncomfortable. (Snip) Israel argues that it must maintain security control over the West Bank because its major population centers are vulnerable to rocket attacks...

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'Companies could be sued over climate change'

The scare

In early December 2008, The Guardian, a newspaper of the British Left and an unquestioning true-believer in the catastrophist version of climate alarm, quoted Professor Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, as saying computer models such as one that he has developed can now ascribe individual extreme-weather events to anthropogenic "global warming", allowing environmental pressure groups to sue the corporations they believe are to blame for the catastrophic heating of the planet. Professor Allen joked, "We are starting to get to the point that when an adverse weather event occurs we can quantify how much more likely it was made by human activity."

The truth

Even the UN's climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, admits in its 2001 report that the climate is a "complex, non-linear, chaotic object" whose long-run evolution cannot be predicted by any method. In this the panel echoes the celebrated paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow, with which the mathematician Edward Lorenz founded the new mathematical discipline of chaos theory in 1963. Precisely because the climate is, in mathematical terms, a chaotic object, it is altogether impossible to predict the likelihood, timing, magnitude, duration, or even the sign of any "phase transition" that disrupts the steady state of the object. For this reason, it is not possible to ascribe individual extreme-weather events to "global warming", as the IPCC makes explicitly clear in both its 2001 and 2007 reports.

In practice, the international, alarmist Left has taken very great care not to get into court battles over the science behind "global warming", because the courts, unlike the majority of the news media, are obliged to give a full and fair hearing to both sides of the story. Therefore, all of the "global warming" court cases instigated by the alarmist faction have been sweetheart cases, where both sides secretly want the same outcome. The recent case by lavishly-funded environmental groups against the US Secretary of the Interior to order him to make a decision on listing polar bears as an "endangered species" was a prime example: Mr. Kempthorne was as much a true-believer as those who were apparently suing him, and the court was in effect used as a mere rubber-stamp, in which no real argument was heard.

The alarmist faction knows that, if it were to bring a case against a corporation whose executives were not minded merely to believe in the extremist presentation of "global warming" just because it is temporarily in fashion, they would lose. The case of Dimmock v. Secretaries of State for Education and for the Environment in the UK in 2007 was a very clear warning. The UK Government threw all of the resources of the taxpayer and of the Meteorological Office at the case, attempting to defend Al Gore's sci-fi comedy horror movie against the plaintiff's allegation that it was serially and seriously inaccurate. The judge, having heard both sides, said bluntly of Al Gore that "the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view". A few more judgments like that and the "global warming" fantasy would rapidly collapse. End of scare.

Slowly but surely, the number of news media willing to give credence to fantasies such as those which Professor Allen puts forward is declining as the truth dawns: carbon dioxide's impact on "global warming" is small, harmless, and largely beneficial.

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Loblaws bags a nickel starting tomorrow

It's like there's a scarlet letter burned across Jennifer Sutcliffe's forehead as she hastily piles eight bags of groceries into the cart – ''P.'' For plastic. For polluter.

''I have cats. I use them for the litter,''

she clarifies apologetically. Not good enough. Gazing down the line of nine open cashiers, Sutcliffe is the only one who didn't BYOB. The 40-year-old retreats from the Loblaws store, which as of tomorrow will begin a plastic fee of 5 cents per bag...

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NYT: Make The Mormons Walk To Wal-Mart

In the social circles of the New York Times editorialists, it's OK to have one kid. Two is pushing the envelope. Three or more is déclassé, and a threat to the survival of the planet.

That being so, there's really no reason to let any car bigger than a Prius be built. Doing so just encourages the unenlightened to overbreed.

And so it is that in its editorial of today, the Grey-but-barren Lady suggests that as a condition of the Detroit bailout,

"Congress could consider demanding that Detroit simply phase out S.U.V.’s and vans by a certain date."

[and that's the defining aspect of the Green Religion; adherence is compulsory {come to think of it, I can think of a 2nd religion with the same mindset... maybe we should refer to this as the march to the Green Global Caliphate ]

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[meanwhile, in reality]

Model Green Governments?

The renewable energy movement’s leaders are green alright: Green with dictatorship envy.

“Get this,” says natural gas-mogul T. Boone Pickens in a television ad Promoting his self-serving plan for a natural gas-powered transportation. “Iran is changing its cars to run on national gas and we’re not doing a thing here.”

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman writes “China for a day, but not for two.” The point being “about what we would do if for one day we could impose, cut through all the lobbyists, all the amendments, all the earmarks, and actually impose the right conditions to get our market to take off.”

So the only way for American democratic capitalism to prosper is by adopting the lessons of Islamic theocracy and Chinese communism.

Words matter, and the totalitarian reflex behind the Pickens-Friedman agenda should not be ignored.

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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. "

-- Thomas Jefferson
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Nobel Prize Winner's Recession Solution

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said the government could borrow up to $5 trillion -- if needed -- to speed up a recovery from the recession. A stimulus plan of that size is probably not needed, but Krugman said he believes the $775 billion proposal from President-elect Barack Obama isn't big enough. (Snip)

''Government spending is the only surefire way to create employment.''

[blatant lie (but hey, it's Kludgeman).

OR we can slash business taxes. The difference? Kludgy's way runs up your national debt to pay for temporary jobs, Milton's way creates legitimate/permanant jobs, financed by investors, and which bring money into the treasury.

And BTW: Nobels are political prizes, not meritorious: Gore, peace prize, for mis-forecasting the weather...]

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CUT TAXES FOR ALL

[HT:SR]
To "create or save" the 3 million jobs he intends to, Obama must instead focus on the unpopular but necessary job of lowering the burden on those taxpayers who create jobs and spur economic output -- the nation's entrepreneurs. But most of them are in the top 5 percent of earners -- those whom Obama would cut out of any tax reduction. This is class warfare with no real underlying economic rationale.

If Obama is serious, he should:

> Cut corporate tax rates. U.S. businesses pay a top rate of 35 percent on income, which rises to 40 percent when state taxes are added. The average corporate tax in Europe is 24.2 percent, so it is no surprise that many successful corporations are moving abroad.

> Slash capital gains tax rates. A recent report from Ernst & Young found that U.S. capital gains taxes are already higher than in more than half of the world's top-performing economies. Raising them would only make us less competitive.

> Not raise taxes on the rich. Those with incomes over $250,000 a year are the most likely to invest, (and they already pay 48 percent of all taxes).


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Reich: Stimulus Spending Shouldn't Only Help White Males

A rather astounding statement was made a few weeks ago by an economic adviser to Barack Obama that went completely ignored by America's press:

"I am concerned, as I'm sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers."

Despite huge attention given this hearing from a wide range of press outlets not one mentioned Reich's racist comments (video and partial transcript below the fold):

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Mexican Drug Traffickers Now ‘Greatest Organized Crime Threat’ to U.S.

Mexican drug trafficking organizations are now the greatest organized crime threat to the United States, according to a recent report released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009, released last month by the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, says Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) operate in more than 230 cities across the United States.

“The violence, intimidation, theft and financial crimes carried out by DTOs, criminal groups, gangs and drug users in the United States pose a significant threat to our nation,”

the threat assessment concluded.

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What If Mexico Loses Its Drug War?

Security: A new Pentagon forecast warns that Mexico is so embattled by drug lords it could rapidly collapse. The study says the only other state so threatened is Pakistan. This ought to be a wake-up call about U.S. priorities.

In its assessment of worldwide security threats, known as the "Joint Operating Environment," or JOE 2008 report, the United States Joint Forces Command warns that Mexico and Pakistan face the possibility of a "rapid and sudden" collapse.

"The Mexican possibility may seem less likely [than Pakistan - some standard], but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that international conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone,"

That means a military surge — not to defend faraway Iraq, but defending our own homeland. A collapsed state will bring millions of Mexicans spilling over our border, not as illegal immigrants, but war refugees, fleeing for their lives from violence.

The U.S. will have no choice but to accept such refugees on humanitarian grounds, just as Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela have had to do from over their own borders in the past. Criminals often embed themselves among them, to prey on the helpless and to expand their operations, creating a new internal threat to the US.

It's time to pay attention now...

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ACLU to sue Twin Cities charter school that caters to Muslims

The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota said it will file suit today against a publicly funded charter school, alleging that it is promoting the Muslim religion and that it is leasing school space from a religious organization, the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, without following state law.

[We need unencumbered school vouchers so parents decide where their kids go. The state wouldn't be promoting anything: the parents would be choosing as they saw fit. Anything less and you get this kind of nonsense.

Has it occurred to any of the ACLU geniuses that prohibiting government funds going to any religious school is state 'promotion' of atheism? {said the atheist}]

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ABC Touts Messages From Kids to Obama: Stop the Wars! Save the Earth!

"Good Morning America" on Wednesday featured video messages from young children to Barack Obama. GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo asserted that the kids, ranging in age from seven to 17, had "strong opinion[s]."

Yet, every single one of these youths spouted the type of liberal propaganda usually reserved for people like Keith Olbermann and not one conservative voice was featured.

One young boy sputtered, "Stop the wars. And- because more people die. And it's just- they don't want to die. They just die. But they don't want to die."

[is this how we want to govern? I'm growing increasingly suspicious/concerned of the increasing use of our children for political purposes.]

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Inaugural ratings likely second best

Early numbers for the inauguration of Barack Obama are impressive but, perhaps surprisingly, could come in below those for Ronald Reagan's first term in 1981.

Preliminary Nielsen estimates show that 29.2% of U.S. households were watching the presidential inauguration -- easily the largest in decades but below the 37.4 household rating for Reagan. Obama's figures include viewership on roughly 15 broadcast and cable networks, while the Reagan ceremony was viewed only on ABC, CBS and NBC.

The Reagan inauguaration in 1981 ended up averaging a whopping 41.8 million viewers to stand as the most-watched on record. [snip]

In total viewers for the night: Fox, 17.3 million; ABC, 11.5 million; CBS, 9.7 million; NBC, 8.9 million; Univision, 4.4 million; CW, 2.0 million.

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Tom Cruise calls on Americans to back Barack Obama

[better idea: stay informed, support him where you think he's right, speak up when you think he's wrong. Just a thought.]
.