MOVE YOUR MONEY

 

Study: State Taxes The Poorest, Gives Breaks To Rich

Most of Michigan’s income and local taxes come from the state’s poorest residents, resulting in a regressive tax that “no one” would intentionally design, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.

While non-elderly residents who make less than $15,000 per year typically pay about 9 percent of their income toward taxes and those who make between $32,000 and $54,000 pay nearly 10 percent, the very rich pay about a third less, said the study, titled: Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States.

The rich, defined as those with average annual incomes of $1.1 million, typically pay about 6.4 percent toward taxes, the study said.

“No one would ever design an income tax with lower tax rates for the best-off taxpayers,” said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the institute and the study’s lead author. “But that is exactly what Michigan’s tax system overall does: it allows the very wealthiest individuals to contribute less of their income, on average, than middle and lower-income families must pay. In other words, Michigan has an unfair, regressive tax system.”

The League for Human Services, which has been focusing heavily on getting lawmakers to increase revenue rather than make cuts to the state’s poorest residents, said this news should be a wake-up call to make the changes now that will right-size taxation, while bringing in much-needed revenue.

The group recommends extending the sales tax to more services that they say people with more disposable income use. The league also wants to move from a flat tax to a graduated income tax, as well as ending what it calls “preferences” for wealthier seniors, such as exempting most pensions from income taxes.

“It’s time we look to reforming our revenue structure to make it adequate, stable and fair,” said League President Sharon Parks. “This report makes it crystal clear that our system disproportionately depends on those struggling households that are least able to contribute.”

The report found that Michigan’s reliance on sales and property tax made it more regressive. Despite Michigan’s flat income tax, which is usually considered regressive, Michigan’s income tax is slightly progressive, due to the state earned income tax credit, a homestead property tax credit and personal tax exemptions indexed to inflation.

 

Lehrer’s Rules

Lehrer’s Rules
By Michael Getler
December 11, 2009

Last Friday evening, Dec. 4, was the final broadcast of what has been known for many years as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The following Monday, Dec. 7, the new-look version of the venerable, one-hour, weekday nights, news broadcast made its debut as the PBS NewsHour. Lehrer was still in the anchor chair but his name was gone from the logo and some things had changed. I’ll come back to that.

One of the things that has not changed, however, is Lehrer’s unwavering approach to journalism. So, in closing that final broadcast on Dec. 4 and providing a glimpse of the forthcoming new look, Lehrer said:

“I promise you, one thing is never going to change. And that’s our mission. People often ask me if there are guidelines in our practice of what I like to call MacNeil/Lehrer journalism. Well, yes, there are. And here they are:

* Do nothing I cannot defend.

* Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.

* Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.

* Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am.

* Assume the same about all people on whom I report.

* Assume personal lives are a private matter, until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.

* Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything.

* Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions.

* No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.

* And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.”

Source: PBS

 

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

By JAMES A. HAUGHT

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

More: A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

Also, here and here.

 

Alter: Our Heath-Care System Is Just Fine As Is!

Go ahead, shoot me. I like the status quo on health care in the United States. I’ve got health insurance and I don’t give a damn about the 47 million suckers who don’t. Obama and Congress must be stopped. No bill! I’m better off the way things are.

I’m with that woman who wrote the president complaining about “socialized medicine” and added: “Now keep your hands off my Medicare.” That’s the spirit!

Why should I be entitled to the same insurance that members of Congress get? Blue Dogs need a lot of medical attention to treat their blueness. I’m just a regular guy and definitely deserve less.

I had cancer a few years ago. I like the fact that if I lose my job, I won’t be able to get any insurance because of my illness. It reminds me of my homeowners’ insurance, which gets canceled after a break-in. I like the choice I’d face if, God forbid, the cancer recurs—sell my house to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, or die. That’s what you call a “post-existing condition.”

Source: Newsweek

 

White House Meeting Marks New Milestone for Nontheists

June 1, 2009 - The nontheist movement reached a new milestone when the Secular Coalition for America had its first individual meeting with White House officials last week. Although the Secular Coalition had met with White House officials before, this meeting was significant as it was the first private meeting focused solely on nontheists’ interests.

Read the rest of this post at: Secular Coalition for America

 

Ireland Makes Blasphemy Illegal | Paliban Daily

Ireland Makes Blasphemy Illegal

As part of a revision to defamation legislation, the Dail (Irish Parliament) passed legislation creating a new crime of blasphemy. Update: The bill went to the Seanad on Friday, July 10, passing by a single vote. This attack on free speech, debated for several months in Europe, has gone largely unnoticed in the American press.

• Atheists can be prosecuted for saying that God is imaginary. That causes outrage.
• Pagans can be prosecuted for saying they left Christianity because God is violent and bloodthirsty, promotes genocide, and permits slavery.
• Christians can be prosecuted for saying that Allah is a moon god, or for drawing a picture of Mohammed, or for saying that Islam is a violent religion which breeds terrorists.
• Jews can be prosecuted for saying Jesus isn’t the Messiah.

Source: palibandaily.com

 

The House of Death: An Interview with DEA Whistleblower Sandy Gonzalez

Radley Balko, senior editor of Reason magazine, says: “Federal agents looked the other way while one of their drug informants [Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, also known as “Lalo”] participated in a series of gruesome murders. They knew about the murders, but refused to call off the drug investigation. When an outraged DEA agent [Sandy Gonzalez] blew the whistle, the DEA, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and DOJ forced him into early retirement. The government is now trying to deport the informant they’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to over the years. They want to send him to Mexico, where he’ll almost certainly be killed.”

Reason: The DEA administrator at the time, Karen Tandy, has admitted in court testimony that she gave you the only poor performance review of your career because of your letter calling for an investigation into the murders. That led to your retirement. Have any of the ICE officers who handled the Lalo case been held accountable –criminally, professionally, or otherwise?

Gonzalez: Not to my knowledge. I doubt it. I would have heard about it.

Reason: Have you had any indication that Congress might step in? Have you talked to anyone on Capitol Hill?

Gonzalez: Back in 2005 I went and briefed the senior staff of two senators.

Reason: Which ones?

Gonzalez: [Iowa Sen. Charles] Grassley and [Vermont Sen. Patrick] Leahy. I think what happened is one of the members of Leahy’s staff was a Justice Department officer who was on loan on a detail to the senator’s staff. I think she knew [U.S. Attorney] Johnny Sutton. She worked out of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. She knew Sutton personally and throughout the whole interview she was antagonistic. My guess is that she railroaded the whole thing.

An Interview with DEA Whistleblower Sandy Gonzalez

Source: Boing Boing

 

YouTube - Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney for Torture Speech

 

Obamabot to be installed at Disney World, will robotically cover up torture, suspend habeas corpus

An incredibly lifelike advanced Obamabot is ready to be installed in the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents. It’s traditional for the current president’s robot to give a little speech at the end of the show. Presumably, Obamabot will explain how the reasonable middle-ground demands suspending habeas corpus, covering up war crimes, and blocking the prosecution of participants in illegal wiretapping programs.

The Obama figure is the result of attention to minute details by Disney sculptors, animators, engineers and even anatomists who pored over presidential photographs and video of him and then drew on the latest advances in robotic technology.

Thus the audio-animatronic Obama purses its lips to pronounce its b’s and p’s in a way frighteningly evocative of the real one, and raises its hands, open-palmed, while shrugging its shoulders, in a way that can only be described as Obamaesque. Even the president’s wedding ring, with its braided design, has been recreated.

Animatronic Obama Going to Disney World With High-Tech Style

(Thanks, Eloisa!)

Source: Boing Boing

 

Mobile News Network

Wis. nurse called out of surgery and laid off

Published: Yesterday

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A nurse was called out of surgery so a manager could tell her she was being laid off. Dean Health said the surgery was minor and the patient wasn’t affected, but the manager who summoned the nurse from surgery violated medical protocol. Dean Health spokesman Paul Pitas said the incident happened at Dean’s West Clinic in Madison on Wednesday or Thursday.

Read the rest here.

Source: apnews.com

 

Jared Diamond lecture on the evolution of religion

Here’s a fantastic lecture by Jared “Guns, Germs and Steel” Diamond at the USC College Center for Religion and Civic Culture on the “evolution of religion” — the evolutionary forces that shape religions and cause some to prevail and others to wane.

Source: Boing Boing

 

British cops identify 200 schoolchildren as potential terrorists

200 children in the UK, some as young as 13, have had files opened on them by the British anti-terror cops as potential terrorists — even though they have committed no crimes. The children were reported to the anti-terror squad by their teachers on the basis of school work, journals and conversations that, in the teachers’ view, indicated that the children were susceptible to extremist beliefs. The programme is only 18 months old and has already identified 200 children who should be treated as terrorism suspects. At this rate, every child in Britain should be on the watch list by, what, 2018?

The police say it’s all right, though, so that’s OK.

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are committed to stopping people becoming or supporting terrorists or violent extremists. The aim of the Channel project is to directly support vulnerable people by providing supportive interventions when families, communities and networks raise concerns about their behaviour.”

Police identify 200 children as potential terrorists

Source: Boing Boing

 

Obama Continues Bush-Era Extremism on Liberties, Secrecy

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

The Obama administration has undone a few of the Bush administration’s worst policies, true. Yet when it comes to Obama’s increasingly clear disdain for some core civil liberties and his administration’s penchant for secrecy despite cheerful rhetoric to the contrary, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald arrives at a dismal — but sadly, logical — conclusion:   

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it’s becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years.  Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true:   they are rushing to actively embrace them.  And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no real intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.

Democrats in Congress and much of the political left have been silent or nearly so despite the evidence. You expect cowardice from Congress, which spent the Bush presidency in a perpetual bent-over posture. The Netroots folks who did so much to elect Obama should be screaming bloody murder by now. Too few are even slightly audible. A shame.

Maybe the Republicans will re-discover civil liberties at some point. Nah.

(photo via Flickr by 

Source: Boing Boing

 

CIA Busted by Google Earth

Google Earth reveals secret history of US base in Pakistan: When the CIA gets busted by Google Earth, you know it’s a whole, new world.

The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.

[…] the Pakistani Government said in 2006 that the Americans had left and both sides have since denied repeatedly that Washington was using Pakistani bases. Pakistan has also demanded that the US cease drone attacks on its tribal area, which have increased over the last year, allegedly killing several “high-value” targets as well as many civilians.

Source: Gadgetopia

 

370H-SSV-0773H

Osama Bin Laden decided to send George Bush a letter in his
own handwriting to let him know he was still in the game. Bush opened the
letter and it contained a single line of coded message:

370H-SSV-0773H

Bush was baffled, so he e-mailed it to Condoleezza Rice. Condi and her aides
hadn’t a clue either, so they sent it to the FBI.

No one could solve it at the FBI so it went to the CIA, then to MI6 and Mossad.

Eventually they asked Australian Intelligence (ASIO) for help. Within a
minute, ASIO emailed the White House with this reply:

‘Tell the President he’s holding the message upside down.’

 

What if Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine and Jimmy Carter had a child?

What if Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine and Jimmy Carter had a child?

 

Dems start ad campaign

The ads will be sent widely to the press later this morning by the coalition funding them, which includes Americans United for Change, MoveOn.org Political Action, AFSCME and SEIU. 

The spot shows some arresting images of the recession — chained up factories, empty warehouses — and features Obama talking about our dire economic times and his economic package, an effort to harness Obama’s popularity to push the plan at a time when Republicans are training their fire on House Dems, rather than the White House.

Along with the ads, Democrats will run campaigns in their districts an official tells Politico. The White House plans to release state-by-state job figures so we can put a number on what folks voted for an against, an administration aide added. It’s clear the Republicans who voted against the stimulus represent constituents who will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs.

 

‘Like Going From an Xbox to an Atari’

Obama administration officials meet the existing White House tech infrastructure:

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found
computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft
software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the
West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on
online videos.

Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit
mobility — partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to
ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential
Records Act.

Source: Daring Fireball

 

‘A Return to These Truths’

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

– President Barack Obama

Source: Yahoo