Day: January 28, 2009

Yes Irene, There Is A Tax Cut Con

Repubs are yelling for tax cuts in the new economic stimulus package that is being offered up by the Obama team but is it the best idea?  I would like to quote Paul Krugman, the Nobel economist.

At this point, one must be blunt: the selling of the tax cuts has depended heavily on chicanery. The administration has used accounting trickery to hide the true budget impact of its proposals, and it has used misleading presentations to conceal the extent to which its tax cuts are tilted toward families with very high income.

Tax cuts?  Wait!  Don’t we still have the Bush tax cuts in place?  Thought so.  Are Americans spending?  NO they are not!  So cannot we stop all this bullshit, this tired old mantra of tax cuts being good for the economy?  On this Repubs are as full of crap as a well hay fed bull.

There is yet another tired old moth eaten conservative mantra that is being trotted out.  Dare I say it…well okay…lower the corporate tax because the US pays one of the highest in the world, if not the highest.  Sorry but that is also so much bull dookie.

Why would I say that?

You asked for it. Since corporations in the US get special preferences on taxes and with all their tax incentives that Washington grants, the US collects the fourth lowest corporate taxes in the industrialized world.

You people do realize that tax revenue pays for most of the stuff that the government does in this country right?  Bush Tax cuts?   The Bush tax cuts contributed, along with underlying economic conditions, to a historic decline in federal tax revenue. In 2000 total federal tax revenue was as high in proportion to the U.S. economy as it had ever been. By 2004 federal tax revenue in proportion to the economy had fallen to its lowest level in almost fifty years.

And that Irene is the truth about your tax cuts.

Oh BTW, please stop using the condum argument it has been removed from the stimulus package—damn guys—try to keep up, okay?

Oh My God! Are You Serious?

I found this story while surfing when I was bored with the usual crap in the news.  It is just amazing what politicians will do to try and deflect attention from what they are doing, huh?

Face to face with the worst economic crisis to face the nation in decades, our leaders are hard at work trying to come to America’s aid. The latest legislative salvo? A bill that would require cameraphones to make a sound “audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone.”

The bill, called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, is the brainchild of New York’s Peter King, and it’s a response to the continued popularity of voyeuristic photos snapped on the sly by those darn kids. King specifically cites adolescents being spied upon “in dressing rooms and public places” in the draft of the bill.

As well, Wired notes that a similar law is already on the books in Japan, where such behavior is practically a national pastime.

But, as Wired also notes, the prospects for King’s stateside bill doesn’t look entirely rosy. He has no co-sponsor for the action and, a smattering of press reports aside, there hasn’t been much interest in the legislation at all.

One supposes that Congress may have other matters at the top of its mind right now than phone-wielding peeping Toms. Just a hunch.

An Unacceptable Death

A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said.

Marvin E. Schur died “a slow, painful death,” said Kanu Virani, Oakland County’s deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.

Neighbors discovered Schur’s body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below 32 degrees at the time, The Bay City Times reported Monday.

Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City Manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.

A city utility worker had installed a “limiter” device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur’s home on Jan. 13, Belleman said. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.

The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur’s body, Belleman said. He didn’t know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.

Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn’t paid utility bills or arranged to do so.

Okay sports fans I have a serious problem with this situation.  I find it unacceptable on so many levels.  IMO, the utility murdered this man in the name of money.  If I killed a person that owed me a thousand dollars I would be lethal injected; corporations should be held to to same standard and laws as I am.  Whoever made the decision to kill this man should be prosecuted to the fullest extend of the law.  Because of the circumstance of his death, the torture, the “slow and painful death” there should be NO appeals and the sentence should be carried no less than 30 days after conviction with no chance of pardon from a governor or president that has received money from the corporation.  If an attempt is made to help the person then the politician can be prosecuted as an accessory.

In case there is any doubt….I feel very strongly about this situation.

Enough said, Irene?

Now The Bad News

Climate change is “largely irreversible” for the next 1,000 years even if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could be abruptly halted, according to a new study led by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The study’s authors said there was “no going back” after the report showed that changes in surface temperature, rainfall and sea level are “largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after CO2 emissions are completely stopped.”

The study found that CO2 levels are irreversibly impacting climate change, which will contribute to global sea level rise and rainfall changes in certain regions.

The authors emphasized that increases in CO2 that occur from 2000 to 2100 are set to “lock in” a sea level rise over the next 1,000 years.

Rising sea levels would cause “irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged,” the study said.

Decreases in rainfall that last for centuries can be expected to have a range of impacts, said the authors. Regional impacts include — but are not limited to — decreased human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts.

One Way To Shut Them Up

Please do not give the Patriot Act sleaze-oids any ideas…..As reported in Newsweek:

China kicked off the New Year with another crackdown on the Internet. A government-supported entity—the Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, tasked with finding and fighting online content that violates the law—began by informing 19 popular Web sites, including Google and Baidu, China’s two leading search engines, that they contain “vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths.” Only a few days later, they expanded their blacklist to 91 sites, including MSN and MySpace, demanding that they all take action to remove the offensive content. By last week more than 1,250 Web sites had been closed down and 41 people arrested. The crackdown singled out galleries of scantily clad women on tiexue.com and videos on vodone.com, as well as Google searches with links to anything that could be deemed racy. On the same day, People’s Daily, an official outlet, posted paparazzi photos of the Chinese celebrity Zhang Ziyi in a bikini at the beach. The Web site of Xinhua News Agency has also run a slide show called “China’s Hottest Babes.”

Hypocrisy aside, calls by authoritarian regimes to curb vulgarity are often a smoke screen for the stifling of political dissent. Iran recently included several sites critical of the government on a blacklist of more than 100,000 pornographic sites, and a study by the OpenNet Initiative, a university consortium that tracks Internet filtering around the globe, found that Vietnam censors politically sensitive content along with obscenity. China’s current crackdown is no exception. Bullog.cn, an edgy Chinese bloglike platform that often irked the Chinese authorities by reporting on controversial events like protests against new chemical plants, is one openly political victim of the current purges. Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet at the University of Hong Kong, writes that “historically in China … the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content,” and this appears to be the case again now. The thaw in anticipation of the Olympics, in which politically damaging sites like those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were allowed to publish unhindered, may now be nearing its end.

It is already way too easy for an agency to shut up a critic by hacking then plantinmg child porn on critic’s pc…now China is joining in the attacks on people who are dissenting.