Day: January 31, 2009

Do Any Of These Guys Pay Their Taxes?

Bet you pay yours, huh?  Looks like these guys do not feel they have to.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle, tapped by President Obama to lead his healthcare reform campaign, failed to pay more than $128,000 in taxes in the three years before Obama nominated him in December to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

The disclosure — involving unreported income and the use of a car and driver provided to Daschle — comes 2 1/2 weeks after Obama’s choice to head the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, admitted that he had not paid about $43,000 in taxes.

But a spokeswoman for the former Senate majority leader and close Obama ally stressed Friday evening that the tax errors were the result of simple mistakes that Daschle had worked in good faith to correct.

Is he gonmna blame Turbotax too?
The bulk of the unpaid taxes — first reported Friday by ABC News — stems from a lucrative business relationship that Daschle began with a wealthy investor shortly after Daschle left the Senate in 2005.

That year Daschle was paid $83,333 a month — or $1 million a year — to advise a private equity fund, according to a confidential draft report prepared by Republican staffers on the Senate Finance Committee.

The South Dakota Democrat was hired by Leo J. Hindery Jr., a longtime friend of Daschle’s, to consult for InterMedia Advisors. The private equity fund invests in media companies, including the Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson, the Gospel Music Channel, and Cine Latino, a leading Spanish-language movie channel.

Who will be next to step up and admit to not paying their taxes?  I pay mine maybe they should pay theirs before they get caught.

A Chicken In Every Pot And Broadband In Every House

I recall, I believe, this was promised by Obama during either the primaries or the election as a way to increase the education of the people of the country.  Personally, I think it is a helluva idea.  The economy has pretty much taken that idea off the table for now and probably for the first four years of the Obama admin, but there are others who are moving to get the jump on the rest of the world.

All UK homes should have access to broadband and faster download speeds by 2012, the government has said.

An interim report on the UK’s digital future also looked at plans for public service broadcasting.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said digital technology was as important today as “roads, bridges and trains were in the 20th Century”.

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham told MPs it would help Britain secure a competitive low carbon economy in the next five to 10 years, adding the country “led the world in content creation”.

The report called for everyone in the UK to have access to a broadband speed of up to two megabits per second (Mbps).

This would make internet connections capable of handling much more video and sites that offer greater interactivity.

By the time of the final report, the government will know whether internet service providers (ISPs) can build next generation networks themselves or if government help will be needed.

Must Women Have Litters?

Eight kids at once. The mind boggles. The mind is also pretty creeped out by the thought of one tiny baby after another coming out of a woman as if she were a mouse.

It’s basic energetics. Every individual has only so much energy. Some energy is spent staying alive – that is, finding food and not being somebody else’s food – and what’s left over can be spent on reproduction. In other words, there are limits to reproduction.

Of course, the various slices of that reproductive energy pie also vary between males and female of all species. Males don’t gestate or lactate so they pass on the most genes by flitting from female to female making as many babies as they can, and then walking away. The female reproductive pie is much more complex. There are costs to pregnancy, lactation for mammals, and then whatever else is needed to bring a kid up to sexual maturity so they can pass on genes as well.

But there are all sorts of ways, from an evolutionary point of view, for females of a species to distribute that energy and bring up babies successfully. She might have as many babies as she can in one shot, litters that is, and have them as often as possible. For that kind of female, reproduction is an assembly line of cheap production per kid. Or a female might opt for the other end of the scale and make one baby at a time and wait for a very long time to see if that one investment pays off.

Take a look at a naked woman and see for yourself how many babies a woman is designed to care for – two, at most.