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what about the second highest corporate tax rate in the world? It sits at about 39%.

With all the loopholes, actual corporate tax payments are less than half of that theoretical rate. In 2000, for example, IBM reported $5.7 billion in U.S. profits and paid only 3.4 percent of that in federal income taxes.

Corporate taxes are a joke. They just get passed on to the consumer anyway

No more so than payroll taxes get "passed on" to the consumer.

Raise workers taxes, reduce their take home pay; many working-class people are already living paycheck to paycheck, so they have to join together, unionize and strike to demand pay raises to make ends meet. Labor costs go up, end prices go up.

Raise corporate taxes, investors profits -- their unearned income -- is reduced. Too frickin' bad; it's like a tax on your gambling winnings. You can raise prices to try and return your profits to higher levels, but if there's any competition, you'll be undercut by someone willing to keep profits per unit lower and make it up on volume.

If corporate taxes were cut, payroll taxes, of course, would have to rise (modulo massive spending cuts, just what we need in the middle of a recession and two wars). That would shift even more of the tax burden off of the rich and on to the working classes, just what the investment classes would like.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

Finally, there's a summary at Wikipedia.

Someone needs to write a bot to post a response every time someone blames the financial crisis on the CRA or in some other way largely on the GSE's.

"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:

* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."

- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

Here's a few other links:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

There is also a summary at Wikipedia.

"Federal Reserve Board data show that:

*More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
*Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
*Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

It doesn't take much poking around to see some serious holes poked in the idea that the CRA caused this mess:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

But, let's not get those pesky facts get in the way, shall we?

Democrats have been running the show for 2 years now

Did you read my post?

How exactly do you justify the idea the Democrats have been "running the show" for 2 years?

. Look up Community Reinvestment Act when you get a chance if you're interested in the truth.

You sound as if you'd be surprised to discover that I'm already quite familiar with it -- and its popular usage as a tool of misdirection from failures and malfeasance in the private sector:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

Corporations are supposed to be greedy; government is supposed to reign them in a bit. Government policies encouraged that stuff

You mean government lack of policy. The crisis happened because the laws which were put in place to prevent it after the last one were repealed under the reaganite/libertarian montra of "govt intervention = bad"

It involves rebating all US Citizens and legal resident aliens amounts equivalent to the tax on poverty line spending.

The median income isn't at the poverty line. For reference, these are the people who suffer most under the un-fair tax

Ah, and the government gets to determine what "poverty" is.
In my state that threshold is defined as 3k/yr. Notice the graph shows only those whose who will never know what a lightbulb is will benefit from the "prebate"

Spend less? You get extra income, spend more? Your effective tax rate goes up as you spend more.

Yay, a federal policy which is fundamentally contractionist! This will certainly keep our economy flying.. straight at the ground and into a colossal crater.

And promptly be taxed at the border?

not going to happen. I've shipped in from overseas thousands of times and been socked with a surcharge only once.

The Democrats have always been fairly cozy with the media industries in particular, so it wouldn't surprise me if Obama is likewise fairly cozy with them.

It was a Republican dominated FCC board that allowed mass media to increase it's ownership in local media from 35% to 45%.

My question is whether the RIAA stuff is the sum of what this lawyer has done with his career, or if there are other achievements, perhaps more noteworthy

And it's a good question. Wiki has a page on Thomas J. Perrelli but there's not much there. Here's more, what I found interesting was that the entertainment industry contributed $7,669,442 to the Obama campaign. The American Prospect has more as well.

Falcon

...thanks to the CRA...

CRA really had very little affect on this whole situation. Here is a good argument against the "Blame-CRA" theory. To summarize, from the link:

...half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves... Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not more, of the most dangerous lending.

I don't think that your description of the whole mortgage securities buying/selling process is entirely accurate. My understanding is that it is like a game of musical chairs. Banks bought and sold securities for ($loan_amount + $loan_future_interest). As the interest rate went up on adjustable rates, people were no longer able to pay the loans off and the loans defaulted. So a large percentage of $loan_future_interest was immediately lost by whoever was stuck holding the securities when the music stopped. And a significant percentage of $loan_amount also could not be recovered by taking possession of and selling the property because the property had lost value due to the housing bubble.

...they should be prosecuted for making (and winning) the bet that tens of thousands of people would lose their livelihoods, their houses.

I think prosecution goes a little too far. In most cases, everything was legal. Although I don't think that they deserve to be bailed out either. They made a bad decision, both borrower and lender (the people who took those unaffordable loans are as much at fault as the banks who gave them). Suffering monetarily is punishment enough. Personally, I think that the banks should lose the money (no bank bailouts) and the borrowers should lose their homes (no homeowner bailouts). Why should anyone else (the taxpayers) have to pay for the banks' or the homeowners' bad decisions? Sure, many banks would go under, but is that really such a bad thing? The only decent argument I've heard against letting these banks fail is that it will reduce the amount of available credit. But isn't credit (the idea that property can be obtained now while the money is paid later) what got us into this mess in the first place? Personally, I think the sooner our country loses its addiction to credit the better.

Giving risky loans to people less likely to be able to repay them is what caused the crisis.

http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis

Long and the short of it: CRA/CAP loans actually had better underwriting standards, and the evidence suggests that rather than being the bulk of the weight of failing loans, CRA/CAP loans have lower default rates than comparable commercial lending. The GSAs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and Congress (including Democrats) are not without responsibility, but the policy Card's talking doesn't really have much to do with the heart of the problem.

A better explanation of some of the underlying mechanics is given in an award-winning episode of This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. There's a lot of blame to go around -- from the borrowers up through the securitizers who sold global investors the Mortgage Backed Securities, but it seems pretty obvious that without the MBSs and in particular some of the faulty representations of the risks involved in MBSs, you couldn't have had the disconnect between the loans and sensible lending standards (*not* mandated by the CRA), which is ultimately where things really started going off the tracks.

Did you even read your own link? GP called labor the "biggest anchor" on the big 3. Your link shows exactly that: hourly labor cost for Big 3: $70+/hr... for Japanese companies in the US: less than $50/hr! Frankly, that is an amazing difference.

Now you may or may not find that palatable, but you should be agreeing with the GP. Labor costs are a real issue here.

GP didn't refer to labor costs as "the biggest anchor". GP called *unions* the biggest anchor.

My point was that their actual *salary* was relatively low (28$/hour on average), but that labor costs could have been made manageable by socializing the portions of the costs which pushed the "labor costs" up to about 70$ an hour. If they don't have to worry about benefits and pension, it becomes far more palatable for the companies to pay their workers a fair wage.

Since I don't see us doing any experiments in single payer health care, I'd assume that the unions are going to be necessary to ensure that workers get compensated fairly for the work they perform. UAW tried to set up something beneficial with car manufacturers in the 70s to handle health benefits, etc, but it apparently didn't pan out.

If what you're telling us is true, then how come...

1. ...only about 20-30% of subprime loans in recent years were made by lenders fully subject to CRA supervision? (source; another)
2. ...mortgage-backed securities based on CRA mortgages aren't the worst performers in the crisis, because Fannie and Freddie had higher standards for subprime loans they would buy?
3. ...we had the CRA for well over 20 years, without any mortgage crashes, before the explosion of subprime lending by non-CRA institutions?
4. ...a lot of the problem mortgages aren't actually subprime (i.e., made to people with weaker credit histories), but rather, Alt-A (made to people with good credit histories, but without documenting their ability to pay)?

While I don't mean to suggest that the CRA is perfect, the recent criticism of it is opportunistic, agenda-driven, and not based on actual facts. The reason we have a CRA and non-discrimination laws for mortgage lending is that: (a) for decades, mortgage lenders refused to lend to some people, irrespective of their credit history, based on criteria like their race or the neighborhood they were looking to purchase in (redlining); (b) even today, minority borrowers have a harder time getting loans than white folks, even after you control for income and creditworthiness.

What policies like the CRA aim to achieve is to make lenders lend to minorities on the same terms. A black applicant looking to buy in certain neighborhoods has a lower chance of getting a loan compared to a white applicant with the same income and credit history, looking to buy in a different neighborhood. Policies like the CRA aren't aimed to forcing lenders to lend to that black guy. The point is that if a bank judges the black guy to be an unacceptable risk, then it should reach the same conclusion about the equivalent white guys that it gets applications from.

Not that this is terribly relevant, again, because the recent boom of subprime lending was due to institutions not subject to the CRA. The argument just fails to get off the ground because of this.

Finally, let me challenge this widespread assumption that your whole argument requires: subprime = poor folk = minorities. That just ain't so; being brown, black or poor doesn't automatically make you uncreditworthy (which is the whole damn point of programs like the CRA). To quote a really good blogger on this topic (Tanta from Calculated Risk):

The association of subprime lending with the brown people is just the most overtly disgusting bit of bigotry to arise from the great mess. The belief that subprime borrowers are "poor people" has taken root so deeply that you need a jackhammer to rip it out. The capacity C of traditional underwriting was, of course, always relative to the proposed transaction. A lower-income person buying a lower-priced property was, you see, not a case of subprime lending; assuming a reasonable credit history, it was a prime loan. People with quite good incomes and stellar credit histories who tried to buy way too much house got turned down by the prime lenders. That was back in the days when you could live within your means, and you were expected to do so.

The blog post in question is worth reading.

From TFLA: Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?

IMHO, the article is wrong to assume that the CRA had little nothing to do with it (it was at the start of the whole process even though it wasn't wholly responsible...it was the second step on the road to where we are now if you will with the Great Depression and the New Deal creation of Fannie Mae being the first) and the correct answer is really both. The banks made the loans both to comply with the provisions of the CRA and also with subsequent laws and pressure from community organizers (lawsuits and political pressure cost money too you know, just like bad loans) AND they also wanted to make money of course (since if you are not earning interest then you are losing money because of inflation).

Ask yourself this question: Would the deposit banks in the United States (and elsewhere), which have a long history of mortgage lending and experience in that business, have loaned to the subprime borrowers if THEY had to hold the loan paper and suffer the loss if the marginal borrower defaulted? Perhaps more personally, would you loan $1000 to your coke-head do-nothing uncle (or other irresponsible family relation) given what you know about his lifestyle, financial history, and credit worthiness (or lack thereof)? Of course not and it is the same situation with these banks. Now, what if the government said that they would take that loan to your uncle off your hands for face value (i.e. they assume the risk and pay you your profits up front) or let you resell the loan as AAA debt without having to disclose the details? Well then it is a whole different ballgame.

If lending standards had not been lowered by the government (they very arguably encouraged bad loans with CRA by signaling that the Fed would not deny the banks access to overnight loans for making irresponsible loans to subprime borrowers who met CRA requirements) AND the government had not made things even worse by having Fannie and Freddie buy up and guarantee a large part of the bad loans themselves, then the subprime mess would never have become large because banks and investors would not have loaned to people, at least not on a large scale, that they KNEW were not going to repay and THEY (the banks) were going to be left holding the bag.

Remember that it is the government (and to a lesser extent those banks which can borrow from the Federal Reserve) that creates money in the fiat money system here in the United States so if the government tells the banks that it is OK to lend to marginal borrowers AND then agrees to take the loans off the bank's hands OR allows them to sell them into the securities market as AAA packages then of course they are going to do it (As long as the banks aren't forced to hold the bad loans themselves). They cannot afford NOT to participate in what is essentially an expansion of the money supply with lots of NEW credit (if they did sit it out then their competitors would increase their share of the money supply while their own pre-expansion holdings would decline in value because of all the new money being created).

If the government had not interfered in the housing market, beginning in the 1930s and continuing until today, for essentially political reasons then we would NOT now be having the financial crises that we are having today because private investors don't generally lend money at low rates to bad risk borrowers. The present situation is the inescapable result of decades of poor government financial policies made for political reasons. Does this mean that we should have zero regulation? Of course not, but there is a big difference between having the government regulate and mandate full disclosure of relevant information and directly supplying the capital and altering the lending s

Uh-huh

Bah, I've heard this before, and it's all bullshit. CRA loans were but a fraction of the total number of subprime loans that were given out. It's a fact. Look it up. No, wait, I'll do it:

Further, CRA only governs a certain class of federally insured banks. Problem is, half of the subprime loans came from mortgage companies with no CRA involvement at all. Another 25%-30% came from companies with very little CRA exposure. For those who left their abacus at home, that's 80% of the loans which were fully or largely outside CRA jurisdiction. More than that, the non-CRA mortgage firms made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA-covered firms.

Meanwhile, the "racist" rules you're referencing were simply this: if you give a loan to person A with qualifications X, then if black person B shows up with qualifications X, you have to give them the same loan. That's it, that's all. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd love to see it.

The assertion that over-regulation cause the current financial problems is not well supported by the facts. See this rebuttal.

"Facts" my ass. Here are some real, unbiased facts:

1) The CRA bill had virtually nothing to do with the current financial crisis. To quote:

Further, CRA only governs a certain class of federally insured banks. Problem is, half of the subprime loans came from mortgage companies with no CRA involvement at all. Another 25%-30% came from companies with very little CRA exposure. For those who left their abacus at home, that's 80% of the loans which were fully or largely outside CRA jurisdiction. More than that, the non-CRA mortgage firms made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA-covered firms.

The reason bad loans were given out was because it made people a fuckton of money. The real failure was in the Bush administration not working to encourage investment opportunities outside the secondary mortgage market for the vast glut of credit that was around after the 2001 tech crash. Instead, they let the "invisible hand" work, and since real estate looked like a great way to make money, they threw their money in there. Suddenly banks saw a market for MBSs and began loaning like mad so they could resell the investments and make boatloads of cash. This drew new investors, which encouraged more bad loans, lather, rinse repeat. Throw in unregulated ratings agencies that were financially motivated to lie about risk, not to mention general risk obfuscation thanks to the structure of the instruments being sold, and you have a recipe for disaster.

All of this could've been fixed with some sensible regulation, but the government instead chose to sit back and ride the wave.

2) Fannie and Freddie largely largely avoided the subprime market until late 2007 when the market was failing and needed credit to keep it functioning, and they only stepped in when the government more or less told them to. So what the hell would regulating Fannie and Freddie have done to avoid the current problems? Nothing at all.

But I don't expect you to actually believe any of this. After all, cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

And yet, she specifically targeted the Bridge to Nowhere and had it killed.

Despite what people continue to say Palin didn't oppose the bridge to nowhere. There are more links on it.

Falcon

she is also a proponent of teaching creationism alongside Evolution in public schools

Not quite. The actual quote would be:
"Next, Carey asked about teaching alternatives to evolution - such as creationism and intelligent design - in public schools.
Palin: "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information."

(and yes, the following sig needs to be updated. again)

Jonah Goldberg has zero credibility on the subject of fascism. He doesn't even seem to know the textbook definition.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=jonah_goldbergs_bizarro_history
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nVjb_-5kkf0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=biSrwMX7oM0

This is important. I'm replying just in case anyone has AC filter on.

Jonah Goldberg has zero credibility on the subject of fascism. He doesn't even seem to know the textbook definition.

One disagreement: McCain was actually the first choice of the Neocons during the 2000 primaries, and has long been a supporter of "preemptive" war.

As Matthew Yglesias put it:

McCain was the neocons' candidate in 2000, McCain adhered to a truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11, and as president McCain would likely pursue policies that will make what we've seen from Bush look like a pale imitation of the real thing.

That there is a (often extreme) liberal bias in the US academic world is only arguable or argued by extremist liberals who see that bias as representing their views and therefore not biased

Right, all those math and science and engineering professors whose research is funded by the DOD are a bunch of extremist liberal peaceniks.

Just like all the agricultural science professors figuring out how to run more efficient battery cage operations are a bunch of radical animals rights advocates, and the criminal justice departments are full of future social workers, and the folks teaching the MBA program are all labor union activists.

you don't perceive them as biased and therefore have to come up with bizarre conspiracy theories to discount all the evidence of that bias

It's not a bizarre conspiracy theory, it's a criticism of a poor study. Read the fine article I linked. AEI, the far-right thinktank that claimed to have indisputable evidence of liberal bias in academia, cherrypicked their data.

Really, it's the other way around: Since the first Red Scares of the early 20th century, the right wing has been so successful in biasing discussion that anything considered "moderate" in the rest of the world seems leftist here.

As the perfect example, the whole "Politically Correct" movement is a left wing matic attack on free speech originating in the academic world.

Yes, it is a perfect example. Because there is no such thing. The "PC movement" is 10% a couple of isolated actions by boneheads on the authoritarian extreme of the left, and 90% a pure fiction of the right's propaganda machine.

In my opinion there's plenty of idiocy, in different areas, on both side's views of the world.

There is certainly plenty of idiocy. But since the 1980s when the conservative moment allied itself with fundamentalist religion and made biology a campaign issue, to today's White House attempts to quash climate science, the Republican political machine has deliberately moved toward ignorance. (So much so, that many of them can't properly distinguish the noun from the adjective forms of the name of the other major party...if I hear one more idiot talk about the "Democrat Party" I swear I'm going to hit something.)

Sure, I hear a lot of stupid, wrong, and ignorant stuff from Democratic politicians, but you don't see any of the Democratic presidential candidates denying the reality of biological evolution.

the ACLU doesn't usually pick up the kinds of cases that FIRE is interested in, because the cases often involve public academic institutions suppressing religious speech and conservative political speech.

The ACLU often comes to the defense of religious expression and of conservative political speech.

(Academic institutions in general tend to carry a liberal bias in their administration and faculty, which makes it more likely that conservatives will run afoul of such bias.)

This idea of academic political bias is based on deliberately slanted "research", from the sort of priviledged conservatives who, for some bizarre reason, like to view themselves as a persecuted minority. (I suppose it has its roots in the sort of twisted, martyrdom-centered Christianity they tend to practice.)

But even though most of the far right's whining about "liberal bias" in education is based on restricting their surveys of academics' party affiliations to the women's studies department, perhaps there is an inherent bias. After all, academic institutions tend to carry a bias toward knowledge, while the contemporary conservative movement continually allies itself with ignorance.

I thought it was common knowledge that china has more dollars than the USA ?
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=10&year=2007&base_name=how_many_dollars_will_china_ho

All the chinese need do is start to sell a few trillion dollars of their reserve to start a slide in the value of dollars ,
then more oil producing nations will switch to selling oil in euros instead of dollars and you can kiss goodbye to the american economy.
http://www.energybulletin.net/7707.html

Sure they would loose lots of money but its got to be less than the cost of having a war against the USA and without all
that messy killing , you also get to tell the next generation it was americas fault and they wont care because , well , it is really isn't it ?

Toodle-pip
Amias

THE HILLARYCARE MYTHOLOGY: Suddenly, we're being told that Hillary wasn't behind Hillarycare -- it was all Bill's idea!

        The first lady was an active force in these discussions, but there was never any question that the president was in charge. We took our guidance from him. That, of course, was how it should have been (who else but the president ought to make such decisions?), except that many reporters and the public thought that Bill Clinton had handed over the policy to Hillary and that she would report back to him, which was not the case.

        Presidents often downplay their own direct involvement in decision making to put some distance between themselves and policies that may eventually prove to be unsuccessful. Part of the job of cabinet members and advisors is to take the blame when things go wrong. Clinton's appointment of his wife to chair the task force did not, however, create the necessary distance and deniability. Not only did the fiction of Hillary's personal responsibility for the health plan fail to protect the president at the time, it has also now come back to haunt her in her own quest for the presidency.

Well, you know, tangled webs and all that. (Via Newsalert).

UPDATE: This, on the other hand, is just weird.

While the Clinton years did good to reduce the budget (Keep in mind he had to work with a Republican Congress - Funny how things work better when those 2 branches offset each other). They were not *actually* balanced budgets. We were still using Social Security as part of the numbers. Separate SS, and we're in a deficit again. Add in the long-term accounts payable of SS, and we were actually still deficit spending. Not to dismiss the effort, it was a good start.

Read here: The Great Surplus Debate for detail. "The surpluses belong to Social Security; there are no surpluses in the rest of the budget."

I agree completely, we need to operate in a (money in) >= (money out) manner. I don't know if we'll ever get a group of people in Washington honest enough (HA!) to make that happen, no matter what political persuasion they claim.

I think that there should not have been tax cuts 5 yrs ago. We should have taken the short-term punch-in-the-gut to the economy for the long-term benefits. A little every year starting then would have been far easier than the huge tax hikes that are inevitable in the near future.

Iraq is a cluster-fsck. We could have waited and had far fewer people die through sanctions and Saddam's attentions. (For the sake of clarity, I bought the "Lets get Saddam/Iraq" thing as much as anyone else, hindsight is 20/20) We are going to be a century working our way out of this one if we start correcting things after the next election (big "if" knowing how Congress works).

Ah well. Time to do something less frustrating and get a little work done.

It's all much simpler than that.

The goal of health care is to get everyone covered, at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible quality. But in the United States, our system seeks to get everyone covered, at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible quality, while generating the maximum possible profits.

Within that context, the trade-offs and outcomes all seem to benefit the last goal, and so we tolerate 45 million uninsured Americans, unbelievably high prices, and a fractured system that lacks the proper incentives to deliver high-quality care.

It doesn't have to be this way.

And it doesn't have to be socialized. Canada, Germany, France, the UK, and our very own VHA all have different solutions; only France's and the UK's can properly be termed "socialized medicine."

Many solutions have been tested, and they're all better in many ways than what we have now. But god forbid someone miss out on a profit opportunity in the grand ol' U S of A.

The gains they made were from moderate Democrats, not the raving liberals who seem to have directed the party for a while now.

The elections in the U.S. are different from third world countries. Elections in the U.S. are by and large, worse. The U.S. has never been concerned about the integrity of elections, much less anything that could be described as free or fair by a third party observer.

To really crank up the body count to insane levels though, you need to have some True Believers trying to make their utopia a reality regardless of who they have to kill to do it.

Nuts. I don't believe any of those things, yet I can see that Gore was telling the truth. You don't have to believe that all cars are made in Detroit to recognize that some particular car was. And you don't have to believe that government drives all R&D to recognize that the internet (the backbone, not the content) was a an outgrowth of research and development by the US government.

It was quotes like that that truly drove people (like me) away from Gore. He was (and still is, I think) of the single mind that the government is the sole driving force of the country and in this case, technological innovation.

Nuts again.

While Gore may have worked in government, he has certainly done a great deal in the private sector as well. Since the 2000 election, he has started his own TV network, made a movie, appeared on several TV shows (Futerama, Saturday Night Live, etc.), chartered planes to evacuate Katrina victims, taught a college journalism class, served on the boards of Apple and Google, and all sorts of other things.

So far as I know, he didn't look to the government to help with any of these projects, even in cases where it was arguably the government's job to be doing what he did.

During those same years, the advocates of "smaller government" ran up a huge national debt, dramatically increased the intrusion of government into our lives (including, to keep this post sort of on topic, aiding their corporate owners in trying to squeeze out Open Source software), and engaged in the largest corporate welfare program in history.

--MarkusQ

It's the legal argument of the United States, Great Britan, and France, that 688 is indeed relevant to 678...

Yes, and it's a BS argument; 688 has nothing to do with Kuwait, and 678's authorization of military force was for the U.N. to use force to resolve that situation, not for member nations to intervene in Iraq's internal affairs. (I don't think it's been France's argument for a long time, either.)

You'll note that, back in 1991, the legality of the no-fly zones wasn't questioned, even Saddam Hussein acknowledged their legitimacy until 1998

There was objection long before 1998. The New York Times editorialized against them in 1992. Iraq objected before 1998: "Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zone because it was not a UN job," Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, 1993. Also in 1993, the U.N.'s legal department announced that it could find no authorization for the NFZs.

Objections were muted, though, since the U.S. and Britain would simpy veto any condemnation of the NFZs.

but to call it illegal in 2002 what was praised as a humanitarian mission in 1991 is absurd.

Many people were not praising it as a humanitarian mission.

Unless you count continued attempts to shoot down US planes patrolling the UN-sanctioned no-fly zone.

The no-fly zones were illegal creations of the U.S. and Great Britain; a sovereign nation shooting at hostile aircraft that violate its airspace is not creating a threat to the violating nation.

But Saddam was far from a downtrodden lamb.

Yes, Saddam was a bad guy. That does not mean that anything done to oppose him therefore automatically becomes legal, ethical, or smart.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&n ame=ViewWeb&articleId=11367 might be it

The Tchotchke Economy

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&n ame=ViewPrint&articleId=11299

Never let it be said I don't do the legwork...


It's fitting, then, that after some hanging chads lynched his political ambitions, he returned to his roots, accepting a post at Columbia's journalism school to teach about the intersection between journalism, his first career, and the Internet, his longstanding obsession. The class, which began in Spring 2001, was entitled "Covering National Affairs in an Information Age." Gore's first lecture engaged objectivity itself, challenging the journalistic trope that fairness resides in controversy and an article has to represent all sides -- no matter how marginal -- equally. Instead, Gore argued that the journalistic impulse to exalt even the most fringe views to parity in order to furnish opposing perspectives is harmful to basic accuracy. This didn't sit well with more than a few of the wannabe reporters in the class, many of whom were aghast at the suggestion that the media should attempt to actually mediate between truth and spin. As Josh Bearman, a student in that class and now an editor at the LA Weekly, recalls it, "He stood up there challenging the entire dogma of the journalism school. First semester, you learned that objectivity was emperor, then Gore came in and told you it had no clothes."

And along with that backlash, the old anti-intellectualism Gore experienced in 2000 made a reappearance. As Bearman tells it, "He knew more than everyone in the room. So the class basically turned against him because he was smarter than they were, and they didn't like that. We witnessed exactly what had happened on the campaign plane in the year prior." Gore did not return to teach the class in 2002.

You're proving that an excess of reason is a malady in itself.

Of course businesses are run by citizens. But in operation they exhibit special business interests which are at odds with the public interest.

Small business owners may be concerned about fairness in government and industry. Individuals working for large businesses may be concerned about fairness in government and industry. Shareholders may be concerned about fairness in government and industry. But the overall system is greater than the sum of its parts and the behaviors of individuals add up to different behaviors on the whole. Society is not made up of individuals, distinct from each other. The very fact that we use language to converse about anything at all is evidence of the fact that we are part of something greater than our individual selves. Efficient, intelligent government is aware of and addresses these emergent aspects of business and society.

But it should come from our hearts and not be forced upon us.

If this worked in practice, there would have been no need for the labor movements of the late 19th century, no need for the women's suffrage movement, no need for the civil rights movement, and certainly no need for the original American revolution.

Oh, and a note on social mobility, in regards to your family anecdote a few comments up, and it also has to do with market fairness: It's declined a lot in the last few years. "When asked if people get rewarded for their effort, 61 percent of Americans agree, versus 49 percent of Canadians, 33 percent of the British, and 23 percent of the French. But of all these societies, America is one of the least mobile, which is to say the least dependent on hard work rather than social station. In Denmark, the relationship between one's parent's income and one's own is 15% percent or so. In Canada, it's 19% percent. In France, it's 41 percent. And in America, it's 47 percent. The only country more hidebound and hierarchal is England (50 percent), also the country most closely approximating the American economic model."

So despite common American beliefs that, in general, if you work hard you'll be rewarded for your efforts and rise up high, it's just not true, and not as true now as it once was...

egarland, you might be interested in this re gas tax:

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2006/02/in dex.html#009278

B

• This JAMA study found over 27,000 errors due to hospital (not other medical care) negligence in one year, in New York state alone.
• This Institute of Medicine study found 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year due to hospital errors alone. That makes it the 8th leading cause of death, ahead of car accidents, AIDS, and breast cancer.
• The more comprehensive HealthGrades study puts the number of deaths due to hospital error at 195,000. And the study's authors think that underestimates it. (Also reported here.)
• Just try a few Google searches and you'll easily find more information, like this study.

That's right, doctors' errors are at least the eighth leading cause of death in this country. And the problem is the lawyers?

The response of the medical industry is to continue their practices, blame lawyers, and lobby congress for protection from accountability. I remember when the IOM study came out, it was proposed that hospitals be legally required to report these errors -- think about that: There is no reporting mechanism for, and no regulation of, hospital errors!. The American Medical Assoc. (the doctors' lobby) resisted, saying the potential penalties would discourage doctors from complying. By that reasoning, I shouldn't have to report running that guy over the other day -- I might be held responsible!

It can be done better:

When anesthesiologists were facing high error rates and corresponding malpractice costs, they took a different approach: They systematically studied the problem and tried to reduce errors. As a result, deaths due to anesthesia dropped from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 200,000-300,000. And insurance premiums dropped 37%. You can read about it here or pay for the full story here.

And most of the industrialized world countries manage to deliver better care for far less. According to a study reported here, Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world's median of $2,193; ... Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less

Given that record I'm not going to take her assertions on the Verona Project at face value; only a sucker would. So if the parent can find independent support for the claims about the Verona Project, I'm interested, but if it's all based on Ann Coulter's brand of unsupported claims, forget it,

You obviously are not a corporate tax attorney. There's a lot more to setting up a non-profit charitable trust than a simple deduction for charitable contributions. Microsoft spent several of its most profitable years paying virtually no federal taxes at all. To quote (from prospect.org:

Microsoft enjoyed more than $12 billion in total tax breaks over the past five years. Microsoft, in fact, actually paid no tax at all in 1999, despite $12.3 billion in reported U.S. profits. Microsoft's tax rate for the past two years was only 1.8 percent on $21.9 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits.

Who knows what Gate's motivations for his foundation contributions? There are probably many. And you can bet that every one of them are self-serving. I have a hard time believing that he's doing it because he has any genuine concern for the plight of 3rd-world peasants.

How did that post have anything to do with mine? Did you even catch onto the nation of reference which has:

  * 200-400 nuclear weapons, most mated to delivery systems
  * Threated Iraq
  * Threatens Iran

But, lets take the bait anyways. So, the Iraqis gained immensely from our invasion, eh? True. They gained this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Good to see that the American Geophysical Union and the National Science Teachers Association have criticized Bush's statements on ID. I wish more scientific and professional organisations would do the same.

For more perspective on this, and to see some of the subjects of his past columns, see here.

That's not the point I was making. First off, regular people who own stock don't have the enormous options and kickbacks that the executive class does. And secondly, real incomes are falling. We make up for this by working more, and working harder, to make the same money we were before. Does that seem right to you?

--grendel drago

GENOCIDE -- DARFUR ACCOUNTABILITY ACT STRIPPED FROM BILL:

Last month, both the House and Senate unanimously passed amendments to the war-time supplemental bill that called on the Bush administration to ratchet up its diplomatic efforts to help end the crisis in Darfur. Yet today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the House is expected to pass the supplemental bill, and surprise, surprise, those Darfur provisions won't be included. What happened? After pressure from the White House (including a letter from administration officials to House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis), the Darfur Accountability provisions were stripped from the bill.

Parent means to write "eminent domain," which is the legal theory under which the government can condemn property and forcibly purchase it "for the common good."

So far, there is no such thing as eminent domain for intellectual property. In fact, the Supreme Court ruled that a state may not break patents in Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd. v. College Sav. Bank (527 U.S. 627, 119 S.Ct. 2199)

That's not to say that that policy could change, however. This article explains: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&n ame=ViewWeb&articleId=9237

• (c) Waiver-
  • (1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.
  • (2) NO JUDICIAL REVIEW- Notwithstanding any other provision of law (statutory or nonstatutory), no court shall have jurisdiction--
  • (A) to hear any cause or claim arising from any action undertaken, or any decision made, by the Secretary of Homeland Security pursuant to paragraph (1); or
  • (B) to order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision.