One of President Barack Obama’s campaign pledges on taxes went up in puffs of smoke Wednesday.
The largest increase in tobacco taxes took effect despite Obama’s promise not to raise taxes of any kind on families earning under $250,000 or individuals under $200,000.
This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.
To be sure, Obama’s tax promises in last year’s campaign were most often made in the context of income taxes. Not always.
“I can make a firm pledge,” he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” He repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.”[emphasis added]
Ho hum, another politician another lie.
The extra money will be used to finance a major expansion of health insurance for children.
It’s for the children? Well okay then.
That represents a step toward achieving another promise, to make sure all kids are covered.
What? He isn’t going to try and claim that such a program will provide an economic stimulus therefore we should spend the money absent any tax increases? And I thought he could do all this without increasing taxes. Didn’t he said, he’d cut waste, fraud and abuse? Oh, wait they always say that. The Obamassiah…just like any other lying politician.
His detailed campaign plan stated that his proposed improvement in health insurance and health technology “is more than covered” by raising taxes on the wealthy alone. It was not based on raising the tobacco tax.
“Listen now,” he said in his widely watched nomination acceptance speech, “I will cut taxes—cut taxes—for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.”
Yeah, well that was a lie too, or at least it was a statement with enough weasel words in it so that it doesn’t mean what one’s first impression would be. According to the Tax Policy Center, only about 75.5% of households will get a tax cut under Obama’s plan. And factoring in the new tax on cigarettes that number is likely to be smaller.
People under a certain age have stopped using voice mail, Jill Colvin reports for NYT.
When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. Hollywood screenwriters incorporated it into plotlines: Distraught heroine comes home, sees blinking red light, listens as desperate suitor begs for another chance to make it all right. Beep! But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.
[...]
“Once upon a time, voice mail was useful,” said Yen Cheong, 32, a book publicist in New York who has transitioned almost entirely to e-mail and text messaging. According to her calculation, it takes 7 to 10 steps to check a voice mail message versus zero to 3 for an e-mail. “If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code,” Ms. Cheong said. “Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again,” she added, feigning exhaustion.
I’m reminded of an Eddie Murphy routine from roughly the era when voice mail was introduced in which he made fun of the advent of one-push automatic windows and wondered about people who were so lazy they couldn’t hold down a button for three seconds.
Still, while I remain sufficiently fit and possessed of the mental stamina to withstand the rigors of checking my messages, I join Matt Yglesias in vastly preferring email. I often forget to check my voice mail for days on end and my wife simply won’t check a message, preferring to return any missed calls that show up on her mobile.
Does this trend have meaningful consequences? Document attachments in our networked age have largely replaced faxes just as the telephone largely displaced the telegraph in an earlier time and common thinking has little regret about these developments. But perhaps this trend may have some lasting significance that might be worth considering. The more we leave to text and less to voice, the more messages may get misconstrued. We cannot tell if someone is joking or is upset from text and more often text can send misleading signals about our emotions (unless the stray emoticon provides some help, which is certainly less prevalent in the professional sphere). It also may have an effect on litigation, to the pleasure, or great pain, of many lawyers. The more we write down, the more we tend to raise problems for ourselves, and hence the more that attorneys have to sift through in discovery. To be sure, voice mails are discoverable, but they are less likely to provoke a series of other voice mails where a text or email can lead to a disastrous series of replies, often written in haste and possibly in anger. This may be a true boon to e-Discovery consultants (as my civil procedure students would wisely suggest). And the more that we write down in digital format, the more chance that such information could be hacked, leaked, or sent to an undesirable audience at the expense of privacy and reputation.
That’s especially interesting given that so many of us are using Gmail and other online messaging systems and no longer delete read messages.
“[W]orrying about acting in a film like this is like worrying about fat in a double cheeseburger: It misses the whole point.” - Peter Suderman, reviewing the umpteenth installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise for NRO
A bill that would levy a $5 tax on sex acts appears to have no chance in Nevada’s Legislature, even though the state is facing a more than $2.8 billion revenue shortfall.
“I don’t know why people won’t recognize that we have a legal industry,” said state Sen. Bob Coffin, who is pushing for a tax on the world’s oldest profession. “I’m willing to go in and do the dirty work if no one else will.”
Perhaps not the most felicitious choice of phrasing.
University of Colorado professor Ward L. Churchill, left, with attorney David Lane after the verdict. (David Zalubowski, Associated Press) April 2, 2009
A Colorado jury yesterday decided that Ward Churchill had been fired, not for his blatant plagiarism, but for saying outrageous things that embarrassed the University of Colorado. He was awarded a dollar in damages, presumably because his actual plagiarism mitigated the fact that it wasn’t the reason for his termination.
The former ethnic-studies professor won his civil case against CU on Thursday after a unanimous jury found he was fired in retaliation for his controversial essay about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the jury awarded Churchill only the paltry amount in damages, allowing both sides to claim some measure of victory in a four-year battle pitting free speech and tenure against the value of academic purity.
It’s not over, however:
Denver Chief District Judge Larry J. Naves will decide in a separate hearing whether the former Boulder professor can return to his job or receive “front pay” for future years he could have worked at CU.
[Churchill's attorney, David] Lane says he will file a motion to recover legal fees for hundreds of hours of work he and co-counsels Qusair Mohamedbhai and Robert Bruce put into the case — but he deferred questions about a dollar amount. “We work cheap,” he said. Still, the bill, if assessed to CU, is likely to be well into seven figures.
And, so, we’ll be hearing more from Churchill.
Churchill briefly spoke outside the courtroom and said, “It took four years. It took a while. And it was quick, it was justice.” CU “has been exposed for what it is,” Churchill said. “It was found by a jury that I was wrongly fired,” he said. “They not only violated my rights, but my students’ rights and the community’s rights.” Churchill said he was satisfied with a $1 judgment and said his case was not about money. “Reinstatement, of course,” he said. “I did not ask for money. I asked for justice.”
Ultimately, Scott Robinson is right that the university acquitted itself poorly throughout this mess. I also agree with Margaret Soltan on this much:
Churchill’s massive academic misconduct was easily discovered; and yet he was chair of a dept. at Colorado. No one cared.
The principle has to be equal treatment. If your university typically overlooks plagiarism among your professors, you don’t get to randomly brutalize one plagiarizing professor because he said something that pissed off people.
I find it a non sequitur, however, that a University has no right to be upset with professorial misconduct if it houses a big time athletic program with a history of NCAA violations. Academics are, after all, the university’s raison detre whereas sports are a side business.
UPDATE: I also concur on all points with Freddie, especially points 1, 4, and 8.
Photo: LAT. The caption, which is theirs, is premature.
The Obamas are coming under criticism from around the blogosphere for their dealings with royals. First, Barack Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II a video iPod filled with some rather add materials (along with an actually thoughtful gift). Then, Michelle Obama got into trouble for getting too familiar with the the queen. Now, Barack Obama is getting chastised for bowing to the Saudi king.
Now, frankly, I don’t give a hoot what the president gives the British figurehead. I’m slightly concerned, as evidenced by his also giving PM Gordon Brown a boxed set of DVDs, that he seems not to understand that the UK is a First World country and that its leaders can probably afford anything available at Amazon for under $200. But, really, it’s the thoughtlessness that counts.
Second, QE2 has been at the monarch thing for several decades, so one presumes that she gets a reasonable amount of obsequious treatment. Being touched on the shoulder by the wife of the American president, presumably, is something from which her ego shall rebound. As for Mrs. O, she is not a subject of the queen and thus not obligated to be anything other than cordial in dealing with her.
The bowing to the king thing annoys me. It’s a proper enough show of respect for a monarch in his home and it would be rude for an ordinary American citizen not to follow this protocol. But Obama isn’t a tourist being granted an audience with the king, he’s our de facto head of state. Then again, a quick bow is less creepy than holding hands with him, as Obama’s predecessor was known to do.
At the end of the day, I just can’t muster the outrage of Michelle Malkin or even Mark Steyn on this one. (I do find amusement, however, at Steyn’s description: “So let me see if I understand American protocol in the age of Obama: The First Lady hugs Queen Elizabeth as if she’s some granny at a seniors’ center photo-op, but the President of this republic prostrates himself before King Abdullah as if he’s a subject of the Saudi pseudo-Crown.”) Mostly, I share Pat Lang’s befuddlement that Americans care so much about monarchs and their little rituals.
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin thinks Senator Mark Begich, who narrowly defeated incumbent Ted Stevens last November shortly after the latter was convicted on corruption charges, should step down and agree to a rematch now that the Justice Department has decided to drop the case against Stevens.
Asked for her response, Palin simply wrote back: “I absolutely agree.”
When the reporter wrote back to confirm that Palin meant she’d like to see Begich resign in order to hold a special election, the governor responded: “Yes.”
In an email to POLITICO, Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton confirmed the governor’s position. “She absolutely agrees that there should be a special election,” Stapleton wrote. “Stepping down to hold the special election would be the right thing to do.”
In the statement Palin was provided, Ruedrich said that “the only reason Mark Begich won the election in November is because a few thousand Alaskans thought that Sen. Ted Stevens was guilty of seven felonies.” “A special election will allow Alaskans to have a real, non-biased, credible process where the most qualified person could win, without the manipulation of the Department of Justice,” he added.
It’s not just the voters who thought Stevens was guilty of seven felonies but an Alaska jury. The Attorney General dropped the case against Stevens prior to sentencing because of prosecutorial misconduct, not because of evidence exonerating Stevens.
Beyond that, it’s not uncommon for narrow elections to be decided based on dubious knowledge on the part of the voters. Candidates are often smeared with unfounded charges by their opponents and occasionally even charged with actual crimes for which they are subsequently exonerated. Them’s unfortunately the breaks. There are no do-overs.
Needless to say, I agree with Jon Henke that sticking up for Ted Stevens is not a plank I’d like to see the Republican Party run on.
First: Maggie Mama - Last week it was the HRP-4C Fashion Robot. Now the Japanese have rolled out the DNC-09 Obama Robot: whenever he opens his mouth, my stock portfolio burns.
Second: IrishTexan - When asked for his remarks after destroying the Staypuff Marshmallow man in their much anticipated rematch, Casper said “Hey, anyone want S’Mores????”
Third:Elmo - Who dares disturb the great and powerful Obie ….
HONORABLE MENTION
elliot - That’s our new human resources director, don’t ever let him tell you… “you’re fired”.
Stormy Dragon - This robot was actually built to appear in Gay Pride Parades. You can tell because it’s flaming.
ℛODNEY’S BOTTOM OF THE BARREL
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun ‘Bot.
The Three Laws of Robotics be more suggestions than actual rules…
With the appearance of an up-armored Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man everyone realized what Don Rumsfeld had been up to since leaving the Bush Administration.
UPDATE (April 2 - Bumped to top): After a little more than 24 hours of testing, it seems that the system has some quirks. I’m going to disable it for now and either spend time trying to deal with said issues or perhaps look for another plugin.
As one who reads most of the comments on the blog (I don’t get auto-sent emails on posts written by my cobloggers), there are a handful of regular commenters who simultaneously don’t qualify as trolls yet tend to derail the discussions. So, in theory at least, I like the idea of both a user rating system and threaded debates.
Readers: What did you like about IntenseDebate vice the organic commenting system? What didn’t you like?
_______________________________
I’m trying out IntenseDebate, a new hosted commenting system that allows threaded comments — i.e., conversations within the conversation — and user ratings that I saw over at The League.
If it turns out to be better than the old system, I may or may not get around to importing old comments. If it turns out to suck, I’ll disable it and go back to the old system.
Feel free to comment on the new commenting system in the comment section below, using the new commenting system.
Note: For now, at least, the new system displays if you either go to the permalink or click “Discussion.” Clicking “Show comments here” on posts which already has comments, however, will generate the standard WordPress comments.
As the NATO heads of government prepare to converge on Kehl and Strasbourgh for the Alliance’s 60th anniversary Summit, they’re facing extreme skepticism from some heavy hitters in the security policy community. Ted Galen Carpenter terms it a “Hollow Alliance.” Andrew Bacevich wants the USA to quit in order to save it. Mark Medish wants to rename it POTATO.
In my New Atlanticist rejoinder, “The Case For NATO,” I acknowledge that their criticisms have merit but that they’re missing the big picture.
Firms spend millions and go through a lot to keep their workers from goofing off on the Internet. That may not be such a good idea:
Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It’ll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.
The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not. Study author Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing, said “workplace Internet leisure browsing,” or WILB, helped to sharpened workers’ concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration,” Coker said on the university’s website (www.unimelb.edu.au/) “Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days’ work, and as a result, increased productivity,” he said.
Since I’ve always simply presumed this to be the case — at least for those whose jobs are primarily intellectual — it’s hard to dub this finding “counterintuitive.” And, it should be stressed, this finding holds true only up to a point.
However, Coker said the study looked at people who browsed in moderation, or were on the Internet for less than 20 percent of their total time in the office. “Those who behave with Internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without,” he said.
Shocking.
Hat tip: DrewM. Photo by Flickr user tueexperto, used under Creative Commons license.
Rand Fishking and Darren Rowse have noted a remarkable decline in the social nature of blogs, most notably the culture of inter-linking, and think Twitter and other social media outlets may be partly to blame.
In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn’t uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What’s happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:
Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
Blogging, at least in the “bleeding edge” technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.) is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there’s certainly some circumstanstial evidence - just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 - there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.
They offer a bit of data to support their thesis but admit that it’s rough.
Based on my own observations — and I’m only casually involved with Twitter, Facebook, and other non-blog social media outlets — the first of these bullets strikes me as more plausible than the others.
The professionalization of blogging and the rise of automatic aggregators has shaken out the pocket-Glenn Reynolds types, leaving essayists and discussion leaders in the ascendency. Most of the “serious” blogs now create quasi-unique content and/or (as this post is attempting to do) bring attention to content from outside their niche into a wider discussion.
The hundreds of blogs that once existed mostly as true web logs — i.e., mostly just pointing to content elsewhere that the proprietor finds interesting — have mostly withered away. There’s just not a market for them (perhaps because the professional bloggers are cranking out too much content and people don’t have time to read anything else.) It’s quite plausible that those folks have moved in to Twitter.
The second part of that first bullet is right, too. The linking culture that still persists on political blogs is much less common in other niches. Although I’m no longer actively posting, I own celebrity and sports blogs and there’s virtually no tradition of source acknowledgment in those sub-spheres. Celebrity blogs in particular generally pass off cut-and-paste content from elsewhere as their own.
Photo by Flickr user HGruber, used under Creative Commons license.
The stories of Obama appointees whose integrity had heretofore been unassailed having to file amended tax returns are now so common that I don’t find them blogworthy. Paul Caron’s post yesterday (via Insty) on how visiting professors on sabatical from their home institutions, though, provides yet another opportunity to examine the bewildering complexity of our tax code.
He passes along an article [PDF] whose abstract helpfully notes:
A sabbatical leave and a visiting position at another university offers professors many professional and financial advantages. Among the financial advantages are often favorable taxation of the expenses incurred and income earned at the expenses earned at the visiting university. This paper discusses the tax implications of a visiting position including the rules of eligibility for traveling deductions, rules for deducting travel and transportation expenses, implications of taking a position outside of the United States, the problems caused by the Alternative Minimum Tax and other related issues. Also covered are the recorded keeping requirements and the use of the federal per diem allowances.
Re: the AMT, he includes this suggestion:
It is really important for visiting professors to negotiate well with their institutions. Insist up front that your travel expenses (to and from) and living expenses while there (rent) are “reimbursed employee business expenses” and thus excludable under Treas. Reg. § 1.62-4(c). Do NOT negotiate for a higher salary, out of which you will pay these expenses yourself (which are deductible only the exent in excess of the 2% floor under the regular tax and are not deductible at all under the AMT).
This raises at least several obvious questions. First, why in the hell does the U.S. tax code treat visiting professors differently than their cohorts earning the same salary and benefits down the hall? Second, shouldn’t your average PhD be able to file his own taxes without the advice of micro-specialists in tax law? Third, isn’t forcing people to keep elaborate records solely for the purposes of filing taxes an incredible waste of productive time?
Our tax system is simply insane.
Photo by Flickr user Cayusa under Creative Commons license.
Democratic contender Scott Murphy made a novel use of Google AdSense during the closing hours of the very tight race for New York’s 20th Congressional District, Kate Kaye reports for Tech President.
Call it the “Google Surge” or the “Google Network Blast,” the ad tactic has piqued the interest of old-school political media consultants typically reluctant to consider using Internet ads for anything other than fundraising or building supporter lists. From late Sunday night through noon yesterday, ads for Democratic contender Scott Murphy blanketed Web pages viewed by residents of the district, which encompasses Saratoga Springs, Lake Placid, Glens Falls, and Oneonta. The tactic tested by the Murphy campaign involves serving up ads on behalf of one advertiser on most or all of the Google content network pages generated within a short period within a specific geographic area, in this case New York’s 20th congressional district and some surrounding areas to catch local commuters at work.
[...]
The goal is akin more to a classic television campaign than a typical online political ad effort. In short, the Google blasters aim to persuade voters just before an election by getting their ad messages in front of them multiple times within a short time frame.
The Murphy campaign expected to hit the district’s 650,000 residents who visited a site in Google’s AdSense network with around 12.5 million display ad impressions during the 36-hour period before noon Tuesday. “I assume the GOP had some Google ads going, just not at the level we were at during the 36-hour period before noon Tuesday,” said de Villis.
Google itself suggested this strategy to Democratic and Republican media consultants a few weeks back. At $25,000 for 12.5 million impressions, I’d expect to see more of this sort of thing. Of course, if both candidates are bidding for the space, the price will go up and may no longer be such a great buy.
Beyond that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this practice drew the attention of campaign finance reform advocates, charging that it’s unfair to give such valuable space to only one candidate.
via memeorandum
In addition to uncertain healthcare services, economic disadvantages, and finding a place to call home, veterans certainly do not need any more challenges. Unfortunately, the wounds of war can be less obvious than those that we can see. Psychological disorders and sicknesses caused by toxic exposure can be the most damaging aspects of war that veterans bring home. Toxin exposure in particular is of particular concern as previous exposure to asbestos among veterans is causing incidence of the aggressive cancer mesothelioma to rise among former members of the armed services. We must not leave those who risked their lives for our nation in the cold. Our veterans have never questioned the right or wrong of war when it mattered most. They simply did as they were trained. We must now show the same unwavering determination, in all ways we are able, by affording those opportunities to which they are entitled, including financial, medical and emotional support to all veterans.
Isn’t true if you engage in a lifestyle that most people find icky. You know that pledge that if you make less than $250,000/year you won’t see an increase in your taxes? Yeah, well not if you smoke.
