Category: Politics, Religion & Money

At the beginning of the year, the news was this:

Tax Cuts Offer Most for Very Rich, Study Says

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: January 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 — Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.
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Families in the middle fifth of annual earnings, who had average incomes of $56,200 in 2004, saw their average effective tax rate edge down to 2.9 percent in 2004 from 5 percent in 2000. That translated to an average tax cut of $1,180 per household, but the tax rate actually increased slightly from 2003.

Tax cuts were much deeper, and affected far more money, for families in the highest income categories. Households in the top 1 percent of earnings, which had an average income of $1.25 million, saw their effective individual tax rates drop to 19.6 percent in 2004 from 24.2 percent in 2000. The rate cut was twice as deep as for middle-income families, and it translated to an average tax cut of almost $58,000.

And today the news is this:

Buffett Says Estate-Tax Repeal Would Benefit Richest

By Alison Fitzgerald and Ryan J. Donmoyer

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) — Warren Buffett called on Congress to maintain the estate tax, saying that plans to repeal the levy would benefit a handful of the richest American families and widen U.S. income disparity.

Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., told the Senate Finance Committee that advocates of repeal were “dead wrong” to call the levy a “death tax.”

It would be more appropriate to call it a “death present,” said Buffett, 77, who is the third-richest person in the world, according to Forbes Magazine. “A meaningful estate tax is needed to prevent our democracy from becoming a dynastic plutocracy.” Heirs to vast fortunes, he said, have already won the “ovarian lottery” and shouldn’t be further rewarded by the tax system.

But enough reading. Let’s watch a video!

[flv:/Video/NOV07/Smirnoff.flv 400 300]

In honor of American military veterans, here is a excerpt of the Glee Club of the USMA at West Point singing ‘America’. A DVD is available at Stand Ye Ready.
[flv:/Video/NOV07/USMA.flv 400 300]
Veterans Day is intended for the living, but during a time of armed conflict it is sadly also a memorial day. I compared the list of glee club singers against a list of Army fatalities in Iraq, and found these two matches.

09/14/04	Brown, Tyler Hall	1st BN, 9th INF REG, 2nd Infantry Division	Camp Hovey, Korea
10/31/03	Bryant, Todd J.	1st BN, 34th Armor REG, 1st Infantry Division	Fort Riley, KS

May they rest in peace.

A while ago I said that the traveling exhibition called ‘Bodies’ was coming to Framingham, Massachusetts. Well, it’s here, and having seen Bodyworld 2 last year, I recommend staying away. A local pharmacist named Aaron Ginsburg is speaking out against the exhibit, and while I may not feel as strongly as he does, I think he’s on track with his comments, which you can read by clicking here.

The medical advisor of the show claims, in this article from the Metrowest Daily News, that…

…all bodies in the exhibit died of natural causes and were unclaimed. Under Chinese law they were acquired by Dalian Medical University for research and loaned to Premier Exhibitions for the show. After the exhibit, they will be either donated to U.S. medical institutions or returned to China to be cremated and interred.

Do I believe this? Nah. But even if it’s true, some of the displays of human bodies I saw last year at Bodyworld 2, including a literal chest of drawers, aren’t about education, so much as they are about desecration.

Did Jack Kevorkian have a point about dying with dignity? Sure he did. But, c’mon, didn’t it seem there was something “off” about the way he went about it? Same thing, in my view, with Gunther von Hagens saying these body exhibits are solely educational, and Mel Gibson’s claim that he was interested only in portraying the suffering of Jesus in ‘The Passion of The Christ.’ In my opinion, these guys are acting out something very deep and dark.

This week’s issue of Newsweek speculates on New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, no longer a Republican, as a wild card candidate for President. This raises an amazing prospect of the top candidates being a Catholic and a Mormon, a woman and a black man, and a Jew. It’s going to be a perfect storm of an election!

This quote from the article reminded me of something.

Landing at the Wall Street heliport earlier this year, after the mayor announced he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent, President Bush gestured to Marine One and told Bloomberg: “That bird could be yours.”

It reminded me that my brother is one of the people who maintains Marine One. He and I do not share the same opinion of Dubya.

Mark Evanier’s friend Harry Shearer (Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls, and both Burns and Smiters on The Simpsons) puts some fun back into the sport of waterboarding.

The PBS series FRONTLINE has a program on the situation between America and Iran. This is a must-see explanation of how we got where we are. Is it any surprise that Bush has screwed up everything, at every turn? I have to conclude this was done intentionally because the policy from Day 1 has been to go to war. The only other explanation is outright incompetence. Of course, both intent and incompetence are possible.

Fortunately, it’s up to Congress to declare war, and there’s no way that’s going to happen. If Bush and Cheney act on their own, claiming coverage by the powers granted in October 2002, there would be grounds for immediate impeachment proceedings.

You can watch ‘Showdown With Iran’ either on TV or online.

Oh, look. It’s Richard Armitage. The man who compromised national security by revealing Valerie Plame‘s identity as a covert CIA operative to right wing-nut columnist Robert Novak.