Its not the job of government at whatever level. to protect people from themselves, to micro-manage their lives and say you can do this or that with your life or your body. In case you haven’t noticed, this blog is not in favor of the nanny state. What government should do as a protector but not director of society is to develop and broadcast good information on what is good for you and what isn’t good for you. Individual citizens can then make decisions about their own lives.
This would be an interesting way to raise the much needed revenue to rebuild America’s infrastructure system but, as I’ve argued in the past, we wouldn’t need to go to this length if we created a National Infrastructure Bank instead. That would prioritize the national infrastructure projects that our country actually needs, real projects that support strong economic and job growth as opposed to pork .
A National Infrastructure Bank was proposed by senators John Kerry (D) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R)in the 112th Congress. This would be an independent corporation created by Congress. It would simply prioritize national infrastructure projects and then find funding for them in the private sector by bringing in investors. It would make profits from the investments from tolls and fees that users would pay to use the roads, bridges, airports etc.
This is how we should paying for infrastructure improvements, moving past Congress to create an organization that could work on its own without taxpayer funds, collecting revenue from the projects. Our country would have all of the revenue needed to pay for its infrastructure requirements and not need to go to a dysfunctional Congress every year to meet its cash requirements.
The Orioles blew great opportunities to put together a real dynasty in the 1970s and become the MLB team of the 1970s. Yes, they won two World Series from 1966-71 and won three American League Championships and four AL Eastern Championships from 1966-73. They could easily have accomplished so much more but instead they lost the 1969 World Series to the New York Mets, an inferior team even with their great pitching. They then did not play up to their capabilities against the Pirates in the 1971 World Series.
Mike Tyson was the most devastating and intimidating force in boxing for about five years from some point in 1985 to 1990 and I could end the story right there because that pretty much sums up his career. Oh wait, you want the rest of the story. A man who was the most devastating and intimidating force in boxing for five years, who was undisputed World Heavyweight Champion during that time is not good enough for you. You actually want more than that?
That was really the only productive part of his career. He was not only champion but was also winning fights against major contenders. For the rest of his career, he was either in prison, beating fighters who had no business fighting him, or losing to simply better fighters like Evander Holyfield, twice, and Lennox Lewis.
But the five-year run that he did have was one of the most impressive careers any boxer had. Not just because of the fights he won and how long he was undisputed World Heavyweight Champion but also because of how he won the fights, the title, and how he defended it against the best. It is not his fault that he fought in a relatively weak era.
“The counterintuitive argument that Putin should be considered a hero of American conservatives probably originated with the founder of this magazine who asked last year whether in “the culture war for mankind’s future,” Russian President Vladimir Putin was “one of us,” speculating that the former member of the Soviet Communist Party and ex-KGB agent was, well, a paleoconservative.
Other conservative-leaning pundits perpetuated the meme. Matt Drudge called Putin the “leader of the free world,” while Victor Davis Hanson, who in what sounded like a bizarre S&M fantasy, ruminated that “Putin is almost Milton’s Satan–as if, in his seductive evil, he yearns for clarity, perhaps even a smackdown, if not just for himself, for us as well.”
More recently, the British Spectator magazine published a big “think” piece suggesting that Putin actually hopes to become the “the leader of global social conservatism.” The Daily Show even ran a spoof titled, “Better Off Red,” which portrayed Russia as the new “conservative paradise.”
I’m not trying to sound overly partisan or harsh and when my dad reads this he might say, “Why not?”. But when I think of Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, I think of the militant wing of the so-called Christian-Right in America in America.
Except that Vladimir Putin has his own state, government, security and military forces, to protect him and to do what he wants to do, which is remain the President (or dictator) of the Russian Federation for the rest of his life. And perhaps rule over the rest of the Slavic World as well.
Leon Hader is exactly right. Vladimir Putin is not a Conservative. He doesn’t believe in the rule of law, checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, strong but limited national and foreign security policy. He simply believes in power and wants that power to be for himself and everyone who looks at the world exactly as he does, especially other ethnic-Russians, in outside of Russia.
The current use of the process of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons is deplorable. There are no guidelines relating the length of confinement to severity of offense. The process is used at the discretion of onsite officials. This results in wide variations with some cruel and counterproductive results. Indefinite solitary confinement is simply inhumane and can only intensify anti-social tendencies in inmates suffering any psychological disturbance.
Solitary confinement should be used as a punishment that is commensurate with the offense committed and the need to convince the inmate that objectionable behavior is unacceptable. It may provide a needed cooling-off period when there is conflict in the prison population. It should be managed by psychological professionals.
Inmates considered too disturbed to live in the prison population are sometimes subjected to indefinite solitary confinement because the onsite authorities have no other strategy for managing them. This experience only makes them worse and makes the job of dealing with them much more difficult for the prison staff whose professional training is often inadequate. These inmates need to be in prison hospitals where they can do their time and get the mental health care they need. Rotting away in solitary confinement only makes them worse. Cutting them off from the prison world and outside world all together just makes them meaner and angrier and more convinced that they have nothing left to lose. They take that anger out on the first people they see. The really hard to manage inmates, who have consistent records of violently acting out, should be in mental institutions where they can get the help that they need.
A lot of us when we were kids had the experience of being sent to the office for acting out in class and even doing an in-school suspension. The penalty box in a hockey game is an example of what isolation units in prisons should be for the mentally healthy inmates, a place they go for short-term punishment but then they go back to their normal prison life.
Myra Breckinridge is not the movie that made Raquel Welch a star. Myra Breckinridge was a loser at the box office no matter how funny it was. It was one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. It might of been an official loser but Raquel was great and hilarious in it and it was, in a several ways, a great movie.
Jennifer Rubin, in her Washington Post column today, said that there’s nothing in the Bible that says Christians should deny gays service because of their homosexuality. The more of her I read, the more she sounds like an actual conservative, like George Will or Charles Krauthammer, not someone who just calls herself a conservative. This closes the case, as far as I’m concern, because this has never been about freedom of religion. It’s been about finding an excuse for discrimination based on sexuality after excuses for discrimination based on race, ethnicity and gender have failed.
Discriminating against gays is the far-right’s last shot of pushing what they see as their moral agenda and turning America back to the 1950s. They failed to justify discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and women and people of religious minorities. Their one last gasp at discrimination against people whom they consider “other” is now aimed at gays who want to marry. It is failing horribly for them so they have now moved to denying gays service in the public domain simply because they are gay.
No one is saying that Christians or Muslims or people of any other religion can’t view homosexuality as a sin but where that stops is how people treat each other and how they act. You can call someone a fag or sinner or anything else you want short of murderer or rapist but you can’t physically attack or deny people service because of their sexuality and for no other reason than that. Again this is not about Freedom of Religion but trying to create a freedom to discriminate.
The Washington Post: Jennifer Rubin
In the end, it was politically, economically and morally impossible for Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to countenance a state law allowing businesses to discriminate against gays because of anti-gay bias as long as they presented their objection as rooted in religious faith. (What part of the Bible requires a restaurant owner to deny a gay couple a table?)
If todays so-called Progressives only knew how tough Bobby Kennedy was on corruption in organized labor as Attorney General of the United States, then I don’t believe he would as popular with organized labor and the far-left community as he is today. RFK was one of the toughest and, perhaps, the most effective Attorney General we’ve ever had.
Attorney General Kennedy and his brother Jack, the President of the United States, when they took office in 1961, saw organized crime as one of the biggest threats to national security and the Rule of Law in America. Their Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, didn’t even acknowledge organized crime as a problem in America. The brothers launched a campaign that was so effective that it put corrupt union bosses like Jimmy Hoffa in prison.
I believe that the real legacy of Robert Kennedy is the bringing down of organized crime and the reduction of its impact on the United States. This, along with his very effective work in the civil right movement was the early product of what would’ve been a brilliant career in public service had the man not of been assassinated in 1968.
I believe America needs both a short-term and a long-term tax reform plan not only because of our current partisan makeup in power but also because of our long-term economic outlook. The short-term plan is based on what can be passed now, which would improve our economy and give us a functioning and understandable tax code that anyone could understand that promotes economic and job growth. But long term, we are going to need something much better than that, which is even simpler and does a better job of promoting both economic and job growth as well as help us pay down our debt and deficit.
Short term, as far as a good plan that has any shot in hell of passing in this Congress or the next Congress, we need to simplify the code, and that means getting rid of a lot of wasteful tax deductions and credits, especially as they relate to businesses. We need to lower our corporate and business taxes on all investments and profits made inside the United States, so a 25 percent corporate tax rate sounds good to me, as long as you eliminate all corporate welfare, including agricultural welfare.
The home mortgage deduction needs to be reformed but not eliminated for all single or primary homes where people either live or work full-time up to, let’s say, $1 million and index that for inflation. But for all homes worth more than the HMD this would no longer apply and all vacation homes would no longer be eligible for the HMD, but someone with a home for work and for living could get the HMD for both places, just as long as they together are both worth under a million dollars, so we could stop the HMD for people who do not need it.
I could go along with keeping the top income tax rate where it is, or even lower, just as long as the wealthy are taxed on all of their income including capital gains so you no longer see people like Mitt Romney, who is worth over $200 million, only paying 15 percent in taxes. We should increase the cap on Social Security to, let’s say, $500,000 or $1 million so a 6 percent payroll tax applies to everyone equally, and lower taxes on the middle class as well as eliminating wasteful loopholes like deducting State and local sales taxes.
So that would be my short-term tax reform plan, but long term I would scrap the income tax and replace it with a Progressive National Consumption Tax so we are taxing people based on what they take out of society and no longer tax people based on what they produce for society because if we really want to create long-term economic and job growth, we need to stop taxing people for producing and instead tax people for taking.
I call this the Progressive National Consumption Tax (PNCT) for a good reason, because it would still be progressive. We would have lower taxes on things that people need to live well, like food, health care, and so forth, rent for middle class and low-income apartments, and middle income housing, to use as examples, but tax luxuries or entertainment higher, such as luxury cars, ballgames, yachts, vacations, movies, as examples. We need to encourage people not to stop doing what they are doing but to be smarter with their money.
The PNIT again would be progressive because low-income workers would still get their Earned Income Tax Credit simply by reporting their income to the IRS every year and would have to be truthful and accurate about that. But even before they get their EITC and pay taxes, they spend so little because they make so little and generally spend most of their money on what they need that they would have a very low tax rate.
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