Dear Just About Every Tea Partier:

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How do you like your Obama tax cut?

By the way, remember that “47% of people don’t pay Federal income taxes” cannard? Yeah, here’s the rest of the story. Like pretty much everything else the nutbird loony right trots out as a “fact,” it’s hopelessly wrong (hint #1: it doesn’t count payroll taxes).

Forty-seven percent.

That’s the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007, and it has become a popular talking point on cable television and talk radio. With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.

Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number.

More here, at Yahoo Finance, which finishes with this:

Obama has pushed tax cuts for low- and middle-income families and tax increases for the wealthy, arguing that wealthier taxpayers fared well in the past decade, so it’s time to pay up. The nation’s wealthiest taxpayers did get big tax breaks under Bush, with the top marginal tax rate reduced from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and the second-highest rate reduced from 36 percent to 33 percent.

But income tax rates were lowered at every income level. The changes made it relatively easy for families of four making $50,000 to eliminate their income tax liability.

Here’s how they did it, according to Deloitte Tax:

The family was entitled to a standard deduction of $11,400 and four personal exemptions of $3,650 apiece, leaving a taxable income of $24,000. The federal income tax on $24,000 is $2,769.

With two children younger than 17, the family qualified for two $1,000 child tax credits. Its Making Work Pay credit was $800 because the parents were married filing jointly.

The $2,800 in credits exceeds the $2,769 in taxes, so the family makes a $31 profit from the federal income tax. That ought to take the sting out of April 15.

Go, Astros!

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And take the Texans with you. Stros “improve” to 0 and 8 and remain the only winless team in MLB; they are the team that 1-8 Baltimore looks at and says “Whew! At least we’re not them!”

One more game in St. Louis (12:40 this afternoon) before a 3 game series with the Cubbies (4-4) this weekend. They could come home with a new club record if they stay focused! 0-10 here we come!

Canon Uber Alles

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The season finale of House was shot with a Canon 5D Mk II. The 5D is Canon’s “prosumer” DSLR camera — in other words, it’s a still camera that also takes HD video, not a purpose-built HD video camera.

At $2,500, it’s not cheap, but it’s also not so expensive that normal (but devoted) photographers can’t have one — it’s laptop territory, not used-car territory.

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Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld: Worse than you thought

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Check it out:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”…

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”…

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

Backup Update

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At first I thought it was unreasonable that the proximity of completion was exciting to me, and then I remembered it’s been running for a month and a half.

crashplan-update.png

So, how’s YOUR backup plan coming?

“Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.”

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Gizmodo has an appreciation of the ultimate gadget: The sadly grounded SR-71 Blackbird.

One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again. To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars Shooting stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound. I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight.

The excerpt also includes an account of a flight over Libya during which the author and his recon officer were fired upon. Apparently, when you’re in an SR-71, a perfectly acceptable defensive maneuver is to simply accelerate, which they did. To Mach 3.5+, over three and a half times the speed of sound.

Whoa.

Sadly, the author’s book is out of print, and the only copies available are limited edition, signed pressings at $400+ a pop. Oh well.

Obituary of the Year

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How call must you be to have your obit headlined “Cantankerous Hellfighter”? Coots Matthews was that cool, which comes as no surprise since he was one of Red Adair‘s folks before going out on his own.

Also, the obit starts with this joke:

A joke has it that St. Peter was showing a Texan around heaven, with the Texan claiming that everything he saw was better in Texas. St. Peter tired of the routine and pointed to the fire of hell. “Do you have anything like that in Texas?” he asked. The Texan said no, then added, “But there are a couple good old boys in Houston who can put it out for you.”

In which we notice things a few days late

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For several days, I’ve had this Mefi link open in a tab, and I didn’t get around to clicking through until now. It’s Robert Kennedy at a rally on 4 April 1968, announcing that Dr King had been killed. (Yeah, kids: back then, you didn’t learn every news story immediately. Crazy, I know.)

He spoke off the cuff, with no notes. It’s probably not a waste of time to wonder, just for a minute, what might have happened had a second President Kennedy been elected that fall, and not Richard Nixon; instead, of course, RFK himself was assassinated two months later.

A transcript follows; how awesome was he that he could get away with quoting Aeschylus?

I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some — some very sad news for all of you — Could you lower those signs, please? — I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King — yeah, it’s true — but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past, but we — and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.

Color me shocked

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Whoa:

Hold on to your hats. At a town hall meeting in Oklahoma City last week, staunch conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) defended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, disparaged Fox News and told a constituent her fears about the health care law were unfounded.

When a woman in the audience asked Coburn if it was illegal for the government to jail citizens for not complying with the new health care law, Coburn responded by blaming TV news, and Fox News in particular, for that false rumor:

“The intention is not to put anybody in jail,” Coburn said. “That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn’t the intention.”

Later, when his audience started to boo at the mention of Pelosi, Coburn stopped them.

“Come on now… how many of you all have met her? She’s a nice person,” Coburn said. “Just because somebody disagrees with you, doesn’t mean they’re not a good person.”

“Don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody’s no good,” Coburn added.

Coburn urged audience members to widen their points of view by reading and watching different media outlets, not just the ones they agree with.

He will, of course, now be targeted by the Tea Partiers as a RINO, and sacked.

Suck it, publishers

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The NYT’s Ethicist says “Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform.” in response to a question about the ethics of downloading an illegal digital copy of a book previously purchased in hardback.

Cohen gets it. Publishers don’t, at least not yet. Here’s the whole bit:

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin “Under the Dome,” the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

Unsurprisingly, many in the book business take a harder line. My friend Jamie Raab, the publisher of Grand Central Publishing and an executive vice president of the Hachette Book Group, says: “Anyone who downloads a pirated e-book has, in effect, stolen the intellectual property of an author and publisher. To condone this is to condone theft.”

Yet it is a curious sort of theft that involves actually paying for a book. Publishers do delay the release of e-books to encourage hardcover sales — a process called “windowing” — so it is difficult to see you as piratical for actually buying the book ($35 list price, $20 from Amazon) rather than waiting for the $9.99 Kindle edition.

(There’s more; click through.)

The Northern Virginia Police Hate You

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Radley Balko explains just how hostile the NoVa departments are to routine citizen oversight, transparency, and even existing sunshine laws. The quotes in this story are absolutely staggering, and appear utterly at odds with the stone cold fact that power, unsupervised, leads to corruption and abuse every single time.

How can you tell the TSA is full of shit?

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They’re talking. Check out “Full-body scanners improve security, TSA says” at CNN; it’s chock full of bullshit.

  1. “Full-body imaging machines that see through clothes have significantly improved security in airports where they are deployed, and have revealed more than 60 “artfully concealed” illegal or prohibited items in the past year, the Transportation Security Administration says.” This is dishonesty via implication; certainly people take things on planes TSA has prohibited. They do it because the TSA’s regulations are bullshit, and they do it with no plans for anything more nefarious than trimming their nails or cutting open boxes while they’re traveling. This supposed catch of 60 items doesn’t translate into 60 thwarted plots. It translates to zero thwarted plots. Improved compliance will bullshit rules just gets us more bullshit.

  2. “As evidence of the machines’ capabilities, the security agency released five photos of drugs or suspected drugs that airport screeners found after scans revealed anomalies on the ghost-like images of people’s bodies. The agency said metal detectors would not have revealed the items.” This is completely irrelevant. The TSA’s job isn’t to search for contraband. The TSA’s job is (supposedly) to check for safety. They have no mandate to pat us down for drugs, and no business doing so.

At least the article points out an opposing view, from John Perry Barlow:

But some passengers say the machine’s capabilities are presenting new Fourth Amendment questions about the government’s searches, saying the machines — in detecting very small objects — are subjecting passengers to scrutiny beyond what is needed to safeguard the plane.

“I can’t imaging an explosive that is powerful enough in that [tea-bag size] quantity to endanger an aircraft,” said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who once took the TSA to court after a search of his checked luggage revealed a small amount of drugs.

“Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth Amendment, and often we have to reclaim the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives us powers that were not envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” Barlow said.

I recently encountered some of these no doubt very expensive machines in Kansas City. They’re a complete waste of time and money, and materially increase the amount of time and hassle required to get on an airplane. Somebody needs to put the kibosh on these things quick, but that won’t happen — I’m sure palms have been greased, explicitly or implicitly. The TSA gets to point at these machines and say “look what we’re doing!”, and most people will believe them. And the scanner makers laugh all the way to the goddamn bank while those of us just trying to travel pay the price.

It’s almost ten years later, and we’re still freaking out so much I can’t help but imagine Osama chuckling in his cave over all this. Jesus.

Game over, man! Game over!

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It should come as no surprise to any of you that the background music for the Bill Paxton Pinball Machine is, at least part of the time, How Can The Laboring Man Find Time For Self Culture.

It should go without saying that any such machine — featuring as it does “Big Love” multi-ball mode — must obviously be the best example of pinball ever created. A shame there’s only one of them. There’s video, by the way.

(Obvious choice for alternate post title: “You’re stewed, dickwad.”)

Oh, Fox. Stay classy.

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Fox has got Sarah Palin tied to some interview show, but they’re using interviews conducted quite some time ago by people other than Palin as filler. Douchey, right? It gets better: it turns out some of those interviewees aren’t too keen on being associated with Palin. One of the folks they picked was LL Cool J, who took exception to his association with the rightwingnut on Twitter:

Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW

Fox responded with predictable maturity:

Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith’s interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career.

Note their absolute insistence on missing the point (LL doesn’t want to be associated with Palin, or with an enterprise that makes money for Palin); they instead suggest he’s somehow anti-hero. But the best part is their persistent usage of “Mr. Smith” (LL’s actual name is Jason Todd Smith), and their junior-high mean-girls-bitchy crack about his “fledgling” acting career. News flash, Fox: LL started acting before you existed; his first credit is from 1986. But we know how hard it is for Fox News to do something as basic as check facts, so knock yourself out.

Now it appears that Toby Keith is also not happy about his inclusion. DeLIGHTful.

Remember David Frum?

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He’s the principled conservative who, after watching the GOP decide to oppose HCR at all costs, posted a pretty accurate “I told you so” on his site a few days ago.

Frum was, at that time, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He’s since been dismissed. Cause and effect is left as an exercise to the reader.