Category: News

Blackfive reports on U.S. citizenship granted to Laotian Hmong refugees:

The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.

“I can’t believe we’ll be Americans,” said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. “We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere.”

I’ve got three words that express my sentiment for earnest immigrants, particularly those who helped the United States in the past, who would come to this country with hope of a better life and the will to make it so:

Bring ’em on.

From today’s StLToday.com:

Advertising is ubiquitous nowadays, with marketers using product placements on television shows, linking words in magazine articles with ads and, as an ad firm working for Toyota recently did, temporarily tattooing pitches on people’s foreheads.

“It’s a littering of the mental landscape,” MacFarlane said. “We live in a culture that pushes the fear of not succeeding, getting sick, of being alone. … Advertisers sidle up to us and say: ‘Hi, we love you. We understand. But isn’t there something wrong with your life?'”

Words from Paul MacFarlane, left-wing hippie advertising mogul.

Something of this smacks of poserism. The dude spouts antimaterialism, but is a successful advertising guy with an office in Downtown St. Louis and who lives in West County. Spare me the bobo.

Perhaps the title tag of the StLToday page says it all: Help

Lileks on that coastal elite, nanny-statist Andrew Sullivan in today’s Bleat:

Okay.
As you may know, Andrew Sullivan has famously proposed hiking gas prices by a dollar to reduce the deficit and pay for the Iraq campaign. Don’t get me wrong – I have a great deal of respect for Andrew.

But.

Here I disagree. Low gas prices are bad for the economy and bad for drivers, he says – the sort of statement that makes you read everything that follows with wry detached amusement, the same way you’d regard an article on canine training that began “dogs respond remarkably well to feng shui.” You read on because it can only get better.

He refers to gas as “woefully undertaxed.” If one uses the phrase “woefully undertaxed” one may be correct, but one should not be surprised when one’s conservative bona fides are called into question. You could make the argument that cable TV is woefully undertaxed. Peanut butter is woefully undertaxed. Once
you’ve identified a good that can be cured by additional taxation, well, everything is woefully undertaxed. There aren’t any pro-war movies being made! We could fund them with a movie tax! Popcornn is woefully undertaxed! He says:

The truly needy tend to consume less gas than their middle-class compatriots. Others say it penalizes those in remote and rural areas. So what?

Some conservatives say it’s antithetical to the American Dream. Hooey.

Lileks must have made it further into the piece than I did to discover Sullivan’s contention that it’s okay to disproprotionatlely tax the people in the heartland (that is, everyone between the Rockies and the Appalachians) because we don’t matter.

Bollucks on Sullivan, again.

Andrew Sullivan has actually gone mad:

TAX GAS MORE: All of your opposition merely convinced me I was right. Here’s my Time column on why raising gas taxes would be a very good thing. Here’s Ramesh Ponnuru’s critique. Make your own mind up.

Make your mind up, but the more you oppose me, the more I convince myself I am right? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed? Yeek.

Here’s his argument for greater taxation to improve your behavior, citizen:

The worst knock against a gas tax is that it is, well, a tax. Who likes that? But with soaring deficits and a war to pay for, taxes are not an option — they’re a necessity. The only relevant question is, Which taxes? The case for a gas tax is a straightforward one. Gas prices are strikingly lower in America than anywhere else in the world; such taxes are relatively easy to collect; since an overwhelming majority of Americans drive, few avoid the tax; and by adding a cost to the wanton consumption of gasoline, you actually encourage conservation, accelerate fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, cut traffic and help wean Americans off the oil that requires the U.S. to be so intimately involved in that wonderful cesspool of rival hatreds, the Middle East. So what’s not to like?

As a source of tax money, recognize that money will be spent on programs with an ongoing basis, and that if the government successfully modifies the behavior of its foolish, short-sighted, and lesser mortal citizens, the government will need to make that amount of money up elsewhere. Which means deficits or other tax increases down the road.

Pretty soon, we’re going to have to stop calling Sullivan a “conservative,” aren’t we?

Reason’s Hit and Run links to an official proclamation that warns hapless American citizens (a redundancy in the mind of Those Who Are Noble Enough to Rule) about Canadian pot:

“Canada is exporting to us the crack of marijuana and it is a dangerous problem,” Walters told reporters in Miami, where he kicked off a campaign to cut marijuana use by Hispanic youths.

Let’s examine that metaphor. Canada (Canada!) is exporting to us the most addictive drug of drug. Crikey, it’s the cornflower blue of all blues! The Super Bowl of football games!

I think somewhere Walters has opened a rift in the Space-Metaphor continuum. Sure, it’s small now, but it’s growing, and someday soon discourse will be sucked into incomprehensibility.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Slate has a wonderfully insightful imaginative piece on the Alternative Minimum Tax as Bush’s Secret Tax on Democrats:

President Bush and the Republican Congress, who believe fervently in cutting taxes for the rich, are quietly presiding over a most remarkable kind of tax increase for high-income Americans.

The Alternative Minimum Tax is becoming a miserable annual tradition for a growing group of prosperous taxpayers. (If you’ve just received a nervous phone message from your accountant—that’s probably what she’s calling about.) The AMT traces its origins to a minimum tax enacted in 1970 when Americans were scandalized to learn that some 155 high-earning taxpayers owed no income taxes in 1966. The AMT was originally designed so that people who had a lot of income but loads of deductions—through the standard exemption, the ability to write off property taxes and state income taxes—couldn’t reduce their taxable income to next to nothing. Historically, it applied to a tiny minority of taxpayers. But with every passing year, more and more citizens are ushered behind the velvet ropes. This congressional backgrounder suggests that 1.8 million Americans paid it in 2001. Newsweek‘s nearly infallible Allan Sloan wrote earlier this month that “about 2.3 million returns for 2003 got nipped by the AMT.” The numbers are set to rise exponentially in the next several years. A two-income couple in New Jersey—he’s an accountant, she’s a public school teacher—with combined income of $230,000, three kids, and annual property taxes of $15,000, could easily fall into paying the AMT. Even government bureaucrats get nailed. Last year, IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson paid the AMT.

Got that? It was enacted in 1970, and it’s Bush’s secret weapon. Maybe that’s what he was doing when he was AWOL from Viet Nam, wot? Working in a secret laboratory devising a tax scheme to punish Michael Moore and Barbra Striesand in 2004.

I know about the AMT because I once worked for a startup and got stock options, and the AMT could have hit me badly if that company’s options had been worth exercising. It’s a crazy tax, but then again, I think most taxes are wasteful and most tax revenues are wasted. But the author of this bit “analyzes”:

Republicans don’t want to fix the AMT because fixing the AMT would require undoing their beloved tax cuts. Without the billions generated by millions of taxpayers getting slammed by the AMT, the marginal rate cuts would be impossible to sustain for the next several years, let alone make permanent. Without the AMT, the deficit picture would look far worse than it does.

No, actually Congress, which includes both mean Republicans and the kind-spirited but misunderstood by the ignorant heartland Democrats could cut income taxes AND eliminate the AMT if it would only cut spending, which is a far less palatable choice to the political porkivores.

The author of this piece, undoubtedly, is one of the persecuted residents of an enlightened coastal state s unfairly targeted for the AMT simply because he’s a nutbar the Republicans want to punish the Democrat-voting states. Tax and spend works much better when only the “spend” part touches you, ainna?

(James Joyner has more, albeit less snarky, about this article.)

South Milwaukee’s mayor was reelected by a single vote after a hand recount.

It goes to prove that your vote has the possibility of being the one that makes the difference.

Of course, the loser is planning to take the count to court, which further proves that no election will ever be settled in the future by mere vote-counting alone.

Overlawyered.com rounds up a summary of groups suing Wal-Mart. Why? Because it’s there. Now shut up and give me some free money, and my lawyers more free money.

Everyone wants to beat on Wal-Mart and Microsoft because they’re successful. Looks like we’ve about bred capitalism out of the country. Good work, social engineers.

The Palm Beach Post reports on the scourage of the sex bracelet:

The multicolored set of plastic bracelets many Palm Beach County middle and high school students are sporting these days aren’t just a fashionable fad.

At some schools, boys and girls snap off one of their classmate’s colored gel wrist bands in exchange for a corresponding sexual favor, health department officials told school board members Monday.

For example, a person wearing a white band may mean she is willing to kiss to the person who pulls it from her wrist. A red band means a lap dance and black is intercourse. The meanings may vary from school to school.

::Yawn:: Back in the eighties, we wore Satanic worship bracelets, wherein the color of the band indicated the animal (white means pigeon, red means chow puppy, and black meant kindergartner, but the meanings varied from school to school) to sacrifice.

I guess we in Generation X didn’t get the cool faddish urban legend.

In other news, Boots and Sabers will soon have more comments in their infamous Bracelets for Sex post, dated October 19, 2003, which the the Palm Beach Health Department probably used as in-depth research.

The Agitator reports that the definition of binge drinking has been revised:

Now, the NIAAA has backtracked a bit.
It now defines a binge as five drinks in two hours or less for men,
four in two hours for women. Seems more plausible, and seems like a
definition that would at least put most people over .08.

That’s good news, and it makes it easier for us at MfBJN to keep from binge drinking. As part of our non-binge drinking program, we recommend no more than four tallboys in two hours. That way, if you inadvertently consume an additional 40 ounces of cheap beer during the movie, you’re still within the bounds of reason.