America

A Terrorist In The Family

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Like everyone, I have been watching the troubling events unfolding in Boston with mounting concern and alarm.

At this early stage, there is not much to be said on this blog that cannot be easily read on Twitter, or seen on the wall-to-wall television coverage. But this video – an audio recording of the uncle of one of the Boston Marathon bombers reacting to the news of the death of his nephew, and the circumstances in which it happened – is very sobering indeed:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danoshinsky/boston-bombing-suspects-uncle-they-do-not-deserve-to-exist-o?sub=2157117_1090512

It appears that both men were enjoying asylum which had been granted to them by the United States of America, but at some point (either prior to or following their arrival) had become radicalised. Which can only lead us to wonder, given the apparent ease with which one can assemble a bomb using a pressure cooker and nails to maim the maximum number of people with the minimum of difficulty – how many other such angry, radicalised young people are currently living among us? And what can possibly be done to prevent a recurrence?

Santorum Lurks

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Rick Santorum

–

In case anyone was worried that Rick Santorum had taken his Republican primary election loss, or the GOP’s presidential election blow-out too much to heart, they need fear no longer.

RealClearPolitics reports that, undeterred by the now undeniable shift away from his socially regressive, paternalistic, authoritarian positions on just about all social issues, he is laying the groundwork to run for the Republican nomination once again in 2016.

Scott Conroy from RealClearPolitics writes:

The main event during Santorum’s impending return to Iowa will be his keynote speech in Urbandale at the annual spring fundraising dinner for the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, a Christian conservative group that holds deep influence among evangelical caucus-goers in the state. He also is slated to participate in a Des Moines luncheon on behalf of a pro-life medical research group.

In both appearances, Santorum is expected to defend what he has called the “soul of the Republican Party” against forces within it that are increasingly eager to downplay or reconsider longstanding aspects of its platform.

His eagerness to remain on the front lines of this intra-party fight comes after Santorum spent much of the 2012 campaign defending his hard-line positions on social issues while also aiming to expand his appeal by touting his blue-collar credentials and economic populism.

Apparently, Rick Santorum is particularly eager to ensure that the GOP does not follow in the footsteps of Senator Rob Portman and others, and continue to “evolve” on those social issues where they are increasingly at odds with public sentiment:

But well before the 2016 GOP field begins to take shape, Santorum’s paramount political priority is to push back against the winds of change within the party. In particular, he’s focused on a de-emphasis — and in some cases an evolution — of stances on social issues in order to attract more moderate voters in general elections and acknowledge shifts in the broader electorate’s views.

In an interview with the Des Moines Register this week that set the stage for his upcoming visit, Santorum was asked about the recent avowals of support for gay marriage made by Republican Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Mark Kirk of Illinois.

Santorum dismissed the growing notion that further movement within the GOP on the issue is inevitable, given polls showing a majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage.

“The Republican Party’s not going to change on this issue,” he said. “In my opinion, it would be suicidal if it did.”

I suppose one must admire Santorum’s consistency. He doesn’t believe that the GOP should evolve politically in terms of their stance on gay marriage, just as he rejects the notion of biological evolution in nature.

Two universal truths of politics in the United States of America – Iowa will continue to play a disproportionately large role in vetting and selecting presidential candidates given it’s sparse population and lack of relative real importance in the union; and Rick Santorum will remain thoroughly uncompromising on all matters social and “moral”.

Racism, Alive And Well In Georgia

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

I was astounded to see this particular video report from the excellent left-leaning online news show, The Young Turks.

In this clip, they are talking about a high school in Wilcox County, GA, which maintains “separate but equal” proms for their students. In the year 2013. And in fact, as is always the case, there is nothing “separate and equal” about the two proms – there is a white prom and an “integrated” prom. So if you are blessed to be a white student in Wilcox County, you are able to attend two parties, but if you made the error of being born black or mixed-race, then you have only one option.

And yes, the local police enforce the policy and eject any non-white student who attempts to enter the whites-only prom.

Huffington Post reports the same. Watch and be amazed.

 

Local supporters of this Jim Crow-era policy seem to be defending it on the grounds that the proms (despite their names and obvious affiliations to the high school in question) are actually hosted away from school property and paid for by donations from parents and local organisations, and are therefore exempt from any applicable desegregation laws. I’m pretty sure that the same excuse was used when school districts, public swimming pools and other facilities attempted to find legal ways to wriggle around that awkward “all men are created equal” nonsense in the declaration of independence.

I can’t even begin to articulate how screwed up this is. Georgia joins the list today.

An Angry Return To Blogging

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I have been busy for the past several weeks, which when combined with my boredom with both the Republican and Democratic party conventions, and more recently my being struck down with appendicitis, has meant that Semi-Partisan Sam has not seen much new activity lately.

I remain confined to the couch and hopped up on painkillers, and though sitting up and typing on a laptop still causes considerable discomfort, I am doing it because would like to say the following to the hosts of “Fox & Friends” on Fox News:

SHUT UP WITH ALL THIS STUFF ABOUT A “POLICY OF APPEASEMENT”. DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND THE FREAKING POINT OF HAVING A DIPLOMATIC SERVICE? AMERICAN EMBASSIES AND CONSULATES ARE NOT JUST THERE TO SERVE AS MASSIVE MEGAPHONES THROUGH WHICH THE UNITED STATES CAN GLOAT ABOUT ITS SUPERIORITY, OR CHIDE THEIR HOST NATIONS ABOUT THEIR VARIED SHORTCOMINGS. DIPLOMACY INVOLVES BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER COUNTRIES AND FOSTERING PERSONAL, ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL TIES, AND GOODWILL, IN SERVICE OF THE NATIONAL INTEREST. HOW DO YOU PROPOSE THAT THE AMERICAN NATIONAL INTEREST WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER SERVED IF THE LIBYAN CONSULATE AND EGYPTIAN EMBASSY HAD SENT OUT MESSAGES SAYING “FREE SPEECH RULES AND YES, WE DO THINK YOUR RELIGION IS A BIT DODGY. NOW BRING IT ON!!” ?

Aah, why am I bothering? You’re all ignorant at Fox, save the increasingly orange Shepard Smith, the hard-to-define Juan Williams and the curious case of Gretchen Carlson, who holds degrees from Stanford and Oxford and just pretends to be dumb sometimes (“I looked up the word ‘czar’ in the dictionary, and it said…”).

And to Mitt Romney:

WHEN AN EMBASSY SENDS OUT A MESSAGE CALLING FOR RESTRAINT IN UNNECESSARY VERBAL ATTACKS ON OTHER RELIGIONS, IT IS NOT TRYING TO SUPPRESS FREE SPEECH. NOR IS IT SYMPATHISING WITH “ATTACKERS” WHO WOULD NOT BESEIGE SAID EMBASSY FOR ANOTHER SEVERAL HOURS. TIME, FOR OUR PURPOSES, IS LINEAR.

There.

That is all.

Tax Breaks For Gold Medals

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Though neither of them have any intention of doing anything about it, in the run-up to the November elections both main political parties in America are at least making noises about the need to reform and simplify the massively complicated tax code in the United States. This is urgently needed – a thick, impenetrable layer of deductions and tax credits doled out by previous Congresses to the favoured special interests or wavering voting blocs of the day have led to an almost incomprehensible system, one which means higher marginal rates overall for everyone and one which benefits almost no one apart from the well-connected and their tax accountants.

So when “rising star” Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, proposed a tax break for US Olympic medal winners on the cash bonuses that they receive from the US Olympic Committee, you would think that the “first do no harm” rule might apply, and President Obama and others would shoot down the idea. Right?

No. President Obama actually supports this opportunistic piece of pandering, according to Matthew Yglesias, writing at Slate:

If they gave out awards for dumb new policy ideas, President Obama and Republican rising star Sen. Marco Rubio would both be medaling this week. Their achievements? Rubio’s completely pointless bill offering a tax break to recipients of Olympic medals and—even worse—the president’s decision to hop on the bandwagon rather than show the country he has a firmer grasp on the issues than his adversaries do. In the scheme of things, of course, winning Olympic prizes is not an important sector of economic activity, and the medals’ tax status doesn’t really matter. But the overall shape of the tax code does matter a great deal, and the speed with which a bipartisan consensus emerged around making it worse bodes quite poorly for efforts to make it better.

Yglesias goes on to provide some essential background that some early supporters of this harebrained scheme appear to have missed:

In this particular case, the issue is that the U.S. Olympic Committee—the nonprofit group that organizes Team USA for the games—rewards athletes with cash bounties for medals won. Gold medalists receive $25,000, silver medalists get $15,000, and bronze medalists receive $10,000. That’s income, so come spring of 2013 when medalists are filling out their tax forms, it’ll be reported and taxed like any other income. Their after-tax income will be higher if they do win a medal than if they don’t. There’s no “extra tax bill” waiting for anyone. There’s simply extra income, and the income would be taxed. (Some people have confused this with the idea that the medals themselves come with a hefty tax bill, but the real tax issue is about the cash prizes.)

Precisely. This is not about suddenly being landed with an unexpected tax bill just because you worked hard and won an Olympic medal. This is about the IRS treating the prize money that the winning athletes receive as an incentive from the US Olympic Committee as income, which it is, and taxing it at the appropriate marginal rate.

Of course, the number of London 2012 Olympic medal winners as a percentage of the US population is miniscule, so the policy, if enacted, would do no real harm to tax returns or anything else. But the blatant favouritism of rewarding Olympic athletes alone with this tax break, while making other “worthy” types pay normal rates of tax, would set yet another ridiculous and rather alarming precedent:

In terms of fairness, it seems like a strange slight to winners of other kinds of prizes. Are Olympic medalists worthier than winners of the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes? And of course exempting all prize income from income tax could merely encourage all kinds of people to restructure their income as prizes. The J.P. Morgan Memorial Prize for Achievement in Investment Banking, anyone?

And then the money quote:

The underlying issue is that taxes aren’t supposed to be a cosmic judgment on the underlying worthiness of people’s activities. The earnings of a great artist and a reality TV show producer are taxed the same. That can seem a bit perverse at times, but having Congress try to assess which professions are important and which are bad would be much worse.

Republicans always talk about how the government should stop trying to “pick winners”, accusing President Obama of doing this with his subsidies for various forms of green energy (and apparently turning a blind eye toward their own efforts to help their own favoured industries). Well, I would submit to Senator Rubio and President Obama that the successful US Olympic athletes have already picked themselves as winners through their achievements in London. They are to be congratulated and afforded all the respect due to a champion, but their accomplishments do not entitle them to a tax break, particularly at a time when the tax code is crying out for simplification.