Australians have won 2 gold
Australians have won 2 gold medals now, and so far it is the highlight of the games for me. Grats, mates.
Serious problems with blogger today. I got some email about port41.com, which had something to do with websites, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I can see me using a new service within two weeks- just need to consult with Charles Johnson first….
Sgt. Stryker has a different
Sgt. Stryker has a different take on the Landsburg op-ed I talked about earlier.
Bias Watch
I think it was Andrew Sullivan who was holding the bias watch regarding the labeling of conservatives. At any rate, the unrivaled Instapundit had a discussion this afternoon about how one of the side effects of Greta van Susteren’s cosmetic surgery was a ‘spate of articles, like this one.’
I went to the article to read it, and I saw something that Glenn missed or just decided not to comment on. Great van Susteren was described as a television personality. See if you can find the labelling disparity:
If she looks too good — like conservative columnist Ann Coulter — she’s a bimbo who trades on her looks. If she looks like an ordinary person — like Van Susteren — she’s a battle-ax. Even if, as in Van Susteren’s case, her personality always gave a sheen to her less-than-perfect face.
Again, I don’t care if you call Ann Coulter a conservative. She is a conservative (I would call her an ULTRA-conservative). But if we need to toss out labels, what would Greta be? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t conservative, which is a dirty word in the San Francisco publication that this story appeared in.
Th NY Times is chock
Th NY Times is chock full o’ goodness today. And, they are making me dizzy. In the lead op-ed, William Safire hyperventilates outside his brown paper bag:
In terror of an external threat, our leaders are protecting Washington at the cost of every American’s personal freedom.
Generally, I do not like the surveillance techniques being discussed either. But then we go two columns down, and Yale Law Professor and guest columnist Akhil Reed Amar tells us that we need to pass laws narrowing the scope of the Fifth Amendment:
…sometimes a truth-seeking society needs to be able to compel a person to speak outside his trial – in grand jury rooms, civil cases and legislative hearings, for example. One solution is to require the person to testify in these specific places, but then exclude this compelled testimony from any later prosecution brought against him. This way, he would never become a witness against himself “in a criminal case.”
This rule would offer Congressional witnesses a narrow type of testimonial immunity. While the testimony itself would be excluded from the criminal trial, evidence that might be drawn indirectly from the testimony would be admissible at a later trial. This would allow prosecutors to use any reliable leads that the testimony might generate. Courts today allow government lawyers to force people to give voice samples and take breath tests for alcohol because these are not considered forms of self-incrimination prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. If prosecutors can compel defendants to provide these kinds of evidence, they should also be allowed to introduce reliable evidence that is found as a result of earlier immunized testimony.
This is exactly the rule that Congress enacted, and President Abraham Lincoln signed into law, in 1862.
We also had slavery in 1862.
You gotta just love the Times. We are gonna be hysterical about your rights, unless it gets in the way of empowering Congress over the individual and getting some good ENRON testimony. I might have to sue them for ideological whiplash.
The NY Times weighs in
The NY Times weighs in on the two versions of the farm bill:
The House and the Senate have now passed differing farm bills that preserve many of the worst features of the old subsidies. Yet for a host of reasons the Senate bill is far superior.
Any wild guesses which bill spends more money?
It seems American companies are
It seems American companies are fleeing to Bermuda to incroporate to escape confiscatory tax rates.
Stanley Works, for 159 years a Connecticut maker of hammers and wrenches, is among the latest with plans to become a corporation in Bermuda, where there is no income tax. The company estimates that it will cut its tax bill by $30 million a year, to about $80 million.
Tyco International, a diversified manufacturer with headquarters in Exeter, N.H., says that being a Bermuda corporation saved it more than $400 million last year alone.
Bermuda is charging Ingersoll- Rand just $27,653 a year for a move that allows the company to avoid at least $40 million annually in American corporate income taxes.
I am sure this will be deemed as terribly unpatriotic and self-serving, but I say more power to ’em. I bet those companies and their shareholders and all the greedy tycoons that run them have better ways of spending that money that Ted Kennedy and the ‘fiscal conservatives’ in the House and Senate. Let’s all move to Bermuda and choke off all the government’s assets. Sounds like a plan to me.
The amazing thing is that the reporter and Charles Grassley seem surprised by this. I guess they were not paying attention to the comparative BOOM of the Irish economy as everyone RAN there from other European nations to set up shop because of the comparatively low tax rate. Hell, even France’s Marianne, Laetitia Casta moved out of France to escape high taxes…