kimmy

Yeah. Seems like a silly question. -k

So did any individual at the bank pay a fine? Did any individual at the bank do any jail time? The bank itself might have paid a fine, but since the people actually involved in breaking the rules didn't pay the fine or face legal consequences, there's no deterrence. -k

The unspent superPAC money that Stephen Colbert made vanish on national TV last month has reappeared. As chairman of the Ham Rove Memorial Fund, Colbert has donated it to Hurricane Sandy relief, wounded soldiers, as well as to two political transparency groups. The Center for Responsive Politics receives the donation on the condition that they rename their meeting space "The Colbert Super PAC Memorial Conference Room", while the Campaign Legal Center receives the donation on the condition that they host "The Ham Rove Memorial Conference Room". -k

Oh, BS. This is not some obscure ordinance requiring a hitching-post be provided on the main street in front of business establishments. This is in the state constitutions. The issue has been raised in petitions and news stories and various controversies. In 2009 Bothwell's opponents petitioned state officials to remove him from office. Groups like American Atheists, Secular Coalition of America, and FFRF have made the issue known to legislators. In the 1990s, the state of South Carolina spent several years and lots of money fighting to reject Herb Silverman's application to be a notory public due to the his lack of religion. The governor and secretary of state were both defendants in the lawsuit; and when defeated in lower court they appealed to the state supreme court. It took Silverman over 5 years to become a notary, just because he would not affirm the existence of the Supreme Being. -k

American Family Association and Mike Huckabee think that mandatory prayer in school would have prevented the school massacre. -k

To me it seems like a common thread among many of these people is that they're young men who are nobodies. Harris and Kliebold, Kimveer Gill, Marc Lepine, Anders Breivik, the Cho guy who shot up Virginia Tech... Maybe they just felt like nobodies and wanted to find a way to make a mark in the world. Ever see the movie "Fight Club"? It's about a young man who basically feels emasculated. He falls under the influence of a guy named Tyler Durden, who is the ultimate bad-ass. Tyler embodies all the things he wish he could be. Joining Tyler Durden's "fight club" gives the young man a way to express all the masculine energy that he had been repressing. The fight club fills a need for the participants that regular day to day life in our society just doesn't provide-- a way to express their masculinity. (although, things get pretty carried away...) I can't help thinking that maybe Kliebold and Harris and Gill and Breivik and Cho and the rest were trying to find their own Tyler Durden. -k

I don't find many actors or celebrities to be fascinating. Ben Affleck made a good movie this year? That's excellent for him, but is it really "fascinating"? Prince Harry got drunk and made poor decisions? How unusual for a young adult. An athlete won a medal at the olympics? That's outstanding for her, but not very fascinating to me. I can't imagine what would be fascinating about "One Direction"; I don't know anything about them. I think this list to some degree reflects that Barbara Walters makes her living in the celebrity world. She works in the same circles as the people who keep putting the Kardashian sisters on magazine covers and reports "news" about people whose only claim to fame is being famous. Our society's need to create and follow these fake celebrities is in itself perhaps a fascinating phenomenon. I myself find Hilary the most fascinating person on this list; I was also fascinated by the presidential candidates. Governor Christie's future will be of importance to people beyond his state's borders too, and his everyman style of expressing himself makes him one of the most likeable politicians around. The Petraeus train-wreck has been pretty fascinating, although I think whats-her-name's role in it is the more fascinating part. The Honey Boo-Boo phenomenon raises fascinating questions about us as a society. Perhaps "50 Shades" and Seth McFarlane's body of work are fascinating for that reason as well. -k

I think legislative reluctance to change such a law would in itself be evidence of ongoing anti-Semitism. In North Carolina, after an atheist named Cecil Bothwell won a seat on a city council in 2009; some of his defeated opponents complained and cited the state constitution as a reason to have him disqualified. The city recognized the futility of attempting legal action and Bothwell was allowed to serve, however I think the fact that this even happened illustrates a problem. One of the arguments advanced was along the lines of "it's not about religion. It's about respect for our state constitution! Bothwell is openly disobeying our state constitution! He's not unfit to serve because he's an atheist, he's unfit to serve because he does not respect our state constitution." Symbolic or not, it's offensive and wrong. -k

Your comparison with the mugging would be more apt if you mentioned that you mugged the guy while I was watching. HSBC *knew* they were facilitating the drug trade. They participated in helping people conceal that their money came from illegal sources. That's money laundering. If you've got boxes full of cash you got from selling drugs, you've got a problem. But not at HSBC! Just drop them off, and they'll put the money in your account with no questions asked. For you or me, $1.9 billion is a vast amount of money. For HSBC, a $1.9 billion fine works out to less than 2 months of profits. Some perspective is in order. More to the point, the $1.9 billion doesn't come out of the pockets of the people who actually broke the law. It comes out of the pockets of the shareholders. -k

True. They are old laws, and they have not survived court challenges. However, I think we all know that if a state constitution said "no Jew shall hold public office", saying "oh, it's an old law, we don't enforce that anymore" would not keep people from pointing out how offensive it is. -k

I had been on a serious Southern Rock kick for a while... Lynyrd Skynyrd, Outlaws, Molly Hatchet... I think I'm mostly over it, although I've been interested in Skynyrd and Outlaws ever since I got my own guitar... funny how that works. Lately I've been listening to the Silversun Pickups. -k

Your reflexive need to apologize for corporations might have blinded you to the fact that HSBC has been caught red-handed committing crime. While the part about funding terrorists and drug-lords is only speculation, the part about money-laundering is hard fact. Nobody launders money for a "good" reason, especially for people based in Iran and Mexico. -k

They have paid their debt to society. -k

Yes, a news network acting as a press agency for one political party, that's normally something we'd associate with places like Pyongyang or Tehran. People used to accuse the CBC of being a mouthpiece for the Liberal party... in the case of Fox and the Republicans, it's the literal truth. -k

Pennsylvania state representative Mike Fleck just came out of the closet last week. This was a risky thing for him to do as a Republican representing the most conservative district in the state. Here are some comments he made about his experiences in trying to come to grips with same-sex attraction, reconcile his faith with his sexuality, and attempting to "cure" it through therapy. He continued that during his 20s, he firmly believed what he’s been taught, that homosexuality was a choice and so never felt in great conflict because he’d learned to suppress his feelings. “I wanted to live a ‘normal’ life and raise a family,” Fleck said. “I also believed that by marrying, I was fulfilling God’s will and I thought my same-sex attraction would simply go away. (...) While his professional dreams were becoming reality, Fleck said he was also weathering personal battles, namely his same-sex attraction which, contrary to all he believed and was taught, remained. “So I just prayed harder and put it in God’s hands,” he said, adding that as one of the county’s most visible couples, the unresolved feelings and pressure of public scrutiny took its toll and Fleck opted for therapy. “I sought out treatment from a Christian counselor, but when that didn’t work out, I engaged a secular therapist who told me point blank that I was gay and that I was too caught up in being the perfect Christian rather than actually being authentic and honest,” Fleck said. He said the hardest part of the process has been reconciling his faith with his sexuality. “Through years of counseling, I’ve met a lot of gay Christians who have tried hard to change their God-given sexual orientation, but at the end of the day, I know of none who’ve been successful,” he said. “They’ve only succeeded at repressing their identity, only to have it reappear time and time again and always wreaking havoc not only on themselves, but especially on their family.” Fleck said once he was able to be honest with himself, he could finally be honest with others, because no one in his life had any clue about his personal struggle, not even his wife. “My wife and I became closer than ever before but it was bittersweet as we both concluded that the marriage was over,” he said. Fleck moved out in the summer of 2011 and his wife bought a house that fall. -k

In what's becoming a common refrain with you, the information you've cited doesn't make the claim you think it does. It doesn't say that being in the 35% tax bracket means that all of the individual's income is taxed at 35%. As a matter of fact, yes. Here's a screenshot from the 2011 IRS tax guide. This illustrates the concept of marginal tax rates. Someone who made $379150 pays (379150*.33-15103) = 110016.50 Someone who made $379151 pays (379151*.35-22686) = 110016.85 The first $379,150.00 were taxed at the exact same rate as the guy in the 33% tax bracket. The extra dollar was taxed at 35%. Nobody loses money by going up a tax bracket. Also observe that $110016.85 taxes on $379,151 income works out to 29%. Here's the Canada Revenue Agency version: So if the same guy made $379151 in Canada, he pays 15% on the first $41544, plus 22% on the next $41544, plus 26% on the $45712 after that, plus 29% on everything above $128,800. That works out to $99857.79, or about a 26.4% rate. So as you see, both Canada and the United States use a system where only money made above certain thresholds is taxed at higher rates. I hope that clears up your confusion. -k

Spreading the true gospel! John Travolta too. "Battlefield Earth" was, as I hear it, more or less an attempt to spread the word of Hubbard. Didn't go over terribly well, as I recall. -k

I'm sure he'll be fine. He was given $400 million in his super-PACs to fight the election, and there seems to be some question as to how much of it was actually spent. Stephen Colbert and his lawyer made a million dollars of unspent super-PAC money vanish into thin air on national TV; I am certain that Karl Rove knows a lawyer who can do the same trick. It's a false equivalency to say "well, they're all biased". They might be all biased, but Fox took it to a whole new level by putting active members of the Romney campaign on TV and passing them off as "analysts" or "Fox Contributors". Dick Morris identified as an "analyst", but he was working for the Romney campaign when he made his "landslide" prediction, and said later that he was trying to boost the campaign when he made that prediction. Other Romney team members who appeared on Fox and were identified as "analysts" or "contributors" were Elaine Chao, John Bolton, Walid Pheres, Dan Snyder, and Jay Sekulow, all active with the Republican campaign. And of course Karl Rove, who was described as an "analyst", rather than "Dude who is spending $400 million to defeat Democrats". If I am watching CNN and they put Donna Brazile or Ari Fleischer on tv, it says "Democrat Strategist" or "Republican Strategist" under their face while they're talking. There's no attempt to disguise the fact that the person I'm watching is attempting to convey a view that is favorable to their political party. To me, putting members of one party on the TV under the guise of "analysts" to convey their party's point of view is crossing a line. -k

If the "47%" figure provided by Tax Policy Center was good enough for Willard and all the top conservative thinkers and mouthpieces in the media, I'm not sure why you're skeptical of it. No, Pliny, the number of people enrolled in food stamps or medicaid doesn't contradict the number of people paying federal income tax. It might be a result of changes in eligibility requirements, or of lower after-tax income, or rising expenses. As well, the growth in people on food stamps is most likely among people who were in the "not paying taxes" category in both 2008 and 2011, so I'm not sure why you think there's any contradiction. As well, you've picked a graph where everything is normalized to year 2001, rather than one showing raw numbers. Without raw data the relative increase in the number of people on food stamps is completely meaningless. As well, as I pointed out earlier, the part of your graph that actually does pertain to the "makers vs takers" argument-- the private sector employment line-- actually supports the premise that there are more "makers" now than in 2008. No, they don't compare. Dark matter, magnets, high-school physics, marginal tax rates... -k

If the tax rate jumps from 20% to 60% at 1 million, then the guy who made $1 million pays $200,000. The guy who made $2 million pays 20% on money up to $1 million, and 60% on his second million. The guy who made $1 million keeps $800,000 and the guy who made $2 million keeps $1.2 million. This is a concept that ought to be familiar to any Canadian who does their own tax return, because our taxes work the same way. -k

Karl Rove (pictured) is being removed from Fox News by order or Roger Ailes himself, according to this article. Rove, as well as hilariously wrong analyst Dick Morris are apparently not to be on TV unless Ailes says so himself. Rove's time at Fox News will no doubt be best remembered for the segment in which he got clowned by Megyn Kelly and the math-nerds from the back room. Dick Morris is the guy who said the election would be a Romney landslide, then admitted on Hannity that he'd just said that to try to boost the Romney campaign. One assumes that Roger Ailes has come to the conclusion that putting those guys on TV makes the network look like (more of) a joke. After his super-PACs spent $100 million of donor money supporting candidates that all lost, Rove might not be in the super-PAC business for long either. -k

He had help deciding when to leave. He was given a hint that was too strong to ignore. I agree with you, though probably not in the sense you mean it. There's no arguing that Mitt did open a lot of eyes as to how "bread gets buttered". Thanks to press scrutiny of his financial and business dealings, we all learned a lot about tax dodges and vulture capitalism. And sadly for us, most of them are too sensible to bring the kind of attention to themselves that Mitt brought to himself and his ilk. That's too bad. -k

BC Sapper said so... I think it was mentioned earlier that they oppose celebration of anything, even birthdays. -k

Millions, maybe, but not identical millions. I think Obama needs a few more zeroes on the end. Romney's estimated to have at least $250 million, and now that he can leave politics and get back into private equity, he might have a billion before he's done. No, he's not an asswipe because he's rich. He'd be an asswipe even if he was a hundredaire. He'd just be a much less famous and powerful asswipe. He's said and done a lot of things that led me to that opinion; the statement I mentioned above was just one of them. I brighten my country with my sunny disposition, my civic spirit and solid citizenship, my charitable efforts, and my contributions to a number of community projects. I've offered my services to the government on several occasions; they've declined thus far, but I will be here if required. And I'm a tax payer; something Willard hasn't always been able to say. I just think that if a guy is going to run for office on the premise that rich-guys and corporations need lower taxes, he ought to man up and show us. -k

"Those goll-durn liberals! Tarnation!" -Bobby Jindal. -k