The Washington Post has been running many articles on the events underlying (and adjacent to) Jack Abramoff's indictment. Part of that story involves running large sums of money "through" Grover Norquist's "Americans for Tax Reform" groups, which then returned the money (minus good ol' Grover's cut) to some third group, thus concealing that the money actually went from Abramoff to the third group.
The question in the title of this post is addressed by Stuart Levine, an attorney in
Baltimore, Maryland, on his blog:
http://taxbiz.blogspot.com/2005/10/did-grover-norquist-commit-tax-fraud.html Newspaper headlines often use casualty figures in their headlines: Seventy Insurgents Killed in Raid. Twenty Insurgents Dead After Night Strike. And so on. Very precise, very knowing, very certain.
Which makes you wonder: How do you know how many of the dead are "enemy" and how many "unlucky civilian?" Do "insurgents" (or "the enemy" or any other popular name for the "bad guys") carry ID cards that clearly mark them as insurgents? Below is a transcript of the exchange between Senator Russ Feingold and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, which was forwarded to me via e-mail by Sen. Feingold's Deputy Press Secretary:
Check out this article about Billy O'Really in Newsday called What's hate got to do with it? By Verne Gay. Ironic isn't it, that he'd be interviewed by Mr. Gay? I can see the headlines now, "O'Reilly Grilled By Gay!" Man, I have to Laugh Out Loud! The letter I sent to the editor and forwarded to MR. BILL is in the body.
[Link to story]
[Link to Verne Gay bio] This can only be considered devastating news for the pathological liars among us: researchers have reported finding a correlation between the relative amounts of gray and white matter in the brain's cerebral cortex. news report here
Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the study finds that individuals who habitually lie and cheat have less gray matter and more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than normal people. People with antisocial personality disorder fell somewhere between the pathological liars and normal people.
The news story from Reuters concludes with:
"While the findings have no practical implications at present, if confirmed they could be useful in clinical diagnoses of whether a person is pretending to be sick. They could also help in criminal justice settings by helping police determine if a suspect is lying, and in pre-employment screening."
Right. Pre-employment screening when your desired employment is political office. Or corporate executive. Or salesman. But especially political office.
I can just see the future of political campaigns: Vote for Honest Joe Mansward--certified to have a 20% higher gray to white matter index than his opponent. If only we'd had reliable testing for this in 2000. And 2004. In the days leading up to the very first test of a nuclear warhead, many wondered: How powerful is this sucker going to be? Following up a prior entry on privatizing flood control, we get this from another great political mind, a true pioneer in planning, (from the Nashville Tennesseean; source here http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051015/NEWS01/510150331/1001) I've been having an e-mail debate with a bunch of folks (none of whom I've even met--isn't the electronic age wonderful?) on what the Democrats need to do to get back control of the government.
In the course of it, I developed a list of issues/goals that seem worthwhile to me. Here's my summary of a proposed agenda for 2006 and 2008--I'm interested in what other people think of these. Okay, sometime in the last week I decided that we had finally gone from stage one of the deflation of America, to stage two of the deflation of America. Stage one was the recent damper on wages for those American jobs that have yet to be shipped overseas. The most discernbible effect of stage one is that prices in America have risen faster than wages in America for the last year-plus.
Stage two hit home with the announcement that Delphi Corp., the huge auto parts manufacturer, is asking its employees to take a 63% pay cut, and some loss of benefits, to boot.
What happens when all segments of a large, militarily powerful nation are running on empty? Or worse, running on minus, up to its collective national neck in debt? We're about to find out.
That the national debt is at its highest ever is now common knowledge. And pretty much everyone acknowledges that the level of consumer debt is staggering, with the country now having a zero savings rate.
Now it turns out that individual business have run up so much debt, compared to their assets and future earnings expectations, that more and more companies are finding their bonds reduced to "junk" ratings.
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