meta-roj

vice president richard cheney, speaking to the national rifle association

John Kerry’s approach to the Second Amendment has been to regulate, regulate and regulate some more

vice president richard cheney, speaking to the national rifle association

Senator Kerry seems to have his own view of the Second Amendment

ok, yeah. thanks for the tip, mr. cheney. let’s review.

united states constitution, second amendment

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

i saw this on fox news on april 15 (tax day, of course) and it came with such a positive spin i almost spun myself right off the chair. now that i’m firmly back in a chair, it’s time to comment.

fox news

But 44 million people will pay no federal taxes at all — that’s the highest number in U.S. history and it translates to 33 percent of all tax filers.

Before the Bush cuts were implemented the number of filers who paid no federal taxes was 30 million, or 23 percent of all tax filers. These numbers are much larger than those from 1980 when the revolt against federal income tax rates began.

i’m not convinced that the tax cuts are the reason we’re setting records for the number of people who don’t owe income tax. i think it might have more to do with the economy.

fox news

In addition to these 44 million zero-tax filers there are another 14 million whose incomes are so low, $20,000 or less, they are off the tax roles entirely. Add to that the dependents, children, family members and those who aren’t taxed at all — it equals 122 million Americans who live completely outside the federal tax system.

maybe it’s just my twisted sense of taxation, but wouldn’t it be… i dunno… better… if more of these people with such low incomes actually made enough money to owe taxes?

according to the department of health and human services, the 2003 federal poverty level is $8,980 for an individual and $18,400 for a family of four.

tom mauser, father of daniel mauser

an organization with a Field and Stream magazine membership, but a Soldier of Fortune magazine leadership.

your tax dollars at work (but only if you live in alabama)…

associated press

Ousted Chief Justice Roy Moore’s fight to keep a Ten Commandments monument in a courthouse rotunda will cost Alabama taxpayers nearly $550, 000, officials said Wednesday.

…or you could look at it as $104/pound.

now if only there were some way to keep this money from going toward law school tuition for the next generation….

i’ve been meaning to say something about this whole pdb mini-fiasco for a while, but i don’t want to wrap myself into a full essay, so hopefully i can keep this short…

after fighting the creation of a 9/11 investigative commission…

and fighting against giving that commission subpoena powers…

and in-effect declaring that the “independent, bipartisan commission” is a congressional commission (the separation-of-powers argument keeping dr. rice away from the microphones)….

and putting dr. rice on the media circuit to spin the story…

and limiting access to many documents under the color of classified material (and how did we manage to get people we couldn’t trust with classified material on this commission in the first place?)

and claiming privilege with regard to the presidential daily briefing…

and now spinning the rice testimony and the newly-declassified pdb….

now i get to say something about all this trouble from the bush administration… and speculate a bit. this administration hasn’t been forthcoming, so they’ve left lots of room for speculation.

everyone, up and down the intelligence hierarchy, signed off on this pdb. people in field offices made reports and their superiors passed them up to regional offices, and those got passed up to national offices, and through multiple agencies and through the cabinet-level officials, everyone decided that despite the inability to “corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting,” that this material was important enough for the desk of the president.

now, i may have unreasonable expectations here, but if i saw this document as president the first questions i’d ask are “what do we know about these al quaida members in the united states and this support structure they’ve created?” “what’s the status of these 70 investigations?” “is there anything else we should be doing?” (like, maybe, watching these al qaida members for strange things like… interstate travel or odd financial transactions?).

my people, operating in the most expensive and expansive intelligence-gathering structure in the history of the world used up 30 of less than 500 words in this brief to tell me there was an infrastructure inside the united states operating with the intent to “strike.”

that’s “actionable” enough for me. impossible to know if these actions might prevent or mitigate the 9/11 attacks, but i have more than a month to get upset about “terrorist support structures in the united states.”

it seems that almihdhar and alhazmi were identified as al qaida operatives by the cia in 1999 or 2000 (i’m not digging deep enough to put a solid date on that), but didn’t make the fbi/ins terrorist watch list until late august 2001. would a couple extra weeks have found them? would it have stopped them at the airport?

perhaps moving up the september 4 cabinet meeting on terrorism by a few weeks would make some difference…

anyway, pure speculation, of course…
pdb text below…
(more…)

it’s just a book review, but it’s a perspective that explains why it’ll take a whole lot of silver bullets to fix the mess we’ve created.

It began back in the 1980s with the United States government’s misplaced multi-million dollar anti-Soviet policy in Afghanistan. During that time, an Afghan royalist mujahideen commander offered this warning to the US: “For God’s sake, you are financing your own assassins.”

evidence, i think, that the current american administration thinks we citizens are fools.

dr. condoleeza rice has been trying to make the case that there was no silver bullet that could stop the september 11 attacks – and, of course, she’s right. it’s not a simple problem. there isn’t one vampire to kill.

sound-bite length, but hardly a real response. her job description doesn’t include vampire hunter – she’s supposed to grasp the complexity of global security policy issues. she didn’t convince me that she has that grasp.

she did, on the other hand, convince me she has a political agenda.

apparently, after years of frustration in the senate, frank murkowski, now governor of alaska, has announced his intention to encourage oil development in state-controlled waters just offshore from the arctic national wildlife refuge (anwr).

governor frank murkowski

While the U.S. House and Senate remain gridlocked over opening ANWR for oil development, I am not burdened by that process

it’s been called brinksmanship… it’s been called political maneuvering… i’m personally not convinced that the oil-that-would-be is worth chasing (in the big picture), and this does chase right on the heels of opec’s production-cut announcement. hmmm.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan

The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow

is this catching?

a [former] government official that steps up and says i’m sorry, we failed you?

amazing. inspirational, even.

this could change everything.