400 individuals earn 10% of all capital gains in the U.S.

Wow. Paul Krugman (my emphasis):

One of the more interesting documents published by the IRS — I know, I know, not the hardest criterion in the world — is its report on the income and taxes of the top 400 taxpayers (pdf). A lot of attention gets focused, rightly, on the remarkably low average tax rate these people pay — less than 17 percent in 2007, the lowest on record.

But I was struck by something else: in several years during the last decade the top 400 accounted for more than 10 percent of all capital gains income in America. Just 400 people!

You don't have to posit a Bilderberg Club, or whatever, to realize that these guys all know each other and hang out together. It's a whole lot easier for a couple dozen billionaires to get coordinated than millions of Democrats. The billionaires can do it after golf.

By the way, I'm willing to bet the guys at the IRS who released that report will be getting a little phone call. Any takers?

GP Read the rest of this post...

GOP House believes every rich white male deserves a lawyer, but if you're a poor woman beaten by your husband, sayonara

ThinkProgress notes the hypocrisy of the GOP Congress' claim that every bigoted piece of legislation deserves a lawyer when they don't believe that actual human beings, especially poor people and women beaten by their husbands, deserves lawyers.

Sensenbrenner’s argument that “everyone deserves a lawyer” may be noble, but it is also hypocritical. Republicans have recently stripped nearly $16 million from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which defends tenants against slum lords, helps women obtain court orders against abusive husbands, protects consumers against exploitative lenders, or to otherwise provides legal representation to Americans who can’t afford it. As Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) quipped, “I’m delighted to hear the observation of the gentleman from Wisconsin — that everyone is entitled to a lawyer — and I look forward to his support of greatly increased appropriations for legal services and legal aid so that people who need lawyers in this country can get it.”

More on this from AMERICAblog Gay. Read the rest of this post...

The day two reporters spotted Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and didn't have their camera

That'll teach ya.  Cool story, actually.  And judging by the description of bin Laden, in 2001, as "He walked slowly with a cane, flanked on each side by a man holding on to him," perhaps that's why he wasn't shooting back on Sunday. Sounds like the guy was seriously not well, even 9 years ago. Read the rest of this post...

Senator Conrad, lead Dem negotiator, offers up most conservative budget imaginable - as a starting point

From HuffPost Hill:

CONRAD BUDGET DEBACLE Mike McCauliff and HuffPost Hill: "Senate Democrats are furious at their lead budget negotiator, Sen. Kent Conrad, for crafting a blueprint that they think moves their party too far to the right, a leadership source said. Conrad (D-N.D.), who has been negotiating for months in secret with Republicans in the so-called Gang of Six -- we prefer Slash Mob, but it ain't catching on -- to craft a plan that might win bipartisan acceptance, abruptly dropped the veil and rolled out his own offering Tuesday for his party colleagues -- to brutal reviews. "He's going to be a man without a country," the leadership source said, describing a contentious luncheon. The problem for Democrats is that Conrad has adopted a plan that resembles the work he's done with legislators across the aisle -- which was meant to be a compromise position. In bringing it forward himself, it sets the starting point for the Democratic position in a more conservative spot than the President's budget -- which itself was already a compromise and includes a spending freeze for federal workers amid its many concessions to the GOP."

Note how the Republicans' crazy budget proposal is to the far right, and the Democrats' crazy budget proposal is to the far right. That's each party's version of crazy - trying to out-Republican each other. Read the rest of this post...

Second Air France black box found

Sounds like we will finally know what caused the Air France flight to go down now that both black boxes have been retrieved.

Search parties scouring the sea bed off Brazil's northeast coast have recovered the second of two flight recorders from the Air France aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic in June 2009, investigators said on Tuesday.

The discovery of the audio recorder, two days after the flight data recorder was fished up, brings investigators even closer to the cause of the crash as it should hold recordings of cockpit conversations during the flight's final moments.

"We can now hope to find out what truly happened within the next three weeks," French Transport Minister Thierry Mariani told RTL radio.

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Jonathan Turley: "If bin Laden wanted to change America, he succeeded"

Legal scholar and lawyer Jonathan Turley, writing in USA Today reflects on "what has been lost, and what has been gained" in the reaction to Osama bin Ladin and the attack on 9/11.

First, a list of what Turley feels has been lost, which includes this (h/t DN via email; my emphasis):

What has been most chilling is that the elimination of Saddam and now bin Laden has little impact on this system, which seems to continue like a perpetual motion machine of surveillance and searches. While President Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned Americans of the power of the military-industrial complex, we now have a counterterrorism system that employs tens of thousands, spends tens of billions of dollars each year and is increasingly unchecked[.] ... If bin Laden wanted to change America, he succeeded.

And also this:

Police power works like the release of gas in a closed space: expand the space and the gas fills it. It is rare in history to see ground lost in civil liberties be regained through concessions of power by the government.

Whew, that's a lot to have been lost. Now for what Turley says has been gained:

[He doesn't say]

Bad trade. I'm with the Teabags; I want my country back too. All of it.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Conservative blog with ties to Comcast exec claims throng at White House, celebrating Osama's death, was fake

Right.  Obama told a couple thousands college students that Osama was killed before he told the nation.  Uh huh.  And a Comcast exec is a funder of the blog. Read the rest of this post...

Atlas Shrugged, Part II (from Second City)

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White House's story on Bin Laden take-down now changing

This is not helpful.  I have no idea what it must be like for the White House and the military to get their act together on such short notice, and to inform the world of the accurate details only hours after the attack.  Still, that's no excuse.  Their credibility is going to be judged on their word.  They simply cannot get the story wrong on such basic details.

First we're told Bin Laden was firing back, now we're told he wasn't armed.  Odd that he wouldn't be armed.  And if the mission was to extract him alive, then why was he shot if he wasn't armed (I couldn't care less that he was shot, but we were told the mission was to get him alive, then why was he shot? or was it collateral damage?  And if so, why not just say that?)  Then we were told he held his wife in front of him as a human shield.  Now we're told he didn't.  We were told he was shot twice in the head, now it's once in the head and once in the chest.  They had his body, how did they get that wrong and now get it right, when the body's already gone?

This strikes me as unacceptably sloppy.  It also begins to call into question the other "facts" of the story.  What else did they tell us that at some future date we'll find out they got wrong?  Mistakes are made, I get that, and accept that.  But you have his body, how do you get wrong where he was shot?  How do you get wrong that he was firing back when he wasn't?  If you know the truth now, how didn't we not know the truth then?  It's a simple matter of asking our guys who were there.

This is a huge story, and hugely important, politically, but also simply important to all of us who suffered through September 11.  You just aren't permitted to get it wrong, especially on details that seem rather easy to get right, and especially when you're the President of the United States.

(And yes, it's Politico.  But it's Josh Gerstein, who I've dealt with repeatedly, and he's a good guy and good reporter.  And in any case, Slate is reporting the same concerns.)

UPDATE: Slate seems to be suggesting that these kind factual errors are common in big stories the first few hours.  They cite Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch as an example of stories that ended up wrong.  Um, Pat Tillman was an intentional cover-up.  And the Jessica Lynch story wasn't much better, as I recall.  Neither is what we should expect as business as usual from our government.

Then Slate talks about how the sources were anonymous, so we should have expected some error. No, our own Joe Sudbay was invited on one of those "anonymous" calls Sunday night. He was on it with a lot of top reporters, and a very senior administration official.  Just because we aren't permitted to tell you the official's name hardly exonerates the White House for hypothetically putting an official on a call who then gets it wrong.

If you're not 100% sure of the details, don't give them until you are. Read the rest of this post...

Chris Hedges on the death of Osama bin Laden

Chris Hedges is a former long-time war reporter and Arabic speaker who has covered the Middle East and was in New York for 9/11. He also covered the First Iraq War, was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard, and in fact says jokingly, "I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard." Like Robert Fisk, he's a major journalist for the region.

He recently spoke about the death of Osama bin Laden. These are just a few of his reflections:

When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.

And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within their own societies. ...

So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. ... And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are. [But we] responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence.

Three comments:

(1) I'm afraid of a certain dynamic. It's easy to become locked in combat with someone, a person in your life, say. Their goal is to keep you engaged, to keep you from breaking free. And your goal is to win. They are using your goal to achieve their goal.

The way to beat these small groups of so-called "terrorists" is to keep them small, to isolate them, to dis-aggrandize them. Turning the whole machinery of state against them in permanent combat gives them the credibility of being our equal. A tragic mistake, in my view. There is no way for us to win without breaking away — by making this a police action, sending in the international version of the cops, and relegating them back to their small world.

(For a local comparison, imagine how grand the Western Idaho Hyper-Jesus Poobah Militia would feel if the whole security apparatus of the U.S., all of it, were focused on them; and all they had to do to keep the glory alive was leave the occasional hand grenade in a shopping mall. We'd dance to their tune forever.)

(2) When you are locked in combat with an enemy, you mirror the enemy over time and become him. You become twins fighting. ("But don't you see? He's white on the right side of his face!")

(3) And finally, there's always a winner in the Games People Play version of "Let's you and him fight." And it's not the combatants. The people we're really locked in combat with ... is them, the real winners. Often it's the person selling tickets to the fight, for example, or the guy who owns the concession stand. Maybe we should turn our focus that way.

Chris Hedges understands all this. His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a must-read, as is this short article.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Should the White House release photos of bin Laden dead?

It's an interesting question, and one that's only beginning to be asked: Should the US release photos of bin Laden dead? I had wondered yesterday why no proof was being offered that the guy we got really was bin Laden. We've seen none. Not just to ensure that the hunt is really over, but also to stop all sorts of conspiracy theories popping up across the world. Little did I suspect that right-wingers, and at least one sad left-winger, would also join the "deather" bandwagon. More from the Washington Post:

U.S. personnel washed, wrapped and prayed over the body of Osama bin Laden before dumping it off an aircraft carrier and into the Arabian Sea. But even as the Obama administration worked to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities over the manner of bin Laden’s burial, it stopped short of releasing visual or forensic proof that he had, in fact, been killed.

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, said the government had not decided when or whether it would make public photographs taken of bin Laden after he was gunned down at his hideout in Pakistan. He suggested that officials were still balancing whether the images were more likely to inflame public sentiment around the world or to erase doubts that bin Laden was really dead.

“We are going to do everything we can to make sure that nobody has any basis to try to deny that we got Osama bin Laden,” Brennan told reporters.

According to the Post article, the US confirmed bin Laden's identity with photos (hardly dispositive), DNA evidence (good), and identification by one of his wives (again, hardly dispositive, one assumes friends and family were told to lie about the identity of any "doubles" that were caught).

The problem with releasing photos? According to the article, they're pretty gruesome. And I'm sure no one wants to enrage the "Arab street". And it's true, photos of a dead bin Laden probably would incite some folks even more.

Still, it's hard understanding why no evidence at all is being offered. How about at least the DNA evidence? DNA data can't be that top secret. Something. Or at least get some outside academics to review the data and confirm it. I doubt the conspiracy nuts will ever be happy with any proof, but something still feels better than nothing. Read the rest of this post...

Stewart on the death of Bin Laden

In times like these, it helps to get the perspective of Jon Stewart (who admits he's not rational about this subject):
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British household income facing worst year since 1977

And to think austerity sounded so attractive only a year ago. The Conservative program is only now starting to kick in so it's bound to get even worse for everyone. But once again, at least the bankers are fat and happy with their pay that has not missed a beat. How fair is that?

Roger Bootle, a former government adviser who now works with Deloitte, the accountancy firm, predicted that 2011 would be the worst year for household finances since 1977 – and added that if interest rates were to rise, British families would not have seen conditions deteriorate so badly since 1952.

Mr Bootle's warning, published in Deloitte's latest economic review, reflects the impact of higher inflation and taxes on people's incomes, as well as increased joblessness, with the economist not optimistic that the private sector is capable of offering works to all those likely to be laid off by the public sector this year.

"Real incomes do not provide the definitive picture as to the health of households' finances, but taking a broader look at households' finances arguably leaves the position looking even worse," said Mr Bootle. "I think this year will see falling real earnings, falling real house prices and rising unemployment."

In addition to higher income taxes for most people in work, Deloitte pointed to the fact that inflation is running at 4 per cent, much faster than the rate at which pay rises are being awarded. While inflation is expected to fall back before the end of 2011, it may not be until 2012 that wage increases catch up.

Maybe someone could also explain how a country with severe financial problems could afford another freeloading event by the royals. The financial loss of having the country on public holiday last Friday for the royal wedding where they dressed up in Disney-like uniforms and marched in front of dictators and torturers was surprising considering the state of public finances.

Where did the money come from to pay for security? Obviously the right wing government doesn't really think things are that bad if they can afford to fund the royal circus. Of course there was money made from the vendors selling kitsch plates and mugs celebrating the event but it hardly comes close to the loss of productivity. Is it really more important to fund the egos of the freeloading royals over programs for the middle class and poor? Clearly the Tories aren't taking the finances seriously enough. Read the rest of this post...

Conservatives win big in Canadian elections

This has to be a frustrating time for our friends up north on the left. Between Harper's anti-climate change beliefs and the nasty, polluting oil sands project, the environment can't be very pleased either. The Independent:

Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has won his coveted majority government in elections that also marked a shattering defeat for the opposition Liberals, preliminary results show.

Mr Harper, who took office in 2006, has won two elections but until now had never held a majority of parliament's 308 seats, forcing him to rely on the opposition to pass legislation.

While Mr Harper's hold on the 308-member Parliament has been tenuous during his five-year tenure, he has managed to nudge an instinctively centre-left country to the right.

He has gradually lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided climate change legislation, promoted Arctic sovereignty, upped military spending and extended Canada's military mission in Afghanistan.

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Angry Japanese parents deliver Fukushima dirt to education officials

The risk for children sounds much higher than should be tolerated, so it's easy to see why the parents in Japan are upset. It takes a lot to anger the Japanese, but education officials who are easing regulations somehow managed. The Guardian:

Ministers have defended the increase in the acceptable safety level from 1 to 20 millisieverts per year as a necessary measure to guarantee the education of hundreds of thousands of children in Fukushima prefecture, location of the nuclear plant that suffered a partial meltdown and several explosions after the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March.

It is estimated that 75% of Fukushima's schools may have radiation levels above the old safety level of 1 millisievert. The local authorities in Koriyama have tried to ease the problem by digging up the top layer of soil in school and day centre playgrounds, but residents near the proposed dump site have objected.

The new standard of 20 millisieverts a year – equivalent to the annual maximum dose for German nuclear workers – will mean those schools remain open, but parents and nuclear opponents are angry that safety concerns are being ignored.

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