Bye, Bye, Cubs!

The Ricketts paterfamilias, one Joe Ricketts, has this really great idea, see: spend ten million bucks plastering pictures of Negroes all over the country during the coming election season. See, one of the Negroes is, however illegitimately --isn't even an American, or a Christian--, the current President; and the other is a retired minister who is on record as saying the kind of intemperate things that people like Pat Robertson have said about America. The retired minister, see, was the secret mentor of the Muslim president; and if America only knew that, why, the Republicans would sweep the polity and restore fiscal sanity to our country, cutting off the lavish tax money giveaways to all those other Negroes, in the process.

Isn't ten million a lot to spend on this kind of foolishness?

Not when you're confidently expecting the City of Chicago to give you $150 million to outfit your fancy new toy, Wrigley Field.

I admit, it's not much of a sacrifice, electing to forego the exquisite experience of watching the Cubs flail about that storied ballpark. But, like one of their better players, who today announced his retirement, I will henceforth render the attention I give to Chicago sports in the direction of the South Side, where the announcers do not have to congratulate the left fielder on his determination, a decade into his career, to learn how to catch a fly ball.
I don't have an account at AmeriTrade --pace Sam Waterston-- that I can cancel. So I'll have to take at least part of my stand against gutter politics and criminally rich bigots by avoiding the Cubs, from now on.

Small loss. It's July, and the Cubs are safely in last place.

Treason!

Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who set up a fake health clinic in Abbottabad, the operations of which eventually provided the CIA with strong clues concerning the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, was sentenced by a Pakistani court to 33 years in prison for treason.


As McClatchy newspapers writes, "The Afridi case illustrates the stark differences between the two countries on anti-terrorism issues. Afridi is regarded as a hero by American officials but as a traitor in Pakistan." The United States had been negotiating, prior to Afridi's conviction and sentencing, to have him released.


Q: How is this case different from that of Jonathan Pollard?

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/24/4512979/pakistani-in-bin-laden-hunt-sentenced.html#storylink=cpy

Taxes and the Constitution

Response to an op-ed piece in the NYT:

Richard Epstein argues that, in granting to Congress the power to tax, the Constitution restricted the use of this power to what he calls “public goods.” He defines public goods as benefits that must be given to all citizens if they are given to any, and then makes a rhetorical leap: “General welfare … is best read as covering only matters that advance the welfare of the United States as a whole.”

I suspect that Mr Epstein, confronted with a student’s argument that some text is “best read” in one way and not in some other, would ask why. And surely he owes his readers the same courtesy, particularly because he goes on to assert that “the redistribution of income, or ‘transfer payments’ among citizens … doesn’t qualify for taxation …”

It would be instructive to learn how, for instance, the transfer of payroll taxes collected in Chicago to retirees in Florida, in the form of Social Security benefits, does qualify. Or how the expenditure of federal funds to address the problems caused New Orleans by the Katrina hurricane is permissible. And, of course, if the power to tax can be used “to pay the Debts” of the government, does Epstein mean to suggest that the government may not incur a debt, unless the related expenditure passes the test of benefiting the United States as a whole? How is that test to be applied?

But more fundamentally, Epstein should tell us who gets to decide what “advance(s) the welfare of the United States as a whole.” If providing our Congressional representatives and their families health insurance coverage, at taxpayer expense, benefits the United States as a whole, but providing the same benefit to other citizens does not, what is the principle at work?

If we allow the recent trends to continue, until the polity consists of one hundred fifty million citizens who have no income, and one hundred fifty million who each have incomes of one million dollars, so that the average income is a half million dollars, would Epstein argue, first, that the welfare of the United States as a whole is undisturbed, and second, that the power to tax cannot be used to take (by taxation), say, five per cent from the top half and transfer it to the bottom half so as to keep half the population from living and dying in the streets?

I think Epstein has labored too strenuously to produce an argument that, ultimately, says the power to tax cannot be used for any purpose that does not directly benefit each and every American. If we take him at his word, most of the budget of the United States is subject to the charge of being unconstitutional. Maybe that is his point.