Apr 22, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
...An Aboriginal woman [Moopor] clad in animal skins has put a traditional curse on Prime Minister John Howard, apparently in retaliation for government plans to abolish Australia's top indigenous elected body....Howard smiled and waved at Moopor before leaving...It was not clear what effect the curse was intended to have on the prime minister....With 17 commissioners elected by Aboriginal voters and a budget of more than $600 million, [the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission] administers government-funded projects aimed at improving their lives.
What did they do with the $600 million?
But Howard said on April 15 that his government plans to abolish the 14-year-old commission because it has failed to improve the lot of most Aborigines, who remain the poorest, sickest and least educated minority group among Australia's 20 million people. In place of ATSIC, the government wants to appoint a panel of Aboriginal experts to advise it on indigenous needs. [CNN, Hat Tip: B. Harburg-Thomson]
Apr 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
The quote in the cartoon above is from a Michael Moore letter to his fans. First he asserts that the insurgents killing our soldiers are not the enemy, and then he compares the insurgents to America's revolutionary-era Minutemen. In other words, he wants us to believe that our soldiers are the oppressive, colonial enemy of freedom-fighting Iraqis. The truth is just the opposite -- it is the militant Islamists who seek to establish another dictatorship, and it is America who fought to depose the previous one. But Moore is not known for letting the facts get the way of his message. Right-Thinking.com gave the letter a thorough critique. Hopefully people will remember this quote when his next "documentary" is released.Apr 18, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
An editorial in the New York Sun observes how many of those who called for campaign finance regulations are now changing their tune:
Take a look at what the liberal groups said back before the law was passed. "Make McCain-Feingold the law of the land," MoveOn.org said. The Sierra Club supported the McCain-Feingold law, calling it "a strong first step toward real reform" and "getting big money out of politics by closing loopholes in current campaign-finance laws." The president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, Kate Michelman, told the Boston Globe, "We think some reform is needed.There is too much money being spent in campaigns." Reform Judaism hailed the law as "a historic step today toward healing a systemic sickness in our democracy" and said the law will "go a long way toward abating the pernicious influence of money in our electoral system."
Here's what they say now, in the FEC testimony. The MoveOn.org Voter Fund now says, "we are concerned about the potentially devastating impact of the FEC Proposal on all tax-exempt nonprofit organizations that engage in public policy advocacy and/or voter participation programs." The Sierra Club and Naral now say, "The proposed rules would seriously impair vigorous free speech and advocacy, as well as voter participation now and in the future. They would double, triple, or even quadruple the number of citizen organizations whose activities are subject to pervasive regulation by the Commission." Reform Judaism now says "we are especially concerned that this proposal would silence the prophetic voice of religion in American Society."
Of course, they still think they're being consistent, because they just want to muzzle the speech of the "big" and the "powerful," not themselves, the "underdogs." Altruism in action once again.Apr 18, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Another example of how Cuba is ruled by thugs:
Minutes after the United Nations human rights commission in Geneva narrowly passed a resolution criticizing Cuba yesterday, a member of the dictatorship's delegation violently attacked a prominent Cuban-American activist, knocking him briefly unconscious....
Mr. Calzon, 60, told The New York Sun people in the hallway began yelling at each other after the vote was announced, prompting him to seek the attention of a U.N. guard. At that point, a man raced down a nearby escalator, swung his arms over the side as he approached the bottom, and slammed Mr. Calzon with a twofisted blow. "All of a sudden, someone hit my head, and I passed out," Mr. Calzon said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Calzon said witnesses later told him Cuban government supporters surrounded him after he collapsed. "When I was awake, they were yelling things like 'traitor,' 'son-of-a-bitch,' 'lackey to the United States.'" A U.N. guard brandishing a canister of Mace broke up the crowd and helped Mr. Calzon. "That's what prevented them from kicking me," he said....
Cuban U.N. officials had a different version of events. "There was a provocation from Frank Calzon against one woman in the Cuban delegation, and he received the due response from our Cuban delegation," Cuban Ambassador Jorge Mora Godoy, who didn't see the incident, told The Associated Press. [NYSun]
Apr 18, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Bruce Bartlett gives some context to the recent statistic showing that almost 3/4 of all foreign corporations and 2/3 of American corporations had no tax liability in 2000:
[That report] will help pave the way for tax increases on corporations to expand the welfare state and perhaps put Democrats back in control of the White House and Congress. Unfortunately,the GAO report provided little context for its findings. It would have been helpful to know that 45% of all corporations had no net income and nearly 60% had assets of less than $100,000 in 2000, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
It is hardly surprising that a company pays no taxes when it has no income and virtually no assets. After all, about 40% of individual income tax returns report no tax liability, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Another point worth mentioning is that all of this alleged tax avoidance came during the Clinton administration.Yet, because the data have been released now, many casual readers are probably left thinking that the Bush administration is responsible. [NYSun]
Apr 18, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Here are some excerpts from an excellent article by historian Keith Windschuttle called "The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky":
Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington...
...Today, when actors, rock stars, and protesting students mouth anti-American slogans for the cameras, they are very often expressing sentiments they have gleaned from Chomsky's voluminous output.
...Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America was the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a sham. Its democracy was a "four-year dictatorship" and its economic commitment to free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power. Its foreign policy was positively evil. "By any objective standard," he wrote at the time, "the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation."
...The worst current example, he claims, is American support for Israel:
virtually everything that Israel is doing, meaning the United States and Israel are doing, is illegal, in fact, a war crime. And many of them they defined as "grave breaches," that is, serious war crimes. This means that the United States and Israeli leadership should be brought to trial.
Yet Chomsky's moral perspective is completely one-sided. No matter how great the crimes of the regimes he has favored, such as China, Vietnam, and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability through the use of evidence he must have realized was selective, deceptive, and in some cases invented...
Well worth reading.
From Cox and Forkum:
