K4V.net BLOG

What’s popularly known as the “Bush tax cuts” expire at the end of this year. President Barack Obama wants to keep rates the same (or lower them even) for individuals making less than $200,000 and households pulling down $250,000.

Continued here:
Can the U.S. Afford $70 Billion in Tax Relief in 2011?

As Jesse Walker noted earlier this month, officials in Montgomery, Alabama have been seizing and demolishing private property without providing just compensation to the owners as required by the Constitution, something the libertarian historian David Beito has rightly denounced as “ eminent domain through the back door .” Here are a few more of the infuriating details, courtesy of the local Fox affiliate:

Originally posted here:
More on Alabama’s Eminent Domain Through the Back Door

Fresh from its victory over Louisiana’s unique-in-the-nation florist licensing system, the Institute for Justice is challenging the state’s restrictions on casket sales.

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Casket-Making Monks Challenge Coffin Cartel

Patricia Neal, who won an Oscar for her role in Hud and starred as Dominique in The Fountainhead, is dead. Patricia Neal was an Academy Award-winning actress known on screen for her husky voice and the quiet strength she brought to roles in such acclaimed films as Hud (1963) and The Fountainhead (1949) and the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Ultimately the actress, who died of lung cancer Sunday at 84 surrounded by her family at her home in Edgartown, Mass., became just as famous for the tragedies that hit her and her family in the 1960s

Excerpt from: 
Patricia Neal, RIP

Should a person who is dying of an incurable illness be allowed to donate his organs before the disease kills him?

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Man Wants to Donate Vital Organs Before He’s Dead

Yet another cop-kills-the-family-dog story today, this one from Willits, California : Mendocino Major Crimes Task Force agents, aided by a uniformed Willits police officer, serving a search warrant at 64 Franklin Avenue on July 27, shot and killed a family pet, an 8-year-old half-pit bull mix named Tonka. When agents searched the home, they found nothing directly linking the residents to the arrest of Craig Anthony Gelber, the target of the search, according to MMCTF Commander Bob Nishiyama.

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Another Cop-Kills-Dog Drug Raid

The Washington Post editorial board makes the case : The feds give companies that combine corn ethanol with gasoline a 45-cent tax subsidy for every gallon of corn ethanol added to gasoline. That’s on top of a tariff on imported sugar cane ethanol from Brazil and federal mandates requiring that steadily increasing amounts of these biofuels be produced.

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Against Ethanol Subsidies

Reason Contributing Editor Walter Olson questions the inherent goodness of the Americans for Disabilities Act , on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. After listing a few of the more notorious silly legal outcomes from lawsuits under the Act, Olson notes: One reason for the law’s immunity from criticism is that it is defended as a matter of identity politics: if you’re against it, then you must be against the people it protects. So it is treated as rude, not merely provocative, to bring up the failure of the original ADA premise that the new law would “pay for itself” by increasing the labor force participation of the disabled (the rate declined   instead ).

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Happy 20th Anniversary, ADA! Or…Is It?

San Jose Merc surveys the default-no-foreclosure demographic, and turns up the story of one brave bus driver : S.J. man fights back San Jose homeowner and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority bus driver Darrell Thomas stopped paying his mortgage in late 2008 after he lost overtime pay and while he was seeking a loan modification. He was offered a trial modification in April last year, but as he was about to start making the new payments, he learned he’d been foreclosed on.

See the rest here:
Personal Finance For the Publicly Employed: Quit Paying Your Mortgage Because Your Overtime’s Been Reduced