K4V.net BLOG

President Obama’s press secretary considers the idea that the president is considering giving some consideration to the idea of a value added tax to be completely inconsiderable. Another White House flack considers the whole thing beyond consideration, From AP’s Charles Babington : For days, White House spokesmen have said the president has not proposed and is not considering a VAT. “I think I directly answered this the other day by saying that it wasn’t something that the president had under consideration,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters shortly before Obama spoke with CNBC.

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White House Press Office: Don’t Listen To the President

George Will was on Colbert last night, talking baseball, banking, and Obama. Click above to watch.

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George Will on The Colbert Report

In her monumentally stupid book The End of America , feminist author Naomi Wolf predicted that the Bush years would end in a full-blown fascist dictatorship. (I detailed the many errors of fact and logic in Wolf’s book here. My favorite claim in The End of America is this one: “The Communist revolutionaries of 1917 were opposed to torture, having suffered it themselves at the hands of czarist forces.”) But the interminable Bush years ended as planned—and to Wolf’s evident disappointment, without a putsch.

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Political Promiscuities: Naomi Wolf and the “Patriot Movement”

Is this month’s ” unexpected ” loss of private sector jobs a hint of what shape the economy will take during the non-recovery? Just yesterday, in an interview with CNBC, Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner said the U.S. economy was “probably just on the verge now, of what we think to be a sustained period of job creation, finally.” The details of ADP’s job report [ pdf ] argue against that.

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The Private Sector’s Losing Jobs. The Government’s Gaining Jobs. Solution: Make All Jobs Government Jobs

My colleague Brian Doherty mentioned yesterday that the mainline Michigan militia groups don’t seem to have much fondness or respect for the Hutaree, the Michigan-based Christian militants hauled in last weekend for allegedly plotting to kill as many cops as they could.

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Hatari!

Judge Andrew Napolitano explains to a skeptical Fox News interlocutor why marijuana should be legalized:

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Friday Pot Link

This San Francisco Bay Guardian feature on the city’s seeming ” war on fun ” is an interesting object lesson in how the concerns, obsessions, and plain obnoxious orneriness of just a couple of cops can shape a whole city’s approach to policing.

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San Francisco’s War on Fun

The Democrats, citing Congressional Budget Office projections, claim the latest version of the health care bill will cut the budget deficit by more than $100 billion in the first decade and $1.2 trillion in the second. As before, those projections depend on Medicare cuts that, given Congress’ track record in this area, probably will not be sustained.

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Losing Count of the Double Counts

Last week, New York state assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D-Brooklyn) introduced a bill to ban the use of all salt in restaurant cooking and impose a fine of up to $1,000 on violators. Like all legislators who introduce absolutely insane legislation, he says he is trying to “make sure that we bring awareness.” Oddly, Ortiz seems to be raising awareness about someone else’s bill

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More on the NY Salt Ban Bill