The FairTax has been getting a lot of attention lately, including support from Presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson. It sounded good to me when I first heard about it - I am in favor of fairness - but after hearing some more about it from responsible conservatives like Bruce Bartlett, I've realized that it does not entirely live up to its name.
I'm usually not one to drown in my own outrage, but how can this be happening? A man murders his ex-wife and a friend of hers, but is found not guilty in trial. Then he writes a book about how he killed them, which is published by one of the premier publishing companies, and goes on television on a major network to talk about it.
Is foreign aid the solution to global poverty?
A 2005 United Nations report called for a doubling of foreign aid to poor countries as the means to reduce poverty. Yet the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a for-profit microloan bank and its founder, an apparent vindication of the ideas of Peter T. Bauer, Henry Hazlitt, Deepak Lal, and others. As Bauer wrote, “Development aid, far from being necessary to rescue poor societies from a vicious circle of poverty, is far more likely to keep them in that state.…Emergence from poverty requires effort, firmly established property rights, and productive investment.”In other words, because some forms of for-profit investments can be effective at reducing global poverty, foreign aid must be completely ineffective. Airtight logic. Unbreakable logic, we might even call it, in honor of the gentleman who reasoned that, since his body was easily injured, there must be someone out there who is incapable of being injured.
With 98% of precincts reporting in Wyoming's Congressional district, the incumbent, Barbara Cubin (R), currently has a 653 vote lead. The Lindgren method (which assumes that unreported precincts will vote the same as reported precincts in the same county) projects Cubin to finish 2 votes behind Gary Trauner (D).
...it's what the scandal says about you. And as even a "frustrated GOP strategist" can see,
his party's mishandling of Foley "speaks to our inability to govern and do the right thing. It says everything about who we are as a party."All of the bizarre things that Republicans are saying about the scandal are just making it worse.
Metapolitics Go-meme
Where were you on September 2, 2004? I was here, on the internets, for the very first time. Self, noted.
Today's moral equivalence nonsense comes from a prominent Democrat Senator from Connecticut:
I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -- more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War.As evil as the Nazis, more dangerous than the Soviet communists, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound - it must be Superterrorist! Seriously, what is it with the Left seeing Nazis everywhere? And this is the man who they wanted to be Vice President in 2000? No wonder they lost!
Is Ahmadinejad "more evil, or as evil" as Hitler? ... [T]he potential is there, with his holocaust denial and all that...Hmmm, denying the Holocaust vs. comitting the Holocaust. Morally equivalent? Outside of a few depraved leftists and Islamists, I trust that most of you can figure that one out on your own.
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