Civil Disobedience

Cancel my shot at glory.
I was going to order William Powell's The Anarchist Cookbook through interlibrary loan.
Now that it turns out a UMass-Dartmouth student fabricated a story about being visited by the Departent of Homeland Security because he had requested Mao's Little Red Book. I'll admit to having my doubts about commie paranoia still alive and well in the BA, but who knows with those guys.

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Tom Reilly Sucks Eggs: Part II

I was watching Law and Order and reading Anti-Intellectualism in America last night when the Tom Reilly campaign called. This was the second time they called. The first time I told them I was undecided on who to support. That pretty much gauranteed the second call.

I told the woman who called that I planned not to support Tom Reilly based on his plan to roll back the income tax. She spent five minutes explaining to me that he would only do that when the economy improved enough to do so. I recommended he check out www.massbudget.org.
The sound bite I heard on WFCR sure sounded like a roll back to me. It ends up he was just pandering to the populace that evidently wants tax cuts. MassBudget explains, convincingly to me anyway, that the hot economy of the 90's masked the damage of tax cuts in Massachusetts. If Reilly doesn't understand this, I don't understand him.

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The Madness of King George

What's it going to take?
That Bush lied us into a war is pretty much clear.
That Americans and civilian Iraqis have died for the man's lies is also clear.
That the BA has reinterpreted laws to legalize torture is also clear.
Now the executive branch's power grab is also clear: the Courts don't matter; Congress doesn't matter. We're at war, perpetually at war, and the President has as much power as he wants.
There's a difference between being an American and believing in democracy. If you're a Bush or Fox (for that matter) Republican, being American is enough.

This week the NYT finally decides to release the story it's been sitting on: Bush has been illegally bypassing FISA to wiretap people. The BA surrogates suggest that that time, being of the essence, precludes the application for warrants. The liars, however, neglect to say that law permits them to go for approval retroactively. There's a 72 hour window after the wiretap begins.

As the almighty Boss once sang, "Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king."

Self-Inflicted Wounds: Tax Cuts

Here's the full report on the financial state the Commonwealth is in.
The report is long, but the point is simple: the impact of tax cuts was masked by increased revenue from the dynamic business climate of the 1990's. In what seems now like a super-charged economy, personal and business income was up. Though the tax rate declined, there was more taxable income. When the economy declined, there wasn't enough money to pay for services.


http://www.massbudget.org/tradingplaces.pdf

Tom Reilly Sucks Eggs

Tom Reilly's running on a platform of cutting (yeah, cutting) taxes. I don't know if there will ever be a time when this horse won't run, but I can't believe people aren't starting to realize how much pressure is being put on towns and cities to either cut services or over-ride Proposition 2 1/2. The Fed's have cut taxes, the commonwealth has cut taxes, and now the myopic Massachusetts voter is facing effects at the municipal level.

This excerpt is buried on his website:

"He's a self-described fiscal conservative, fan of former House Speaker Tom Finneran's accomplishments on same and supports rolling back the income tax to the voter-approved 5 percent."

Back on the Blog

The semester is over.
It's nice to be back writing to my one or two casual readers, one of whom is me (or is that I?).

Next semester should be my last semester taking classes, and if everything works out, I'll start my Comps by conducting a literature review of research and writing on the College Board's Advanced Placement program. The research, sparse and quantitative, considers AP as a producer of scores and an indicator of talent and/or achievement. There is little or no research on the program's culture or the participants' experience of the program.

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