This thread is about to spend the weekend with its e-mom, but decided to drop you a few links on its way out the door.
- You may have seen an article detailing how a collaborative project among UCLA students and faculty came very close to determining the location of Osama bin Laden's hideout. Wired throws some rain on that parade by laying out the case that the findings from the article are much more mundane.
- Things change. The man who signed DOMA into law, President Bill Clinton, has come out in favor of marriage equality for the State of New York:
“Our nation’s permanent mission is to form a ‘more perfect union’ — deepening the meaning of freedom, broadening the reach of opportunity, strengthening the bonds of community,” said Clinton, a New York State resident. “That mission has inspired and empowered us to extend rights to people previously denied them. Every time we have done that, it has strengthened our nation. Now we should do it again, in New York, with marriage equality. For more than a century, our Statue of Liberty has welcomed all kinds of people from all over the world yearning to be free. In the 21st century, I believe New York’s welcome must include marriage equality.”
- I'm still incredulous that as of this moment, for one of the two major political parties in this country, it's two most-discussed presidential candidates are a reality TV host, and a former pizza company CEO and motivational speaker. How did it come to this?
- Surprise, surprise: our taxes are low:
Americans across all income classes paid lower effective tax rates in 2007, the last year of complete Internal Revenue Service data, than they did in 2000. The effective tax rate is what people pay after all exemptions and deductions. This is according to the most recent comprehensive look at taxes by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The highest 20% of tax filers saw their total average federal effective tax rate fall from 28% in 2000 to 25.1% in 2007, according to the CBO. That's considerably lower than the current top marginal tax rate of 35%, and lower than the 27.5% effective rate in 1979, the first year that CBO data are available.
For the wealthiest 1% of filers, the effective tax rate fell from 33% in 2000 to 29.5% in 2007. The poorest 20% of filers saw their effective rate fall from 6.4% to 4%.
It's almost enough to make you wonder why all these Atlas-esque John Galts haven't hired the rest of us already with how low their tax burden is becoming.
- What digby said, like usual:
I realize that for many people this is counter-intuitive. But terrorists who hold highly sensitive intelligence are the kind of people for whom a self-image of tough, resistant warriors is definitional. It's not like holding your little brother in a wrestling hold and making him cry uncle. People have studied human psychology long enough now to realize that if you want real information as opposed to false confessions and misinformation from these people, you'll use a different approach.
But then, I've never been convinced that the people who were ordering the torture ever cared much about the quality of the information it produced. They were interested in "metrics" and "intelligence product." As long as information was flowing they were doing their jobs and that's all that mattered.
True. But of far greater concern is the fact that using bin Laden's death to justify torture was a knee-jerk reaction among the legal intelligentsia of the far right. Unless you actively like torture, you shouldn't be seeking to defend it and prove that it works. In a society like ours, the hope ought by all rights be that torture isn't necessary. If the information that led to bin Laden was acquired through other means, we should be relieved about that, because it means that we don't have to violate our principles to acquire necessary information. It takes a special type of sadism to attempt to convince the American public in light of all evidence to the contrary that good information can only be obtained through torture and that therefore, we should use it indiscriminately.
- A significant chunk of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia centers around the recent deregulation that let to essentially unfettered access for speculators into commodities markets. What's the natural result? Crashes from the fitful explosions of speculative bubbles:
Independent oil trader and author Dan Dicker agreed, saying crude’s reaction to the drop was “great proof of just how much speculative money there was in the oil market.”
Noting that much of the drop included a large volume of margin selling, he added that the fall also showed “just how much stupid money there is in the oil game.”
But despite the speculative nature of the drop, analysts at Lloyds Bank said Friday that some economic fundamentals actually point to even lower prices for some commodities.
“Many of them have looked frothy for a while and have perhaps accelerated beyond the pace justified by the global recovery,” they said in a research note.
So, a whole bunch of profit-mad speculators are driving up the price of oil futures, making me pay $4.50 per gallon to fill up my Prius...and yet the chorus of "drill, baby, drill!" is set to get started again as we approach another "driving season." Tell you what: when supply or demand fluctuates by 10% in one day, then you can get back to us all about drilling while pretending that the current high prices are a supply problem.