-- editor and columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and contributor to Reason magazine.
Also: Recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Medicine, reigning UFC lightweight champion, and two-time winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off.
Among his many other awards, Hinkle has received the 1942 Academy Award (the Oscar) for costume design in "How Green Was My Valley"; the Wooten-Murray Fellowship in Gas Dynamics from the University of Edinburgh; designation as "Sexiest Man Alive" from People Magazine (in 2004 and 2009, and he has a good shot at it again next year since he started working out again); the Robert H. Gibbs Jr. Memorial Award for Excellence in Systematic Ichthyology from the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists; and a variety of military service decorations, including a Silver Star for nighttime air combat missions over the Solomon Islands in WWII and a Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry at Montbrehain, France, in 1918.
Perry started out looking like a rugged cowboy but soon gave voters the impression he would try to milk a bull. Herman Cain unveiled a “9-9-9” plan that, it turned out, represented the number of women he has hit on. Michele Bachmann, who made headway on the assumption that Republicans wanted a little bit of crazy, offered more than they could take.
Newt Gingrich talked himself to the top of the Iowa polls and then talked himself back down. No one ever left a Gingrich encounter wanting to hear more.
Rick Santorum, offering himself as a clear conservative alternative to Romney, got a big “no thanks” from New Hampshire voters. Even in the Republican Party, he has demonstrated, you can be too anti-gay. Jon Huntsman found that you can also be too reasonable.
Ron Paul, meanwhile, has unearthed surprising evidence that many Republicans think the battle against big government should not stop at the water’s edge. Unlike Barack Obama and George W. Bush, they are not eager to launch attacks on other countries or take on massive nation-building projects.
Paul sounds eerily like the Bush who ran in 2000 — promising we would be “a humble nation.” So he has no chance of getting the nomination of a party in thrall to endless war.
Mitt Romney remains the candidate for Republicans who are willing to settle, which is not most of them. His two chief credentials for high office are a career in private equity investment and one term as governor of Massachusetts, and he has been busy explaining away both.
With so many Republicans so dissatisfied, it’s just possible that none of the current candidates will win enough delegates to win by acclamation. That could make next year’s GOP convention a real convention, instead of another in an endless train of pep rallies that modern-day conventions have become.
Taxes are not complicated because it’s hard to multiply your taxable income by X percent. (Heck, the IRS even does the math for you.) Taxes are complicated because of everything leading up to that final calculation… .
The really complicated question is how much you received in income in the first place. Some people collect one paycheck and nothing else. But many Americans have money coming in half a dozen ways. That’s where things get hairy fast:
Did you collect any interest last year – and if so, was it taxable or tax-exempt? Did you receive any dividends? If so, where’s your Form 1099-DIV? Did you collect alimony or jury-duty pay? Did you make any money from tips? (Allocated tips should be shown in box 8 of your W-2. See Pub. 531 for more details.) Renting out your basement? That’s income – see Schedule C. But note that improvements to the property can be depreciated using the modified accelerated cost recovery system. Are you a student? Scholarship money used for tuition does not count as income, but scholarship money for room and board does. Do you run a business out of your home? If the business percentage of an indirect expense is different from the percentage on line 7 of Form 8829, enter only the business part of the expense on the appropriate line in column (a)… .
It’s true that the tax code is cluttered up with a lot special favors for particular industries, groups, and causes. But as the preceding paragraph indicates, much of its complexity arises from the fact that modern life itself is highly complex.
The only energy question that came to Mr. Perry at Tuesday’s New Hampshire debate was this: How, exactly, is his state’s vaunted “Emerging Technology Fund”—which has dumped some 200 million taxpayer dollars into private companies—any different from Obama programs that subsidized the likes of Solyndra?
It isn’t, of course, and that’s a problem for Mr. Perry… .But no one should forget it was Republicans who in 2005 created the loan program that Mr. Obama would later expropriate to funnel stimulus dollars to his green boondoggles… . It used to be that Republican governors competed for business by lowering taxes and regulations. Then some genius worked out that it was easier to flat-out bribe companies to relocate by offering cold, hard taxpayer cash. And with green energy all the rage, a lot of state tax dollars started flowing to Solyndra-like ventures… .
Granted, the ability to speak well extemporaneously can provide a proxy measure of intelligence. It also can provide a proxy measure of how much sleep someone got the night before. Politicians of every political stripe and every intelligence level commit slips of the tongue. Magnifying their importance — at leisure, when you’ve had time to reflect on the question — may be a proxy measure of superificiality and pettiness.
Highest rate of high-school dropouts in the nation
Crumbling education system
Forced government intervention in personal decisions
Low-wage economy, unlivable wages
High poverty rates
Corporate rule
Over a quarter of the population does not have healthcare
Income inequality
Anti-Equal Rights
Rick Perry. Bad for Texas. Bad for America.
Shorter version: Rick Perry = Emmanuel Goldstein!
Consider:
Republicans and Democrats also showed activation in two other brain areas involved in negative emotion, the insula and the temporal pole. It makes perfect sense, of course, why partisans would feel negatively about the candidate they dislike, but what explains the activation of the cognitive regulatory system?
Turns out [that] partisans turn up their negative emotional response when they see a photo of the opposing candidate, said Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles.
In other words, without knowing it themselves, the partisans were jealously guarding against anything that might lower their antagonism. Turning up negative feelings, of course, is a good way to make sure your antagonism stays strong and healthy.
“My feeling is, in the political process, people come to decisions early on and then spend the rest of the time making themselves feel good about their decision,” Kaplan said.
Although it seems paradoxical that people would want to make themselves feel poorly, Kaplan said partisans have a strong interest in feeling poorly about the candidate they are not going to vote for as that cements their belief that they are doing the right thing… .
The result reflects a larger phenomenon in which people routinely discount information that threatens their preexisting beliefs, said Emory University psychologist Drew Westen, who has conducted brain-scan experiments that show partisans swiftly spot hypocrisy and inconsistencies — but only in the opposing candidate.
When presented with evidence showing the flaws of their candidate, the same brain regions that Kaplan studied lighted up — only this time partisans were unconsciously turning down feelings of aversion and unpleasantness.
“The brain was trying to find a solution that would get rid of the distress and absolve the candidate of doing something slimy,” Westen said. “They would twirl the emotional kaleidoscope until it gave them a picture that was comfortable.”
Social Security … has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics… .
In its latest e-mail blast, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee takes George Allen to task for trying to “dismantle” and destroy Social Security. How? Well:
“Looks like Rick Perry has jumped aboard George Allen’s express train to dismantle Social Security,” said Matt Canter, spokesman for the [DSCC]. “George Allen voted to dismantle Social Security once before, there’s no doubt he would do it again.” …
Allen Voted for Amendment Designed to Divert Social Security Funds into Private Accounts. In 2006, Allen voted for an amendment sponsored by Senator DeMint that would have diverted Social Security’s annual surpluses into a reserve fund that would have been used to set up private accounts. [Vote 68, 3/16/06]
Sounds terribly frightful! But consider the status quo: Congress was diverting Social Security surpluses into current spending. Which isn’t any better for the program’s solvency and certainly worse for program recipients.
Given the choice between diverting surplus Social Security funds to the Iraq war or to a reserve fund to set up investment accounts for seniors, which would YOU choose?
We’ll be talking about the New Apostolic Reformation on today’s show. Mike Bickle, pictured above, is a leader in the group and helped organize Rick Perry’s recent prayer rally in Texas. [background from today’s guest]
From the rapidly thickening annals entitled, “Political History Through Rose-Colored Glasses.” They include the conservative contributions relating how, when you look at Barack Obama, it turns out Bill Clinton wasn’t such a bad guy after all!
Sure, they’re both swaggering Texans with a plainspoken, shoot-from-the-hip style. but Rick Perry is no George W. Bush. Here, a look at how they differ.
This criticism of “overheated rhetoric” brought to you by the publication that calls people it disagrees with “insane” and “chilling” “fanatics.” Hello there, Mr. Kettle!
When Rick Perry opened his presidential campaign with a dazzling display of what GOP consultant Alex Castellanos called “mad cowboy disease”—threatening Ben Bernanke with ugly treatment if he ever ventured into Texas, questioning President Obama’s patriotism, denying the global-warming “hoax”—one of the Texas governor’s greatest vulnerabilities as a candidate became immediately obvious: He enjoys nothing more than raising eyebrows (and hackles) with incendiary talk….
Whereas George W. Bush adopted a swaggering, plain-speaking populist persona, Perry—the poor ol’ farm boy from Paint Creek—is the genuine article. Unless his savvy campaign guru, Dave Carney, can glue Perry’s tongue to the roof of his mouth while he sleeps, the campaign is practically guaranteed to dish up an endless stream of heavily accented, overheated rhetoric.
But as I learned from covering him for nearly three years in Texas, Perry has serious liabilities as a candidate, and they don’t begin and end with the tendency to shoot off his mouth (or his beloved Ruger LCP, with which he claims to have killed a coyote with while he was out jogging last winter). His ten-year record as Texas governor, along with his ideological and political eccentricities, will offer ample fodder for attacks from Bachmann on the right, Romney in the center and, perhaps eventually, Obama on the left. (And nobody can possibly predict what he’ll say about foreign policy.) Here’s a short list of Perry’s major pitfalls as the campaign begins.
