“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.” —Edmund Burke
Tag: liberty
Lawrence Lessig delivered “Free Culture” in July 2002 at the Open Source Convention. If you read nothing else that I post here about copyright and your constitutionally-ordained fair-use rights, read this.
And if you don’t want to actually read this transcript, think on this, from Lessig:
- Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
- The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
- Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
- Ours is less and less a free society.
Thursday night, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNBC all decided to subtly berate President Bush’s upcoming economic stimulus package, which will include tax cuts. From the Media Research Center:
ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas worried: “President Bush will roll out more tax cuts, but will they benefit everyone?” On CBS, Bill Plante noted how President Bush “brushed aside the debate over whether his tax policy favors the rich” and that Bush’s tax cut package set to be unveiled on Tuesday will “very likely” include “the very top tax rate despite the criticism that that will disproportionately benefit the wealthiest taxpayers.” CNBC anchor Forrest Sawyer intoned that it’s “a package that critics are already saying is not enough and helps the wrong people.” NBC’s David Gregory noted how Bush insists his tax cuts “are not simply a giveaway to the rich.” NBC’s Tom Brokaw stated that President Bush insisted his “plan to fix a struggling economy” will “help all Americans–not just the wealthy.”
To the blowhard talking heads and other tax-and-spend leftists: it’s very hard to give tax breaks to people who are paying very little, if any, taxes. What the talking heads fail to mention is that from the IRS’s own records, we learn that in 2000, the bottom 50 percent of wage-earning Americans, those earning less than $27,682 annually, paid under 4 percent of the taxes. They paid 3.91 percent of the federal tax burden, to be exact. These are the people that need a tax break?
Contrast that with the top 5 percent of wage earners ($128,336), which paid 56.47 percent! And the top 50 percent of wage earners in the country paid the 96.09 percent that the bottom 50 didn’t, and still doesn’t, have to come up with.
To the point, half of the wage earners in this country pay nearly all the federal taxes, while the other half pays next to nothing.
So the economic lesson for today, boys and girls, is that if you’re poor in America, you’re paying very little, if any, federal taxes, and any proposed tax cuts are not going to impact you negatively. Therefore, talking heads need to stop instigating class warfare and shut their traps.
“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” —John Adams
“A group of people may have rights, but it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to defend or safeguard such rights.” —Murray N. Rothbard
A new site has appeared, protectfairuse.org. I encourage you to check it out. They make it easy for you to email and print letters to send to your Congresscritters regarding protection of your fair use rights.
Exercising the Second Amendment right he defends every day through his service, Marine Sergeant James Lowery shot and killed a would-be carjacker last Thursday, after being wounded himself. Sergeant Lowery is in fair condition, and will rejoin his unit, an aerial tanker squardon, upon his release from the hospital.
A lot has been said and written in the past few months regarding the fate of the Iraqi civilian population in the event of a U.S.-led attack on Saddam Hussein. Many charges have been laid at the foot of the Bush administration that the White House doesn’t care about the Iraqi people, or what they think. Many of these “journalists” have argued that the Iraqi people are fine with the current regime, and are utterly opposed to a U.S.-led invasion. Oh, really?
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group has released a white paper on the results of anonymous, on-the-street interviews conducted with Iraqi citizens in Baghdad, Mosul and Najaf. And I, quite happily, quote:
“A significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view that, if such a change required an American-led attack, they would support it.”
and
“Few Iraqis opposed an invasion for patriotic reasons or fear that an attack would lead to heavy civilian casualties.”
Granted, and understandably so:
“It should not be assumed from this that such support as might exist for a U.S. operation is unconditional. It appears to be premised on the belief both that any such military action would be quick and clean and that it would be followed by a robust international reconstruction effort. Should either of these prove untrue–if the war proved to be bloody and protracted or if Iraq lacked sufficient assistance afterwards–the support in question may well not be very long sustained.”
Now, everybody sing! “All the world over, so easy to see; people everywhere, just want to be free. . .”
ABC News has conducted an exclusive interview with two FBI agents, who said they were repeatedly warned off of the cases they were working on. Beginning in the mid-1990s, “the two Chicago-based agents were assigned to track a connection to Chicago, a suspected terrorist cell that would later lead them to a link with Osama bin Laden. Wright says that when he pressed for authorization to open a criminal investigation into the money trail, his supervisor stopped him.”
They were ordered to stop investigations into the suspected terror cell linked to al Qaeda, which would eventually perpetuate the Sept. 11 attacks. One of the individuals they were tracking was “a powerful Saudi Arabian businessman, Yassin al-Kadi. Al-Kadi is one of 12 Saudi businessmen suspected of funneling millions of dollars to al Qaeda…” After September 11th, Al-Kadi was confirmed as one of bin Laden’s financiers.
Way to go, Bill.
“The expectations in the reformed-terrorist category are not high–Jomo Kenyatta, Robert Mugabe–but [Yasser] Arafat has failed to make even this minimal grade. His Palestinian Authority is a swamp of corruption and organized crime presided over by trigger-happy goon squads from the Chairman’s dozen competing state security agencies. If you gave this guy Switzerland to run, he’d turn it into a sewer.
“…Today, the only tattered remnant of the pan-Arab cause is Palestinian nationalism, and very helpful it is, too. Why, only the other day a wealthy Saudi assisted by Egyptian lieutenants and Iraqi intelligence blew a hole in the middle of New York and the world rushed forward to insist that this proved the need for a Palestinian state.” —Mark Steyn
In case you missed it, and I know you did since I did, too, Sunday, 15 December, marked the 211th anniversary of the adoption of our Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
“Many of the Founders objected to listing the Bill of Rights as ‘amendments’ because it might be construed that such rights were subject to change. The Bill of Rights is both an affirmation of innate individual rights and an explication of constraints upon the central government.” —The Federalist, 02-51 Brief
Monday, the 16th, marked the 229th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.