Ezra Klein on Romney’s theory of the “taker class,” and why it matters

For what it’s worth, this division of “makers” and “takers” isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.

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Part of the reason so many Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is that Republicans have passed a series of very large tax cuts that wiped out the income-tax liability for many Americans. That’s why, when you look at graphs of the percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, you see huge jumps after Ronald Reagan’s 1986 tax reform and George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. So whenever you hear that half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, remember: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush helped build that.

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Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.

From Jezebel: High School’s Awful ‘Prey and Predator Day’ Lets Guys Dress in Camo While Girls Dress in Animal Print

For "Prey and Predator Day," students were encouraged/allowed to wear outfits that celebrate the sport of shooting woodland creatures. According to a news release, however, Crookston's big celebration of hunting culture has different dress-up guidelines for male and female students: "guys dress in their camouflage and other hunting apparel while girls will show off their animal print." Get it?? Like, okay — they guys are the hunters, right? And the girls are the hunted, because dating is a lot like pursuing a potential mate through the woods and then shooting her with a crossbow.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's collective bargaining law has been a flashpoint in the efforts to either destroy or save unions. A new twist: large parts of the law have been struck down.

Judge throws out Walker's union bargaining law:

Gov. Scott Walker's law repealing most collective bargaining for local and school employees was struck down by a Dane County judge Friday, yet another dramatic twist in a year and a half saga that likely sets up another showdown in the Supreme Court.

The law remains largely in force for state workers, but for city, county and school workers the decision by Dane County Judge Juan Colas returns the law to its status before Walker signed the legislation in March 2011.

Last year, another Dane County judge blocked the law because it was passed in violation of Wisconsin open-meetings law -- but the state Supreme Court overruled that decision and restored the law. And a federal judge has overturned part of the law that required public unions to hold annual elections in order to retain their official status. That case is on appeal.

In These Times reports on the movement to turn public school funding into stockholder profit: The Right-Wing Machine Behind ‘School Choice’

The pro-corporate ideology behind school choice asserts that business style competition will be invariably good for education, and that putting school management and teaching into private (and nonunion) hands will make education less expensive, more efficient and more effective.

The statistics do not bear out their claims. By 2011, test results for the two oldest school voucher programs in the nation–Milwaukee and Cleveland–had reported disappointing results.

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...The multi-billion dollar budget for the nation's schools is a rich prize for those who would profit from the privatization of public schools, and they are joined by equally determined anti-public education ideologues.

Steve "Woz" Wozniak: the one bright spot in the wretched hive of scum and villainy and patent abuse that is Apple. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on Samsung patent verdict: ‘I hate it and I don’t agree with it’

In fact, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hates the result, doesn’t agree with it, and thinks it will be overruled. Samsung will of course appeal, and this case will go back and forth for months still, but Wozniak just wishes everyone could get along.

“I hate it,” Wozniak told Bloomberg in Shanghai today, referring to the patent battle. “I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.”

On the lighter side: from http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html, something I stumbled across a while back about the history of the ubiquitous and important programming language "C". It seems it may be descended from something named after Tibet's native religion/magical practice:

Challenged by McIlroy's feat in reproducing TMG, Thompson decided that Unix—possibly it had not even been named yet—needed a system programming language. After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, he created instead a language of his own, which he called B. B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain. Its name most probably represents a contraction of BCPL, though an alternate theory holds that it derives from Bon [Thompson 69], an unrelated language created by Thompson during the Multics days. Bon in turn was named either after his wife Bonnie, or (according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas.

The best take I've seen so far on the murder of Chris Stevens,
US Ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans (believed to be Marines on consulate duty, but details are still hazy), is from The Christian Science Monitor. The title says it all: US Ambassador murdered as extremists on all sides win, again (The Christian Science Monitor)

The ginned-up controversy over the film, which was propelled to violence by a rabble-rousing Egyptian television channel that presented the film as the work of the US government, recalls the protests over cartoons depicting Muhammad published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005.

Then, there were violent protests across the Middle East over the exercise of free speech in a Western nation. In some ways, it was the beginning of an era of manufactured outrage, with a group of fringe hate-mongers in the West developing a symbiotic relationship with radical clerics across the East. The Westerners deliberately cause offense by describing Islam as a fundamentally violent religion, and all too often mobs in Muslim-majority states oblige by engaging in violence.

When we routinely cage adults for trivial matters like owning bits of outlawed plants, when we routinely use chemical and electrical torture devices on people who dare to question police authority, how can we act surprised when this brutality trickles down to how we treat our children?

Legend has is that Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization, and he replied that it would be a good idea. It still would be. No society that treats children like this can lay claim be being civilized.

A Terrifying Way to Discipline Children

Among the recent instances that have attracted attention: Children in Middletown, Conn., told their parents that there was a “scream room” in their school where they could hear other children who had been locked away; last December, Sandra Baker of Harrodsburg, Ky., found her fourth-grade son, Christopher, who had misbehaved, stuffed inside a duffel bag, its drawstrings pulled tight, and left outside his classroom. He was “thrown in the hall like trash,” she told me. And in April, Corey Foster, a 16-year-old with learning disabilities, died on a school basketball court in Yonkers, N.Y., as four staff members restrained him following a confrontation during a game. The medical examiner ruled early last month that the death was from cardiac arrest resulting from the student’s having an enlarged heart, and no charges were filed.

The sexual abuse of children is a terrible and horrible thing, and those who perpetrate it need to be removed from our company.

It does not follow, however, that possessing images of the sexual abuse of children should in and of itself be a criminal act; and criminalizing the possession of such images has had corrosive effects on our liberty. Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge is right on target: Three Reasons Possession Of Child Porn Must Be Re-Legalized In The Coming Decade

Child pornography is a toxic subject, but a very important one that cannot and should not be ignored. This is an attempt to bring the topic to a serious discussion, and explain why possession of child pornography need to be re-legalized in the next ten years, and why you need to fight for it to happen.