Talking Points Memo: White House—We Thought We Were Down To The DetailsTurns out the real reason that Boehner walked out on Obama on Friday is because Boehner demanded a repeal of the individual healthcare mandate. Which, ironically, would actually have worsened things, since the individual mandate will significantly reduce federal spending. New York Times: Some …
Category Archives: ShortLinks
Links for July 22nd
Wikipedia: Flotsam and jetsamFloatsam is the wreckage of a ship or cargo that is floating in the water. Jetsam is any part of either that was tossed overboard deliberately. ChosenThis is a nice-looking, non-intrusive little jQuery/Prototype plugin that improves the UI of HTML select boxes. I'm not using it anywhere, but I intend to. BBC …
Links for July 19th
Sunlight Foundation: Use the Net!Both Sen. Jim Webb and Mark Warner are still filing campaign finance reports with the FEC on paper. They've presumably each got small staffs who do all of their data collection and number crunching on computers, only to them print out their campaign finance reporters, snail-mail them to the FEC, who …
Links for July 16th
Tabulaw: What Congress Does When it Runs Out of NumbersCongress recently passed a bill that created section 139D of the tax code. But there was already a 139D. No problem—they just kept the existing one. So there are two section 139Ds. Given my work on codes, this makes my head feel all explodey inside. New …
Links for July 14th
Reuters: How I misread News Corp’s taxesPulitzer-prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston broke a story earlier this week about how News Corp had received $4.8B in income tax refunds over the past four years, while paying nothing. Turns out he was entirely wrong. What he'd written was the opposite of the truth. News Corp changed …
Links for July 12th
GitHub: nysenatecio/OpenLegislationThe New York Senate's online legislative repository is available on Github. Very impressive. Reuters: It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov’t.Over the past four years, not only has News Corp. not paid income taxes, they've actually gamed the system to collect $4.8B in tax refunds. Murdoch has 152 subsidiaries spread among tax …
Links for July 9th
GAO: Replacing the $1 Note with a $1 Coin Would Provide a Financial Benefit to the GovernmentGetting rid of the $1 bill would save the government $184M/year. Not an enormous amount, on the scale of the budget, but there's no getting around that $184M is a very large amount of money indeed. Ten years ago, …
Links for July 8th
Wikipedia: The National RoadOne of the first highways in the country was the aptly named "National Road," running from Cumberland, Maryland to south-central Illinois, the road was to continue clear to Missouri, but the project ran out of cash. Construction of the 620-mile road ran from 1811–1838, having been authorized five years prior by President …
Links for July 7th
PolitiFact: George Allen changes stance again on ethanol subsidiesAllen was against ethanol subsidies. Then he was for them. Now he's against them. It's got to be dizzying, change positions every time the political wind shifts. PolitiFact: Virginia GOP says Phil Puckett voted against sending EPA a messagePolitiFact finds the RPV's criticism of Sen. Puckett to …
Links for July 6th
The Register: Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its resultsGood. .co.cc sites are almost uniformly worthless—a hive of malware sites and search engine spam. Andrew Sullivan: Boehner’s Economic Terrorism"For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only …