News and Abuse...

Over at MSNBC there's a pretty good article about why the whole tax-cut thing from Bush doesn't really make a difference. The first is that it applies only to income tax, not the Medicare and Social Security taxes that we pay on our income. (And think: your employer pays the bulk of your medicare and social security taxes, so that you don't take a double-hit on your own salary but that's money your employer could be giving *you* for your own benefit.) Secondly, BushCo has rewritten the laws so that "income tax" is now a "wages and salaries tax"; the law used to apply to capital income as well, but with the reduction of capital gains taxes the bulk of "income" taxation rests on those who put in daily hours at their scut jobs. And thirdly, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) was not revised by Bush's tax cuts; if his tax cuts put you in the AMT bracket (and the number of people who were covered by AMT has risen from 200 in 1970 to 2.7 million this year) you pay the AMT amount.

Read: Why Your Tax Cut Doesn't Hold Up

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A reminder:

Attacks on religion and religous faiths are not allowed. Reverence is to mark any mention of the name of God, His attributes and powers. Clergy portrayed in their callings are vested with the dignity of their office and under no circumstances are to be held up to ridicule. - The Broadcasters Code Of Practice, 1950-1980

Looks like we're going back to those days...

Nasty Rhetoric on Gay Marriage

Man, the rhetoric from the right has become unimaginably ugly. The center of the ugliness appears to be WorldNetDaily, which is as right-wing as it gets without putting on the red-and-black armbands. Consider this "for the children" article that basically says that gay marriage has destroyed the instutition of marriage in Denmark-- without informing us that marriage had collapsed as an institution in Denmark before gay marriage was instituted. If "marriage" is worth defending, it's worth defending-- and joining. The necessary mentions of NAMBLA and the ongoing excoriation of Judith Levine follow. Levine comes in for particular hate from the right because of her book "Harmful to Minors," in which she dares ask the question, "How is sex harmful to minors?"

The American Family Association follows with The Sexual Assault On America, which lists off the emotional aftermath of rape and then tries to ascribe those states to "America" as a whole: powerlessness at "stopping the Homosexual juggernaut", accepting blame for denying gays and lesbians their civil rights, so forth, ad nausea. This article is especially repugnant for its naked aggression against gay and lesbian supporters and it's description of civil rights as "the gang rape of a nation." Jesus wept. At least during the early 1900's the characterization of black men as "rapists on our white flowers" came from the pitiful and the pathetic, seeing light only in the yellowest of dingy newletters; to see it coming out of a man of the cloth throuh Agape press is a sign of how just how coarse and crude discourse has become. I am left a-gape.

WorldNet goes for the throat: "At least three of the world's major religions œôòó- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- condemn homosexual relations. These faiths prescribe varying degrees of punishment for those who practice such behavior. The most serious punishment is death." Charming, huh? "The nature of the lust that consumes their bodies," he writes. Lovely. He cites "personals ads" in gay mags about barebackers, as if that were the totality of gay men's activities.

Man, the Internet just lets the ugliness hang out.