Sadly, No!

Walter Williams disagrees with potential religious doctrine regarding tax havens and offshore banking:

Pope Benedict could benefit from a bit of schooling. Tax avoidance is legal conduct whereby individuals arrange their affairs so as to reduce the amount of income that is taxable. Tax avoidance can run the gamut of legal acts, such as investing in tax-free bonds, having employer-paid health plans, making charitable gifts, quitting a job and banking in another country. Tax evasion refers to the conduct by individuals to reduce their tax obligation by illegal means. Tax evasion consists of illegal acts such as falsely claiming dependents, income underreporting and padding expenses.

Evoba: Smailliw Retlaw

To support his claim (or at least rile up his readers), Williams dusts off my all-time favorite wingnut argument:

Should the Roman Catholic Church support the welfare state? Or, put more plainly, should the Church support the use of the coercive powers of government to enable one person to live at the expense of another? Put even more plainly, should the Church support the government’s taking the property of one person and giving it to another to whom it doesn’t belong? When such an act is done privately, we call it theft.

Ah, but when such an act is conducted publicly – that is, through legal means and by elected representatives – we call that “taxes.” Similarly, executions are not murder, incarceration is not kidnapping and elections are not coups.

The pope might say that the welfare state reflects the will of the people. Would that mean the Church interprets God’s commandment to Moses “Thou shalt not steal” as not an absolute, but as “Thou shalt not steal unless you got a majority vote in parliament or congress”?

One can only imagine what sort of arguments Williams, for whom the world is but an Econ 101 classroom full of easily impressed college freshmen, might employ to rebut the ecumenical command to render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s, etc. As one of his regular readers, however, I’d expect an example that involved Williams hiring some hypothetical day laborers.

Above: “We’re jammin’, jammin’ — an’ I hope you like jammin’ too…”

We Are Going To Hit Iran. Bigtime.

• If false, this laughable Kos diary shows how the deranged, unhinged left-blogosphere despises facts and truth. If true, this treasonous Kos diary demands due punishment by imprisonment and/or death. Update: Markos Moulitsas deletes the diary, exposing the thoroughly discredited left-blogosphere as truth-despising disloyal traitors who are unhinged, deranged, and laughable.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Dammit Brad, where are we? What’ve we been doing for the past couple of days?!

Above: A.O. Spades expressing dumbness

It’s hard to keep track of all of Ace’s miniature nephews these days, but among the Hueys, Pipeyes, Deweys, Louies, Peepeyes, and Poopeyes now posting on the site, one continues to distinguish himself in the flailingly arrogant wrongness that is, by common reckoning, the site’s trademark and chief source of appeal.

It’s one of life’s small tragedies that smart people are usually painfully aware of how little they really know, and are forced to confront their own humility day after day, whereas guys like Dogstar, eh, not so much. Tomorrow it’ll be something else, but today he’s happy to issue pronouncements on science, specifically climate science:

Time to move the Global Warming goal posts again!
[Dogstar]

Hey, it’s been a while since we checked in with the Global Warming eco-kids. They’ve taken some hits lately- the IPCC dropped the “hockey stick” graph and NASA was forced to recalculate all post-2000 US temperature data. The results- they lost two of their best talking points.

Um, yeah. Here are some questions for Dogstar: What does that matter*, what exactly do you think is the significance of that recalculation, and have you ever read a single sentence of an actual scientific article — as in like one single one, ever?

Actually, it looks like the last question is about to answer itself.

However, they still had their A-1, die-hard fallback position- “There’s a CONSENSUS of scientists!!!”

Well, sorry to be the party pooper, kiddos, but you just lost your ace in the hole…

I don’t know how they do it or what it means for the rest of us, but the guys at Ace HQ manage to make everything sound like a 10-year-old’s misconception of gay sex. Now we’re thinking about Ace’s hole pooping at a party. Next it’ll be gerbils and Rod Stewart choking on a gallon of semen.

And I didn’t even touch ‘die-hard fallback position.’ We’re talking about a context of only two consecutive sentences.

So wait. Let me pour this bleach into the hole I drilled in my skull, and we’ll forget all about the preceding. . .gub, ug, fnah. I smell roses — no, hot tar. Where were we?

Oh right, here’s how the, uh, scientists have lost their ‘ace in the hole’ as regards the consensus of scientists:
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Mark Noonan at Blogs For Bush, once again getting all grandiose about the measurable and not-at-all-number-juggled evidence of progress in Iraq:

Remember back in January where the President was supposedly on the political ropes and would shortly be forced to begin withdrawing from Iraq? “Lame Duck” didn’t even begin to describe President Bush as that time – heck, even the GOP base was abandoning him. Well, now its the last day of August, and how are things going?

Not only have all Democrat attempts to force a surrender failed, but there are actually 30,000 more US troops in Iraq than there were at the beginning of the year. Back in January, the rhetoric was all about how Iraq was irretrievably lost, with President Bush’s protestations that it wasn’t lost painted as the last, desperate gasps of an utterly failed Presidency…now the reality is showing that Iraq is improving all the time, and those Democrats who were loudest in proclaiming defeat in January look more and more stupid.

I think we all know who to thank for this, and it isn’t Mark Noonan.

Above: Bears standing up so that we can stand down

The proprietors of this bear show have valiantly pledged their support in bear recruitment. But many deployed bears are still operating with unarmored unicycles, and several puma units are plagued with hairballs and are facing their third or fourth deployments.

Oh yes, it’s easy to sit at home and brag about the sacrifices of others, Blogs For Bush. Now what about making an effort? Or has failure in Iraq been your hidden agenda all along?

[Graphic: Drummer Hoff]

Update: Robert Green has obtained a pledge of service from all of these bears:

We are proud to offer a matching pledge of Jars of Hunny and pick-i-nick baskets.

Looks like ol’ Chris Muir is still getting in trouble over there. Case in point: This recent effort:

Above: Original Day By Day strip

Let’s do what we do best — i.e., help provide solutions:

Above: Enhanced Day By Day strip

Yay, all better!

Update:
In case Chris has found himself in a corner, politically speaking, we’ve prepared him a strip for tomorrow:

…Although, maybe a better procedure with these Gaggle strips is just to add frickin’ punchlines to them:

See, that’s not genius work or anything, but…

Okay, wait a sec. That method doesn’t fit with the spirit of the strip at all. Hang on:

There. It needed a certain, you know, gratuitous incoherency.

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another wokka-wokka-wokka-hoo-hee-hoo column from Charles Krauthammer. There’s lots of good stuff here, but this is particularly juicy:

Maliki is not just weak but unreliable. Time is short. We should have long ago — say, when national security adviser Stephen Hadley wrote his leaked memo last November about Maliki’s failure — begun working to have this dysfunctional government replaced.

Even the French foreign minister, upon returning from a recent fence-mending trip to Iraq, called for Maliki’s replacement. (One can discount his later apology as pro forma.) Such suggestions are often denounced as hypocritical and contrary to democracy. Nonsense. In a parliamentary system, a government serves only if it continues to command confidence.

But, like, if, uh, we’re “working to have his dysfunctional government replaced,” and not the people who have been elected by the Iraqis, isn’t that a de facto coup? And how are we going to force the Iraqi parliament to have a no-confidence vote?

Does anyone imagine that Maliki enjoys the confidence of the majority of Iraqis? If he does not, parliament, representing the people, has the perfect right to vote no confidence and bring down the government.

And then? Rather than seek a new coalition as a shaky substitute, the better alternative is new elections. And this time we must not repeat the mistake of election by party list, a system almost designed to produce warlord leadership and unstable coalitions.

New elections. Lovely. Everyone loves those picture-perfect purple finger moments. Makes everyone feel warm’n’fuzzy about waging a pointless war that’s ruined millions of lives. Just as long as the Iraqis vote for someone we approve, is all. And to do that, we’ll likely have to ban every legitimate candidate save Allawi and Chalabi.

Democrats, can you please, please, please, please get us out of this? I’m tired of watching my country slowly commit suicide. Thanks.

‘A Time for Grace:
America needs unity in dealing with Iraq. That means the president must lead.’

Above: Quit taking the paper years ago

• Pro-war forces must be willing to admit that mistakes have been made. Antiwar forces must be willing to start taking the president at his word.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.