Rangel Is Rich

AP reports Pres. Obama wants to eliminate tax deferrals for overseas profits. Not sure, but if it goes through I believe the U.S. would be the only developed nation with such a law.

Meanwhile, Rep. Charlie Rangel had this to say about the proposal:

For too long, our tax laws have rewarded companies that invest and keep their money overseas and turned a blind eye to the use of tax havens by the wealthy.

This from the same dude that put his money in the Dominican Republic, and didn't even pay taxes on it there, let alone in the U.S.

If Anyone Still Doesn't Understand the Tea Party Protests...

...this is what they're about.

And judging by what I see on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, there's a lot of pundits out there who only think they understand the protests.

Attention all journalists and pundits: just because you found a few citizen protesters who couldn't express their views in front of a camera doesn't mean they don't have good reason to protest.

Attention Fox news: stop gravy training. We all know you don't give a crap about real politics, you only care about advertising revenue.

Salt Lake Tea Party Round-up

I've got a number of photos to post from the Salt Lake Tea Party protest at the Federal office building. But Notoriously Conservative has already posted his here. He's also posted videos of Bishop, Chaffetz, and Shurtleff addressing the crowd.

Dodd Under Fire

A combination of scandals have rocked Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT). He's looking less and less likely to survive his reelection campaign next year.

But it's important to note that prominent Republicans on the Senate Banking committee are likely to have many of the same problems. Since 2003, the ranking Republican, Sen. Shelby of Alabama, has received over $90000 in campaign contributions from Citigroup, and thousands more from Price Waterhouse, JPMorgan, and other financial institutions. He's also received $37,500 from Cerberus Capital Management, which is a private investment company (i.e. hedge fund).

The second ranking Republican, Sen. Bennett of Utah, has since 2003 received over $200,000 from financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, American Express, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and, most notoriously, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, Sen. Bennett is the 7th largest recipient of Freddie Mac donations for 2008.

Dodd's problems have been largely of his own making. But many of those problems would have gone unnoticed without journalistic digging. Who knows what would happen if journalists started digging at Shelby, Bennett, and others? If Republicans really want to shed the corruption label, they need to clean house, starting with some of their most senior members.

(h/t Instapundit for the Dodd links)

Safety, Danger, and Attention Span

Glenn Reynolds has a good review of Tom Vanderbilt's latest book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). The main point is that added safety features can make us behave more dangerously. He follows a tangent and raises a very interesting point:

This approach could be taken beyond the world of personal transportation. We’re in the current financial mess in part because things that were actually dangerous—from subprime mortgages to risky financial instruments that no one fully understood—felt safe and ordinary. Modern financial markets, with computers, regulations, deposit insurance and bond ratings, felt as routine and as smooth as that four-lane highway in Spain, causing a lot of people who should have been paying attention to doze off. Investors might have been more careful if it had felt like they were driving down a twisty mountain road with no guardrails, especially since we really were engaged in the financial equivalent of high-speed mountain driving, only without the discipline of fear.

I wonder if there isn't some way to make government and the economy feel more dangerous without actually making it more dangerous? Or would this just be like someone setting their clock ahead 10 minutes to avoid being chronically late?

Bennett Votes to Keep Earmarks

From a NYT blog...

Nine Republicans voted with Democrats against Mr. McCain’s amendment: Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Robert Bennett of Utah, Christopher Bond of Missouri, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Dude needs to go.

I Love This Guy

Tom Coburn on President-Elect Obama's historic victory:

The unmistakable mandate from the 2008 elections is one that applies to both parties in equal measure--it's time to define a "new kind of politics" not just with our words but with our actions. If anything, a "new kind of politics" means elected officials putting aside their careerist aspirations in pursuit of solutions that work.

And then some tough love for his own party:

What led the Republican Party to this day was not the application of conservative principles but the abandonment of those principles while hypocritically appealing to those tenets. The past few years have shown a strong correlation between electoral success and fidelity to limited government conservatism. The more Republicans abandoned conservatism, the more voters abandoned Republicans.