Darth Vader Vents

WHY is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea?       

Scorched earth runs in the family.

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.

Cheney may no longer have a pulse, but his blood quickens at the thought of other countries he could have attacked. He salivates in his book about how Syria and Iran could have been punished.

Michele Bachmann: Rick Perry 'Sucks The Oxygen Out Of The Room'

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann pivoted her focus to jobs and the economy Wednesday during her first campaign appearance in Iowa since winning the leadoff caucus state's Republican straw poll earlier this month.

With Texas Gov. Rick Perry now in the race and promoting his state's job growth, Bachmann put jobs ahead of government spending cuts on a day in Des Moines that included private meetings with area business owners. Bachmann urged the federal government to allow companies with cash holdings overseas to reinvest the money at home without paying taxes on those profits. She claims the change could quickly inject billions in investment into the U.S. economy.

"They want to bring it back into the United States and create jobs here in Iowa, all across the country," Bachmann said while appearing at a tea party rally in Des Moines. "Wouldn't the smartest thing to do be to say to all of these companies, `Zero repatriation tax?' "

It's a popular notion with economic conservatives, but a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found similar policies to have little impact on employment when used in the past. Most of the money has been reinvested in stock buybacks and shareholder dividends, according to the study.

Dick Cheney's Deceit of Shakespearean Proportions

Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue. The deceit of Dick Cheney is indeed of Shakespearean proportions, as evidenced in his new memoir. For the former vice president, lying comes so easily that one must assume he takes the pursuit of truth to be nothing more than a reckless indulgence.

Here is a man who, more than anyone else in the Bush administration, trafficked in the campaign of deceit that caused tens of thousands to die, wasted trillions of dollars in resources and indelibly sullied the legacy of this nation through the practice of torture, which Cheney defends to this day. Still this villain claims that, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the horrid methods he endorsed were a necessary response to the threat of Osama bin Laden. How convenient to ignore that it was Barack Obama, a resolutely anti-torture president, who made good on the promise of Cheney and the previous administration to take down the Al Qaeda leader.

Not to mention that bin Laden was killed in his hiding place in Pakistan, a nation that the Bush administration had befriended after 9/11 by lifting the sanctions previously imposed in retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a program connected with the proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how and the sale of nuclear material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

Executive Pay and the Great Tax Dodge

Before the deficit reduction “super-committee” embarks on a $1–2 trillion course of human slashonomics, it should take a hard look at the Institute for Policy Studies’ (IPS) eighteenth annual executive compensation report, which details how corporations are rewarding CEOs for aggressive tax avoidance—to the tune of at least $100 billion in lost tax revenues every year.

Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging reveals that last year twenty-five of the 100 most highly paid CEOs took home salaries greater than the amount their companies paid in 2010 federal income taxes. And it wasn’t because the corporations weren’t making dough—they averaged global profits of $1.9 billion, and only seven reported losses in US pre-tax income.

But these twenty-five companies shielded their profits in 556 tax haven subsidiaries in places like the Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, and Singapore, which proved to be a lucrative tax dodging strategy for the CEOs themselves: the twenty-five CEOs averaged $16.7 million in compensation, compared to $10.8 million for their peers in the S&P 500.

“What we’re seeing here is tax dodging, pure and simple,” says Sarah Anderson, who directs the global economy project at IPS and has coauthored the Executive Excess report for eighteen years running. “And tax dodging that’s benefiting the CEOs of these companies personally.”

South Africa's Wine Woes

I've seen it: People who are extremely fussy about the food they put in their mouths—shopping at farmers markets for veggies and meat and looking for Fair Trade labels on tropical goods—nevertheless choose wine based on whatever has the quirkiest label at the price point they're comfortable with.

But just as much as tomatoes or pork chops, wine is an agricultural product. Grapes are grown on real land and tended by real people—and marketed by corporate flacks who know how to paint a lovely picture.

GOP Smear Machine Targets Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has yet to officially declare whether she'll challenge Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) in 2012—but already Massachusetts Republicans are flinging mud in her direction and previewing their attack plan if she does jump into the race.

Since Warren formed an exploratory committee on August 18, Brown's staff and the Massachusetts Republican Party have branded Warren a carpetbagger, an elitist, and a candidate too liberal to represent the Bay State. Using press releases, public statements, and even an anonymous Twitter account, GOPers have depicted Warren, a Harvard professor and middle-class champion who launched the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as a political nonentity and "another Martha Coakley." The latter refers to the state's Democratic attorney general who, despite greater name recognition and the advantage of running for a seat controlled by Democrats for more than 50 years, was upset by Brown in a 2010 special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy. "If the first few days of professor Warren's campaign are any indicator, Massachusetts Democrats will soon be yearning for the golden days of Martha Coakley," sniped Jennifer Nassour, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts GOP in August.

Rising tuition fees: A debt sentence for Ontario families

Recently the Financial Post suggested a steady diet of Kraft Dinner and encouraging 13 year olds to become more entrepreneurial were strategic elements in helping students bear the rising cost of higher education. (I'm exaggerating -- but only just.)

Because I guess the problem that needs to be addressed isn't that tuition fees in Ontario have increased by 244 per cent over the past 20 years (adjusted for inflation) -- although the article did concede that fees were high. Or that the cost of higher education is being increasingly downloaded onto families who are already struggling under record levels of debt and years of stagnant incomes. Or that the funding relief that is in place often requires low-income families to take on additional debt to qualify for grants, or comes in the form of RESPs that overwhelmingly privilege those who have extra money left over every month to put aside for their child's education (read: the wealthiest).

No. The real problem: today's students have a sense of entitlement and aren't content to live on a diet of peanut butter and KD. Oh, and kids in grade 7 haven't gotten with the program and started to put money aside each month to help them pay down the debt they'll have when they graduate from university.

The number of days of income it takes to pay for your child’s degree soars, study finds

While a poor family has to spend 1,268 days of income to pay for a child’s university degree, a rich family only has to kick in 137 days of income, a new policy institute analysis reveals.

Skyrocketing tuition and stagnating incomes for all but the very rich have dramatically increased university costs in the past decade, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said in a study, “Under Pressure: The Impact of Rising Tuition Fees on Ontario Families,” released Wednesday.

In 1990, a poor family would have had to divert its total income for 981 days to pay for tuition, textbooks, tax breaks, and living expenses for a four-year degree. A rich family would have had to divert only 135 days of total income.

The income-to-tuition gap sapped middle-income families, as well, the study said.

The institute divided household income into five tiers: about $150,000, about $80,000, about $55,000, about $33,000, and about $15,000 as average after-tax income.

The money needed to pay for a university degree jumped by 32 days for the second tier, 47 days for the third, and 99 days for the fourth.

WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks suggests that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Police defend handcuffing autistic boy, 9

A 9-year-old with special needs left police no choice but to restrain him, authorities said.

The boy, who police were told has autism, was attending the Fairbank Memorial Day Care Centre last month when he became upset after being teased by other children.

“This boy was out of control, according to the two 911 calls that we got,” said Const. Victor Kwong of Toronto police. “The information that we received was that he was picking up tables and chairs and throwing them around. The precaution that the school had taken was they took out the other students and they locked him into a room by himself.”

It’s the first time the daycare has had to summon police on a child, said Peter Frampton, executive director of the Learning Enrichment Foundation which accommodates 750 kids across 17 centres. He could not comment on this specific case.