Day: February 16, 2005

Some states are considering taxing motorists by the distance they drive, which would help them in collecting more revenue.

Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy.

A former staffer for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee admitted Tuesday to stealing about $360,000 in donor checks while he was employed there.

Researchers in Japan have discovered some eye-opening news about coffee: It may help prevent the most common type of liver cancer.

House members are looking to hit broadcasters where it hurts – in the pocketbook – to crack down on racy programming.

In making Howard Dean its new national chair, it’s easy to imagine the Democratic Party thinking, “We’ve lost the White House and lost the Congress; what else do we have to lose?”

Washington, it seems, does not have a monopoly on idiotic utterance, although that exists in the nation’s capital in plentiful supply. The words of some of Washington’s politicians, pundits and activists of various stripes are vaporous, mean and destructive, but most of them seem little more than ants at a picnic compared to the words of ethnic studies professor Churchill, which are more on the order of Nazi prison guards ushering their victims to gas chambers.

Over the past few days I’ve been bombarded with e-mails regarding the Ward Churchill scandal. Many have expressed astonishment at how someone like Churchill could have been hired in the first place, let alone tenured and made chair of a department.

It was the chief executive and commander-in-chief who made the choices to spend billions of bucks to put still-unproven defense missiles in the ground while putting soldiers on the ground in Iraq without basic armor.

Northeast Alaska – the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, more specifically – is thousands of miles away and has almost no physical similarity with the warm, watery eastern Gulf of Mexico at Florida’s back door. Little except the likelihood that oil and gas lie below ground in both places.