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Lieberman Will Join Republicans In Blocking Health Care Bill
Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reiterated his opposition to a public option today by announcing that he will join Republicans in filibustering Majority Leader Harry Reid's health care bill. "If the bill remains what it is now, I will not be able to support a cloture motion before final passage," Lieberman stated earlier today. In opposing the bill, Lieberman could potentially affect other moderate Democrats who are still unsure about supporting a plan that includes a public option. While Lieberman originally said that he would not support a public option that charged taxpayers, under Reid's plan, the option would be financed by premiums. Lieberman's move could make it harder to Democrats to reach the 60 votes needed to block a Republican filibuster.
CBS News | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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"Mickey Mouse Project": Chicago Men Plot Denmark Attacks
Chicago residents David Coleman Headley and Tahawar Hussain Rana have been arrested and charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts. The FBI said they were planning to attack a Danish newspaper. The plot, dubbed the "Mickey Mouse Project," entailed attacking the offices of the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005. According to the Justice Department press release, Rana, who is a native of Pakistan, was arrested on Oct. 18 at his home in Chicago, while Headley was arrested on Oct. 3 while boarding a plane to Pakistan. Rana is the owner a multinational company called First World Immigration Services, which helps immigrants from the subcontinent enter the U.S. legally. According to the Jawa Report blog, Rana runs a series of businesses in the U.S. and Canada—including a Halal meat processing plant and an import business— and may have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The men had been in contact with al-Qaida and radical Islamist operatives, and they had allegedly already taken two trips to Denmark this year to scope out potential targets. Headley is facing a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted while Rana may receive up to 15 years.
Agence France-Presse | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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The IRS has announced the creation of a new enforcement unit designed to audit the very wealthy people by focusing on international networks of wealth instead of just reported incomes. The unit, called the Global High Wealth Industry group, targets individuals with assets "in the tens of millions of dollars," and focuses on offshore banking, international partnerships, and the complex ways in which the very wealthy conceal their incomes. Under the old IRS approach, which was described as "silo-like," audits focused on a single income source and generally overlooked additional assets. "You cannot assess compliance among the nation's wealthiest individuals by looking only at their 1040s [tax returns]," IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said in a statement yesterday.
Wall Street Journal | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Ellison: Iran Nuclear Sanctions Won't Work
Blogging in the Huffington Post, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison argues that no good can come of imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear activity. Imposing sanctions, Ellison says, won't cow Ahmadinejad into cooperating, but it will allow him to change the subject and turn the issue into a question of national pride rather than international security. Introducing sanctions also threaten to "rally and strengthen the nation's resolve to further its nuclear ambitions in the name of self defense." Moreover, if we do impose sanctions on Iran, the sanctions will probably bolster the country's black market—a sector controlled by Iran's infamously corrupt Revolutionary Guard. When sanctions do work, Ellison argues "they likely do so at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable—as they did in Iraq." Many of the country's most prominent figures, including opposition leader Mir Hossein Maousavi, have opposed sanctions for these very reasons. There's a nascent democratic movement growing in Iran, Ellison says. Sanctions would be the quickest way to kill it.
Huffington Post | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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October Deadliest Month for U.S. in Afghanistan
As pressure builds on the White House to decide whether to increase its military commitment in Afghanistan, October 2009 became the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the country after eight American soldiers were killed there Tuesday. So far in October, 55 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan; August 2009 was previously the most deadly, with 51 troops killed. The eight soldiers were "killed in multiple bomb attacks," according to the Associated Press. On Monday, 14 Americans were killed in two separate helicopter crashes.
Associated Press | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Swine Flu: Now Responsible for Internet Overload, Too
A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that if a national swine flu pandemic forces millions of people to stay home sick, it'll probably overload Internet servers. The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for coordinating communication during times of crisis, and so far has failed to come up with regulations for dealing with an Internet blackout. According to the GAO report, the government is woefully underprepared for the prospect of having "a majority of users on the Web at the same time." Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are similarly unprepared. In response to the overload, companies could either increase bandwidth—an expensive and time-consuming process—or prioritize certain kinds of traffic, although this toes the line of being illegal. The report was commissioned by the House energy and commerce committee, and focused on the impact of an outage for securities traders, many of whom telecommute.
Washington Post | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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France Spent $1.5 Million Daily During EU Presidency
During his six-month stint as EU president, French President Nicholas Sarkozy set new records for spending, according to a report from France's national audit office. Between July and December 2008, France shelled out around $1.5 million a day, or $254 million total in EU funds. Prior to this, EU presidencies generally cost between $105 and $120 million. Experts aren't exactly sure where all the money went, although the Guardian notes that Sarkozy held a lavish banquet for European leaders at the Grand Palais in Paris last year, spending $1.5 million in a single evening. Of this, $290,000 went to gardening, $448,000 to the podium, and $136,000 to carpets. "The scale of this summit, the irregular nature of its procedures and its massive impact on public finances together make this summit a kind of record," the report stated. In spite of all this, Sarkozy somehow managed to come in $42 million under budget.
BBC | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Kristol: Few Moderates in GOP's Future
Republican power brokers are pushing to make the GOP more moderate in order to compete with Democrats on fundraising and in swing states. But new polls show that the party's best bet is to remain "unapologetically conservative," William Kristol argues in his monthly Washington Post column. Kristol says polls, which show that 72 percent of Republicans identify as conservative, mesh with conservative momentum in next week's elections for Virginia governnor and New York's 23rd congressional district. Kristol sees in the 2012 presidential race another big shift away from the Republican elite. None of the four leading candidates—Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich—is a current officeholder. "So a party that has over the past two decades nominated a vice president (George H.W. Bush), a senator (Bob Dole), a governor (George W. Bush) and another senator (John McCain), now has as its front-runners four public figures who are, to one degree or another, outsiders."
The Washington Post | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Guam (And Its Surfers) Brace for $15 Billion Military Expansion
In upcoming months, the U.S. military will undertake a $15 billion expansion plan on the small American territory of Guam, moving 8,000 soldiers over from Japan and increasing the island's population by anywhere from 15 percent to 30 percent. Locals worry that the increased military presence could create overcrowding and threaten the island's easygoing, surfer-friendly culture. "It's gonna be hell out here," one Guamanian surfer said. "Like too many rats in a cage." Guam is already home to many in the U.S. military—according to the Atlantic, Guamanians have some of the highest participation and death rates of any state or territory in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The expansion is likely to augment this, but it could also help bolster the islands with jobs and infrastructure development. "We don't want to be treated like a 21st-century colony," Sen. Judith Guthertz said. "We support the buildup, as long as it's a win-win for Guam and the military."
Atlantic | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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French Court Convicts Scientology of Fraud
A French court on Tuesday fined the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre and its Paris bookshop roughly $900,000 for defrauding its followers, and handed the group's leader in France a two-year prison sentence. Officials, however, "voiced regret that a recent change in the law prevented France from banning it outright," according to Agence France-Presse. The case was brought by two women, one who says she was fooled into buying expensive Scientology products, such as an "eletrometer," and another who says she was fired by her boss, a Scientologist, when she refused to enroll in the church's courses. France declared Scientology a cult in 1995.
Agence France-Presse | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Web Site Helps Trick-Or-Treaters Crowdsource for Candy
Real estate Web site Zillow.com has come up a creative new way to lure users to their home page: They've developed a Trick-or-Treat Housing Index designed to help kids figure out the best neighborhoods to visit on Halloween. According to the Zillow, the Index "was calculated using four equally weighted data variables: Zillow Home Value Index, population density, Walk Score, and local crime data." Cities are broken down by neighborhoods (although at the moment, data is available only for Los Angeles and Chicago) and weighed according to which areas will provide the most candy with the least walking. The WSJ suggests that this model is ripe for mashups and could easily be combined with apps to measure the quality of the candy, or to factor in the locations of registered sex offenders. Another suggestion: a feature identifying houses that hand out apples.
Wall Street Journal | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Lessons Learned From Fitzgerald's Tax Returns
What can we learn from F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns? A lot, William Quirk writes in the American Scholar. For starters, Fitzgerald was more of a spendthrift than previously thought. He kept meticulous ledgers of all of his spending, and by 1920, was making the equivalent of $500,000 a year. So why did Fitzgerald die insolvent? A few reasons, Quirk says. First, Fitzgerald began living a little too much like Gatsby: He spent money on servants and lived in Great Neck, one of the most expensive towns in the country. Finally, he didn't account for unanticipated expenses—what Quirk calls "leakage"—and was pushed further into financial trouble by Zelda's illness, which required her to stay in a Swiss sanatorium for 15 months in 1929. In spite of carefully monitoring his finances, all this combined with an erratic workflow left him deeply in debt for most of his career. In 1924, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned him to write a piece titled "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year." Fitzgerald's solution to the problem—which didn't really work—was simple: Move to Europe and take advantage of the exchange rate.
American Scholar | Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009
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Teddy bear is no match for DC snow http://bit.ly/beDsor
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How to levitate by standing next to a wet spot on the sidewalk http://bit.ly/alJHez
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A Lori Gottlieb ex strikes back on Jezebel http://bit.ly/dB5jqn
