Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- VICTORY! Court Says Plaintiffs Can Challenge Bush Wiretapping Law – Good.
- Analysis: higher prices, fewer choices if AT&T swallows T-Mobile – Per AT&T,among the five "opportunities" of the T-Mobile deal: "Number two is 'grow ARPU,' or average revenue per user. Number three is 'reduce churn.' And number four is 'expand margins.' They could be recast as 'you'll pay us more money each month, you won't leave, and we'll make more profit on each dollar you pay.'" I suspect that's about the size of it.
- Gingrich Says We Should ‘Celebrate’ Corporate Tax Dodgers, Argues Employees Should Pay Instead – Gingrich seems to confuse “legal” (what they did was legal) with “beneficial” or “moral” or “laudable.” That said, yes, our arcane tax code is full of deductions and write-offs, many of which are designed to incent certain societally beneficial behavior. The deductions I get on my taxes for my mortgage interest and for my charitable donations are examples. So, yes, Arch Coal may well have managed to offset their $42MM in profit with activities that have been given legal sanction AND are useful (e.g., charitable contributions). Or they may have simply used (legal, one hopes) accounting and tax tricks and “loopholes” to avoid taxes though activities that aren’t beneficial to the country, or weren’t (ostensibly) intended to that purpose.
- Ben Dimiero: Was It Something Out Of “Red China” When Fox Celebrated Kids At A Tea Party? – Yes, yes, we’re all shocked when Fox News shows its (yawn) shameless hypocrisy.
- Nathan Fillion: Geek God [Pic] – Fun.
- Firefox 4.0 Final Available for Download Now, Official Release Coming Tomorrow [Updates] – Look forward to it, and to see if some of the performance problems I’ve had in 3.x are resolved.
- How Dumb Are Americans? – (Facepalm)
- Why so little looting in Japan? It’s not just about honesty.
- Longer yellow light could put brakes on Fremont’s profits – Inside Bay Area – So, of course, since what cities are interested in with traffic lights is safety, not making money, I’m sure fractionally lengthening the yellow lights, despite the revenue loss, will go be a top priority.
- Nuclear Energy Advocates Insist U.S. Reactors Completely Safe Unless Something Bad Happens | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
- The Catholic Church still doesn’t get it – Just as there are cases of sexual abuse accusations outside the church that turn out to be false, I’m sure that’s true for some accusations against the Catholic Church. That’s irrelevant, though, to the crimes that we KNOW have been committed, and covered up, and for the church leadership to continue to spin it as “others do the same, and why is everyone always picking on us” does a disservice to the true victims AND to the Church itself.
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3. I’d sure like to know how many, if any, new jobs Arch Coal created last year. How would one find that out?
A very legit question. More specifically, I’d like to see an itemized list of how they did their write-offs and deductions and so forth. If they did it by providing shelter for homeless Haitian puppies, great. If they did it by … well, book-keeping tricks, then not so great.