Whistleblowers in Iraq fired, demoted, imprisoned

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a report on how individuals blowing the whistle on corruption in Iraq rebuilding efforts are being treated--they're being fired, demoted, and even imprisoned. Donald Vance reported that the company he was working for, Shield Group Security Co., was selling guns, land mines, and rocket launchers to insurgents, U.S. soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy employees for cash. He didn't know who to trust in Iraq, so he reported it to an FBI agent in Chicago. The result--he was thrown in to an American military prison outside of Baghdad for 97 days and subjected to harsh interrogations.

Brayton also reports on how two whistleblowers brought a civil suit regarding corruption by their former employer, Custer Battles, winning a $10 million jury award, only to have it overturned by the federal district judge on the grounds that the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq was not part of the U.S. government.

Ted Haggard's coming to Phoenix to live

Ted Haggard and his wife are moving to Phoenix, where they will be living and providing counseling at the Phoenix Dream Center, a faith-based halfway house. They will also both be full-time students in psychology and counseling.

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out that they are asking for donations to be sent to them through a Colorado Springs 501(c)(3) called Families With A Mission that no longer exists and was run by a convicted sex offender who has failed to register as such in Colorado.

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula points out that Haggard is far from destitute--his $138,000 annual pastor's salary is still being paid through the end of 2007, and he owns a home in Colorado Springs worth $715,000.

UPDATE (September 7, 2007): Now, apparently Haggard will not be moving into or working for the Phoenix Dream Center, which is associated with Tommy Barnett's Phoenix First Assembly of God (they don't go by their initials) church.

Early U.S. income tax

I'm in the process of reading Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography, and just came to the portion about the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax. I had already known that the tax was a very low percentage, but I hadn't realized that only the top 1% of income earners paid any income tax. It would be a nice model to go back to, but not possible without dramatically reducing federal spending--the wealthiest Americans wouldn't tolerate an extortionate percentage of taxation that would be required on the current level of spending, and given the huge amounts of money that are now a part of political campaigning, nobody gets elected without the support of at least some of the wealthiest Americans. (And those levels of spending are tied together--there's huge money riding on political campaigns because there's huge money and power in the hands of the federal government. The only way to reduce the former is to reduce the latter.)

Here are the two paragraphs where Amar describes pre-Civil War and post-16th Amendment income taxes in the United States:

Prior to the Civil War, at least seven states had adopted income taxes. High exemptions and graduated rates--the basic features of a progressive tax structure--were commonplace in these states. Congress followed this pattern when introducing a federal income tax in the 1860s. For instance, the 1865 federal tax code exempted all persons who made less than $600, taxed income between $600 and $5,000 at 5 percent, and subjected all income above $5,000 to a steeper 10 percent rate. Later federal laws tweaked the specifics but preserved the basic structure, under which more than three-quarters of federal revenue came from the seven wealthiest states: New York (which itself generated more than 30 percent of the total national intake), Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Under the law struck down in Pollock, incomes over $4,000 were taxed at 2 percent, all others were exempt. According to Treasury Department estimates, less than 1 percent of the population had been subject to this levy.
...
In the first income-tax statute enacted after the new amendment was in place, Congress once again opted for a progressive tax structure that exempted a large swath of low- and middle-income persons and taxed the rest at a sloping rate, beginning at 1 percent for an individual making $3,000 and topping out at 7 percent for income over $500,000. The $3,000 minimum threshold effectively limited the tax to the top 1 percent of the economic order. In 1916 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the new tax law, expressly rejecting the notion that the "progressive feature" of the tax somehow rendered it unconstitutional. The American People had spoken and--this time, at least--the Court listened.

Ten years in prison for selling light bulbs

Steve Tucker ended a ten-year federal prison sentence last year. He served his time for selling light bulbs--specifically grow lights--that, while themselves legal, were sold to some customers that were using them to grow marijuana. Even though he and his brother asked any customers who so much as mentioned marijuana to leave and refused to sell any products which had any visible references to marijuana, they were successfully prosecuted on conspiracy charges because they had knowledge that some of their customers were using their products to grow marijuana.

His brother Gary, who was given a fifteen-year sentence that was reduced to ten after a successful petition to apply a change in policy from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, died of cancer at about the time his sentence was served.

History channel wipes the floor with 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Rightwing Nuthouse reports that the History Channel's documentary, "9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction" gives the conspiracy theorists a high-quality debunking. The format is to allow a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to make a claim, and then have experts in the appropriate fields respond to the claim. I've got the TiVo set up to record this weekend's showing.

UPDATE (August 26, 2007): I watched the show today, and I thought they did a very good job, though of necessity they were fairly brief in their rebuttals. I was pleased to see that, contrary to some conspiracy theorist claims, they did in fact address conspiracy theorist claims about the collapse of WTC Building 7. I was also quite amused to see that in Alex Jones' concluding remarks, he made the classic crackpot self-comparison to Galileo, and did so in such a way to demonstrate his own lack of awareness or concern for factual accuracy by stating that the dispute between Galileo and the Catholic Church was about whether the earth was round or flat.

Fox beats the drum for war with Iran

Robert Greenwald's "Fox Attacks: Iran" compares Fox News coverage leading up to the war in Iraq with what they're airing today about Iran.

Expensive intelligent design movie uses Borat tactics

[UPDATE (April 15, 2008): See the NCSE's "Expelled Exposed" website for a look at the deceptive tactics of the filmmakers and the real facts that they aren't showing you.]

In February, the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," starring Ben Stein, will be released. [UPDATE: The release was delayed until April 18, possibly due to copyright infringement worries.] The film apparently argues that intelligent design is being wrongly excluded from public school classrooms, despite the fact that intelligent design is rebranded creationism and is a religious view without scientific support. There is no scientific theory of intelligent design to be taught in schools--it doesn't exist.

The advertising for the film says that P.Z. Myers appears in the film--but he was not interviewed for a film called "Expelled," but for an apparently fictional project called "Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion." Mark Mathis, a producer for Rampant Films, contacted Myers, and he agreed to appear in that film. Now, as it turns out, Mathis is an associate producer on "Expelled."

Myers writes:

Why were they so dishonest about it? If Mathis had said outright that he wants to interview an atheist and outspoken critic of Intelligent Design for a film he was making about how ID is unfairly excluded from academe, I would have said, "bring it on!" We would have had a good, pugnacious argument on tape that directly addresses the claims of his movie, and it would have been a better (at least, more honest and more relevant) sequence. He would have also been more likely to get that good ol' wild-haired, bulgy-eyed furious John Brown of the Godless vision than the usual mild-mannered professor that he did tape. And I probably would have been more aggressive with a plainly stated disagreement between us.

I mean, seriously, not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest.

Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education reports a similar experience--she also was interviewed for "Crossroads."

The producers of this film are sleazeballs. This kind of technique is already at or beyond the ethical edge for a comedy film like Borat, but to do this for a film that purports to take on a serious issue--and pretends to be on the side of God--is well past any such boundary. If, as has been suggested, this film is going to argue that belief in God is necessary for moral behavior (a falsehood), the behavior of the producers proves that it is not sufficient.

The lesson for the future: Do not sign an agreement to be interviewed for a film if the agreement contains language that says they can use "…footage and materials in and in connection with the development, production, distribution and/or exploitation of the feature length documentary tentatively entitled Crossroads…and/or any other production…" That "and/or any other production" is a big loophole that will be exploited.

UPDATE (August 23, 2007): Ed Brayton observes that two of the alleged controversies that "Expelled" will cover are bogus claims of persecution--the denial of tenure for Guillermo Gonzalez and the alleged martyrdom of Richard Sternberg. Ed notes that he has an article coming out in Skeptic magazine in February 2008 which will debunk the Souder report about the travails of Sternberg at the Smithsonian (a subject he has already written extensively about on his blog--linked to from the articles at my blog under the "Richard Sternberg affair" category).

UPDATE (December 18, 2007): Ed Brayton points out that a new argument from the Discovery Institute for why Gonzalez shouldn't have been denied tenure actually undermines that claim.

UPDATE (February 10, 2008): John Lynch has a nice visual diagram of Gonzalez's publication record.

Mortgage lenders failing at a rate of one per day

Michael Donnelly's blog has a chart of mortgage lender failures since April 2006, which reports that we reached 21 lenders going under this month yesterday, on the 21st of the month.

(Via Distributed Republic.)

Chandler school suspends student for drawing picture of gun

Payne Junior High School in Chandler, Arizona has suspended the 13-year-old son of Ben and Paula Mosteller for three days (reduced from five) for drawing a picture of a gun, an action which they characterized as a threat which they compared to the Columbine High School massacre in a discussion with his parents.

The Arizona Republic reports that "The school did not contact police and did not provide counseling or an evaluate the boy to determine if he intended the drawing as a threat," which suggests to me that they did not really consider it to be a threat.

The boy's parents described the picture as a harmless doodle of a fake laser, which did not show blood, bullets, injuries, or target any human.

If the school really considered it a threat of an impending massacre, they should have treated it as one. Since they didn't, why is it even worth a suspension? Is there more to the context that we aren't being told, or are school administrators so irrational that they fear drawings of guns?

Are there any adult males who didn't draw guns along with cars, motorcycles, spaceships, monsters, aliens, and floor plans of secret hideouts when they were around 13?

Time travel investment strategies

Long or Short Capital takes a look at a few investment strategies available to the time traveler, including "groundhog maximization," "terminator option protection," and "alien/squid technology asset allocation."