Quote from ARogueTrader: Ask Arthur Anderson about "legally fudging the numbers." Last time I looked, DOJ put Anderson out of business. Don't think it was because of gross legality. Many things on tax returns are subject to interpretation, and an audit. My accountant always wants to push the envelope, where I choose to be more conservative. I said in business there is wide room for fraud, er, interpretation. That won't change with a flat tax on individual filings. Where are the personal abuses presently? If the money in tax were being paid 100% for military programs like SDI and oil exploration in Alaska, and not to help the poor and social welfare programs, would the wealthy wage earners still complain? Very little is spent on welfare ect. As a conservative I recognize that. The military is needlessly wasteful, but non-discretionary spending,i.e. the pension system for retired govt. employees, will some day sink the Treasury. The issue is not the amounts being taxed, but where it is being spent. It is an ideological issue, not really a tax issue. Ideological in terms of whether one believes that the state should be equal partners with individuals. There are quite a few wealthy democrats who pay just as much, if not more than the majority of conservative republicans.....and these people don't bitch about taxes. How do you know how much they pay in taxes? For all I know, Gates, Buffet, etal could be massive shelterer's.
Do you really think the average rich guy cares to subsidize oil exploration. Millionaires don't care about $4 a gallon gasoline, farmers do.
Quite a few rich guys I know own oil/oil service stocks, if not a stake in companies that would benefit from further continental oil/gas exploration and drilling. In general, I wager most average rich guys are more supportive of the industrial complex and its advancement, than they are supportive of social/environmental programs.
World > Terrorism & Security posted December 19, 2003, updated 11:00 p.m. ET Where are Iraq's WMD? Does it matter? News of lead inspector's departure raises anew weapons question. By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com The Guardian reports that David Kay, the man leading the US hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, will leave his post prematurely in the next few months amid "dwindling expectations" that there is anything to be found. Mr. Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, had been appointed by the CIA to lead the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) whose mission was to find the weapons whose "existence" had been used by both the US and Britain as one of their main justifications for going to war with Iraq. "This is a big blow to the administration and it will signal the effective end of the search for weapons of mass destruction," said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace in Washington. "Some will continue looking but very, very few expect there to be any significant finds at this point." The Washington Post reports that Kay says he is leaving for family and personal reasons. But other members of the ISG say Kay had become increasingly frustrated when key members of his team were reassigned to help the US military fight the insurgency. The Associated Press reports that these days, members of the ISG spend most of their time at their base camp, and not searching for WMD. "For a while this place was really active, but that's changed in the last month," said Charles McKay, a member of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency who has been involved in the search since May. "Now we're lucky if there's a mission once a week around here," he said at Camp Slayer, the nickname weapons hunters have given to their base on the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein's former Baghdad palaces. Agence-France Presse reports that the CIA has begun discussions with Kay about what steps to take following his departure. The White House has made no comment on his departure. In January of 2003, shortly before the war, Kay wrote an article in The Washington Post that was deeply critical of the way the United Nations inspection team, and in particular chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, were conducting WMD searches in Iraq. The real problem lies with the way the searches are being conducted, period. The fact that day after day, the inspectors go to sites, most of which were inspected in the 1990s and put under long-term monitoring, has served Iraq's claims that it is complying with the inspections. It also ensures that these non-threatening inspections will continue for some time. The Scotsman reports Mr. Blix said on Tuesday it is becoming "increasingly clear" that Saddam Husseinâs regime did not have any illegal weapons of mass destruction. When his inspection teams found a crate of warheads last January in Iraq, Blix said they asked themselves "whether this was the tip of an ice berg, or was it just an ice floe floating around" as a remnant. "I think itâs getting safer and safer to say that it was just an ice flow," he said. Blix also said he believes most of Iraq's WMD were destroyed in 1991, during the first Gulf War. (Other WMD experts, such as former weapons inspector Dr. Raymond Zilinskas of the Monterrey Institute of International Studies agrees with this position, saying that some WMD potential was probably kept and supported in case the opportunity arose in the future to once again try to dominate the region, but "this was not a major effort.") Blix added, however, it was a good idea to look further into the issue with the recently captured Saddam Hussein. "Saddam must have knowledge about what he ordered. He should know about what he built" and "he must have some information himself on when they destroyed their weapons of mass destruction," he said. Mr. Hussein has, so far, denied his regime still had weapons of mass destruction. Citing a United States intelligence official in Iraq, the report said that when asked if his government had such weapons Saddam replied: "No, of course not. The US dreamed them up to have a reason to go to war with us." The WMD issue reemerged during a recent interview President George Bush had with ABC News correspondent Diane Sawyer. The New York Times reports that Mr. Bush said it no longer really mattered if Hussein had WMD or was just planning to have them. When reminded by Ms. Sawyer of his claim before the war of the "hard fact that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons" Bush replied "What's the difference?" As the Times notes, it's a big difference to critics of the war. "This was a pre-emptive war, and the rationale was that there was an imminent threat," said Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a Democrat who has said that by elevating Iraq to the most dangerous menace facing the United States, the administration unwisely diverted resources from fighting Al Qaeda and other terrorists. The overwhelming vote in Congress last year to authorize the use of force against Iraq would have been closer "but for the fact that the president had so explicitly said that there were weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to citizens of the United States," Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday. Columnist Derrick Jackson of The Boston Globe accuses Bush of telling a lie that lead to the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Bush told the world we were going to secure America and liberate Iraqis at the same time. With no weapons of mass destruction, with no nuclear weapons, and with no tie to 9/11, Saddam's capture could not possibly have been worth the lives of 455 US and 80 European soldiers. With no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons, and no tie to 9/11, it could not possibly been worth the lives of 7,600 to 45,000 Iraqi soldiers. With no rationale for the invasion, you could consider this a massacre. As murderous as Saddam was, an invasion with no reason was not worth the killing of unknown thousands of Iraqi civilians. But writing earlier this year, Deroy Murdoch of National Review Online says that putting an end to Hussein's murderous regime was more than enough reason to justify invading Iraq. Never mind, he writes, how many lives will be saved in the future, it also makes big differences to many Iraqis right now. Juad Amir Sayed finally emerged from his own cell. Sought by authorities for loyalty to a Shiite mullah, he deserted the Army at age 24 and hid in a three-by-five foot tunnel beneath his mother's house. She fed him through a hole in her floor. He read the Koran, listened to the BBC's Arabic service, and, one by one, stored his teeth in a matchbox as they fell out. He surfaced this spring after 21 years underground, looking 60-plus rather than in his mid-forties. He praised his new-found liberty to London's Daily Telegraph: "I believe that Allah worked through Mr. Bush to make this happen." Still, Michael Moran of MSNBC writes, the Bush administration is concerned that the WMD issue might roar back to life in the middle of an election year. So the US could be willing to offer Hussein his life in exchange for information about WMD, in order not to leave any "loose threads" that could unwind the Bush reelection bid. The weapons of mass destruction issue also came back to bite British Prime Minister Tony Blair earlier this week. He told British Forces Radio that inspectors looking for WMD in Iraq had found what he calls " massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories." But, The Scotsman reports, it turns out that Blair wasn't talking about any new finds, but some preliminary findings outlined by the ISG in its October, 2003 report. Recalling an earlier incident which is still being investigated by the Hutton nquiry, Michael Ancram, a key member of the opposition in Britain, accused Blair of once again trying to use "spin" to create the impression that the WMD search had been successful, when in fact it had not. Blair's office later confirmed that he had indeed been referring to the October report and not to any new evidence. Finally, NPR's Here and Now reports that documents newly released under the freedom of information act place Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad in 1984, personally assuring Saddam Hussein that the dictator's use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, did not threaten US-Iraqi ties. Rumsfeld was then-President Reagan's special Middle East envoy. The documents were obtained by the non-profit National Security Archive. The organization says more documents may follow that will show the degree of US concern over Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction when the weapons were used against Iran.
Not to me it doesn't. Only dead horse beating liberals, ever unable to keep an eye on the bigger picture (not even a clue about what the bigger picture is), think it matters.