Category Archives: General

Huckabee’s FairTax

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For those of you who are inclined to like Huckabee: keep in mind he’s got a completely insane tax proposal. How does a 30% sales tax — or more — sound? That’s incredibly regressive. (Taxes are progressive if people who make more money pay more taxes; they’re regressive if everyone pays the same tax rate, which means that the poorer you are, the higher proportion of your income that goes to taxes. Way unfair.)

He seems like a friendly guy, and he’s against Bush’s foreign policy, but this is an incredibly stupid tax plan.

Winner Take Some

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I still haven’t decided who I’m going to vote for in the New York primary next month.

I watched both the Republican and the Democratic debates last night. I watched the former for entertainment and the latter for information. I thought Obama and Clinton both acquitted themselves well. Edwards doesn’t seem to have much of a message other than “powerful people stand in your way,” and I’m sorry, but anger isn’t a plan.

One thing to keep in mind is that unlike in the general election in November, most Democratic presidential primaries are not winner-take-all; delegates are assigned somewhat proportionally to the vote the candidates receive. Therefore, if your favorite candidate isn’t polling among the top two candidates, you shouldn’t worry that you’d be throwing away your vote on that candidate or casting a spoiler vote.

Still – I honestly don’t know who I support.

NYT 2007 Banner Headlines

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I have this weird interest in the front page of the New York Times. One afternoon a few weeks ago I got quasi-Aspergic about it. It turns out you can look at any New York Times front page since February 13, 2002 by using a URL formatted like this one. Just enter the appropriate year, month and day.

Anyway, I realized that in all of 2007, the Times ran only two banner headlines. Neither of them took up more than one line and neither was in all caps, which usually identifies something REALLY IMPORTANT.

The first was on March 7, 2007, after Scooter Libby was convicted:

Libby

The second was on April 17, 2007, reporting the Virginia Tech shootings:

VT

In fact, the last time the Times ran a multi-line, all-caps banner headline was more than a year ago (December 30, 2006), after Saddam Hussein was hanged:

Saddam

I wonder if the Times is trying to de-emphasize banner headlines.