Daily Archives: February 1, 2006

Taxing the Constitution

This entry was posted in Constitution on by

I wonder just why these folks think this will pass constitutional muster(reg):

The governor’s tax-reform commission is considering a new state business tax of around 1 percent on the gross income or gross receipts of all corporations and partnerships on their business in Texas, the panel’s chairman said Tuesday.

Pretty standard looking at first glance, but check out this next bit:

“If you’re out of state and you sell products in Texas but you manufacture those products in California, you’re going to pay higher taxes than if you had built a plant in Texas and hired people in Texas,” he said. “If all your buildings and employees are sitting up in Chicago, you’re going to pay more.”

As noted in Granholm v Held:

(a) This Court has long held that, in all but the narrowest circumstances, state laws violate the Commerce Clause if they mandate “differential treatment of in-state and out-of-state economic interests that benefits the former and burdens the latter.” Oregon Waste Systems, Inc. v. Department of Environmental Quality of Ore., 511 U.S. 93, 99.

If this goes through as is it looks like it will make a few lawyers happy with their future work.

bush on Science

This entry was posted in Biology Health Care Science on by

Yea, I know that bush can’t make an intelligent statement on science but there are a lot of folks who probably nodded their heads knowingly when he spoke about bannng human cloning and more during last nights stump speach. For all of those and any of the rest of you who haven’t found your way via /. PZ has a bit of science education:

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.
George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.
He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.'”
Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.

Read it all!

bushco Must Be Very Envious

This entry was posted in Anarchism Privacy on by

Where will all the freedom loving Brits move to?

Big Brother-style surveillance is growing on Britain’s roads, where police will have the greatest ability in the world to scrutinise, control and record the movements of drivers by the end of the year.
Thousands of cameras reading vehicle number plates and comparing data with a central data base will analyse some 35 million pieces of information per day.
The data will be transmitted to the police and also MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, to help in the hunt for suspected criminals or terrorists. It will be kept for two years, but the period may be extended to five years.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s centre-left government has invested some 15 million pounds (27 million dollars, 22 million euros) in the project this year.
“The plan is to deny criminals the use of the road,” said retired police officer John Dean, who is coordinating the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) programme.
“We will combine our efforts in a national network which, we hope, will be active from May,” Dean told AFP.
The entire country will be hooked up to the ANPR system between now and the end of 2006.
The network of cameras will automatically alert the authorities when it finds a car listed as stolen, with an out-of-date tax disk or a vehicle that is not insured.
The system also raises the alarm if it recognises there is an arrest warrant out for the driver of a vehicle. And it can be used simply to track the movement of a certain person who is of police interest.

You shouldn’t feel all that secure in the US either. Surely you’ve noticed the increasing numbers of cams at intersections in your community…well, maybe only in larger cities. Once installed it is a relatively simple step to interface the imagery to a system similar to what the British are using.

Via Lew Rockwell.