What I hate about war is that it makes good people do bad things.  Also, that people have their lives cut short for bad reasons, that money is wasted and that generally only the world's worst people are any better for all the sacrifices made.  But also that it makes good people do bad things.

Lately, we've been hearing from conservatives that 51% of Americans don't pay federal income taxes.  This is meant to put the kibosh on any attempts at raising taxes on wealthy individuals by painting everyone from the middle class on down as freeloaders.  We are already, the argument goes, letting the wealthy pay for the upkeep of the country, so the next sacrifice needs to come from working people.  I took this issue up in The Daily this week.

MINNESOTA – A wayward elf that froze to death in the snow last December has challenged the entire GOP Presidential Field to a debate on the U.S. Constitution, sources close to the Dead Elf say.

“He’s pretty confident. Or IT is pretty confident,” said the source. "I’m really not sure how to refer to an Elf corpse.”

The challenge comes after literally two consecutive years of Republican Presidential hopefuls butchering the Constitution in order to make it appear it agrees with their often-outlandish views. The most recent come from Pizza Guru Herman Cain, who confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, while admonishing his fan base for not actually reading the Constitution.

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviewed Harry Belafonte on Monday, and Belafonte cited Eleanor Roosevelt as the source of the story that Goodman told us at the Enoch Pratt Free Library last year:

The Rapture is coming tomorrow. Tomorrow at 6 PM three percent of the citizens of the world will be swept up and deposited in what they hope will be God's loving arms. The rest of us can look forward to five months of tribulations, until October 21, when a worldwide catastrophe will take place and we'll all be gone.

Since Pakistan's recent double embarrassment in the Osama bin Laden affair, in which they proved unable to detect either bin Ladin living half a mile from their chief military academy or an American helicopter raid deep in the Pakistani interior (i.e. half a mile from their military academy), angry American legislators have been asking What Pakistan Knew about OBL's presence in their country.

Let me try to reframe that question with another one:

Does the President of Pakistan know who had his wife killed?

ConocoPhillips CEO John Mulva thinks that denying tax breaks to his highly profitable global oil and gas company is "Un-American."  People have been really taken with his rhetoric on this one, but his words sent me to his company's 10K.  The truth about Conoco's taxes is buried in the footnotes and it's very revealing.  It's at the core my my column for The Daily today, but I want to get a bit more granular here.

It's very difficult to talk about (okay, I'll say it) outgoing IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, if you want to say anything other than "let's let the justice system turn and accept the ultimate result," without swallowing your own foot.

I don't believe that Newt Gingrich's candidacy for the Presidency is real in the slightest.  Like Ron Paul or Sarah Palin, Newt makes a great deal of money selling books and himself as a speaker and lecturer, to conservative groups.  This candidacy is a way of using donor money to promote himself as a lecturer, author and pundit.  For Palin, it happened by accident.  But Newt's been an industry ever since he left office.

HEAVEN – Following a staggering donation to the Heaven Fund, the Koch Brothers will now have final say on who gets Raptured. sources tell this reporter.

David and Charles Koch – who combined are worth $43.5 billion – recently made headlines when it was learned that they had essentially taken control of the economics departments of such public colleges as Florida State University. In the FSU case, the Koch Brothers donated $1.5 million to the economics department, but with the caveat that the money could be taken away should the brothers disagree with any new hires.

Nearly every morning lately I wake up feeling as though my heart is ripping out of my chest.  My loves are still my loves, my health is okay, and it looks like there's a chance my measly but adequate bank account may outlive me, so for a while there the cause of these major palpitations was a bit of a mystery.

Since the 1990s, both the Democrats and Republicans have agreed that capital gains taxes should be kept lower than income taxes in order to encourage investment and to support the economy.  It's really pure trickle down theory and further proof for the cynical that whenever the Democrats and Republicans agree on something, it's bad.  Setting capital gains and dividend taxes at the same level as income taxes is the subject of my column today in The Daily.

If you need more proof that Libertarianism is an ideology of the soul-less, let John Stossel finish the deal:

After my FBN show last week, where I let critics of my FREELOADERS show talk back, I got this e-mail:

Dear Mr. Stossel,

I am a veteran who is rated and compensated as 100% disabled.

Do you, and Libertarians in general view me as a “freeloader;” and should I not be compensated according to your views of this situation?

Word to the wise: Don't bluff when your cards are on the table.

(I learned that the hard way.)

Apparently, House Speaker John Boehner has yet to learn the lesson. On Monday, he truculently pledged, "Without significant spending cuts and the way we spend Americans' money, there will be no debt limit increase."

But there will be a debt limit increase. John Boehner knows it. Barack Obama knows it. Everybody knows it.

Coming from a conservative upbringing, I have long held strong beliefs about marriage and the commitment that comes with eventually destroying said marriage. So when I married more than seven years ago, I set out on a path to make mine the most traditional marriage and divorce as possible.

A week ago, with barely a pause for breath, advocates of torture began claiming that torturing prisoners had been the key to finding Osama bin Laden. Indeed, some complained that the Obama Administration had been insufficiently deferential to the torturers from the last regime.

They made this assertion with no real evidence and no solid facts. This should surprise no one. If they were interested in facts or evidence, they would not advocate torture.

Here's the thing to remember:

Last week, I called the Republicans' budget "a dead plan walking." I was referring in particular to the proposal to "reform" Medicare by replacing direct payments with vouchers for private insurance. Most Americans are not pleased by this proposal, which they correctly regard as a benefits cuts, and many of them have said so angrily at town hall meetings across the country.

In the wake of Osama Bin Laden's death, pictures of his corpse have become the most sought after photographs since Britney Spears sans panties.

President Obama's arrogant, pussyfooting refusal to hand over the pictures to the deserving public has spawned a competition among the world's top news publications to obtain the photos.

I'm pleased to announce that dagblog's crack paparazzi ninja-spy, William K. Wolfrum, with his trustee sidekick, his own ego, have succeeded where all others have failed. I hereby present to you the real dead Osama photos:

Mark the day: April 29. It was the day Donald Trump officially became irrelevant to the GOP.

I'm extremely impressed that it was the President's decision for the Pentagon to use more than 2 helipcopters for the Bin Laden mission, in case something happened to one of the vehicles.  "I don’t want you to plan for an option that doesn’t allow you to fight your way out,” he said.