I was delighted to see this Bloomberg story about the White House pursuing additional stimulus after the failure of QE2 and the recent rise in unemployment.  But the method he's pursuing -- a temporary holiday for the employer portion of the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, is not going to fix things, even if the Republicans go along with it.

My social libertarian side comes out in my column for The Daily today.  I've always been a live and let live and let your freak flag fly type of person.  I think that people who want to live an atypical life should enjoy being chemically, sexually, physically and emotionally adventurous, so long as that's what they want to do.  If we only get one go at life, there's probably no point in returning your rental body without a few dings in it.

Over the weekend, Austan Goolsbee went on the chit chat shows to tell people that the economy is out of the emergency zone, that slipping into a Great Depression is no longer what we all fear and that the government isn't going to do anything else dramatic to put Americans back to work, to say nothing of raising wages and living standards.

My column for The Daily today is about the reinstatement of The Patriot Act and how the fact that the government can and will spy on 300 million Americans is now just an accepted fact of life, and is no longer something that inspires serious debate.  I believe that we will live with The Patriot Act forever and that government and corporate abuses of privacy are just going to get worse.

Sorry for the second entry of the day, but I don't seem to be crowding anyone out today and David Brooks really ticked me off this morning.  I probably should let that emotionally stunted geek get under my skin, but I think it's a pretty horrible thing when somebody takes to The Freaking New York Times to specifically tell ambitious and hopeful college graduates not to follow their bliss, not to pursue their dreams and not to find themselves, as Brooks did today in a rhetorical back alley abortion called "

"NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Monday that Qaddafi's 'reign of terror' was coming to an end, underscoring western countries' ultimate goal of removing him from power." -Foreign Policy Magazine morning e-mail for 5/31/2011.

Interesting.

Because when this whole thing started, deposing Qaddafi was not a stated goal of the NATO operations authorized by the United Nations.  The goal, by which I mean the whole, entire goal, was to "protect civilians."

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.

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.

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.

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.

As already noted here at Dag, a NATO air strike killed Gadhafi's son and narrowly missed the dictator and his wife.  The way I see it, this isn't the war we were sold.  Weren't we told quite explicitly that Ghadhafi wasn't being personally targeted?