Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party |
- Mitt’s Taxes Stoke “Carried Interest” Flames
- Mortgage rates hit another record low, housing struggles
- New York Moves to Deploy Body Scanners on Street in Search for Guns
- Army’s Virtual Reality Plan: A Digital Doppelganger for Every Soldier
- Cancer drugs make tumors more aggressive and deadly
- Romney Parks Millions in Cayman Islands
- Poll shows Ron Paul’s strengths and weaknesses in GOP primary
| Mitt’s Taxes Stoke “Carried Interest” Flames Posted: 19 Jan 2012 11:07 AM PST By: Robert Wood, Forbes.com Mitt Romney has finally confirmed what everyone knew—he's been a savvy investor. He may not be paying Warren Buffet's reputed 11% rate, but he's mostly paid 15%, a far cry from 35% on service income. We know wealthy people like Buffett and Romney benefit from a 15% dividends and capital gain rate. But as a tax lawyer for 30 years, I've always thought it odd that "carried interests"—something primarily about performing services—are taxed like capital. In exchange for providing the service of managing investors' assets, fund managers often receive a portion–often 20 percent–of the fund's profits, or carried interest. A comprehensive overhaul of the tax code is overdue, but the rule that private equity and hedge fund managers are taxed at capital gain rates on carried interests could be changed in the interim. Mitt's tax talk is shining a bright light on it. Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Sander Levin (D-MI) has twice authored legislation to tax carried interests as ordinary income. Levin first tried in 2007. It has passed the House four times since. It has yet to pass the Senate. Levin notes that "Gov. Romney's statement that his tax rate is close to 15 percent likely reflects that he has benefited from a loophole that we have been trying to close for years. In 2007, I introduced legislation to close that loophole and it has passed the House four times as part of broader measures. When Gov. Romney says his tax rate mostly reflects returns on his own investment, he needs to clarify how much this is truly money that he invested himself and how much is carried interest income that he earned managing other people's money. Conflating the two is at the heart of this tax equity debate." Timeline of Action on Carried Interest Legislation: June 22, 2007 — Rep. Levin introduces H.R. 2834 to treat carried interest as ordinary income. Original co-sponsors include Ways & Means Chairman Rangel and Financial Services Chairman Frank. Nov. 9, 2007 — The House of Representatives approves carried interest legislation as part of H.R. 3996, which included tax extenders, an AMT "patch" and other provisions. To read more, visit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2012/01/19/mitts-taxes-stoke-carried-interest-flames/ |
| Mortgage rates hit another record low, housing struggles Posted: 19 Jan 2012 11:04 AM PST By Derek Kravitz, USAToday.com The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage fell again this week to a record low. The eighth record low in a year is attracting few takers because most who can afford to buy or refinance have already done so. Freddie Mac says the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage dipped to 3.88% this week, down from the old record of 3.89% one week ago. The average on the 15-year fixed mortgage ticked up to 3.17% from 3.16%, which was also a record low. Records for mortgage rates date back to the 1950s. Mortgage rates are lower because they tend to track the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which fell below 1.9%. However, a government report out Thursday on housing starts at the end of 2011 show the housing market is still a long way from returning to health. U.S. builders ended 2011 with a third straight year of dismal home building and the worst on record for single-family home construction, despite modest improvement at the end of the year. To read more, visit: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/story/2012-01-19/mortgage-rates-january-19/52669616/1 |
| New York Moves to Deploy Body Scanners on Street in Search for Guns Posted: 19 Jan 2012 11:01 AM PST By: Kurt Nimmo, Infowars.com NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told CBS in New York his department is looking to deploy Terahertz Imaging Detection scanners on the street in the war on "illegal guns." Kelly said the scanners would be used in "reasonably suspicious circumstances" and intended to cut down on the number of stop-and-frisks on the street. So called stop-and-frisks are considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment. New York City is largely a Second Amendment free zone. The city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has said that citizens "acting outside of any governmental military effort" should not be allowed to protect themselves with firearms. "The NYPD and Department of Defense are working together testing Terahertz Imaging Detection, a new way to get concealed illegal weapons off the streets," CBS reports. Terahertz Imaging Detection measures energy radiating from the body up to 16 feet away and can detect anything blocking it. The ACLU and civil libertarians oppose the effort to use the technology on the street. "It's worrisome. It implicates privacy, the right to walk down the street without being subjected to a virtual pat-down by the Police Department when you're doing nothing wrong," the NYCLU's Donna Lieberman said. In addition to violating the Fourth Amendment, the proposed technology would subject citizens to a documented health risk – the destruction of DNA. To read more, visit: http://www.infowars.com/new-york-moves-to-deploy-body-scanners-on-street-in-search-for-guns/ |
| Army’s Virtual Reality Plan: A Digital Doppelganger for Every Soldier Posted: 19 Jan 2012 10:57 AM PST By Katie Drummond, Wired.com The Army wants soldiers of the future to be all they can be — onscreen and off. As the military's enthusiasm for virtual reality training continues to grow, the Army's got a new plan to make the programs freakily immersive: National Defense magazine is reporting that the Army wants to give every soldier a digital doppelganger — a custom avatar they can use throughout their stints in the military, and in myriad virtual training environs, from urban combat practice to cultural prep. "You design an avatar that has the individual facial features of a soldier," James Blake, the Army's program executive officer for simulation, training and instrumentation, tells National Defense. "Then you add more of what he looks like, physical attributes. When you're in your game environment, you'd like to have the physical and mental attributes of that individual reflected in that virtual world." But the avatars would be much more comprehensive than simple lookalikes. A soldier's performance during physical training, for example, would be inputted into the digital replica's athletic abilities. So unlike super-charged videogame operatives, soldiers who huff and puff running an 11-minute mile won't see their avatars do much better. Likewise, soldiers with crappy real-life shooting skills will be liabilities to their virtual units during group training sessions. Given the rate at which virtual reality has become embedded in military life, it's only a matter of time before digital environments act as an ultimate second life for soldiers. Already, military personnel do everything from immersive combat training to cultural sensitivity coaching via videogame. The Army's even after one massive, "whole virtual world" where soldiers can meet up and train. But virtual training, custom avatars or not, will always have its limits. In particular, as Danger Room pal Peter Singer wrote in 2010, the method threatens to churn out soldiers who are seasoned pros on the Xbox — but aren't cut out for the rigors of real-world war. "At some point, piloting a plane in combat is different from piloting a computer workstation," Singer noted. "Just as hitting a real tennis ball is not the same as hitting the Wii version." To read more, visit: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/army-virtual-reality/ |
| Cancer drugs make tumors more aggressive and deadly Posted: 19 Jan 2012 10:54 AM PST By: S. L. Baker, NaturalNews.com When natural health advocates warn against mainstream medicine’s arsenal of weapons used to fight cancer, including chemotherapy and radiation, their concerns often revolve around how these therapies can weaken and damage a person’s body in numerous ways. But scientists are finding other reasons to question some of these therapies. It turns out that while chemotherapies may kill or shrink tumors in the short term, they may actually be causing malignancies to grow more deadly in the long term. For example, NaturalNews previously reported (http://www.naturalnews.com/029042_cancer_cells_chemotherapy.html) that scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB Department of Chemistry are currently investigating the very real possibility that dead cancer cells left over after chemotherapy spark cancer to spread to other parts of the body (metastasis). And now comes news that a little-explored specific cell type, the pericyte, found in what is called the microenvironment of a cancerous tumor actually may halt cancer progression and metastasis. And by destroying these cells, some anti-cancer therapies may inadvertently be making cancer more aggressive as well as likely to spread and kill. A study just published in the January 17 issue of the journal Cancer Cell concludes that anti-angiogenic therapies (which shrink cancer by cutting off tumors’ blood supply) may be killing the body’s natural defense against cancer by destroying pericyte cells that likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis. Pericytes cover blood vessels and support their growth. For the new research, Raghu Kalluri, MD, PhD, Chief of the Division of Matrix Biology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), investigated whether targeting pericytes could inhibit tumor growth in the same way that other antiangiogenic cancer drugs do. Dr. Kalluri and his research team worked with mice genetically engineered to support drug-induced depletion of pericytes in growing tumors. Next, they removed pericytes in implanted mouse breast cancer tumors, decreasing pericyte numbers by 60 percent. Compared with control animals, there was a 30 percent decrease in the size of cancerous tumors over 25 days. But there was a serious catch to these results. Contrary to conventional mainsteam medical wisdom, the scientists discovered the number of secondary lung tumors in the engineered mice had increased threefold compared to the control mice, indicating that the tumors had metastasized. To read more, visit: http://www.naturalnews.com/034693_cancer_drugs_tumors_aggressive.html |
| Romney Parks Millions in Cayman Islands Posted: 19 Jan 2012 10:48 AM PST By MATTHEW MOSK, BRIAN ROSS and MEGAN CHUCHMACH, ABCNews.com Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven. A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based. As the race for the Republican nomination heats up, Mitt Romney is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a shroud of secrecy around the details about his vast personal wealth, including, as ABC News has discovered, his investment in funds located offshore and his ability to pay a lower tax rate. “His personal finances are a poster child of what’s wrong with the American tax system,” said Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who is an authority on tax enforcement and offshore banking. On Tuesday, Romney disclosed that he has been paying a far lower percentage in taxes than most Americans, around 15 percent of his annual earnings. It has been Romney’s Republican rivals who have driven the tax issue onto center stage. For weeks, Romney has cited a desire for privacy as his reason for not sharing his tax returns — a gesture of transparency that is now expected from presidential contenders. “I can tell you we follow the tax laws,” he said recently while on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “And if there’s an opportunity to save taxes, we like anybody else in this country will follow that opportunity.” To read more, visit: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/romney-parks-millions-offshore-tax-haven/story?id=15378566#.Txhk9G_Ox8y |
| Poll shows Ron Paul’s strengths and weaknesses in GOP primary Posted: 19 Jan 2012 10:45 AM PST By Scott Clement, WashingtonPost.com Texas Rep. Ron Paul earns 16 percent support for the Republican nomination in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, statistically unchanged from 15 percent in December and in the same range as Newt Gingrich (17 percent) and Rick Santorum (13 percent). Frontrunner Mitt Romney leads with 35 percent. What are Paul's strongest groups? He performs especially well among independents who lean toward the Republican Party (23 percent support him), those with a high school education or less (23 percent), attend church less than weekly (22 percent), moderates and liberals (21 percent), and those under age 50 (20 percent). Paul's weakest groups? College grads (6 percent), weekly churchgoers (9 percent), white evangelical Protestants and strong tea party supporters (10 percent each). General election Paul trails Obama by eight points in a hypothetical general election match-up, 49 to 41 percent in the new poll. He runs close with Obama among political independents, but wins only seven in 10 of self-identified Republicans. By comparison, Sen. John McCain won nine in 10 Republicans in 2008, according to exit polls. Persistent challenges Paul's opposition to military intervention overseas is seen by 49 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents as a major reason to oppose him; about half as many as see it positively (25 percent). Fully half of Republican leaners think Paul, as president, would pursue policies that are unacceptable to most Americans, while fewer than four in 10 think he would pick policies that are acceptable. Paul doesn't lead the GOP field on any of the 12 issues and attributes tested in the poll. He does best on standing up for what he believes (19 percent) and being the most honest and trustworthy (18 percent). To read more, visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/behind-the-numbers/post/poll-shows-ron-pauls-strengths-and-weaknesses-in-gop-primary/2012/01/03/gIQAO4za8P_blog.html |
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