The Commentariat -- April 17

Michael Moore suggests you spend tomorrow, Tax Day, protesting corporate tax dodgers like GE, Bank of America, Citigroup, Exxon & Chevron -- who pay little or no federal income tax. MoveOn.org has a handy event finder here. ...

... Stephen Ohlemacher of the AP: " As Monday's tax filing deadline nears, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all." ...

... Jesse Drucker of Business Week: "For the well-off, this could be the best tax day since the early 1930s: Top tax rates on ordinary income, dividends, estates, and gifts will remain at or near historically low levels for at least the next two years. That's thanks in part to legislation passed in December 2010 by the 111th Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.... It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.... The true effective rate for multimillionaires is actually far lower than that indicated by official government statistics. That's because those figures fail to include the additional income that's generated by many sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies." Click through for related content on "How to Pay No Taxes." ...

... Papau in Firedoglake: "As usual the Democrats have allowed the debate to be on the GOP idea of smaller government using GOP themes and solutions – ignoring the left – indeed, ignoring their past leaders like FDR and their stated objective of helping the non-rich and corporate.... It is time to end “The More you make the Less You Pay” world of today...."

** The Government Is Not a Household. Ezra Klein: "When economic times are good, households should spend and invest more, while government should spend and invest less. When they’re bad, households need to cut back, and the government needs to step in." Besides, it's easier for the government to raise revenue than it is for it to cut spending.

Nicholas Kristof: "Youth movements have used ridicule & mockery to overthrow dictators, reduce crime, improve calculus scores and stop teenagers from smoking."

Speaking of mockery, Maureen Dowd derides Paul Ryan for relying on Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel Atlas Shrugged as the source of his economic philosophy. CW: Dowd is no Frank Rich. A good place to revive this chestnut from screenwriter John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-- John Rogers

D.C. Disappointment. Paul Schwartzman & Nikita Stewart of the Washington Post: "In the past week, the same [Washington, D.C. residents] ... who saw hope in [President] Obama’s jaunts across the city just before his inauguration ... have excoriated him for relegating the District to the status of bargaining chip in a broader budget game with House leaders."

Environmentalist Disappointment. Bill McKibben in Common Dreams: "... when the political going got a little tough, Obama didn't. By all accounts he watched from the sidelines as the cap-and-trade law went down to defeat last summer. He famously allowed vast new leases for offshore oil drilling weeks before the BP explosion. In the last couple of weeks, the administration has ably defended the Clean Air Act against ham-handed Congressional assault. But they've also done two things really beyond the pale: 1) Opened 750 million tons of coal beneath federal land in Wyoming to mining.... 2) Walked away from the global climate talks."

NEW. Tim Padgett of Time: "I think letting Catholic clergy have wives and families may well make the [Roman Catholic church] hierarchy ... more concerned about safeguarding youths than about protecting priests."

Ian Urbina of the New York Times: "Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats. The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas." CW: this is the procedure which the Times' new op-ed contributor Joe Nocera has devoted two columns (here and here) to hyping as safe, clean & cheap. The Times op-ed page ain't what it used to be.

Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "Days after President Obama called for forming a bipartisan group in Congress to begin negotiating a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership. Yet six senators — three Democrats, three Republicans — say they are nearing consensus on just such a plan." CW Note: this link is not to the Times but to the article's republication in the Boston Globe, which the Times owns.

Big Brother Is Watching, and He Looks Like Mark Zuckerberg. Jessica Guynn of the Los Angeles Times: "For Facebook users, the free ride is over. For years, the privately held company founded by Mark Zuckerberg ... put little effort into ad sales, focusing instead on making its service irresistible to users.... Today more than 600 million people have Facebook accounts.... Now the Palo Alto company is looking to cash in on this mother lode of personal information by helping advertisers pinpoint exactly whom they want to reach.... Facebook doesn't have to guess who its users are or what they like. Facebook knows, because members volunteer this information freely — and frequently — in their profiles, status updates, wall posts, messages and 'likes.' It's now tracking this activity, shooting online ads to users based on their demographics, interests, even what they say to friends on the site — sometimes within minutes of them typing a key word or phrase."

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post: "... indications of progress are among a mosaic of developments that point to a profound shift across a swath of Afghanistan that has been the focus of the American-led military campaign: For the first time since the war began nearly a decade ago, the Taliban is commencing a summer fighting season with less control and influence of territory in the south than it had the previous year. 'We start this year in a very different place from last year,' Gen. David H. Petraeus ... said in a recent interview."

AP: "A '60 Minutes' investigation alleges that the inspirational multimillion seller 'Three Cups of Tea' is filled with inaccuracies and that co-author Greg Mortenson's charitable organization has taken credit for building schools that don't exist. The report, which airs Sunday night on CBS television, cites "Into the Wild" author Jon Krakauer as among the doubters of Mortenson's story...." Here is Mortenson's site, where he asks for contributions to what sounds like an eminently worthy cause. Mortenson's response to the "60 Minutes" piece is currently on the home page under the title "An Important Message...." CW: I first heard of Mortenson from Nicholas Kristof, who has promoted Mortenson & his work in several op-eds (here and here, for instance). I'll be interested to see the "60 Minutes" evidence that Mortenson is scamming the public.

Michael Slackman & Mona El-Naggar of the New York Times: a stark gray concrete Egyptian prison now holds some of the country's former elite including "Gamal Mubarak..., now prisoner No. 23, and his older brother, Alaa, leader among the business elite, prisoner No. 24; the prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, a patrician man who once said Egyptians were not ready for democracy; Zakaria Azmi, the president’s closest confidant; Fathi Sorour, the party loyalist and speaker of Parliament; and more.... The former president [Hosni Mubarak] is not in Tora Farm, but he has been detained, and if his health improves, he is expected there soon. Officials said Saturday that the elder Mr. Mubarak had been moved to a military hospital in Cairo and that, like all the others, he would be interrogated by a special corruption unit within the state prosecutor’s office."

CW: I usually skip the Civil War posts in the New York Times because many of them are pretty tactical and don't have direct relevance to today's news. This one, by Ed Ball, published April 11, is an exception:

... the stream of blood that started at Fort Sumter passed through Jim Crow and into the civil rights era, right down to the present. Southern whites, having gone down in the fight, turned their recollections into rage and resentment at being displaced — fuel for politicians ever since. Likewise, for blacks emancipation was not a jubilee, but rather the beginning of a long season of bitter disappointment. Black national memory in some ways is still commensurate with despair. Redemption turns out to be a false idol. It is said that the South lost the Civil War, but won the peace. That is, while slavery was ended, white supremacy grew into the law of the land.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) dismisses Republican complaints that President Obama's budget speech was too mean to them:

News Ledes

Al Jazeera: "Incumbent candidate Goodluck Jonathan is heading for victory by a landslide margin in Nigeria's presidential election.With most ballots counted in 35 of the West African country's 36 states Jonathan had tallied more than 22 million votes while his nearest rival Muhammadu Buhari, the country's former military ruler, had around 12 million. Formal confirmation of the result is not expected before Monday, but the margin of Jonathan's lead suggests he has secured election without requiring a runoff vote."

The Hill: "Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boldly predicted that Congress will vote to raise the debt ceiling next month, warning that failure to do so would bring 'catastrophic' consequences for the U.S. and global economies. Geithner, appearing on ABC's 'This Week,' said that if House Republicans were to push the vote to the brink or fail to raise the limit, it would 'make the last [financial] crisis look like a tame, modest crisis.'"

Reuters: "Saudi Arabia's oil minister said on Sunday the kingdom had slashed output by 800,000 barrels per day in March due to oversupply, sending the strongest signal yet that OPEC will not act to quell soaring prices."

The New York Times has more on the President's signing statement, which accompanied his signature of the FY 2011 budget bill, & which contained a provision limiting his employment of policy "czars." The signing statement contends that the provision is unconstitutional.

AP: "A furious storm system that kicked up tornadoes, flash floods and hail as big as softballs has claimed at least 25 lives on a rampage that began in Oklahoma days ago, then smashed across several Southern states as it reached a new and deadly pitch in North Carolina and Virginia. Emergency crews searched for victims in hard-hit swaths of North Carolina, where 62 tornadoes were reported from the worst spring storm in two decades to hit the state. At least a half dozen people died just in the Carolinas and Virginia and authorities warned the toll was likely to rise further Sunday as searchers probed shattered homes and businesses."

AP: "The operator of the crippled nuclear power plant leaking radiation in northern Japan announced a plan Sunday to bring the crisis under control within six to nine months and allow some evacuated residents to return to their homes. The roadmap for ending the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, presented by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata at a news conference, included plans to cover the damaged reactor buildings to contain the radiation and eventually remove the nuclear fuel."

AP: "The U.S. ambassador to Malta has announced his resignation following a State Department report that criticized him for neglecting his official duties and spending too much time writing and speaking about his Catholic faith. In letters sent Saturday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and earlier in the week to President Barack Obama, Douglas Kmiec said he would leave his post on August 15, the date of the feast of the Assumption."