• Fidel Castro has stepped down.
• Election: Public or private financing?
• Guest: Neal Boortz, Fair Tax.
• Guest: Professor Saul Landau. What does Fidel's stepping down mean for Cuba?

Topics, guests, upcoming events, quotes, links to articles, audio clips, books & bumper music.

Tuesday 19 February '08 National show

• Fidel Castro has stepped down.
• Election: Public or private financing?
• Article: McCain Got Loan by Pledging to Seek Federal Funds.
• Article: McCain Campaign Banked on Taxpayer-Funded Bailout.
• John McCain of the Keating Five, Savings and Loan Crisis, is trying to have it both ways.
• Clip:
  [Curry]: "Some Americans believe that they feel they’re carrying the burden because of this economy. "

  [Bush]: "Yeah, well…"

  [Curry]: "They say we’re suffering because of this."

  [Bush]: "… I don’t agree with that. "

  [Curry]: "You don’t agree with that? It has nothing do with the economy, the war — spending on the war? "

  [Bush]: "I don’t think so. I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs…because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy’s adjusting."

  [Curry]: "Oh, yeah?"

  [Bush]: "Yeah, because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy’s adjusting."
  Bush Dismisses Iraq Recession: The War Has ‘Nothing To Do With The Economy’.

• War is only a temporary stimulus. Unemployment is up.
• Bumper Music: Every day is a winding road, Sheryl Crow.
• Article: U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Bush Spying Program. ACLU.
• Article: US pension body targets riskier assets.
• Article: Australia to screen sovereign funds.
• Article: US banks borrow $50bn via new Fed facility.
• Article: St. Paul Police Orders Tasers For Every Officer. Police force will have 370 Tasers just in time for RNC.
• Book: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins.
• Book: Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud. Thom disagrees with Freud.
• Unemployment statistics are wrong. Wall Street statistics include people from all over the world who have money.
• Scalia in uncompromising form. He should recuse himself.
• Bumper Music: In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel.
• Lynne Landes called. On her web site she has the 1987 deposition of Leonard Gates of Pacific Bell.
  "Why doesn't the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigate electronic vote fraud? Is it that DOJ and the FBI have long been involved in it, themselves? Read: The 1987 Leonard Gates Deposition -- Gates, a Cincinnati Bell employee for 23 years, testified that in the late 1970's and 80's, the FBI assisted telephone companies with hacking into mainframe election computers in cities across the country. The first election Gates provided the hack for was in 1979, see http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results1970s.aspx?Section=517"
• Guest: Neal Boortz, nationally syndicated talk show host, former lawyer, and author of "The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS" and "FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics".
  "Wouldn't you love to abolish the IRS ...

  Keep all the money in your paycheck ...

  Pay taxes on what you spend, not what you earn ...

  And eliminate all the fraud, hassle, and waste of our current system?

  Then the FairTax is for you. In the face of the outlandish American tax burden, talk-radio firebrand Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder are leading the charge to phase out our current, unfair system and enact the FairTax Plan, replacing the federal income tax and withholding system with a simple 23 percent retail sales tax on new goods and services. This dramatic revision of the current system, which would eliminate the reviled IRS, has already caught fire in the American heartland, with more than six hundred thousand taxpayers signing on in support of the plan.

  As Boortz and Linder reveal in this first book on the FairTax, this radical but eminently sensible plan would end the annual national nightmare of filing income tax returns, while at the same time enlarging the federal tax base by collecting sales tax from every retail consumer in the country. The FairTax, they argue, would transform the fearsome bureaucracy of the IRS into a more transparent, accountable, and equitable tax collection system. Among other benefits, it will:

  • Make America's tax code truly voluntary, without reducing revenue
  • Replace today's indecipherable tax code with one simple sales tax
  • Protect lower-income Americans by covering the tax on basic necessities
  • Eliminate billions of dollars in embedded taxes we don't even know we're paying
  • Bring offshore corporate dollars back into the U.S. economy

  Endorsed by scores of leading economists and supported by a huge and growing grassroots movement, the FairTax Plan could revolutionize the way America pays for itself. In this straight-talking book, Neal Boortz and John Linder show you how it would work—and how you can help make it happen.

  "

  Mike Huckabee has taken up the idea of the fair tax.

  As Thom said in his blog,
  

  Today I had a rousing debate with fellow talk show host Neal Boortz (Jones Radio Networks), author of several books on the Fair Tax, including his latest "Fair Tax, The Truth: Answering the Critics." Neal argues that the Fair Tax is the way to go because it broadens the tax base and makes it fair for everyone. I pointed out that in my opinion it's not fair to the poor or the working class. In fact, it seems like just another conservative scheme to make the rich richer and the working people poorer. I also stated that nowhere in the world where a VAT exists does anyone stand in line to fill out the paper work to get back. I think it's a bad idea all around.

• Bumper Music: Taxes Nashville Session Players.
• Bumper Music: Instant Karma We All Shine On, John Lennon.
• Quote:
  "How far it may be the interest and the duty of all to submit to this sacrifice on other grounds, for instance, to pay for a time an impost on the importation of certain articles, in order to encourage their manufacture at home, or an excise on others injurious to the morals or health of the citizens, will depend on a series of considerations of another order, and beyond the proper limits of this note. The reader, in deciding which basis of taxation is most eligible for the local circumstances of his country, will, of course, avail himself of the weighty observations of our author.

  To this a single observation shall yet be added. Whether property alone, and the whole of what each citizen possesses, shall be subject to contribution, or only its surplus after satisfying his first wants, or whether the faculties of body and mind shall contribute also from their annual earnings, is a question to be decided. But, when decided, and the principle settled, it is to be equally and fairly applied to all. To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it." If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra-taxation violates it.

  "
  Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan, 6 Apr. 1816.
• Taxes rant.
• Bumper Music: Say it ain't so, Joe, Murray Head (video).
• Guest: Professor Saul Landau.
  "Saul Landau, an internationally-known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues. Landau's most widely praised achievements are the over forty films he has produced on social, political and historical issues, and worldwide human rights, for which he won the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting, and the First Amendment Award, as well as an Emmy for "Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang." Landau has written over ten books, short stories and poems. He received an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Assassination on Embassy Row, a report on the 1976 murders of Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his colleague, Ronni Moffitt. He is a senior Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies."

  What does Fidel's stepping down mean for Cuba? America? Displaced Cubans? It's not going to make much difference. Nothing changed when he went into hospital. The changes have been institutionalized. He was charismatic, nobody can follow that, rule will be by committee. Aim of the Cuban revolution, history, it started against Spain. Castro has made Cuba a healthy, educated country. Cubans went on missions; doctors in Vietnam, a tank unit in Syria, they freed Mandela by fighting apartheid. Relatives are running other Latin American countries. Downside; divided families lack of some liberties, but they did not have them before. The embargo prevents change. Openness.

• Bumper Music: Till we get it right, Richard Aberdeen.
• Clip:
  "Now, after 9/11, you remember we came up with all kinds of new — aggressive, new laws to combat a new kind of enemy. One of them was the Patriot Act. Another one was the Protection — Protest America Act. This was an extension of our eavesdropping. It helped our government listen in and find terrorists.

  Well, over the weekend, the House failed to pass this Bill, which would have prevented the Protect America Act from lapsing, an extension requested by the president. It`s got a six-month sunset over and over again. He feels — and I happen to agree with him — that this congressional game-playing by Nancy Pelosi will end up killing Americans.

  Now, what could be even more terrifying than that fact is that congress may be acting with reelection in mind and not your safety. Critics are saying now that the House caved to special interest groups, mostly trial lawyers who want their rights to sue these big, huge phone companies that release sensitive information to the government.

  "
  Glenn Beck: ‘Nancy Pelosi Will End Up Killing Americans’.
• $456.1 billion spent just on the war in and occupation of Iraq as of last December, what could it have paid for?
• At the Mensa meeting where Thom gave the keynote speech, a teacher said that drop out rates were over 50% in some schools. A High School diploma used to be enough, so kids pushed for it, now if they are struggling, why bother?
• Article: US banks borrow $50bn via new Fed facility.
• Bumper Music: Welcome To Wherever You Are, Bon Jovi.
• Clip: "I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'." Ronald W. Reagan.
• Article: Justices Turn Aside Flood Insurance Plea.
• Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News. Clinton conference call, they said they were not going after pledged delegates and don't want Obama to. The Supreme Court turned down the ACLU. It takes 4 justices to take a case. John Dingell letter to EPA worried about Colorado drinking water. California. House panel, Christopher Christie awarded to Ashcroft a contract; subcommittee Tuesday. FDA, house panel, newly retired appointee contract. FDA to step up oversight of beef recall. The Supreme Court agree no flood damage to Xavier University, etc, because their policies did not cover it.