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On Monday, the Senate Appropriations Committee will vote on the "California Tobacco Tax Act of 2014," a bill introduced by Senator Kevin de Leon that would increase taxes on cigarettes to pay for health care programs.
With a deadline approaching in the Illinois concealed carry debate, legislation was introduced in the State Senate late last week. However, each side in the gun debate continues to show signs of intransigence.
I was going to write about the IRS scandal today. A least I thought it was a scandal until I heard an IRS guy testify before Congress on Friday that there was no political targeting. Just foolish mistakes, people trying to be more efficient. No political targeting? That guy actually had the nerve to say that before Congress.
In modern American politics, the word “socialist” has lost a great deal of its true meaning, robbed of its shock value by frequent overuse and naïve misapplication. Many a conservative pundit has warned President Obama and the national Democratic leadership seek to steer the United States towards a socialistic, or even worse, Marxist state, far from anything the Founders envisioned when they penned the Constitution. Rightwing shock jocks, still waging the early 1990s “culture wars,” have railed against Obama and his allies in the House and Senate.
Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny--now there was some serious crazy. And nothing that Queeg does in the book, or the movie, says "crazy" quite like the hunt for the missing strawberries. After noticing that the ship's strawberry ration is a quart low, Queeg (played admirably by Humphrey Bogart in the 1954 movie) turns the ship upside down looking for them. When the kitchen mates admit to eating the strawberries, Queeg ignores them and forges ahead.