Links and Minifeatures 2008 09 16 Tuesday

Carnival of Personal Finance

Timing the Entitlements Crash

Investor's Business Daily ran a story recently, Tax To The Max, on a Congressional Budget Office study of the U.S. finances.What it says is that spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs is unsustainably high. The study projects tax increases of 150%, with the lowest income-tax bracket going from 10% to 25% and top rates going from 35% to 88%.

The IBD correctly notes: "Allowed to grind on without real reform, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will do what no invading army or cabal of terrorists has done or will ever do: bring this mighty republic to its knees. Increasing federal taxes by 150% will strangle economic growth."

also

recent broaching of the subject of certain [U.S. Treasury] bond issues being dropped from AAA to AA was one. To paraphrase Alec Guinness, 'I sensed the clenching of a hundred thousand sphincters on K-street, all in unison.'"

K Street in Washington is where the lobbyists - corporate and interest group both - hang out.

Read the whole thing

How bad has media bias gotten? LGF has details

60% of Washington Post's Biden Tax Story Devoted to Palin

Here's what was left out of the Sarah Palin Interview. HTHugh Hewitt

Debunking a New York Times Hit Piece

I don't think the Yemeni regime is going to stop digging: Yemen Refuses Visa to IFJ President

A senior Yemeni official said on Sunday Yemen's government had apologized officially to grant an entry visa to President of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Jim Boumelha to visit Yemen.

The IFJ President was planning to hand over Yemeni journalist Abdelkarim al-Khaiwani an award of Amnesty International.

The Yemeni regime has dug so deep that they've already put Project Mohole to shame.

For all the times the left accuses the right of wanting to disenfranchise people, for some reason every time there is a specific documentable incident it seems to be the left trying to disenfranchise the right. Volokh Conspiracy has another specific citation where Republican registrations have been rejected where a group of Democratic ones with the same flaw were accepted.

Obama doesn't want anyone questioning his patriotism. But he must believe it's okay for him to question McCain's

Sauce. Goose. Gander.

FactCheck.org takes on the Palin slime.

Hot Air covers some obstruction of an investigation in Alaska.

Spy Agencies Are Learning to Love Google

The officer calls it "the seduction of the 'top-secret' stamp."

That's a common refrain in the intelligence community when the subject of so-called open-source information comes up.

The information itself is not classified, but their interest in it is.

Faster please.

I look forward to the day anybody can use facial matching software to tip the police off to the whereabouts of wanted criminals, and the day when anybody can look and see if they got the right crook or not.

Feminism, then and now

Did Obama try to scotch an Iraqi-US agreement on military forces?

If so, it's not only of questionable intelligence but actually illegal.

Wizbang has more

This isn't good: Pakistan orders troops to open fire if US raids

Pakistan acknowledges the presence of al-Qaida fugitives and its difficulties in preventing militants from seeping through the mountainous border into Afghanistan.

Like the Saudis, Pakistan claims to be an ally, but in practice they're only masquerading as one.

We're all going to have to learn some new jokes:

Porn passed over as Web users become social

Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.