Far East Cynic

Which was pointed out to me by Japan Probe:

The movie is called Hariymaya Bridge-and it appears to capture a lot of the issues involved in Gaijin marriage with Japanese. The story concerns an American man who must travel to rural Japan after his estranged son dies there in a traffic accident. While there, he discovers some secrets his son left behind.

Part of this rings true for me on a personal note-I had a Sailor who worked for me several years ago, whose parents were furious that he married a Japanese girl instead of an African American one.

Danny Glover is in the movie. Can’t wait to see it.

Taken from Japan Probe:

The South Korean government has been pushing for English speakers to stop using the name “Sea of Japan” in favor of the Korea-centric “East Sea” name, but it seems that the South Korean postal service isn’t checking the maps it uses for its posters:

As it should be!

If you make a decision, and have no overlying evidence to change your mind-stick to it.

This, is just plain stupid. Worse, its picking a fight that makes your other fights that much harder to win.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Widening an explosive debate on torture, President Barack Obama on Tuesday opened the possibility of prosecution for Bush-era lawyers who authorized brutal interrogation of terror suspects and suggested Congress might order a full investigation.

Less than a week after declaring it was time for the nation to move on rather than “laying blame for the past,” Obama found himself describing what might be done next to investigate what he called the loss of “our moral bearings.”

His comments all but ensured that the vexing issue of detainee interrogation during the Bush administration will live on well into the new president’s term. Obama, who severely criticized the harsh techniques during the campaign, is feeling pressure from his party’s liberal wing to come down hard on the subject. At the same time, Republicans including former Vice President Dick Cheney are insisting the methods helped protect the nation and are assailing Obama for revealing Justice Department memos detailing them.

There is no defense for this-its really stupid. The Bush era decisions may have been stupid-but there is no going back-only going forward in a different direction.  Anything else is just asking for trouble.

I’m siding with the critics on this one. This is not smart and it will come around to bite Obama in the ass. Releasing the memo’s? That’s one thing-and perfectly Ok with me. Trying to dig up the past? Usually does not work very well.

Once, just once-I’d like to tear down some really stupid myths about taxes.  The one big one I’d like to put to bed once and for all is the line you hear repeated over and over by people who should know better, that 48% of Americans do not pay taxes.

It is just not true.

Like most of the things that the Teabaggers are whining angry about, the idea that almost 50% percent of Americans don’t pay any taxes rests on a half truth-presented out of context. When you fill in the rest of the blocks, the story comes out a lot different.

However, telling that part does not fit the narrative: Namely that the country is divided between givers and takers of wealth.  Workers vs freeloaders.  Its a key part of the Teabagger back story: “we are better than you.”

Except-if they took the time and effort to look deeper, they would find that Glenn Beck and the other Fox News cheerleaders did not let them in on the whole story.

All numbers from now on come from the Tax Policy.org

Lets start with the macro numbers shall we?

In 2009 a total of 151 million tax units will be filing some sort of tax return. ( That definition excludes individuals who are filed as dependents of other tax units-like children of tax payers.)

Of that number, it is true, 43% have an income tax liability of zero. That is the number that the rabid folks in the park have glommed onto-and in part shaped their outrage around. Sounds good doesn’t it?  “43% of all Americans don’t pay any taxes”-something to be mad about.

Except it does not tell the whole story, and if anything it should not serve, as it is so often done, as an indictment of the worth and character of the individuals who fall in that 43%-than as an example of the law of unintended consequences- of well meaning tax law provisions balanced against wages that have been essentially flat lined for the past ten years.  These are the “lucky duckies” that the Wall Street Journal has been decrying for some 7 years.

The problem with this narrow view of taxpaying is that the federal income tax is only one of several taxes Americans pay. Other taxes, like excise taxes, sales taxes, and especially the payroll tax (a.k.a. FICA),  are not refunded or zeroed out. They get paid regardless of ones standing on the income graph.  If you include payroll taxes in that total number of tax units computation I mentioned earlier, the percentage of people with zero income tax or payroll tax drops to 11.6%.

And that does not include state taxes-or sales tax.

Furthermore, the tax protestors have neglected to tell you an important piece of economic demography: 90% of those with zero tax liability made less than 25,000 dollars cash income last year.  In a family of four, factoring in both the poverty threshold of 21, 800 and the income tax entry level of 26,000 ( before taking the earned income tax credit), I’m not so sure they have a lot to brag about. The popular number of a person making 44,900 paying no income taxes is only valid for a filer who can take Child Tax credits on two children and an earned income tax credit. A single filer, has already jumped on board the taxpayer train a long time ago.

It’s also worth noting that for at least the last 50 years, the “non-income tax taxpaying” numbers were generally in the neighborhood of 25-28%, and it was only in the last ten years that they really jumped up. The reason for the jump? Congress and the Bush administration fell in love with the idea of tax refundable credits.   The Bush tax cuts increased the ranks of those with zero or negative liability, and many of the tax credits-however well intentioned- made the deduction threshold much higher than it was at the beginning of the decade.  Tax credits were aimed at everything from children and college students to hybrid cars and homebuyers. In the same period, however, incomes of the top 1% of taxpayers jumped 200%. How about some grass roots outrage about that?  If incomes had steadily increased across the board the “non tax paying” percentage might have stayed at 28% or less.  For most of us though-they didn’t climb any near that amount.

Now none of this means that the tax code does not need to be simplified. It took a lot of research to pull out a lot of these numbers. I’ll agree that the federal tax system needs to be made simpler. Its why I support a flat tax.  But to just say that people who are not making a lot of money to begin with-are somehow conspiring to lower the standard of living of others, well that’s more than just a little over the top if you ask me.

Next up: Words do have meaning.

And why all of the folks defending the indefensible are wrong. James Fallows sums it up very well:

Nonetheless I contend that a full process of American self-examination and accountability will make a tremendous long-term difference in international views of the United States. Even among those who at the moment don’t know that there is any controversy going on within the United States.

For as annoyed as foreigners may get with America and Americans, there have been two saving graces in the world’s opinions of our country. One has been its permeability. Anywhere you go, someone has an uncle or cousin in America. The other, less openly stated, has been a belief that at some point there are rules in America. Long periods may pass when the rules are ignored. Big boys may bend the rules in their favor. Some offenses are never made right. And so on. But in the end, the American system is supposed to recognize injustice and respond — including with public accountability for even the mightiest figures. It has this in common with the British and some other systems — which is what Gandhi relied on in knowing he could “shame” the Brits. For all the increases in liberty within China over the last generation, this is a striking difference with the world’s currently-rising power. No one expects China’s current leadership to conduct a “truth commission” about the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen. But people finally expect America to apply its own rules, even against its own people. Fulfilling that expectation is not sufficient for restoring America’s image international standing. But it is necessary.

So even though most of the world’s population has no idea of what is in the torture memos or of what will happen because of them, in the long run the Administration’s decisions will have a significant worldwide effect. Being true to the world’s idea of America does not (in my opinion) crucially turn on prosecuting individual CIA or military interrogators. Instead it depends on full clarifying disclosure of the reasoning that led to these practices — thus, maximum disclosure of the memos — and full examination of the decisions that public officials made.

You cannot take a position on the moral high ground-stating how you are the good guys-unless you actually stick to that position. It is why I always hate it when people crow about we “liberated” 50 million Muslims. Forcibly trading one corrupt Muslim government for another is not liberation.

If you want to jump off the moral high ground and say we are forcibly exercising our national interest, well that’s another matter. However if that’s the case, why stop at these techniques? It doesn’t matter anymore what you do.

However, you cannot have it both ways.

Billy Joel updated for the 21′st century(Language NFSW):

Flame on baby! Courtesy of College Humor-who says undergrads don’t learn anything?

UPDATE-College Humor wants you to see their ads. You can see the video here.

Chino Otsuka has combined pictures of herself from 30 years ago to make an interesting montage:

See the rest here

It just was…………..

Bonus points if you can guess what Mommy does for a living!

I’m going to go on a series of posts disproving some of the wildest distortions that have been beamed into the minds of those who believe that they have some kind of a novel new notion, about government and taxation. The Tea Parties may have started as a grass roots phenomenon, but it would never have been as big a deal as it became with out the aid and active participation of Fox News and Republican talk radio. Furthermore, what is clear as you try to puncture the bubble of what the folks accept as “facts” is that the basic talking points were not created by the protesters themselves. Rather, they are simply recitations of things they heard on Fox News.

That’s fine-everyone is entitled to an opinion. However don’t get angry when someone has the temerity to call their “bedrock truths” into question.

Especially when those “bedrock truths” don’t turn out to be true:

It’s true that projected deficits have gotten larger since January. But much of this resulted from deteriorating economic conditions that would have occurred even if John McCain were president. Moreover, it is absurd to assume that McCain would not have enacted any stimulus programs had he been elected…

I strongly suspect that many of those that loudly denounced the Obama stimulus package for its impact on the deficit would have cheered the McCain stimulus package even though it would have increased the deficit by about the same amount……..

The truth is that the greatest addition to national indebtedness occurred in 2003 when Bush rammed through the Republican Congress a massive expansion of Medicare to provide drug benefits even though the system was already broke….

Same thing goes with the idea that taxes are spiraling out of control. Historical data suggests that proposition may need a little more thought:

Effective Tax rates were higher under Reagan for all income groups than they are now. Higher income groups paid a little more under Clinton-but the side benefit was that the budget came into balance. I think most of the tea party protesters do not realize that-it was not in Glenn Becks talking points. However the information is there for any one who wants to find it.

Another point that was conveniently left out of the “Party like its 1773” rhetoric, was that if the top 1% are paying more taxes, part of it is because that unlike the rest of us whose wages essentially are flat lined, they experienced the greatest growth in after-tax incomes, too.

They might also have neglected to tell you that the US is not the most highly taxed nation in the world-its actually 23rd in that race. (#1 is Belgium).

Next up: The 40% don’t pay taxes myth.

Since their blood pressure is up and all:

Are a waste of time.

I would no more go to a tea party,  than I would to an anti-war demonstration. I’ll fight stupidity through the ballot box, thank you very much.

The  teabaggers are acting like they are some holy crusade, however they don’t really have a coherent message to put out. What is it they are protesting exactly?

Higher Taxes?  There have not yet been any tax hikes. Yes, some are on the table, which encompass the moving of the top marginal bracket to previous levels.  Further, I would wager that, that the vast majority of people protesting will get tax cuts if Obama’s plan passes Congress.  If these people love tax cuts so  much-they ought to be happy with this year’ s plan. Most folks making over 250 K don’t have time to carry signs anyway-they are out making money.

Government Spending?  “It isn’t as if the spending just started–it has been going on for some time. Indeed, whether it is massive social expenditures (the Medicare prescription drug benefit) or bailouts (TARP, loans to Chrysler and GM, bailout money for AIG, etc.), not to mention war spending, it all started under the previous administration, and some of it has been going on for years. “  So while I understand at some point enough is enough, it is difficult for me to take seriously all of this outrage on this topic right now. Want to save some real money? get the hell out of Iraq-tomorrow.

But, if  Sean Hannity and the rest of the slobbering horde is to be believed, Americans are more than willing to spend billions for worthless Arabs, but not one damn cent for real Americans. And evidently, they have no beef with starting a renewed war for the Somali coast without backing out of any of the the other four we are in.

However government spends too much.

As is noted here-all this  tea baggery makes for an odd brew:

If nothing else, the conservative movement is an irony producing machine. Aided and abetted by their echo chamber at Fox News, on Tax Day next week members of the raging right will gather at so-called Tea Parties around the country. There, the protesters, at least 95% of whom received a tax cut courtesy of President Obama and Democrats in Congress, will in essence decry “no taxation with representation.” And if their misunderstanding of the Boston Tea Party wasn’t bad enough, their choice of tea bagging as metaphor is more unfortunate still.

To be sure, what theoretically began as a protest against profligate government has morphed into a Rorschach Test of right-wing political grievance. (For examples, see this video collection from Huffington Post.) Glenn Beck’s astro-turf acolytes decry saboteurs and “communists,” evolution and “brainwashing machines.” The tea baggers’ strange brew of Birthers and Birchers proclaim Barack Obama foreign-born while issuing calls to “burn the books.” In the end, the far-right foaming at the mouth (starting around the 1:58 mark above) was enough for the renegade conservative blog Little Green Footballs:

“This is some really deranged stuff, and the audience is eating it up.”

As Jon Stewart rightly pointed out to the beaten and battered, furious and frothing minions of the right, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” While President Obama has proposed returning the tax rate for the 2% of taxpayers earning over $250,000 to the Clinton-era levels of the booming 1990′s, the Tea Baggers apparently believe King George III is still oppressing his colonial subjects under the yoke of the Townshend and Tea Acts:

If you ask me the Tea Parties are a celebration of selfishness. Protesting a problem that does not really exist yet-and not offering a coherent solution for a non-existent problem. They can however-tell you who is to blame for it: Any one but them.

Because part of the tea party movement-which was not much of a movement at all-until Fox News, Freedom Works, and other patron saints of the conservative movement decided to up the ante and bankroll the movement. Enlisting the usual suspects of the right to help talk it up.

Which is what makes Republican politicians showing up to support them, as Paul Krugman asserts, more than a little unseemly:

Everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

What I find most disturbing about the tea parties is the attitude of those who praise them. If you argue that maybe, just maybe, the previous administration had something to do with increased government spending, you will be greeted with a rolling of the eyes and that quick eye glance around, ” Don’t you get it? It is all the fault of the One!”  No thought of trying to work together to fix problems as a nation together-rather the same tired old logic of: ” We are better than them”. Them who? Someone who disagrees with you? To hell with the tea bags -make your case to the electorate.

Plus there is always the undercurrent of fear lurking just around the corner:

“Get ready for the anti-Tea Party sabotage and smear campaign”For the next 9 days, the left-wing blogosphere and left-wing clueless pundits will hammer away with their unreality-based Tea Party smears.

And on the ground, the tax-subsidized and Soros-subsidized troops are going to try and wreak havoc every way they can. Many readers and fellow bloggers have seen signs that ACORN may send in ringers and saboteurs to usurp the anti-tax, anti-reckless spending, anti-bailout message.

Always, of course, this message is delivered with a patented sneer-such as only the truly converted can deliver. They go home in the calm self assurance of knowing somehow that their protests are better than someone elses:

No stilt puppets, and precious few kettle drums, so far as I can tell. Everyone fully dressed. And lots of American flags. Most of which were flown right-side up, and all of which were untrampled upon and unburned.

Conclusions are left to the reader.

Which is the important part-the message doesn’t work without that self assurance. I mean God forbid they might just be barking up the wrong tree. Namely-that in the aggregate Americans are not the most heavily taxed society and Stalin is not lurking around the corner. The notion that Obama is “driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did” doesn’t make any sense.

Take the biggest tranch of the future debt – $32 trillion of a new Medicare drug entitlement – Obama gets blamed. Except for the fact that Obama inherited that commitment, with no provision for funding it, from the Republicans. To blame Obama for it is like blaming him for the future costs of the Iraq war. Yes, they will be incurred after Obama took office – but they decided long ago.

And for anyone who was actually paying attention, instead of being blinded by silliness-you knew that already.

Oh and in case you guys never heard-you might have picked a better name.

Have fun in the park today.

They have an Astro-boy ( proper name: Atomu) application for the I-phone:

Sh*t-and I was going to save money this month too…………

They say that you should work doing  something you love. This might be a good way for me to spend my golden years…………………………..

I am convinced the political well in America is good and truly poisoned. If so, the country is in for a long down hill slide regardless of who is President.

Consider the right wing monologue. In just about 75 days, the nation has slid down the road to facisim, socialism, nazisim, communism or any other ism that blows your skirt. As Jon Stewart said in the previous post, when Obama is not so busy being a big pussy allowing the Europeans to walk all over us-he’s flexing his muscle as a tyrant scheming to deprive all real Americans of their guns, land, and money.

All of the bad things that happen in America have all occurred in the last 70+ days. No seeds were planted before hand-no one else bears any blame for leading the country down a rat hole its all Obama’s fault. Even when the team-gets one for the good guys-he is still to blame for not acting quickly enough, or trying to steal the credit from the real brains who thought up the solution.

The left is actually guilty of many of the same things in the previous eight years-although I’d argue that at least Obama has not had time to invade a country that didn’t attack us yet and get 4500 Americans killed doing so. Give him time.

I’ve got a news flash for everyone. Regarding the piracy incident? It would have probably gone down exactly the same way if Bush was still President. Or if McCain was President.

It is just the way it is.

All the people who are screaming about how we should have whacked the fuckers and how limp-wristed we are for not preventing the incident, forgive my French, don’t have a f**king clue.

People who talk about sweeping these guys off the map should really look at a map. The US Navy did:

The east coast of Somalia is a vast stretch of water. To put it in perspective, it starts from — draw a box from Houston to Chicago to New York City down to Jacksonville, Florida.

It’s an immense body of water. When the “Maersk-Alabama” had their problem, our closest vessel from all the navies that were out there, we have 16 navies patrolling those waters, and the closest one was the “USS Bainbridge” and it was over 300 nautical miles.

The day before, they had made an announcement through their company that they were fending off some pirates and then when — and they said it was under control.

And then the next day when this one that they ultimately got on board, we were closing Bainbridge as quickly as we can, but 22 knots, 300 nautical miles, it take as while to get there.

And there’s about a 10 minute window from when the pirates are able to get on board that we have time to act. Up in the Gulf of Aden, north on the north coast of Somalia where it’s a little bit more concentrated, we’ve had more successful attempts when a ship was being attempted to be pirated where one of the navies of the 16 navies down that are down there that could react and assist with breaking up the attempt. But out on the east coast of Somalia, such a vast area, we simply do not have enough resources in order to cover all those areas.

In other words, even if Bush was still President, the Maersk Alabama would have still been sailing unescorted. Which was a big part of the reason the whole thing unfolded to begin with. And once the Captain was a hostage-well the actions taken then go down a slow and deliberate path.

Unless you want hostages to get killed.

Maersk is a Danish line that flies the US flag. If it had been a Filipino Captain on a Panamanian flagged freighter-and the same thing happened, think it would have been all over the news? There would still be hostages, just probably no rescue.

150 crewman from various ships are being held hostage as we speak. How come there is no outrage about shipping companies that are placing their ships in harms way just to save on their fuel bill? Why isn’t the area declared an exclusion zone?

Piracy is not new-its been going in South East Asia and off Somalia for about the last ten years. It is only in the last nine months or so that the Fifth Fleet has started to make attempts to get serious about it.

Probably because it was a little busy trying to be in four big stretches of water at once: The Gulf, The Red Sea, The Omani coast trying to stem the drug trade, or off the coast of Somalia and Aden.

There are a lot of ships there-go see Galhran for the latest list. However they are not under a single command structure.

Getting them to do so will be like herding cats. Maybe the one benefit of this particular incident is that it will enable the efforts that were already underway to get a boost.

And we could actually start convoying ships through the area with escorts and air surveillance.

The pirates are probably networked via the internet, with dock workers in Port Said and elsewhere. They know when the fat cargoes are coming through- throwing ships at the problem does not solve that right away. It is going to take time to make this become reduced, and given the example of the Malacca Straits, it is never going away totally.

I’d like to give the Navy some credit-they have been thinking this through for some time now. And that is one reason they performed so well.

But never mind, its all still Obama’s fault.

Once again Jon Stewart poke holes in Republican rage machine:

H/T to Once a Marine!