The New Republic

Good column by Ezra Klein on the Republican war on the Internal Revenue Service: READ MORE >>

Washington—You might imagine that if a terrorist attack killed an American public servant and threatened the lives of 200 people, it would have been big news for weeks and an enduring symbol of the risks taken by those who serve their country. READ MORE >>

American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks has a Wall Street Journal op-ed today arguing that it's unfair for the tax system to make rich people pay higher rates than the poor and middle class. This is, of course, a foundational belief of the conservative movement. READ MORE >>

Numerous Republican worthies, like Paul Ryan, John Ensign, and Dave Camp, have recirculated the claim that the Affordable Care Act will require 16,000 new IRS agents. Factcheck.org dissects the urban legend and describes how it spread. READ MORE >>

Republican Pete Hoekstra admits that, by any reasonable definition, the extremist who flew a plane into an IRS building, a cop-killer who believed President Obama wanted to take his guns, and others of the like are "domestic terrorists." Conor Freidersdorf, who is being driven mad by Andrew McCarthy's refusal to acknowledge that not everybody detained as a terrorist is in fact a terrorist, READ MORE >>

WASHINGTON -- Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to use an attack on health care reform to bring us back to the 1830s. Cuccinelli, to cheers from the Tea Party crowd, went to court this week to overturn the new law, which he says conflicts with a Virginia statute "protecting its citizens from a government-imposed mandate to buy health insurance." READ MORE >>

Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into an IRS building, turns out to hold a greivance against... the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Yes, I know -- your first guess for the issue that set him off was going to be SCHIP expansion. READ MORE >>

The Chicago Tribune recently profiled a Naperville, IL couple struggling, like so many others across the country, to make ends meet. She had to stop working as a nursing assistant because of health problems, and his $8.50-an-hour job isn’t enough to pay all their bills. They’ve fallen behind on rent, even after pawning belongings to help catch up. READ MORE >>

The big banks are pre-testing their main messages for bonus season, which starts in earnest next week. Their payouts relative to profits will be “record lows,” their people won’t make as much as in 2007 (except for Goldman), and they will pay a higher proportion of the bonus in stock than usual.  Behind the scenes, leading executives are still arguing out the details of the optics. READ MORE >>

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