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The IRS has posted statistics on taxpayers coming and going from various states in 2008 versus 2007. New York lost 201,570 taxpayers with aggregate adjusted gross income of about $12.3 billion, mostly to Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Over the same year, the Empire State gained 173,194 taxpayers with aggregate adjusted gross income of about $8.4 billion. The biggest feeder states to New York were New Jersey, foreign countries, Florida, Pennsylvania, and California. On a net basis, the state lost taxpayers, and the ones that left earned more money than the new ones who arrived.

Don’t let the government hit you in the wallet on the way out.

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From Columbus Dispatch – “Mayor Michael B. Coleman has banned city workers from traveling to Arizona…” and “He agrees with those who want to send a message to the state of Arizona that this is not the American way.” Really?

I wonder if Mayor Coleman lives in a gated community. I wonder if Mayor Coleman has a fence around his residence. I wonder if Mayor Coleman has a lock on his door. Oh the humanity. How un-American of him.

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It is one thing to have no shame and quite another to have no class. Carly Fiorina apparently has neither.

Never did, actually.

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UC San Diego Professor Ricardo Dominguez spearheaded the March 4 digital protest by calling on demonstrators to visit a webpage that sent a new page request to the UC president’s website every one to six seconds. A separate function automatically sent 404 queries to the server. A “spawn” feature allowed participants to run additional pages in another window, multiplying the strain on the targeted website.

Dominguez, an associate professor in UC San Diego’s visual arts department, said the demonstration was an act of “electronic civil disobedience,” a field he’s been studying for more than a decade and for which he earned tenure in 2006. He said he’s organized or participated in at least 16 similar protests and until now has never been accused of criminal hacking.

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Sometimes reality intrudes into even the rosiest scenario.

As I posted two days ago, the City of Central Falls (whose slogan is “A City With a Bright Future”) filed for receivership, the state equivalent of bankruptcy. Rhode Island law does not allow a municipality to file for federal bankruptcy protection, but provides the state receivership alternative.

First, Central Falls’ “actuarial accrued liability” for pensions exceeds $35 million, but there are only $4 million in assets. The annual contribution required by the actuaries for 2009 was $2.7 million, of which the City actually contributed $0. No funds are available for 2010 contributions.

Second, of the $18 million budget, $6.5 million is for employees with collective bargaining agreements. According to The Providence Journal, “City Solicitor John T. Gannon said the city is in the middle of all its municipal employee union contracts. Mayor Charles D. Moreau has been trying to negotiate concessions, he said, but without success.”

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A mafia mobster responsible for one of Italy’s most shocking crimes – dissolving in acid the son of a police informer – has been released from a life prison sentence because he is depressed and has diabetes.

I’m curious as to why this guy is still breathing.

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably once Obama realizes that we don’t have the money to pay for his bright ideas.

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CNOOC Ltd., the Hong Kong-listed unit of China National Offshore Oil Corp. has partnered with the state-run Turkish Petroleum Corp. (TPAO) to win a contract with Iraq to develop the lucrative Missan oil-field in southern Iraq, marking CNOOC’s first upstream access to Iraqi oil following its two major rivals, CNPC and Sinopec.

According to CNOOC, the 20-year contract includes an increase of Missan’s production capacity to 450,000 barrels per day from the current 100,000 barrels a day within six years. CNOOC has agreed to price every additional barrel of oil produced after capacity rises by 10 percent at US$ 2.30.

CNOOC will be the operator and hold 63.75 percent of the interest. TPAO will have 11.25 percent interest while an Iraqi drilling company will hold the remaining 25 percent.

Our blood, their oil. Wonder whether they even said Thank You? Probably not. No good deed goes unpunished.

None of the Crust care, of course, if they’re even paying attention.

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And, really, who could blame them?

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Don’t you sleep better at night with those wonderful folks in D.C. watching out for you? It’s not enough that they’ve screwed up the economy in general, and are in the process of further screwing up our medical care. Now, they’re working toward dismantling our defenses against terrorists and regimes that sponsor terrorism.

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Texas doctors are opting out of Medicare at alarming rates, frustrated by reimbursement cuts they say make participation in government-funded care of seniors unaffordable.

Can’t really blame them.

“You do Medicare for God and country because you lose money on it,” said Culpepper, a graduate of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. “The only way to provide cost-effective care is outside the Medicare system, a system without constant paperwork and headaches and inadequate reimbursement.”

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A council which spent £3 million to build Europe’s first artificial surfing reef has finally admitted that it produces the wrong kind of waves.

Everything government touches gets screwed up. You’d think people would eventually learn that.

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For years the major question regarding China has been whether it will embrace the post–World War II order. The answer is no.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Time-shares for the Apocalypse?

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Tourists last night described the camp as an “eyesore” and said it was “unbelievable” police had allowed the protesters, who have been joined by a number of homeless people, to remain.

Police have searched tents, but have not evicted the protesters, who said they had not applied for permission to hold a demonstration.

It is against the law to hold an unauthorised protest within a square mile of Parliament.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said that the force is having “ongoing dialogue” with the group and that they are monitoring the situation.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in D.C.

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It has never been more apparent than it is now. In just the past couple of months alone, examples of this attitude have uncovered that what was once perhaps just dangerous naivety, is now the purposeful ignoring of what should be basic knowledge. All in order to appease, accommodate and appear culturally sensitive. The fact that the very people for whom they are apologists want to, you know, kill them is somehow lost on them.

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(Other than on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, of course.)

Kagan, then, can be viewed as an elitist nominee in the bad sense. The eight Justices with whom she would serve could claim, when nominated, to be elite by virtue of what they had accomplished without any reference to an elite institution of higher learning. Such a claim by Kagan would be tenuous.

Harvard law school, and how one views it, is therefore an issue in Kagan’s nomination, not because she went there but because she remained there and ended up running it, and because her other credentials seem thin for a Supreme Court Justice.

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The worst attorney general ever? That’s what most folks in the U.S. are saying about the current guy sitting in the chair.

Me? I think it’s mostly a top-down problem. Holder can’t let past his lips anything that is not part of his Obama-derived marching orders. After all, the President is his boss. If our president, B. Hussein O., has dismissed the notion of “radical Islam” then no matter how often a member of his cabinet is asked directly to respond to a question about -gasp — “radical Islam” — that person will stonewall. After all, what can any interlocutor do to a cabinet member that BHO won’t execute in spades? He plays by Chicago rules.

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Well, it turns out there’s a reason those comics and beer companies keep making those jokes. Many of the exciting advances in brain mapping and genetic research are proving that some of the oldest, most hackneyed gender-based stereotypes are totally true.

Say it ain’t so….

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Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

When the official intelligence agency has succumbed to the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, and you’re in a war, there is little choice.

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The functional equivalent of a hammer for totalitarians.

I quoted the prescient warnings of the Anti-federalists, who warily regarded the proposed Constitution as affording a grant of powers that might lay dormant for some time, but which – in the midst of crisis – would be readily seized upon as providing the only means for remediation of whatever dire exigency might be facing the nation. Thus, Federal Farmer wrote, ” The lever by which power would ultimately be accrued was the use of powers not necessarily then required, but granted for future possible use as would be “necessary and proper.” Wrote the Pennsylvania minority, “the legislature of the United States are vested with great and uncontroulable powers, of laying and collecting taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; of regulating trade, raising and supporting armies, organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, instituting courts and other general powers…. And if they may do it , it is pretty certain that they will; for it will be found that the power retained by the original states, small as it is, will be a clog upon the wheels of government of the United States; the latter, therefore, will be naturally inclined to remove it out of its way.”

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Judges are of course entitled to have their own views about which things “right-thinking members of society” should “recognize” and which they should forget. But it seems to me that under the First Amendment members of society have a constitutional right to think things through in their own ways.

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There’s nothing like imminent bankruptcy and the prospect of sovereign default to focus the attention of a national leader on what’s really important: gaining increased political power.

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The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators. But there’s an underside to that conventional wisdom. Perhaps no more than half of those who began a four-year bachelor’s degree program in the fall of 2006 will get that degree within six years, according to the latest projections from the Department of Education. (The figures don’t include transfer students, who aren’t tracked.)

The Other McCain points and laughs as the Nanny State becomes entangled in its own briar patch.

Of course, Newt Gingrich was saying this 15 years ago, and as a result liberals denounced him as a stooge for Corporate America who wanted to rape the planet.

Clive Crook is your typical lefty Brit journalist, but seems to have stumbled on some common sense.

When did a united Europe ever capture the imagination of many of its residents? The European project was an elite-driven, top-down affair from the outset. Its leaders took the view, often explicitly, that Europe’s voters did not know what was good for them and would have to be led to enlightenment. There was never any willingness to let public indifference or outright hostility moderate the pace. For the most part, voters were not consulted. When they were, and voted No in the occasional referendum on further transfer of power to Brussels, governments resolved to keep on asking until voters got it right. Germany adopted the euro despite a sustained majority opposed to monetary union. (Surely this helps to explain German anger over the bail-outs. “We were against this in the first place. Now see what’s happened.”)

Robert Samuelson looks to the future, and goes “Aaaaack!”

The welfare state is today’s equivalent of the gold standard. With aging societies, advanced countries have promised more benefits than their tax bases can support. Hence, high government debt. Greece is merely the canary in the coal mine. But politicians resist cutting popular benefits except under extreme pressure. It takes a crisis. Greece, again. Another unsettling parallel is the global economy. The United States’ leadership since World War II is eroding before China’s ascent. There’s a danger now, as then, of a power vacuum. Witness the long delay in coming to Greece’s aid. No one country acted decisively, even as markets grew nervous.

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The research suggests that when compared with the versions they replaced, the newest air bags, required in all vehicles beginning in 2008 and in some as early as 2004, may place belted drivers at greater risk of death.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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I can see how an Australian would be insulted by that. I imagine the Irish aren’t best pleased by the insinuation, either.

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Never did like Nixon.

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Consumers are returning to old-fashioned ‘wartime’ foods as a result of the recession, according to a study of shoppers’ habits by MySupermarket.co.uk.

Spam, spam, spam, spam…..

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The court heard that Noga locked up his flat and moved in with his mother when his home became overcrowded with stolen post.

Who hasn’t encountered the problem of ‘too much stuff’?

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Five years after Uzbek troops opened fire on hundreds of protestors in the city of Andijan, experts say the Central Asian state has yet to be held accountable for one major reason – Afghanistan.

Actually, the one major reason is that nobody gives a shit what happens with, to, or among Uzbeks.

Megan McArdle nails it.

But I do think that David Brooks is onto something when he notes that her relentless careerism, her pitch-perfect blandness, are a little creepy. Not in themselves, but because they’re a symptom of a culture that increasingly values what Brooks calls Organization Kids: the driven, hyperachieving spawn of the Ivy League meritocracy who began practicing Supreme Court nomination acceptances and CEO profile photo poses long before they took notice of the opposite sex.

The Other McCain is on the case.

But that trick never works….

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You can figure out the logic for yourself just fine, right? Americans eat way too much processed junk, so their/our behavior has to be brought back into line by means of a special tax that will effectively force us to eat tofu, hummus, carrots and arugula.

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Ten candidates were interviewed after the advert was placed in July and the most eligible, a 41-year-old named as Mr Lee, was introduced in October to Mr Kim’s daughter, who works for a design company. The couple is now set to tie the knot on Saturday.

And that’s the daughter’s only appearance in the whole process. We don’t even find out here name.

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I’m waiting eagerly for the census form to arrive in the mail. Its arrival will give me an opportunity to comply with the “real” Constitution by committing an act of civil disobedience. Specifically, I will refuse to answer the questions that have nothing to do with the constitutional purpose of the census.

The Constitution authorizes them to count you. Everything beyond that is a violation of privacy. (Remember your Constitutional right to privacy? It allows you to kill your unborn child but not to tell the government all about your life.)

Of course, conscription (‘The Draft’) is unconstitutional as well (read the 13th Amendment some time), and we see how well that works when it goes against what the Crust wants.

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A friendly native guide to what politicians are saying.

X :  I will serve the people of this district to the best of my ability.

Y:  I intend to look out for my own interest every step of the way, so unless you’re the highest bidder for my services, you’d better start saying your prayers now.

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The pages of this necessary but contentious book burn with a righteous moral anger about the contradictions and tensions of delivering humanitarian aid in conflict zones. Linda Polman’s polemic is a timely reminder that noble intentions and humanitarian motives are often stretched to, and beyond, breaking point in the febrile world of modern-day war. She implores us to look beyond the clichés of humanitarian aid – red crosses, heart-rending dispatches from refugee camps, fund-raising appeals – and examine in detail the difficulties involved in giving aid effectively in such circumstances.

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Having a few of them shot for treason might have a salutory effect.

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Be the first on your block.

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Ya think?

Just trying to help out.

* Iran can have nukes, but you can’t have salt.

* Shape up voters, or we’ll get a cheap replacement for you from Mexico.