Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | It's not too late for lasting peace in the Middle East: "Over the years, opinion polls have consistently shown that about 60% of Israelis favour withdrawing from the West Bank in exchange for permanent peace."......

Harvard's New Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.: "Anti-Semitism can appear in many forms, many disguises"

The Israel Lobby does not control.. anything. Yes, every critic of Israel has been an anti-Semite.. Harvard is a fine institution but come on now. DO YOU SEE THE image of Jews as a monolithic group suffering from "dual loyalty" TO AMERICAN AND ISRAEL?

Taxes for an Ownership Society: "Taxes for an Ownership Society

BUSH IS WRONG ABOUT TAXES.. YES HE IS.

Published: September 15, 2004


When President Bush talks about an 'ownership society,' hold on to your wallet. The slogan, like 'compassionate conservative' before it, is sufficiently vague to mean many things to many people, and the few details that Mr. Bush has provided - encouraging more home ownership and offering new tax-sheltered savings plans - seem innocuous enough. But in tax terms, 'ownership society' means only one thing: the further reduction, if not the elimination, of taxes on savings and investments, including taxes on dividends and on capital gains on stocks, bonds and real estate. That, in turn, means, by definition, a shift in the tax burden onto wages and salaries - or, put more simply, a wage tax.
The regressive results would be appalling. The richest 1 percent of Americans earn just about one-tenth of total wages and salaries, but almost half of all income from savings and investments - income that would be largely, perhaps entirely, untaxed in an 'ownership society.' In contrast, taxable wages and salaries make up almost all of the income of most Americans.
The Bush camp has been floating the idea that what the president is getting at is a consumption tax. But the administration is not talking about a true consumption tax, which would apply to spending regardless of where the money comes from - from your paycheck, cashing in your stocks and bonds, selling your house, or borrowing. It is, in effect, talking about a tax on wages.
Properly understood, a consumption tax is intended to increase national savings by making it relatively more attractive to save than to spend. The main argument against it is that it hits hardest at low-income and middle-income families, who tend to spend most of what they earn. But as "

The Bushes and the Jews By Anne E. Kornblut
THE FOLLOWING STORY IS NOT A GOOD ERASON WHY JEWS SHOULD THINK HIGHLY OF BUSH.. HE THINKS WE SHOULD BE ISRAEL SO CHRIST CAN COME ONCE AGAIN...

The Bushes and the Jews
Explaining the president's philo-Semitism.
By Anne E. Kornblut
Updated Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 3:58 PM ET

In 1998, George W. Bush took his first and only trip to the Holy Land. During a helicopter tour—guided by none other than Ariel Sharon—Bush was astonished to discover how tiny Israel is compared to its Arab neighbors. He later described the visit as one of the most meaningful experiences of his life. A photographer captured a striking image of Bush, in a yarmulke, standing reverently at the Wailing Wall.

The picture may be a symbol of Bush foreign policy these days, but it speaks to an even more startling truth: Bush is the first in his family of politicians to craft a pro-Jewish image. Starting with accusations that Prescott Bush was a Nazi collaborator before Pearl Harbor, the Bush dynasty has generally been viewed with suspicion and at times outright hostility by Jewish Americans. The elder President Bush outraged the Jewish community with a series of perceived insults. Before he became president, the younger Bush, who once expressed doubt about whether non-Christians could get into heaven, seemed likely to follow in the family tradition.

The charges against Sen. Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the current president, went beyond the disdain for Jews and discriminatory practices that were characteristic of New England WASP culture in his day. Prescott Bush was a director of a New York bank where rich Germans who supported the Nazis stashed millions in personal wealth. He was still a director at the bank, Union Banking Corp., when its assets were frozen under the Trading With the Enemy Act in 1941—a fact that has provided endless fodder for leftists and conspiracy theorists since it came to light in the 1990s.

George Herbert Walker Bush shared the same exclusionary pedigree as his father, starting with Yale and the secret society Skull & Bones, and had extensive ties to Arabs through the oil industry as well. But most Jews did not consider him unfriendly to their interests so long as he served under Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the first Republican in 80 years to win a sizable share of the Jewish vote. There were a variety of reasons for this, but the key issue was Reagan's hard line on the defense of Israel, which he considered a crucial democratic outpost in the fight against Soviet communism. In the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter won 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Reagan won 39 percent.

That remarkable shift, however, began to be undone almost as soon as George H.W. Bush took over in 1989. Bush was a self-described pragmatist in international affairs, and in the giddy early days after the end of the Cold War, it was no longer fashionable to view the world in binary terms. As a result, many conservative ideological causes—among them Israel—no longer found a champion in the White House. The point was made most clearly when Bush demanded, in 1991, that the Israelis stop building new settlements in Palestinian-controlled territories. Unlike previous presidents, Bush sounded serious, threatening to block millions in loan guarantees if Israel disobeyed. (Later, when his re-election was in doubt in 1992, Bush promised to press Congress for the loan guarantees unconditionally.)

Just as damaging was the elder Bush's knack for seeming as out of touch with Jewish voters as he did with everyone else. Once, during a 1991 White House press conference, Bush Sr. complained about the strength of the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill—the implication being that "Jews work insidiously behind the scenes," as David J. Forman wrote in the Jerusalem Post. On another occasion, Bush reminded his critics that the United States gives "Israel the equivalent of $1,000 for every Israeli citizen," a remark that detractors took as an allusion to the stereotype of Jews as money-obsessed and greedy.

And then there was Secretary of State James Baker's infamous "fuck the Jews" remark. In a private conversation with a colleague about Israel, Baker reportedly uttered the vulgarity, noting that Jews "didn't vote for us anyway." This was more or less true—Bush got 27 percent of the Jewish vote, compared with 73 percent for Dukakis, in 1988. And thanks in part to Baker, it was even truer in 1992, when Bill Clinton got 78 percent of the Jewish vote and Bush got only 15 percent—the poorest showing by a Republican candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In 2000, as Al Gore hit the campaign trail with the first Jewish vice presidential running mate in U.S. history on his ticket, George W. Bush seemed to make only a half-hearted attempt to compete for Jewish votes. He paid the obligatory dues, speaking at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and visiting the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (where, after touring the sobering Holocaust exhibit, he incongruously signed the guest book, "God bless this world!"). But Bush reserved his real pitch for Arab-Americans, whom his strategists viewed as an increasingly powerful voting bloc. Repeated trips to Michigan, a swing state, gave Bush ample opportunity to meet with Arab-American leaders, heavily concentrated around Detroit. Ironically, he made a campaign pledge to examine "secret evidence" cases against foreign suspects, a matter of great concern among Arab-Americans (and one that fell by the wayside after Sept. 11).

Like his father, Bush failed during the campaign to win over neoconservative Jewish intellectuals—most notably William Kristol, who openly backed John McCain. The problem wasn't just the assumption that he shared his father's coolness toward Israel. It was also his perceived insensitivity toward Jews, as characterized by the only-Christians-in-heaven remark. Bush later joked about the uproar caused by the exchange. Asked by a reporter what he planned to tell the Israelis as he prepared to embark on his 1998 trip to the Middle East, Bush replied, obviously in jest, "Go to hell." Gore got 79 percent of the Jewish vote. Bush got only 19 percent.

But unlike his father, who never managed to repair his relationship with the Jewish community despite several attempts, Bush has only risen in the esteem of many prominent Jews since taking office. The biggest factor is probably the Sept. 11 attacks. After a brief flurry of activity to win Arab support for the war on Afghanistan, Bush began to connect America's struggle against terrorism with Israel's fight against Palestinian suicide bombers. Though he was criticized for sitting on the sidelines as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict worsened, Bush arguably took sides by dropping the standard call for the Israelis to "show restraint." After briefly responding to international pressure to demand an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Bush quickly backed off.

Another factor is shrewd political judgment. At pains to avoid repeating political mistakes his father made, Bush has actively courted conservatives within the Republican coalition. That includes Jewish neoconservatives such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who hopes to encourage Bush to avoid another mistake of his father's—failing to topple Saddam Hussein. It was Wolfowitz who Bush sent to address the big pro-Israel rally that took place at the Capitol on April 15.

But the biggest reason Bush has been able to win over Jews may be personal. Despite his own Skull & Bones pedigree, the president is far less WASP-ish in his tastes and manner than past generations of Bushes, making him less suspect in the eyes of some Jewish Americans. Moreover, he is openly religious in a way that conveys deep respect for religious believers of all kinds. He may even be influenced by the view of Gary Bauer and other fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Jews are biblically ordained to live in the Holy Land. And unlike his father's administration, George W. Bush's is prominently filled with members of the tribe. Most notably, the public face of the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer, is a practicing Jew.

But whatever the impetus, Bush appears to be entirely sincere in his warmth toward the Jewish people. Since Sept. 11, he has resisted condemning his old tour guide, Ariel Sharon, as harshly as his father condemned former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He has also applied the "Bush Doctrine" to Israel, saying in his April 4 Rose Garden address: "Terror must be stopped. No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death." It's hard to imagine any Bush from a previous generation taking the side of the Jews so unequivocally.

Anne E. Kornblut is the senior political correspondent for the Boston Globe.

Astronomer hopes to spot an inviting planet or two

Here Marc Kuchner talks about finding new planets and spending money to find out whether we are alone in the universe? This will cost money and time and efforts, but the result should we find one-- will be worth it. Let's keep hoping.

Here's what the baltimore sun said:

Astronomer hopes to spot an inviting planet or two
Visions

By Dennis O'Brien
Sun reporter
March 19, 2006

Marc Kuchner at Goddard Space Flight Center is aiming to attack a question that has puzzled us since we first peered into the heavens: Are we alone in the universe?

Kuchner came to the Greenbelt research center six months ago from Princeton to step up a search for habitable Earth-like planets outside our solar system.

He is writing a proposal for NASA funding for a new space hunting probe and, over the next few years, plans to hire a staff of five or six researchers for the fledgling ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory. The size of the staff will depend on future NASA funding, he said.

The research is aimed at determining not only whether Earth-like planets exist elsewhere, but how they formed and whether any of them could make a future home.

"One goal is finding some planet we can visit when we use this one up," he said.

The search for extrasolar planets is a relatively new field for astronomers. The first ones weren't discovered until the 1990s. Since then, more than 150 have been detected, but none are anything like Earth. Almost all of them are gas giants like Jupiter, but orbiting so close to their stars that their surfaces are as hot as skillets.

"They're extremely hot. That's why they're called 'hot Jupiters,'" said William J. Borucki, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

A few hot Jupiters have been detected by measuring changes in light as the planet passes in front of its star. Others have been found by gravitational lensing, in which light from a star is magnified by light from another star passing nearby.

But most of the extrasolar planets found so far have been detected by measuring the radial velocity, or "wobbling," of light from the star being orbited by the planet. The wobbling is produced by the gravitational pull of the planet as it orbits the star.

"We don't see the planets directly. We infer the presence of the planet by its effects on the star," said Alan P. Boss, a planet hunter at the Carnegie Institution in Washington.

Wobbling is easier to detect in stars being orbited by Jupiter-sized planets because they make the stars wobble more, Boss said.

But ground-based telescopes have been unable to detect any habitable Earth-sized extrasolar planets because light from them is obscured by the stars that they orbit, experts say.

"If we could find them from Earth without spending $500 million by putting a satellite in space, we would," Borucki said.

Borucki is principal investigator of the Kepler Mission, a satellite scheduled for launch in 2008 that will spend four years looking for new planets by staring at 100,000 stars and waiting for planets to cross their paths. Kepler will focus on the constellation Cygnus because it holds the greatest known concentration of stars, Borucki said.

"We're basically building a giant camcorder, putting it in space and seeing if the stars that it captures dim every so often," he said.

Kuchner's proposal, called New Worlds Discoverer, would be launched with the James Webb Space Telescope in 2013 and would block out star light obscuring orbiting planets.

The satellite would orbit between the Webb and stars suspected of being at the center of a planet's orbit. It would use a star-shaped mask to block out light from stars one at a time - the way you might put your hand out to block a light that is shining in your eyes. Blocking out the light will enable the Webb to gather light from planets that were previously obscured by their stars.

"This is going to find us some Earths," Kuchner said. He is working on the project with Webster Cash, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado.

Kuchner says that the $400 million project would be an appropriate follow-up to Kepler because it will detect planets that are closer to home. New Worlds will find planets about 30 light years away, while Kepler is searching in regions thousands of light years away.

"Ours will be planets that we could actually dream of visiting someday," Kuchner said.

He is convinced that a wide range of exotic planets, made of different materials than the silicon and oxygen that make up most of Earth, are waiting to be discovered. Planets made entirely of carbon, of water or of compounds we can't imagine are possibilities, he said. A planet's composition depends on what kind of material was available when the planet formed.

"It all depends on the exact chemistry of the proto-planetary dust," he said. "It's just a matter of shuffling the dust around to make for conditions that would be really different."

The New Worlds satellite also may help resolve mysteries about how planets form and why the Jupiter-sized extrasolar planets found thus far are orbiting so closely to their stars.

Accepted theories about planet formation say that large planets, like Jupiter, should evolve much farther out from their stars. Some experts think the hot Jupiters formed far out from their stars and then migrated inward. But no one is sure.

Kuchner plans to submit his proposal to NASA this spring. But he knows that securing funding can take years.

"That's the nature of space exploration," he said.

Borucki, for instance, wrote a paper outlining reasons for the Kepler Mission in 1984, and was denied funding in proposals submitted in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000 before it was approved it in December 2001.

"People said we were asking to do the impossible," Borucki said.

Kuchner's proposal comes as many scientists are criticizing NASA for cutting appropriations for planet-hunting projects. NASA proposed a $16.8 billion budget last month that trims spending for a project considered to be a cornerstone of future planet-hunting efforts, known as the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF). Based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, TPF would send a formation of spacecraft with powerful telescopes to look for habitable planets.

NASA officials say the budget reflects priorities aimed at keeping the space shuttles flying, completing the International Space Station and getting astronauts to the moon and Mars. Moreover, TPF is not being canceled, just postponed, they say.

"We plan to do these missions, but not just now," NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin told Congress at a hearing last month.

Kuchner doesn't consider NASA's budget proposal as any indication of the chances for the New Worlds satellite. NASA has consistently funded extrasolar planets research over the years, he says, and interest in it remains high.

"The cut to the TPF was a blow, but that's not the end of it. The fact is, there's wide-scale interest in this kind of work," he said. "Graduate students all over the country want to study extrasolar planets, and the public wants us to."

WebCPA Tools and Resources for the Electronic Accountant - An Investcorp and SourceMedia Publication

New rules... Coming soon!

According to Webcpa.... The rules incorporates the board's July approval of a measure banning auditors of public companies from providing certain tax services to their audit clients, along with technical changes passed in November to existing ethics guidelines. "The new rules would ban auditors from providing three primary types of tax services to clients, including:
Tax services involving contingent fee arrangements;
Tax marketing, planning, or advice in favor of tax treatments that are considered confidential, or that are based on an aggressive interpretation of applicable tax laws and regulations; and,
Tax services to certain corporate managers who serve in financial reporting oversight roles at an audit client or tax services, or those manager's immediate family members. "

The original proposal required auditors to provide audit committees with engagement letters for proposed services. Now, auditors must provide audit committees with a description of proposed services, rather than the actual engagement letters. This is a good thing?

See it and decide to comment: www.sec.gov/rules/pcaob/34-53427.pdf.

SSRN-God's Income Tax: What Jewish Tithing Practices can Teach us About Tax Reform by Adam Chodorow

The abstract-- Tax reform and religion were two of the “hot button” issues during the last election. While at first glance these issues seem unrelated, a number of scholars have argued that religious values should guide our decisions regarding tax reform. This article posits that the relationship between religion and taxes is even stronger than has previously been suggested. People have been tithing for thousands of years. When they determine the amount of the tithe based on their income, the practice amounts to a religious income tax, or, more precisely, God’s income tax. This article explores the Jewish traditions of tithing, looking at both agricultural tithing, which is described in the Bible, and the practice of maaser kesafim, which involves tithing from all types of income, a practice that derives from the Bible but which developed more recently. Over the centuries, religious authorities have developed a sophisticated tax jurisprudence that holds lessons for us as we struggle with the questions of whether to reform our current income tax or replace it entirely with some form of consumption tax. In comparing Jewish tithing traditions and Federal income tax, this article (1) tests claims that Judeo-Christian values require a progressive tax system; (2) examines the ways in which culture and context affect income definition (and are likely to do so in the future); and (3) explores whether a flat-rate income tax or consumption tax will be less complex than our current tax system, as proponents for such systems claim.