Poison Your Mind

The Senate is looking into the offshore tax havens Apple uses to avoid paying taxes on billions in earnings:

“Frankly, I’m offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) in his opening statement. “I’m offended by a $4 trillion government bullying, berating and badgering one of America’s greatest success stories.”

“If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress,” Paul continued. “I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple. The Congress should be on trial here for creating a Byzantine and bizarre tax code.”

There’s so much to talk about here…

1) You may remember the GOP uproar over Obama’s “apology tour” where he supposedly groveled and begged forgiveness for America being the rockingest badass in the world, or something.  Rand Paul wants a different branch to apologize.  To a company.  For asking it about how it avoids taxes.

2) There is nothing wrong with trying to find out why one of America’s greatest success stories doesn’t actually pay taxes on most of what it makes.  Rand Paul thinks that Congress should apologize for a tax code that is bizarre and Byzantine, but apparently doesn’t want them to investigate the giant loopholes that it contains.

3) Rand Paul loves to grill witnesses when he’s on a committee, but for some reason this tax hearing is a “trial” in his mind, despite the fact that there’s no one on trial, companies can’t be put on trial, and none of these people can actually go to jail unless they lie to Congress.  If they did commit a crime, the 5th Amendment applies just as strongly in Congressional testimony.  But all this is besides the fact, Rand Paul seems to believe that any effort to look into a company’s business is a horror.

There is this absurd idea that I’ve seen floated that the reason companies don’t bring their profits home is that the tax rates here are unfair, and that they wouldn’t use tax havens if we lowered tax rates.  In practice, the only way you will get a company like Apple to pay taxes here is if the amount they would pay in taxes is less than the cost of using a tax haven, which is minimal.  I’m all for reforming the complicated tax system to make it easier to follow, but Rand Paul is insane if he thinks that Apple is offshoring profits because of the complexities and absurdities of the tax code.  (He ought to remember that almost all tax provisions decrease liability, so the more complex the tax code is the better off the corporate taxpayer is.)

I have no journalistic training, and I’m still processing the story from my own legal perspective, so I don’t have a firm opinion yet on this whole DOJ/Rosen affair.  Josh Marshall is conflicted instead by his abundance of experience, and raises a lot of interesting points:

Shafer also notes the little noted fact that Rosen essentially burned a US intelligence asset (i.e., someone who was ratting out his country to the US) in a hostile foreign country, for no clear reason. It’s doubtful that many other editors or publications would have published the piece at all.

Marshall is commenting on this piece by Jack Shafer, also a good read.

Remember when Allen West claimed that Congress was infiltrated with communists?  Somehow we let his craziness slide, I suppose because he’s so unabashedly crazy anyway.  But what happens when a Serious Person says something crazy?

 Sen. Rand Paul claimed Sunday there was a “written policy” floating around the agency that said IRS officials were “targeting people who were opposed to the president.”

“And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy,” the Republican senator from Kentucky said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

That’s right, a written memo that proves you would be targeted by the IRS if you opposed the President.  Senator Rand Paul.  A man who gets 1/100th of the total say in Supreme Court Justices, treaty ratifications, cabinet appointments, laws, etc.

Now, I can’t say for sure that such a document exists or doesn’t exist, any more than I could verify that the President has signed a deal with the Reptilians from Omicron Persei VIII, so I guess we’ll just have to take Paul at his word that, like Jonathan Karl, he’s seen this document and knows what it says:

Pressed for more precise details about the memo he was referring to, Paul said he hasn’t seen such a policy statement but has heard about it.

“Well, we keep hearing the reports and we have several specifically worded items saying who was being targeted. In fact, one of the bullet points says those who are critical of the president. So I don’t know if that comes from a policy, but that’s what’s being reported in the press and reported orally,” he told CNN’s chief political correspondent Candy Crowley. “I haven’t seen a policy statement, but I think we need to see that.”

Rand Paul feels like it’s his right, if not duty, to go on television and repeat rumors he’s heard to fuel partisan outrage because that’s the entire raison d’etre for the GOP now.  And he will continue to get booked on Sunday and entertain a 2016 run, for Brutus is an honorable man.

I just stepped out on our porch for a second and the cats both raced in.  I started hearing something that sounded like Gollum up in one of our many pines, and when I got a good view I saw two of these guys struggling to stay up in the thin branches:

As you can see, they were interested in me but not scared.  I was more scared of them, for sure.

I’m sure this isn’t a new thought, though I think it’s original to my own mind.  What if, instead of background checks, we simply extend absolute liability to a private seller who doesn’t perform a background check on the buyer, and we shield private sellers from liability if they perform a background check and it comes back clean.  Negligent entrustment is a tort anyway, let’s just put a presumption in place that a person who commits a tort with a handgun was someone who shouldn’t have been given a gun in the first place, and thus the person who gave them the gun is liable as well unless they can show that they actually did something to make sure they weren’t spreading death.

I’m sure there’s problems with this, I’m throwing it out there for my own edification.

Because we seem to be linking to him daily now, here’s a great summary by Paul Waldman of what the real scandal is in Benghazi:

And then the White House called their bluff, because why not? It isn’t like there was anything incriminating in the real emails. But in their zeal to expose an imaginary White House/State Department conspiracy to mislead the public, the Republicans made their own little conspiracy to mislead the public. Or maybe it wasn’t a conspiracy, but just one person. We don’t know yet, because Karl hasn’t said who his source is. That’s his call to make; I’d argue that while in ordinary circumstances, the confidential relationship between reporter and source is sacrosanct, the reporter has every right to expose the source if if the source lies to the reporter and makes him a party to a deception.

The GOP lied to the public in order to drum up opposition to the White House, and now they’ll just walk away from it unscathed because no one is going to hold them accountable.  The left is used to their lies and the right is indifferent to them.

As of this past Tuesday, Anastasia Adair was one of those responsible, law abiding gun owners that the NRA is always accusing gun control advocates of persecuting.  By Wednesday, though, everything had changed:

Anastasia Adair, a 22-year-old Colorado woman, died after she was accidentally shot with an assault rifle she had recently purchased, TV station KMGH reported on Thursday.

Adair’s husband, Shane, and other witnesses told police she was drinking with friends in her garage Tuesday night and wanted to show off the weapon. It fired twice, hitting her once in the head as she brought it to the room and passed it to Shane.

Lt. Gary Toldness, of the Federal Heights, Colo., police department, told KMGH initial analysis appeared to be consistent with the reports of an accidental shooting, though the investigation was continuing. He also said Adair purchased the weapon at a gun show in March and described it as an AK-47-type rifle.

The NRA tells us that gun control doesn’t work because it only punishes the lawful and responsible gun owners, and then challenges gun control advocates to prove otherwise.  Show them a case like Adair, and they’ll just tell you that her actions demonstrate that she wasn’t a lawful and responsible gun owner.  And tomorrow there will be another story like Adair’s.  Another shooter/victim who was lawful and responsible until suddenly he/she wasn’t.  And we’re not allowed to draw any lessons from these deaths, ever, because the NRA’s test is one that can never be passed.  The term “Catch-22” gets misapplied all the time, but I think that in this instance we have an actual example of what Joseph Heller was getting at.

So the question is, when are we going to stop arguing on their skewed terms?