We've always had taxes on sin...

So Get Ready For the Twinkie Tax:

Apparently unsatiated by their huge claims on booze and cigarettes, the tax police are planning a major snack attack. Potato chips, cookies, sodas, candy--a $30 billion-a-year business--are being targeted by more than a dozen revenue-starved states under the misguided impression that by charging a few extra cents per can or bag they can trim their budget deficits and encourage the rest of us to slim down. Fat chance.

This looks like a growth industry. Pick some product whose consumption is "socially irresponsible" and slap a tax on it. The taxpayers don't like taxes, but they don't like sin either. Twinkies are tough (figuratively) since they are classified as food products which are often exempt from state sales taxes, but a little legislative legerdemain ought to fix that. I'm still waiting for the tax on beans to fight global warming. You think I'm joking? How easily you forget!

And speaking of deadbeats

Cuba's debt to Venezuela soars as oil keeps flowing

CARACAS - With little fanfare, Venezuela's left-leaning President Hugo Chávez has become Cuba's biggest financial supporter since the Soviet Union pulled the plug on its subsidies more than a decade ago.

Over the past three years, Cuba has run up a massive debt of $752 million for oil shipped by Venezuela's state oil company, according to people close to the company and internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Though Venezuelan officials deny that Cuba is falling behind, people familiar with the debt say it is piling up and that the government has made little effort to collect.

That's OK, Fidel is paying it off in thugs. But here's an upbeat note about Cuba:

Its biggest source of dollars is the Cubans who live abroad, most of them in the United States. In 2002, Cubans abroad sent an estimated $1.1 billion to Cuba in remittances, according to a study by the Inter-American Development Bank.

We ought to count up how many countries are being supported by "remittances" from the USA.

They could always call Ditech

White House seeks to loan U.N. funds for renovations

The Bush administration's new budget includes a $1.2 billion, 30-year loan to renovate the aging United Nations headquarters and build a new annex, although U.N. officials expressed disappointment that Washington will charge interest on the loan.

I'd offer to demolish the old building for free and then have "left my wallet at home" when it came to building the new place, although the interest is a nice touch.

The loan to fund the U.N. Capital Master Plan still must win approval by Congress and the U.N. General Assembly. The world body must agree to accept the 5.54 percent interest rate. Interest and principal is to be paid off by all member states.
...
If approved, Washington will pay out $400 million a year for three years, and the organization will have 30 years to pay it back, plus interest. The total bill, with interest, will be close to $2.5 billion.

5.54%! Ditech currently only wants 5.25% on a 30 year loan, but then the UN is a poor credit risk - no income and a champagne lifestyle. It would have been cooler though to send them to the loan sharks - "OK, Kofi, you have until Friday to come up with what you owe or we break your leg!"

Of course, to a large extent we are paying ourselves:

As part of its assessed contribution to the U.N. budget, the United States will supply 22 percent of that repayment figure - $265 million on the principal alone.

Instead of all this flummery, I have a simpler solution - follow the example of the Utah state House of Representatives - Utah House Wants United States Out of UN. But they forgot the "UN out of the US" part.

There's always good news somewhere!

How about the minor league hockey player who was suspended after referring to an opponent as a "Euro"? Tsk, everyone knows the correct term is "Euroweenie."

Then there's the German "artiste" whose medium of choice is human cadavers. The only problem is that some of them seem to be executed Chinese prisoners with bullets in their heads. Probably understandable since while some people leave their bodies to science, I expect very few leave them to "art." Oh yeah, catch the photo of the artiste in the article.

I haven't been following the Martha Stewart trial but Andrea Peyser says You Know It's a Circus When Rosie the Clown Shows Up. Aside from the photo of Rosie with a death grip on a bag of M&M's, the best part is:

"Her daughter [Alexis] made lemon cake, which was delicious!" Rosie enthused. "They had napkins that matched the forks!"

Who knew that Rosie had such refined taste?

And here's a shocker - Expert Says Glass Is Major Threat to Birds!

Carr Everbach, a Swarthmore College engineer heading a "green team" working on a new science center at the school, likens plate glass to other scientific advancements later found to harm the environment, such as ozone-depleting CFCs and leaded gasoline.

"Anytime someone tells you there's something really big that you haven't heard of, you think they're crazy," he said. [Say what?]

The new science center will have glass etched with dots and other patterns, which the green team hopes birds will see and avoid. The building also will have clear glass and "thump sensors" to see if - and where - birds strike the structure.

Why do I envision the "thump sensors" connected up to a giant display of the total and rowdy undergrads on a Saturday night trying to tap on the windows to make the numbers go up?

Heh!

Via the Instapundit - The BBC Lied, Dr. Kelly Died!

Fun with Lurch!

Mickey Kaus asks Why the Long Face? and catalogs some of Sen. Kerry's prevarications with respect to campaign cash. Here's a riddle:

How is John Kerry's office like a subway? A: You have to put in coins to open gates!

And don't forget to include some for handling, because he loves to handle it!

I don't pay much attention to football anymore

But I thought they banned the use of tear-away jerseys! Can you say cheesy, kids?

And then there's John Edwards

Around here we have a couple of sayings for folks like John Edwards. My favorite is "He's full of more crap than a Christmas goose." Looks like the Yankees are catching on to his high crap quotient:

James Pinkerton at Newsday - Edwards Brings His Cornpone to the North

Part of the reason for Southern effectiveness, I think, is condescension: Northerners are inordinately impressed when a Southerner can finish a sentence without tobacco spittle running down his chin. Another reason is gratitude: Northerners, expecting to hear an accent such as that of Renée Zellweger in "Cold Mountain," are unduly happy when they can understand what a Southerner is saying.

Amid all this cross-cultural cluelessness, a Southerner who can play the "Dixie card" gets extra credit for being "brave" enough to talk about race. Here, at a Unitarian Church in this chilly seacoast town, Edwards told a lily-white audience, "They say I shouldn't talk about race." The North Carolina senator never bothered to identify "they," leaving his listeners to imagine that some cynical political boss somewhere was threatening him with doom if he mentioned civil rights.

Having set up this strawiest of straw men, Edwards then knocked it over: "We should not only talk about race," he thundered, "we have a moral responsibility to talk about race." The crowd cheered; nobody seemed to notice that Edwards never did, in fact, say anything about race - other than that he would talk about it.

A lot more goodness by following the link.

And here's an Edwards item I had completely missed - Edwards gets a big-boy cut:

Just two weeks before the Jan. 18 caucuses, Iowa voters had pretty much decided John Edwards wasn't their guy for president.
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Then Edwards surged and the pundits scrambled to find an explanation: his positive campaign, his centrist policies, his working-class roots. All plausible reasons. But they have missed something crucial.

He changed his hair.

Seriously. Look at pictures of him before the New Year and then leading up to the Iowa vote. That boyish swoop of chestnut over his forehead, sometimes nearly touching his eyebrows or settling on his collar, is gone, replaced by a slight wave that leaves his forehead exposed. It's a subtle change, but an important one. With a few snips of a stylist's clippers, Edwards took a step toward neutralizing one of his greatest weaknesses.

"He went from a boy to a grown man in one sweep," observed Roi Parker, who owns R.O.I. Salon in Raleigh, where the new coif is a favorite topic of conversation. "He went from fun, free, fashion-forward hair to in-the-office, behind-the-desk, running-for-something hair."

Woohoo! Follow the link for some snaps.

And speaking of late hits, how about this?

Will George Soros Panic the Market?

The idea was floated first by former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, now the chairman of Citigroup. Unless Congress scales back the Bush tax cuts, he argues in a new study, U.S. government budget deficits could lead to a crisis of confidence in the dollar and the stock market and potentially staggering losses for investors.

To conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, Rubin was "laying the groundwork for a political assault on President George W. Bush over his budget policies, hope[ing] to give the Democratic presidential candidate an issue to run on that could propel him into the White House."

But Wall Street sources say Rubin may have had other designs as well. A consummate insider who talked the market up when he was working for Bill Clinton, Rubin today could be trying to talk the market down. "This market is thin enough that if you made a big move all of a sudden you could move it," Bartlett tells Insight. "At some point, something could happen on its own, and then someone like George Soros could turn a minor blip into something else."
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"Soros believes that if he can force the market down, he will have an effect in the real world," Luskin says. "If it happens on Oct. 31, people might go into the voting booth with fear in their hearts."

Those SPECTRE guys are always thinking, I guess!

By the way, the Luskin mentioned in the quote above is investment adviser and author Donald Luskin from www.poorandstupid.com which is on my blogroll. He doesn't think it's time to start cleaning the flintlocks, but says "investors should watch Soros carefully but calmly." I say, "Where's James Bond when you need him?"

Bye bye Weasley, bye bye!

He may even "win" some primaries come Tuesday, but you can stick a fork in him, he's done. Here's Matthews: Clintons Ready to Dump Clark

After persuading Gen. Wesley Clark to enter the presidential sweepstakes last September and staffing his campaign with their closest advisors, Bill and Hillary Clinton are reportedly preparing to dump the former NATO Commander.

"[The Clintons] are stepping away from [him] so fast, like rats from a ship," NBC's Chris Matthews said Sunday.

"The Clintons deny any connection to the Clark campaign," he added, before predicting, "[Bill Clinton] will be the only man in history to fire Wesley Clark twice."

Bwahaha! Weasley ran for President and all he got was a lousy argyle sweater. Besides a reputation as a slavering moonbat.

But his job is done and Her Heinous and Bubba are riding high - Clinton & Clinton: To maintain their hold on the party, Howard Dean had to be destroyed.

When Mr. Dean hissed at the Clinton's majordomo, Mr. McAuliffe, they knew they had to take action.

Looking back on the assault on Mr. Dean before the Iowa caucuses, one is reminded of the old joke that politics really is a blood sport, and by caucus day the blood was everywhere and so were the Clintons' fingerprints. I cannot recall such a concerted assault on a front-runner in any other primary season. Dick Morris was, perhaps, the first to claim that Mr. McAuliffe's agents spread negative research against Mr. Dean. Now we have more evidence. Sources in the Kerry camp and the Edwards camp told my colleague "The Prowler" at Spectator.org that much of the opposition research that smeared Mr. Dean in Iowa came from the Clark campaign. "It wasn't just Clark, though," a Kerry staffer reported, "We know of at least two different stories that came from people currently on staff with the DNC, who fed the material to reporters." Says an Edwards staffer, "These are folks who worked for Clinton back in '92 and '96 and in the administration."

Of course, the damaging Dean letter to President Clinton in the mid-1990s calling for unilateral action in Kosovo, which USA Today published just before the Iowa caucuses, could only have come from the Clintons. There is another report that Jimmy Carter's anticipated endorsement of Mr. Dean faded into a photo-op after Mr. Clinton called Mr. Carter. Obviously the Clintons have been very busy this campaign season. This explains to some degree Mr. Gore's endorsement of Mr. Dean and possibly Bill Bradley's too.

There are Democrats who want to loosen the Clintons' grip on their party. That grip has always been good for the Clintons but bad for the party. Will front-runner Mr. Kerry be the next victim of the Clintons' political research teams? Possibly not--he is the Washington insider that Mr. Dean is not. And it is not clear that he will be sailing into the summer convention with a great deal of brag and bounce. He may be limping in after still more primary battles. Then Hillary will make her grand entrance. With Mr. McAuliffe smiling from the podium her power will be vast. Possibly she will allow herself to be nominated to the No. 2 spot to assist her party in its moment of peril. Either way, Hillary and her husband will remain the Democratic powerbrokers for 2008. Or possibly just the powers.

Yum, Clintons! That's what they do, that's all they do.