The Founders broke with England, a class-based society. They recognized the limitless accumulation of wealth over generations inevitably leads to an aristocracy.

The Republican party today has made itself the party of that aristocracy. On behalf of the super rich, ‘folksy’ pseudo-conservatives have cleverly couched things in terms of “death taxes,” “losing the family farm” and “basic fairness.” The Super Rich will keep every penny; they can buy what they need and have no need for a government.

ABQjournal: House Votes To Perpetuate Loophole for Wealthy By Sergio Pareja, Assistant Professor, UNM School of Law

With huge deficits as far as the eye can see, calls for urgent program cuts, claims that Social Security is in crisis, and war in the Middle East, House lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday that would make a huge tax giveaway permanent. The giveaway, part of a bill to make estate tax repeal permanent, is a $5.6 million income tax loophole for the nation’s richest families that is unknown to most Americans. …

Most proponents of this tax believe that it is a statement of who we are as a country. We are, ideally, a place where the person who becomes wealthy does so because of hard work and industriousness. We are not a country where who you are is determined entirely by the family into which you happen to be born. In short, we are not Louis XIV’s France, a place with a gilded class of nobles. …

In my nearly decade of tax law practice, I never personally heard of one operating family farm or small business that was shut down because of the estate tax. Not one. As most estate planners who serve the ultra-wealthy would know, people who engage in complicated estate planning are quite often the aristocratically wealthy, people from families in which members have not had to work in three, four, or even five generations. …

Suppose Daddy and Mommy Warbucks buy stock in Microsoft for $10 million and it increases in value over several years to $15.6 million. They die and leave it to their son, Richie Rich Warbucks. Although that $5.6 million of appreciation was never taxed at all, Richie inherits the property with no estate tax and a $15.6 million income tax basis. When Richie sells the stock, he, like his parents, will not pay a penny of tax on that entire $5.6 million of gain. Nada. Zilch.

So, while you and I toil away at our jobs and pay income taxes equal to, say, a third of our income, Richie pays absolutely nothing solely because he was born into the Warbucks’ family.

Start powdering your wigs. Louis XIV would be proud.

One can easily foresee John Dimdahl’s next column in which he rages about “class warfare” and “liberal professors.” Yawn. mjh

Architectural rendering software doesn’t handle people so well. Or do these units come with a robot housekeeper?

I do like the wall poster. It could be Eisenhower or Mao. Maoist metrosexuals considering The Lofts should know it’s an Eisenhower neighborhood. mjh

..:: The Glenwood Lofts ::..

The Albuquerque Tribune: Science By Anna Macias Aguayo, Associated Press

Federal officials are still at a loss to explain how the potentially deadly strain could be sent to more than 4,000 labs around the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is operating under the presumption that the H2N2 strain was purposefully included in the panels designed to test the labs’ proficiency in identifying viruses.

“I’m sure it was not an inadvertent use,” said Julie Gerberding, CDC director, “because it would be almost impossible to believe that they didn’t know they were dealing with H2N2.”

Mike Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said Congress should review how the strain was so easily distributed.

“We can’t have this happen,” Osterholm said. “Who needs terrorists or Mother Nature, when through our own stupidity, we do things like this?”

This Associated Press story appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune. Albuquerque Journal readers should note you didn’t see that part of the article; you only got the first 8 paragraphs which ended on a very confident “no problem here” note. mjh

Is Congress doing the right thing by opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration? Yes. by Sen. Lisa Murkowski

But if Arctic oil development was going to harm the environment or wildlife, then I would agree opening it would not be worth the cost. But the vast majority of Alaskans, including Alaska’s Eskimos who know it best, support ANWR’s development because we know 21st-century technology guarantees the land’s protection.

Planet Ark : Pipe Leak Spews Gas, Oil at Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay

An estimated 1.4 million cubic feetof natural gas and an unknown quantity of crude oil spewed from a leak in a pipeline at the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s North Slope, state environmental regulators said Tuesday.

The resulting mist of crude oil coated an area nearly a mile long and averaged about 300 feet wide, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said in a statement.

adn.com | alaska : Oil spill set at 10-30 barrels

That’s not a large spill compared with others that have occurred since the Prudhoe oil field production began 28 years ago. But the spill was remarkable because of the large area it touched.

US Republicans set to turn Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into oilfield by Svend Soeyland

Several leaks caused by current drilling in Alaska have been reported, and the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989 released crude oil in a coastal zone and kept oil development efforts at bay for some years. Most recently on March 26th this year, some 500,000 litres of produced water was spilled onto the frozen tundra. In March 1997, some 1.8 million litres of diluted seawater were spilled, causing widespread salination. …

Previous exploration activities in Alaska have left massive oil spills, abandoned roads and waste deposits that have caused irreparable damage to the sensitive permafrost environment. Development advocates argue that improved exploration methods will result in smaller environmentally damaging “foot-prints.”? A study by the American Academy of Sciences form 2003 concluded that activities of the magnitude proposed for ANWR will include access roads, air strips, disposal sites, housing and other infrastructure in addition to the oil wells that, as the history of oil drilling in Alaska shows, will be left abandoned once the proposed 2015-2020 project is complete.

A recent study released by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) states that Alaska is already demonstrating tangible evidence of climate change. Due to thawing of permafrost, entire coastal communities, such as Surmac, have to relocate further inland. Oil and gas pipelines are sinking in the melting permafrost and vegetation is threatened. Migration by non-native animal species, and possibly mosquitoes carrying the fatal Nile virus have been facilitated by this climatic shift, claims the ACIA study.

If you don’t know the Whiskey Bar by Billmon, you should check it out. He writes straight-forward criticism, but he also branches out into semi-fiction. Read the whole piece I’ve just excerpted below. It is the epitome of satire. If you don’t know Abramoff, start searching for him — he makes Delay look noble. mjh

Whiskey Bar: Order Up

Abramoff: (alarmed) Look Tom, really, take a break. I can work the grill for awhile. You should rest up. You gotta give the keynote tonight. Ya don’t want the boss to see ya like this — ya know how angry he can get.

DeLay: That sumbitch Bush can kiss my ass. I’ve stepped on fire ants who were bigger men than he is.

Abramoff: I said the boss, not the owner. And ya sure as shit don’t want Mr. Rove hearin’ ya talk like that. So c’mon, you go lie down now.
—–
But the ‘real’ DeLay is self-satirizing…

The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | Ari Berman

Here’s a chronology of DeLay’s recent infractions, followed by The Hammer’s responses. You might notice a pattern. … DeLay keeps blaming the same people: liberal Democrats, liberal groups, liberal media. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach that’s likely to intensify in the weeks to come.

April 13, 2005, after Republicans Chris Shays, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich questioned DeLay’s conduct:

“I’m not here to discuss the Democrats’ agenda.”

[9 more…]

Labs scramble to destroy deadly flu virus by Mark Oliver

Scientists around the world were scrambling today to prevent the possibility of a pandemic after it emerged that a deadly influenza virus had been sent out to thousands of laboratories.

The scare was prompted after US firm Meridian Bioscience, sent out the H2N2 virus – similar to one associated with the 1957 Asian flu pandemic that killed up to four million people – in routine testing kits to almost 5,000 laboratories in 18 different countries. …

Klaus Stohr, who coordinates the WHO global influenza programme, said sending out the virus had been “unwise”. …

Meridian, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, had decided to use the H2N2 virus in testing kits as one of the blind samples that labs must correctly identify to acquire certain certifications.

Usually the influenza virus included in the kits is one that is currently circulating or has recently circulated. The H2N2 virus has not been included in flu vaccines since 1968, and anyone born after that date will have little or no immunity to it.

A US medical company selects a virus that hasn’t circulated in almost 40 years and ships it to 5000 labs around the world. How many of those labs didn’t figure out what they got in the mail and stuck those samples on a shelf? What are the odds that one person in one lab mishandled the sample — or stole it to sell to the highest bidder (check eBay)? Surely the odds are as high as those for the original mistake. To err is human but in this case it could be fatal for millions. Do you think Meridian Bioscience should stay in business?

By the way, according to the Motley Fool, these fools are also “recombinant DNA manufacturers.” If they decide to sell Cat DNA to allergy suffers, they better hope it doesn’t come with the flu.

President Motto happens to have sold 160,000 shares in February 2005 for about $2.5 million. But it’s not like he was trying to profit before the story got out — cuz the stock went UP after this news broke. Investors ignore incompetence, even when it threatens to kill them. I wonder how many folks born after 1968 have this in their portfolio.

Looks like a great weekend to rent “Twelve Monkeys.” mjh

Funny that this story didn’t make it onto the Meridian Bioscience Rapid Medical Diagnostics Testing and Laboratory Diagnostics website.

“The quality of our products and technologies is assured through our commitment to a Total Quality System. We are dedicated to continuous learning and continuous improvement of our systems, processes and products to maintain our competitive advantage.”

Yahoo! – Insider Trades – MOTTO, WILLIAM J.