| | THE BIG STORY, BY MATT TAYLOR Another item on the long list of Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney's violations of ideological orthodoxy: early voting. Demonized by the right and under assault from Tea Party-backed Republican governors, early voting has become a symbol of the Obama era, boosting minority and youth turnout to historic levels in 2008. But it's not clear the practice has historically benefited one party more than the other. READ MORE | Send To A Friend >> | MONEY Last month, when House Democrats introduced the DISCLOSE 2012 Act to try to stop the secret flow of "dark money" into the electoral process, it marked an ironic moment. A decade ago, it was Republicans who were pushing for disclosure of donors to the nonprofit groups now pouring millions into political attack ads -- and House Democrats who opposed them. READ MORE | Send To A Friend >> | BOOK EXCERPT: JOHN NICHOLS Only in the most crudely drawn Orwellian fantasy could the assaults on collective bargaining rights, civil service protections, public education and public services initiated by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in February of 2011 be imagined as the "streamlined" model of liberty that Walker and his adherents imagined. The models in play were those of billionaire campaign donors like the Koch Brothers and their American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporation-funded "bill mill" that had drawn up anti-union, anti-consumer, and, above all, anti-democracy legislation for pliant conservative legislators in Wisconsin, Ohio and states across the country to introduce and enact. READ MORE | Send To A Friend >> | FEATURED COLUMN: DAVID CAY JOHNSTON If President Barack Obama can persuade Congress to reduce the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent, he will move tax rates closer to what other modern countries charge. But his plan to treat "manufacturing" as a special category, with a 25 percent tax rate, brings us to what I call Obama's hamburger problem. The problem is how to define manufacturing. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, I know manufacturing when I see it; I just don't know how to define it in tax law. READ MORE | Send To A Friend >> | TODAY IN STUPID Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), author of a book titled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, is now claiming that climate change is impossible because "God's still up there." READ MORE | Send To A Friend >> | WAR ON DRUGS Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government's war on drugs has failed. READ MORE | Send To A Friend >> | CARTOON OF THE DAY | Send To A Friend >> | |
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