Announced today by Prime Minister Gordon Brown:
Britain’s six-year occupation of southern Iraq will end by the summer, Gordon Brown announced today on a surprise visit to Baghdad.
A joint statement by the prime minister and his Iraqi counterpart, Nuri al-Maliki, said: “The role played by the UK combat forces is drawing to a close. These forces will have completed their task in the first half of 2009 and will then leave Iraq.”
Your turn, Mr. Obama.
The Chicago Tribune takes a look at the new cycling commuter tax benefit:
The bike commuter benefit is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, but one of the main problems is few companies are ready to implement it. Several say they don’t even know how it would work, and they need guidance from the Internal Revenue Service, which is unlikely to arrive before year-end.
That’s to be expected, really, as it was only passed in October (it was part of the bailout bill – tho’ it’s worth noting that easy passage was expected, independently).  What, exactly, is the benefit to cycling commuters?
Here is what the legislation spells out: Commuters can receive $20 in reimbursement for any month during which an employee “regularly uses the bicycle for a substantial portion of the travel between the employee’s residence and place of employment.”
Reimbursable expenses include buying a bike, bike improvements or repair and storage.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. The author tries to make an issue out of some confusion about how to administer the benefit, but it’s the same story with any tax benefit.  He does hit on a real problem, however:
Commuters who use the bike benefit can’t be participants in other transit benefit programs, including those that reimburse for parking, train tickets and subway and bus passes.
Those programs allow commuters to use as much as $120 a month in 2009 pretax dollars to pay their expenses, saving someone in the 28 percent tax bracket about $34 a month. In contrast, allocating $20 in pretax dollars to biking produces a tax savings of $5.60 a month.
Some local commuters ride to a train stop and make the second part of their trip on Metra. If they can select only one transit program, they are likely to choose the train benefit.
If the purpose of the tax benefit is to encourage commuting by bike, this certainly works against that purpose. Then again, the tax benefit I could get for parking at my old office downtown was about triple what I got for using Metro, and I was never tempted in the least to drive. In any event, if you bike to work, ask your human resources people about it, even if you don’t expect to use it:
If the cycling commuter benefit is to become standard in corporate America, Clarke believes employees will have to be the force behind the change, calling and e-mailing the human resources department to indicate their interest.
Ride safely.
(Via Hugh Bartling)
The Armchair Generalist notes a New America Foundation report that examines the United States’ status as the number one arms dealer to the world:
U.S. exports range from combat aircraft to Pakistan, Morocco, Greece, Romania, and Chile to small arms and light weapons to the Philippines, Egypt, and Georgia. In 2006 and 2007, the United States sold weapons to over 174 states and territories, a significant increase from the beginning of the Bush administration when the number of U.S. arms clients stood at 123.
[ . . . ]
U.S. arms and military training played a role in 20 of the world’s 27 major wars in 2006/07 [.] The dollar value of U.S. weapons transfers and weapons orders destined for zones of conflict during that two-year period was $11.2 billion. The biggest recipients were Pakistan ($3.7 billion), Turkey ($3.0 billion), Israel ($2.1 billion), Iraq ($1.4 billion), and Colombia ($575 million).
Death is big business.
There’s been no small amount of handwringing over the WSJ’s (uncharacteristically poor) reporting about Google’s attempts to strike caching deals with major ISPs. Dave Isenberg explains how the WSJ blew it. Larry Lessig has a few things to say about it, too.
When CEOs lead companies through good times, they deserve vast rewards. When they lead companies through bad times, they deserve vast rewards for sticking around. Funny how that works, no? Yglesias thinks this through a bit:
After all, the underlying premise of our finance-led rush to hyperinequality has been that the rich are very very very very different from you and me and that it’s so excruciatingly important that we maintain adequate incentives for them to ply their trade that we should ignore the immense damage rising inequality does to middle class well-being.
One we realize that that’s not the case, that there’s no “magic†at work in the financial field and people are just mucking around I think that has quite radical implications. If nothing the CEOs and top fund managers are doing makes them worthy of taking the blame when the crash hits, then they also don’t deserve nearly the share of the credit — and money — that they got while things were going up.
Expect this point of view to get approximately zero airtime in our ongoing social and political conversations. Indoctrination is a hard thing to overcome.
breaking the law isn’t exactly unprecedented in the US. Except in this case, the only ones breaking the law were the police. This is fantastic:
KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the [cops] lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.
Read more here (note that I endorse Balko’s take on the perpetrator, unfortunately).
Because only the victors get to (re)write history, no?
This really isn’t complicated. President Bush was not being “blunt” or showing “candor” when he told ABC News in an interview published yesterday that his biggest regret was the failure of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Rather, he was whitewashing away his own role in the fisaco by promoting the demonstrable falsehood that there was no available evidence or information that argued against war and that he was merely fooled into invading Iraq solely by the bad intel.
The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel — ignored by the Bush administration — saying that Saddam wasn’t the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing — something that also went ignored.
These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush’s efforts to falsify history in yesterday’s interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.
Or maybe losers get to write history, too.
This is very encouraging:
In what can only be seen as a major coup for those of us who have been hoping that the Obama Administration would embrace a saner and more sensible thinking on questions of copyright than is the norm in Washington, Change.gov has swapped a strict copyright policy for among the liberalist of Creative Commons licenses.
And for those of you who have being playing the copyright game along at home, and are thinking “Wait, isn’t everything prepared by the Federal gov’t in the public domain already?”:
As a rather strange government-private hybrid entity, the Obama-Biden Transition Project doesn’t appear to be covered by government copyright rules which presume that what the government creates should be freely useable by the public.
I’m still not used to these flashes of sanity emanating from DC.
Boing Boing highlights this story concerning children’s groups pushing back against the Australian government’s plan to filter the country’s access to content on the Internet:
Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.
She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.
Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.
means that you should worry about this:
China’s job outlook is “grim,” and the global financial crisis could cause more layoffs and more labor unrest until the country’s economic stimulus package kicks in next year, the nation’s minister of human resources and social security said Thursday.
[ . . . ]
China is most concerned about the growing labor unrest, the human resources minister, Yin Weimin, said at a news conference. The increase in unrest has paralleled the increase of business and factory closings and job losses.
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