† Higher Taxes For Thee, But Not For Me: Twitter wants to locate its headquarters in an area near San Francisco's City Hall that is plagued by “transients, drugs and crime … where more than half of the available commercial real estate sits vacant,” which would spark “urban rebirth” – in exchange to be exempted from a tax the company wouldn’t have to pay if it moved to Silicon Valley. The Stiletto doesn’t oppose corporate tax breaks on principle, but it does gall her when a company’s officers lobby for tax breaks while also bankrolling politicians and ballot measures that raise taxes on the middle class. Leaving the hypocrisy aside, for a moment, “[t]he mayor supports the plan, but progressive politicians - and now the city's largest public employee union - call the proposal a poorly crafted giveaway to the rich,” The Associated Press reports:

[S]ome low-income residents worry that revitalization will just lead to higher rents. And city employees facing layoffs and contract concessions thanks to a massive budget shortfall resent what they see as a giveaway to venture capitalists and a bailout for landlords. …

[A] lawmaker on the Board of Supervisors' progressive wing, Ross Mirkarimi, has proposed an alternative measure he says will fix an underlying legal flaw that has led to anxiety among hot tech companies looking to grow.

San Francisco's payroll tax is unusual enough, but one provision makes it even more unique. The city in 2004 added language to the tax code to make clear that tax collectors considered stock options a part of employees' compensation and hence taxable as part of the payroll.

For tech startups, stock options are one of the most common ways to hold onto employees, especially when a lack of funds doesn't allow them to offer competitive salaries. When lucky companies reach a point where they can make their initial public offering of stock, those options can turn into a major windfall for workers.

But for companies in San Francisco, that windfall sticks employers with a huge tax increase right at the time they've issued the stock in an effort to expand. Mirkarimi's proposal would place a two-year moratorium on taxing any company's stock options to ease the fears not just of Twitter, but other San Francisco-based startups like social gaming leader Zynga and consumer review website Yelp. …

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the Twitter package, and Mirkarimi predicts it will pass even without his vote. If that happens, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the public employees union, may seek a ballot measure that could delay the deal until voters weigh in.

† Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing: ObamaCare relies heavily on expanding Medicare to cover many people who lack health insurance, but with budget-strapped states having repeatedly cut reimbursements to doctors who accept low-income patients, few specialists are willing to do so, The New York Times reports:

With the expansion of Medicaid to cover nearly all people under 65 with incomes up to 133 percent of the official poverty level (up to $29,330 a year for a family of four), Medicaid will soon be the nation’s largest insurer. It accounts for almost half of the increase in coverage expected under Mr. Obama’s health law, but has received less attention than other parts of the law regulating private insurance.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that average monthly Medicaid enrollment, now 56 million, will rise to 71 million by 2016, with another five million people added to the rolls in the five years after that. …

Some uninsured people will surely receive better care when they gain Medicaid coverage, doctors say. The new health law calls for a temporary two-year increase in Medicaid payments for some primary care services, but this does not affect specialists.

† AZ Becomes The Epicenter Of Civility: The worthies running the University of Arizona's National Institute for Civil Discourse need to make a beeline to Atlanta, where "a story on public radio’s “This American Life” about the uncompromising manner in which Glynn County Superior Court Chief Judge Amanda F. Williams runs her drug court has prompted calls for her impeachment and even spawned death threats against the judge," reports The Daily Report:

Reporter Ira Glass said Williams was “a judge that many people truly fear” [and] that Williams’ practices “violate the basic philosophy of all drug courts.” …

In the wake of Glass’s broadcast last weekend, a website, impeachjudgewilliams.com, has sprung up online. So have two Facebook pages: “Oppose/Impeach/Recall Drug Court Judge Amanda Williams,” created by the Texas coordinator of Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign, and “Impeach Amanda Williams,” created by a Vienna, Va., resident.

Williams told the Daily Report … that death threats had been sent to her old campaign website and are being investigated by the GBI. Local authorities also have beefed up her security, she said.

† Fed Up With Farmers: The perennial lament from The Washington Post on farm subsidies:

The flip side of the high food prices that continue to nag at family budgets is a boom down on the farm, as the people who grow commodities enjoy record prices for both land and crops. The Agriculture Department projects net farm income of $94.7 billion in 2011, up almost 20 percent over the previous year and the second-best year for farm income since 1976. Indeed, the department notes that the top five earnings years out of the past 30 have occurred since 2004. …

[T]he case for direct federal subsidies of agriculture has never been weaker. But try telling that to the House Agriculture Committee, whose Republican chairman and senior Democrat recently wrote to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), pleading with him to spare farmers in his forthcoming fiscal 2012 budget plan: “Some may argue that the current agriculture economy and farm prices are strong and therefore now would be a good time to cut our agriculture policies even further,” wrote Frank D. Lucas (R-Okla.) and Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.), “but this conclusion ignores lessons from history. The agriculture economy is cyclical.” The letter implied that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income Americans buy groceries, might be trimmed instead.

You heard that right: Low-income people who are struggling in the here and now should be considered for less aid so that middle- and upper-income people (which is what most farmers are) can be protected against hard times that might come, someday.

† Breasts Are Not Udders: Oh, wait. They are now.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Obama - Not McCain - Will Be Bush III): Proving that he’s educable, on the very day that he kicked off his re-election campaign President Barack Hussein Obama made Attorney General Eric Holder knuckle under on trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators by a military tribunal at Gitmo rather than a civilian court in the vicinity of where the World Trade Center once stood. Holder’s announcement not only was a capitulation to political realities, but another of his purported core principles that Obama’s has cynically thrown under the bus – just as former Vice President Dick Cheney predicted he would in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in 2009.

CNN’s Political Ticker blog notes that “[t]hose who have followed President Obama's stance on which court is appropriate to try accused terrorists can be forgiven for getting a severe case of whiplash”:

So what exactly did candidate Obama say in 2008 when it came to trying accused terrorists?

First, he was going to close Guantanamo, calling it an ineffective "legal black hole:"

"By any measure, our system of trying detainees has been a failure. Over the course of nearly seven years, there has not been a single conviction for a terrorist act at Guantanamo. There has just been one conviction for material support of terrorism," he said in June of 2008. "Meanwhile, this legal black hole has substantially set back America's ability to lead the world against the threat of terrorism, and undermined our most basic values. But make no mistake: we are less safe because of the way George Bush has handled this issue."

Then, he was going to restore habeas corpus rights to alleged terrorists:

"Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy. We cannot afford to lose any more valuable time in the fight against terrorism to a dangerously flawed legal approach," he also said in June of 2008.

Promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, Obama issued a high profile executive order in his first official day as president that required the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.

In his long-anticipated announcement, Holder complained about bipartisan Congressional legislation prohibiting bringing Gitmo detainees to the US for trial that tied his hands:

As the president has said, those unwise and unwarranted restrictions undermine our counterterrorism efforts and could harm our national security,” Holder said. “Decisions about who, where and how to prosecute have always been - and must remain - the responsibility of the executive branch.

For their part, Republican lawmakers complained that it took too long for Obama to come to grips with reality:

"It's unfortunate that it took the Obama administration more than two years to figure out what the majority of Americans already know: that 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a common criminal, he's a war criminal," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith of Texas.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican senator on Judiciary, said the president's "improvident campaign pledge to shutter Gitmo was built on the naive premise that softening America's image would somehow soften our enemies' resolve." Sessions called Holder's announcement a "retreat" and said he hopes it marks "a real policy change from President Obama."

Oh, and one more thing: Holder sent a letter to Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) stating that the administration has plans to relocate Gitmo detainees to an unused prison in his state, strongly signaling that the military prison won’t be closing any time soon.

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, How Did We Get From A Knowledge Economy To An Unskilled And Illiterate Economy?): The Stiletto conditionally supports the DREAM Act with these two restrictions:

1. When an illegal immigrant joins the U.S. Armed forces, those members of his or her immediate family (defined as: parents and siblings and/or a spouse and children) already residing in the U.S. all get put on a fast track to getting green cards.

2, A high school student in the U.S. illegally who have maintained an A average, never got into trouble with the law and are accepted by an accredited four-year college or university can pursue higher education and have his or her green card application expedited only if illegal parents and siblings return to their country of origin and apply for U.S. citizenship from there.

Having said that, The Stiletto finds it extraordinary and disturbing that the Department of Homeland Security is, for all intents and purposes, implementing the DREAM Act even though the bill did not make it out of Congress to be signed into law by President Barack Hussein Obama. The Washington Times reports:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said … illegal immigrant students and young adults who meet the criteria in last year's failed legalization bill in Congress are not a "priority" for her department's law enforcement efforts.

Wading into an increasingly thorny debate, Miss Napolitano said she cannot unilaterally ignore deportations laws for broad groups of illegal immigrants, but said students and young adults who would have been legalized had last year's "Dream Act" legislation passed Congress are not a chief target of federal authorities. …

"The reason we set priorities is so that the focus could be on those in the country who are also committing other illegal acts," she said.

Napolitano again made the ludicrous claim that the border is more secure now than in the past.

Writing for National Review Online, Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies executive director puts the lie to Napolitano’s “Baghdad Bob–style denials of reality” by detailing the 18-point “Restore Our Border (R.O.B.)” plan proposed by the AZ Cattlemen’s Association, named after AZ rancher Rob Krentz who was murdered by an illegal alien trespassing on his land after having crossed the Mexican border. Krikorian writes that R.O.B. – which includes such commonsense procedures as authorize use of force by governmental officials to interdict vehicles and all aircraft illegally crossing the U.S./Mexico Border; enforce all existing immigration laws, both with law-enforcement agencies and within the judicial branch; and Establish seamless border enforcement from FL to San Diego without jurisdictional gaps between Border Patrol Sectors – “sheds some real-world light on the shortcomings of our border-security effort.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Duke DA Says He 'Maybe Got Carried Away'): Crystal Mangum - who falsely accused several Duke lacrosse players of raping her, triggering one of the most egregious cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory – was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill for (allegedly) stabbing her boyfriend. Mangum had been convicted of child abuse in December after a fire that nearly destroyed her home.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Restorative Capital Punishment): Lawyers for Daniel Wayne Cook, 49, who is scheduled to be put to death by the state of AZ next week for raping, torturing and strangling two men in July 1987, filed a motion asking the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to stay his execution until the state switches to a new one-drug lethal injection protocol, The Associated Press reports:

Cook's lawyers have argued that the state broke federal law when it imported drugs used in its injection process, such as sedative sodium thiopental and the muscle relaxant pancuronium bromide, because they were listed in forms as being intended for "animals (food processing)," rather than humans. His lawyers say the sodium thiopental could be ineffective, leading to severe pain during an execution.

The issue became moot when the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution to consider another motion filed by his lawyers contending that he had ineffective counsel during his post-conviction proceedings.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Mama, Don’t Take My Incandescent Bulbs Away): Taking a page from the handful of states that have passed laws to exempt themselves from federal regulation of firearms and ammunition made, sold and used in state, the SC Senate is poised to advance a bill that asserts its Tenth Amendment to sell incandescent light bulbs manufactured within state borders, The Washington Times reports:

Ever since then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the clock has been ticking on Thomas Edison's venerable incandescent. Unless Congress acts before Jan. 1, 2012, federal bureaucrats will begin their campaign to foist the mostly Chinese-made, compact fluorescent bulbs on a public that has shown no interest in buying them on the free market.

Palmetto State lawmakers aren't interested in waiting for the feds to see the light. The "South Carolina Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act" declares any fixture that bears the stamp "Made in South Carolina" is a product of intrastate commerce and thus "is not subject to federal law or federal regulation." …

Conservative lawmakers ultimately are looking to mount a Supreme Court challenge that would, they hope, roll back the expansive interpretation of interstate commerce that has allowed the federal government to meddle in our everyday affairs. …

Ideally, Congress would pass the light-bulb freedom measure introduced by Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, which repeals the 2007 ban. Realistically, her measure would have a tough time getting past the veto pen of President Obama. That's why states are looking at their own declarations of lighting freedom.