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Bloomberg reports that, according to recently released IRS data, “the average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million.” Much of their income came from capital gains resulting from the Bush tax cuts:

The drop from 2001’s tax rate of 22.9 percent was due largely to ex-President George W. Bush’s push to cut tax rates on most capital gains to 15 percent in 2003.

On yet another morning of grim economic news, President Obama sought to further distance himself from his predecessor on Friday as he announced steps that he said would strengthen organized labor and improve the lot of middle-class Americans.

At a White House ceremony, the president signed three executive orders that he said would “reverse many of the policies towards organized labor that we’ve seen these last eight years, policies with which I’ve sharply disagreed.”

The debate over the recent vote of the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education on a Project Stabilization Agreement with the local Building Trades continues here. Pat Flannery – blogger, city gadfly, community activist – has been very critical of the PSA, and we re-post his most recent comments. The Center for Policy Initiatives speaks up for organized labor, and we re-post their website comments.

The right not to associate – union shop or merit shop
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Fight the barrage of lies with facts: School board vote is good for San Diego

All week, 60 Minutes’ Bob Simon has been under attack for supposed “anti-Israel bias” for this past Sunday’s accurate and thoughtful report on the danger that Israeli settlements pose to the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

CAMERA (the Orwellian-named Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) alerted their activist network – flooding the 60 Minutes’ offices and their advertisers with angry phone calls charging media bias. [1] Jewish community leader Abe Foxman fired off a letter calling the piece “a hatchet job on Israel.” [2] Journalists – as well as rabbis, professors and elected officials – know that if they raise questions about what Israel does – they’ll often get attacked as anti-Israel.

On February 25 of last year, professional skydiver Alan (Buzz) Fink and his wife Kristina, who are not residents of San Diego, gave a total of $640 to Jan Goldsmith in his run for city attorney. On July 23, Fink, president of Jamul’s Skydive San Diego, gave Goldsmith another $320.

Goldsmith won the election, and on January 8 he fired deputy city attorney John Serrano, who worked on real estate property. He is one of nine deputy city attorneys who have been fired by Goldsmith. Serrano is an experienced government lawyer, having served as a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles and assistant city attorney in Escondido, among many things.

Karl Rove’s recent remarks to a cheering crowd at the University of Miami should remind us that right wing efforts tocontinue the barbarism of the Bush years will not disappear any time soon. Chelsea Isaacs recently wrote about Rove’s comments in the Miami Hurricane:
“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.” Interrogation tactics used by the CIA during Bush’s term in office were not torturous, Rove said, but he did not deny that the CIA strongly pressed terrorists for vital information. “You bet we squeeze them for information,” Rove said. “If we hadn’t, those same terrorists could have executed their plans to kill, and (people) would be asking why Bush didn’t protect American soldiers’ lives.”

Water rationing probably will be imposed in San Diego by July 1, Mayor Jerry Sanders said yesterday. The reduction would vary per household depending on factors including how much water is used for landscaping. Sanders said residential and business customers alike would face “fairly significant penalties” for using too much water in the face of a drought and spring cutbacks expected from the wholesaler that provides water to the city. Sanders didn’t elaborate on what the penalties might be.

Water administrator Alex Ruiz said the rationing plan would try to take into account customers’ past conservation efforts and seek to distinguish between “discretionary” outdoor water uses and indoor uses, such as cooking and cleaning.

Antiwar activists have taken up the cause of an Army deserter who was deported from Canada and is now being held at the brig at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar. Two dozen members of Military Families Speak Out and San Diego Veterans for Peace protested Tuesday [Jan. 13,2009] afternoon outside the base in support of Robin Long, a onetime Army private who was sentenced in August to 15 months behind bars and a dishonorable discharge.

The activists support Long’s view that the Iraq war is illegal and say his sentence is particularly cruel because it could prevent him from returning to his sick girlfriend and their 2-year-old son in Canada. Canadian law makes it difficult for convicted felons to enter Canada.

Filipino and American troops will hold exercises for 25 days starting Monday inside a military reservation in Capiz that is being claimed by an indigenous people’s group as part of its ancestral domain. “Balance Piston 09-1” will be held on January 26 to February 20 at the Camp Macario B. Peralta Jr. in Jamindan town, according to a press statement issued on Friday by the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division.

The exercises will involve 141 personnel of the division and 31 US soldiers, mostly trainers, acting division spokesman Captain Renante Besa told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net) in a telephone interview Friday.

A more than $1 billion plan to add 10 gates, and probably a parking structure, at Lindbergh Field is scheduled before the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority in March, but it may cost another $4 billion to build out the airport that would soon be gridlocked. An airport update was presented at a Society for Marketing Professional Services meeting at the DoubleTree Hotel in Mission Valley last Wednesday.

Iraj Ghaemi, the Airport Authority’s director of facilities development, noted that with 227,000 aircraft operations, Lindbergh was the busiest single runway commercial service airport in North America in 2008.

On Wednesday night, when former NSA analyst Russell Tice told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that the Bush administration’s National Security Agency spied on everyone in the United States, specifically targeting journalists, the Countdown host was so flabbergasted that Tice was invited back for a second interview.

On Thursday, he returned to the airwaves with expanded allegations against the NSA, claiming the agency collected Americans’ credit card records, and adding that he believes the massive, warrantless data vacuum to be the remnants of the Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003.

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully.

He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago !!!