Author: Mike Ewens

The “Casualty Counter” (see upper right hand side of the blog page) is now available for anyone with a website and a bit of html and javascript knowledge. Visit this page for the easy directions.

Rumsfeld comments on the recent attack on an American helicopter, which so far has resulted in the death of 16 soldiers:

“In a long, hard war, we’re going to have tragic days, as this is,” Rumsfeld told ABC’s “This Week.” “But they’re necessary. They’re part of a war that’s difficult and complicated.”

The Washington Post reports that the Coalition has brought the flat tax to Iraq:

It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen Sept. 15 to accomplish what eluded the likes of publisher Steve Forbes, former representative Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), former senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and former representative Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.

“The highest individual and corporate income tax rates for 2004 and subsequent years shall not exceed 15 percent,” Bremer wrote in Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 37, “Tax Strategy for 2003,” issued last month.

Here comes the punchline:

Bremer’s new economic policy for Iraq will slash Saddam Hussein’s top tax rate for individuals and businesses from 45 to 15 percent. Of course, since Hussein’s government, like others in the Middle East, almost never enforced tax collection, there is no real history of paying taxes in the country.

I have to admit that Saddam had some endearing qualities (ok, just this one)…

After revealing serious holes in the gov’t airport security program, the college student responsible is not receiving any thanks from the protectors of our skies — the TSA:

Deputy TSA Administrator Stephen McHale said Monday’s court action “makes clear that renegade acts to probe airport security for whatever reason will not be tolerated, pure and simple.”

“Amateur testing of our systems do not show us in any way our flaws,” McHale said. “We know where the vulnerabilities are and we are testing them … This does not help.’

Firstly, they “know where the vulnerabilities are”? Huh? Also, considering Nathaniel Heatwole (the “conspirator”) outdid the security protocals, perhaps it is the TSA that is amateur.

Give it more money:

U.S. Posts Record $374.22 Bln Budget Gap

…and it fails more often:

Box Cutters on Planes 5 Weeks, FBI Says

I am not sure the Black Flag (teenage anarchists) knows that their standard “upside down flag” has real meaning:

* United States Code (The Collected Laws of the United States)
Title 4, Chapter 1 – The Flag
Sec. 8. Respect for flag
SubSec. (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.

I found this little tidbit at JPFO. Its Executive Director Aaron Zelman explains his reason for flying the stars and stripes upside down:

One recent afternoon I was working outdoors when a stranger rode up on a motorcycle and started giving me a hard time. No, he wasn’t an outlaw biker; he was an ordinary patriotic American. But he didn’t like what he saw in my front yard.

It was a U.S. flag. But it was flying upside-down, as it always does at the Zelman household.

He growled that he was a Vietnam vet and that he’d fought for that flag, and he didn’t like me showing it disrespect. I answered that I was also a Vietnam vet. But I told him that he _hadn’t_ fought for the flag (which is only a symbol); he’d fought for the Bill of Rights — the document that sets America apart from lesser countries.

And I told him that flying the flag upside-down was as great a sign of respect for my country as I could think of. After all, America is in trouble, and flying its flag upside-down is a sign of distress. The inverted flag calls out to everybody who sees: “Please help the United States. Don’t let the most promising nation on earth fall into tyranny.”