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But then I'm pretty much chat only. If you need any help hunt me down, the site can be a little confusing if you're new to it.
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(Photo: Handout courtesy of The Canadian Press)
The man made famous on the Web for his impassioned rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the back of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police car, had his court appearance today, wearing a Viking hat, sunglasses and a NASA "I need my space" T-shirt. Naturally.
Robert Wilkinson, from Edson, Alberta, represented himself.? Perhaps not surprisingly, the 29-year-old was convicted of impaired driving and refusing a breathalyzer test.
He was fined $1,400 and had his license suspended for one year. But singing? Let's hope he can still do lots of that.
Wilkinson seemed bullish about the conclusion of events, writing on his Facebook page, "The system works." Even as a friend pointed out that he was convicted, he responded, "Who has the right to say that? I am not convicted in my mind."
In the minds of many, Wilkinson is an Internet star.
The Canadian first caught notice when, allegedly inebriated, he was arrested and put in the back of a RCMP cruiser, where he was recorded belting out the Queen hit.
The officer chose not to interfere, although he does say at one point "Calm down," to which Wilkinson replies, "I can't."
The video was sent to Wilkinson as evidence, and friends encouraged him to put it up on YouTube. The rest is Internet history.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/cop-car-bohemian-rhapsody-singer-appears-court-191812463.html
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Divisions among Democrats are undermining President Barack Obama's push to raise the U.S. estate tax on inherited wealth, just weeks before the arrival of the "fiscal cliff" could drive the present estate tax rate even higher than Obama proposes.
Action on the estate tax could be postponed. But in his successful re-election campaign, Obama called for wealthy Americans to pay more in taxes - and it is overwhelmingly the wealthy who pay the estate tax.
The outcome may hinge on whether Obama insists on his estate tax proposal - or something close to it - as forcefully as he has insisted on raising individual income tax rates for high income-earners, or whether he lets the issue be put off.
If a single facet of the complicated partisan stand-off over taxing the wealthy best captures Capitol Hill's fiscal gridlock, it may be the estate tax - a long-standing and volatile issue - that may finally be coming to a head.
"If you look at where the public is on tax issues compared to the last time this was debated - it is night and day," said Frank Clemente, campaign manager for left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness. "They are deep into this tax fairness position."
The "fiscal cliff" is a collection of federal tax increases and automatic government spending cuts that, if allowed to take effect as scheduled early in 2013, could push the U.S. economy into recession, according to economists' forecasts.
Part of the picture is the estate tax.
Under laws signed a decade ago by former Republican President George W. Bush, the estate tax is applied to inherited assets at 35 percent after a $5 million exemption. That means a deceased person can pass on an inheritance of up to $5 million before any tax applies.
Inherited wealth passed to a spouse or a federally recognized charity is generally not taxed.
Obama wants to raise the rate to 45 percent after a $3.5 million exemption. If the Bush rates are allowed to expire and Congress does nothing, the rate will shoot up next year to the pre-Bush levels of 55 percent after a $1 million exemption.
SCHUMER ON ESTATE TAX
New York Senator Charles Schumer on Thursday said the Democrats' proposal to avert the "fiscal cliff" involves $1 trillion in immediate deficit reduction that includes new revenue from raising the estate tax to the level proposed by Obama.
No less a power broker than Democratic Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said this week, however, that he wants to hold the estate tax steady at current rates.
Baucus is up for re-election in 2014 from Montana. He says ranch and farm owners in his state would stand to lose if federal taxes rose on passing property to heirs.
"Rural Montana is much different than urban America," Baucus told Reuters in a brief interview in the U.S. Capitol.
He told a Montana newspaper on Sunday that he would even support scrapping the estate tax altogether, as most Republicans favor. A spokesman for Baucus - the Senate's top tax law writer - said he will seek as much estate tax "relief" as he can get.
At least three other rural-state Democratic senators have proposed extending current estate tax rates: Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.
Spokesmen for Pryor and McCaskill said everything is on the table as Congress struggles to deal with the "fiscal cliff."
But one thing is clear: the voice of farming lobbyists is registering with Democrats on the volatile estate tax issue, although it is only marginally about farms and ranches.
BEYOND FARMS AND RANCHES
The estate tax's impact extends beyond farmers and ranchers. It applies mostly to very wealthy Americans, whose taxes have been specifically targeted for increase by a president whom voters returned to the White House just three weeks ago following a tough campaign in which taxes were a key topic.
Of the 3,600 estates subject to the estate tax this year, only 100 are classified as farming estates, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans pay nearly all of the estate tax under current rates, according to the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan fiscal policy think tank.
The number of estates subject to the tax would double under the plan proposed by Obama. About 300 farming estates would be subject to the tax under Obama's terms, which would raise about $100 billion in new revenue for the government over 10 years.
Republicans have benefited previously from Democratic division over the tax. In July, Senate Democrats shelved a plan to raise the estate tax with a symbolic extension of the Bush tax rates for the middle-class.
A senior Senate Democratic aide said the tax was pulled from the bill because Obama felt strongly about boosting the tax. It is unclear how hard he will fight for his position this time.
BY ANY OTHER NAME
The divide between the political parties over the tax is so wide that they cannot even agree on a name for it. Democrats call it the estate tax, as it is described in law.
Republicans, who generally want to repeal it, have another, more provocative name. They call it the "death tax" and characterize it as a penalty on being wealthy and successful.
First enacted nearly a century ago to combat the rise of dynastic wealth and check income disparity, the estate tax is the most progressive tax there is. That means it hits the wealthy much more than lower income groups.
It was a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, that proposed the first permanent inheritance tax, arguing that inheritance of "enormous fortunes" does a society no good.
"No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax," Roosevelt said.
Another decade passed before it was adopted in 1916, partly to fund World War I. The rate has waxed and waned, hitting a high of 77 percent prior to World War II.
(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Dan Grebler)
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Illustration by Lilli Carr?.
Most of us read or look at art in order to feel something?to experience sensations perhaps unavailable to us in everyday waking life. But it?s not just our feelings. Encountering the visions of the past, we also begin to acquire a sense of how people used to feel as well. Perhaps they lived in more interesting times, where every plot moved deathward or toward maudlin ends. Or maybe their works deadpan an aloof, utterly demystified view of the world, where the only way one feels anything at all is in short, intense bursts of euphoria. Nothing seems more intimate or idiosyncratic than our feelings, of course, but what we allow ourselves to feel is shaped by the culture around us, and art indexes how those in the past understood the scope of their imagination.
These are the issues that animate the work of the literary critic and poet Sianne Ngai. In 2005 she published Ugly Feelings, a study of ?minor? states of feeling and how they have been shaped and animated by the commercial culture around us. Rather than thinking about emboldening, triumphant feelings of anger, joy or faith, for example, she wrote of ?envy? and ?boredom,? what it means that these feelings are so ambient and natural to us nowadays. In her new book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, she considers how those feelings help us form judgments about the aesthetic world, how we know to describe something as ?interesting? or adorable (or, worse yet, ?adorkable?). What does our critical vocabulary say about our present time? Is there a broader context for the conversational readymade ?That?s interesting ???
At first, talking about aesthetic experiences can seem like a dreary, specialized kind of thing. But these conversations are always about so much more than describing pretty or pleasurable things. For instance, what is the difference between beauty and the sublime? While this distinction might not strike us as particularly pressing, the two categories are suggestive of radically different ways of understanding the world, and the question?one wrestled with by figures like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant?contains the anxieties of its time. Beauty is recognition, mastery, a scale that we can comprehend; the sublime remains mysterious, metaphysical, difficult to take in all at once. To speak of beauty and the sublime, then, is to have a conversation on rational judgment and faith.
Our Aesthetic Categories, though, argues on behalf of aesthetic experiences that aren?t quite so awe-inspiring or rare. Sitting before your computers or walking the streets of your town, you don?t encounter beautiful things as frequently as you do interesting, momentarily arresting ones?and as for the sublime, when was the last time you experienced catharsis? Instead, Ngai considers our ?minor? aesthetic experiences, the ones that make up our day. The zany, cute, and interesting won?t stir us to tears or action or a belief in the creator. Rather, these are dashed-off assessments that feel like second nature, given the speed at which things circulate. But these are judgments as rich for unpacking as the beautiful or the sublime?and, in our time and place, more important than ever. Advertising doesn?t want to be beautiful or sublime; it wants to be everywhere at once, remembered but not necessarily judged. Hello Kitty and Sonic the Hedgehog don?t aspire to high art and seem totally disposable. And yet their cuteness survives the market, feeding into a persistent yearning to be able to hold and cuddle and cherish these images that don?t actually exist in the real, hyper-fluid world.?
In Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai unpacks these seemingly simple judgments and finds a great deal hidden within. For example, judging something ?cute? often ?infantilizes" the beholder, as we melt into a puddle of oohs and aahs at the sight of a baby bunny eating a baby carrot. But just as a child might love a doll to tatters, our absorption with ?cuteness? is born of both tenderness and aggression. Something cute is something we condescend to, even as we desire to touch and ruffle and hold and possess it.
The category of zaniness is something we recognize in performance?imagine Lucille Ball at her most frazzled, Jim Carrey at the height of his super-elasticity. Ngai?s chapter on zaniness is the most historical, as she describes zaniness as a flustered, exaggerated response to the all-at-once stresses of modern life.
To deem something ?interesting? is to promise to return to it. It?s a judgment that doesn?t really say anything, beyond forestalling that judgment, like a (per Ngai) ?sticky note? amid an endless wash of data.?At its most thoughtful, calling something ?interesting? might be an expression of indeterminacy, a placeholder for a future conversation. But more often than not, it?s just conversational filler, something dropped in when you don?t feel like judging at all.
So?what does any of this mean? There have always been things that have struck people as zany, cute, or interesting. The question becomes why these kinds of judgments predominate nowadays?what historical and cultural developments they point to, how the world around us might begin to draw on our unexamined comfort in such categories. Ngai offers Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami?s paintings of surly adolescents and fanged anime knockoffs as moments when our assumptions around cuteness?the stability of feeling somehow ?above? the cute object?melt away, for these images manage to be ?helpless and aggressive? at the same time. Does our sense of things being ?interesting? relate to our present-day situation, where ?change is paradoxically constant and novelty paradoxically familiar?? Do we long to hold and protect cute things as a way of anchoring ourselves and making the world manageably small? Is the zany workplace comedy our way of obscuring how awful actual work is?
Author Sianne Ngai.
Courtesy of the author.
Our Aesthetic Categories isn?t exactly light reading?it?s certainly not as glib as a book on cuteness and zaniness, one that juxtaposes Kant, modernist poetry, Yoshitomo Nara and The Cable Guy, might suggest. It?s almost compulsively thick with references. But it?s the type of book that contains ideas that are broadly provocative, even for the ?merely interested.? It is one of the most useful guides to the present I?ve read in a while, almost despite itself. It offers a way of thinking about so many forms of present-day self-expression, from the prevalence of first-person writing on the Internet to the ?Like/Share?-this cheer of social networks. It helps explain a certain style of art (Tao Lin, for example) that advances on muted, subdued, contingent feelings.
Ngai?s book prepares us to think about these new ways we might feel about these relationships?how, for example, our categories for judgment seem to suggest a diffident, uncertain, ironic feeling about life and its possibilities. Does anyone ever mean it when they say something is ?interesting??or do we all, in art and conversation, merely aspire to be interesting enough? We usually ponder the present condition by considering our consumer choices or modes of self-presentation. But perhaps the line around our imagination starts elsewhere, in those aesthetic experiences that happen on the edge of comprehension. ?Before we are inventories of symbols and things, we are thinking, feeling people navigating a fluid, ever-changing world?a world where everything is interesting but not much more, where cuteness and zaniness are the only scales available to us when confronted with global vastness.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=8c52cac28e81c67f918f5e7b696a5abc
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President Barack Obama is having Mitt Romney over for lunch on Thursday, and their meeting is already generating a lot of buzz. Here are five theories about the White House?s motives.
Since then, Romney has stayed out of the spotlight, while Obama said he would invite Romney to the White House at some point.
The pair will have a private meeting for lunch, so there will be no press coverage or a photo opportunity.
So here are five theories that are floating around about the get-together.
1. Obama is extending a common courtesy
In 2008, President-elect Obama met with John McCain on November 17 in Chicago, and there was a photo op with the two men. McCain had lost to Obama, but he was still a U.S. senator.
At the time, McCain said he would ?obviously? help the incoming president, and the former foes issued a statement about bipartisanship.
Conditions are different in 2012, with Romney not holding a Senate position and Obama sitting in office as the incumbent.
We?re also not sure that there is a tradition of losing presidential candidates meeting with incumbent presidents.
The protocol for current presidents meeting with former presidents is entirely different.
You can read excerpts from a book called ?The President?s Club? for a look at how presidents interact.
2. Obama will offer Romney a Cabinet job
That doesn?t seem likely, since Romney is self-supporting financially and has a life outside politics, with 18 grandchildren.
If a job were forthcoming in the new Obama Cabinet, it would have to be approved by the U.S. Senate, with a majority vote.
Since the Senate is controlled by the Democrats, that could get interesting.
Also, as a Cabinet member, Romney would be reporting to Obama, which also would be interesting, given the mutual dislike between the candidates on the campaign trail.
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3. Obama will enlist Romney in the fiscal cliff debate
One issue where the candidates disagreed sharply on the campaign trail was on the fiscal cliff debate.
Romney was not in favor of raising taxes on higher income earners, because he believed it stunted the growth of business and hurt its ability to create jobs.
Obama was critical of Romney?s philosophy about the fiscal cliff, especially his attacks on entitlement spending.
However, one of Romney?s ideas on the campaign trail, a cap of income tax deductions for wealthier Americans, might become part of the negotiations in Congress in December.
Obama had floated out a similar plan in the past, but just after the election, Senate Democrats attached Romney?s name to it, as a way to get the Republicans to discuss it.
?Let?s just say there?s a renewed interest,? said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, as reported in The New York Times on November 13. ?Part of it is people reflecting on Obama?s proposal, but when Romney said what he said, it just added fuel.?
4. Obama wants Romney?s advice on business issues
That?s also a distinct possibility, since President Obama praised Romney?s business acumen after the campaign.
?He presented some ideas during the course of the campaign that I actually agree with. And so it?d be interesting to talk to him about something like that. There may be ideas that he has with respect to jobs and growth that can help middle-class families that I want to hear,? Obama said.
Of course, President Obama has scores of business advisers already, including friends in the private sector.
5. Obama wants closure on the 2012 presidential election, or something else?
President Obama said after the election that he was interested in talking with Romney about ways the two men could work together.
He used similar words about John McCain in 2008, after Obama easily defeated the Republican candidate. That didn?t come to pass.
One theory is that Obama could just want to be consistent in how he publicly handles his consecutive wins in 2008 and 2012, and it would be a slight to Romney if he didn?t extend a similar invitation for a sit-down meeting.
But in an editorial in Wednesday?s Washington Post, former Romney strategist Stuart Stevens paints a portrait of Romney as a good man who is a Washington outsider, who was never accepted by the GOP establishment.
?I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.?s Green Room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That?s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought he would win the nomination,? Stevens said.
Given that some key Republican leaders criticized Romney for his post-election comments about Obama using ?gifts? to win the election, could Obama approach Romney about some kind of position related to bipartisanship or public service?
As odd as the idea sounds, Romney has made it clear he?s done running for public office, but has no plans to retire.
An Associated Press story earlier this month cited a Romney insider as saying the former candidate had an interest in philanthropic efforts or having a role in future Olympics efforts.
Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center.
Also ReadSource: http://news.yahoo.com/five-theories-obama-meeting-romney-100811036.html
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