A native Canadian, Saunders received a scholarship and played hockey at Western Michigan University from 1974 to 1976. In 1976, he transferred to Ryerson Polytechnical in Toronto.
Posted on 05/28/2006 5:08:34 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
The Talk Shows
Sunday, May 28th, 2006
Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:
FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; Staff Sgt. Alfred Lanier, head honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.; Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
THIS WEEK (ABC): Sen. John Warner, R-Va.; Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.; singer Tony Orlando.
LATE EDITION (CNN) : Barham Salih, Iraqi deputy prime minister; Prince Hassan of Jordan; Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert.
Is anyone watching Murtha? This is unF...g believable. I am so nauseous and enraged that he gets away with this!!
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I heard him on the cspan radio replay with Steffi. My disgust with Murtha is only superceded by the contempt with which I hold Bill clinton. I wish him a defeat in Congress next November and a short unhappy life after he leaves Congress.
Turn FNC on and enjoy the program on Donald Rumsfeld. Much better and your blood pressure will lower itself in moments.
I love the way the Antis cannot address the opposition's points but must find some way to impugned them. To simply scorn any other facts or point of views that do not agree with your person view as "falling back on talking points" is intellectually dishonest as well as completely unfair to Mr Snow.
A native Canadian, Saunders received a scholarship and played hockey at Western Michigan University from 1974 to 1976. In 1976, he transferred to Ryerson Polytechnical in Toronto.
There is a huge RINO faction that thinks they will push the Conservatives down,but they are wrong because without Conservatives they are not in the Majority, and that is one one thing that they really covet, "Power." I believe McCain and Whitman are together on this and have made a "devil" pact,but we shall see very soon. What is not very helpful is when some of the Conservatives become so radical on the Immigration Issue that they turn every conversation into a hateful rant. You could be talking about sliced Bread, and they would turn it into an all about illegal immigrants conversation. It makes our side look bad.
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I agree 100%. I just hope that the conservative base realizes that we have to hang together, etc for this November election. Dems and drive-by media will be doing everything they can to exploit this crack between the two halves of the Republican party.
PS: I am listening to a replay of Schumer on FTN. He is flat out lying as usual.
PPS: Shieffer started lying in his introduction to this progam.
I heard the interview too and I'm a bit stumped on the problem. Rush was being Rush and was not intimidated from asking Tony some hard questions (most not all that hard from what I heard), and Tony was Tony Snow, offering his expertise and what he's learned from working in the White House. Tony did not duck the questions and I thought did a credible job putting out the Administrations explanations. I thought the whole thing was interesting and well done. I'm not sure I understand why there's a question about it all now.
That is a very devastating rant by Murtha (9 1/4 minutes long). George tried to pin him down and back up, but the man is obcessed. He does not seem senile. He's just affected with anti-war fever, and is being wildly irresponsible.
The EITC tax credit was established in 1975. It is a refundable tax credit for families that can offset income taxes or provide a tax credit directly to the family. According to IRS data for 2003, 22 million households received $39 billion in EITC payments, an average of $1,782 per household or $2,100 for any families with children.
Now, let me just repeat that. This is a huge Government program. And most of the low-income people don't owe any taxes. If you are making below $20,000 a year, you are unlikely to pay any income taxes. If you have children, you certainly are not going to be paying any income taxes. So how do you get a tax credit if you don't pay any taxes? Well, they send you a check. That is what they do. You file your tax return at the end of the year, and if you have worked and your income was lower, they send you a check. We looked at the numbers. If you are a minimum wage worker and you make around $14,000 a year, that family would receive a check, a subsidy from the Government of 4,700-and-some-odd dollars.
So this was designed to encourage Americans to work. It was a plan to make work more attractive for people on welfare. Do you remember all that talk: Well, you can make more money on welfare than you make working. So a brilliant Congress, a number of years ago, came up with this idea that we would just give people extra money if they would work. It will be less than welfare, so why not do it? OK. That is what we did. But it was not designed to reward illegal aliens for coming into the country illegally, for heaven's sake. But that is what this bill does. As soon as they get that regularized status, they get it.
Now, this would allow them to get the earned income tax credit if they become a citizen but not before. That is not required of us. It is not required of the Senate that we should provide a $2,000 bonus check to individuals who work in our country, who seem to be happy to get the wages they are being paid, a $2,000 bonus check from Uncle Sam as a result and as an incentive for coming into the country illegally. That is a really big issue.
To qualify for the credit, married couples filing jointly who earn certain sums of money would qualify. For example, a single mother with two children, the earned income tax credit provides a tax credit for 40 percent of every dollar earned, up to $11,340. A family that earned between $11,000 and $14,000 received a maximum credit of $4,536, not $4,700. After the floor of $14,810 is reached, the credit is slowly reduced until the income cap of $36,000 is reached. It is only then that it is eliminated. For 2006, the maximum amount of the earned income tax credit is $4,556 for a worker supporting two kids and $2,747 for a worker with one child, $4,012 for a child of eligible employees and adjusted for inflation.
Now, a Social Security number is required in order to reap the benefits of this tax credit, and those applying must have a valid Social Security number and be a resident alien. Valid Social Security numbers are given out to all legally working people in the United States--legally working aliens. Legal permanent residents and citizens have Social Security numbers.
Under the tax law, resident aliens are citizens of a foreign country who are either lawful permanent residents of the United States or have been physically present in the country for at least a certain specified amount of time during the past 3 years. They are taxed in the same manner as U.S. citizens, and thus they qualify for the refundable tax credits.
According to the IRS, under the residency rules of the Tax Code, any alien who is a nonresident alien--an alien will become a resident alien in one of three ways: No. 1, by being admitted to the United States as or changing in status to a lawful permanent resident under the immigration laws; No. 2, by passing a substantial presence test, a numerical formula which measures days of presence in the United States; or No. 3, by making what is called the first year election, a numerical formula under which an alien may pass the substantial presence test 1 year earlier than under the normal rules.
Under these rules, legally present work-authorized aliens who pass the substantial presence test will be treated, for tax purposes, as resident aliens. They are able, then, to claim EITC. Under these rules, even an undocumented illegal alien who passes the substantial presence test will be treated for tax purposes as a resident alien. If they are using a fraudulent Social Security number, they can apply for the EITC. If they are using a legal IDIF number, they cannot apply.
Under S. 2611, the bill before us today, if illegal aliens pay their taxes legally today, they do so with an individual taxpayer identification number they are given for tax purposes. The ITIN cannot currently be used to get the EITC because a Social Security number is required to claim the EITC. They are not eligible to get a Social Security number.
So under S. 2611, illegal aliens will become legally present and work authorized immediately upon passage of the act. They would then be given Social Security numbers and will pass the substantial presence test, making them automatically, at once, eligible to claim the very generous benefits of the EITC.
The Congressional Budget Office has looked at this and tried to figure out what the cost would be. American taxpayers would pay this. This would be a new cost on the taxpayers, created by the very bill that is before us today. Under the current legislation, in S. 2611 as initially offered and came out of the Judiciary Committee, the preliminary CBO score revealed the following about directed spending contained in the compromise. They say this:
CBO and Joint Tax Committee estimate that direct spending outlays would total about $8 billion for the first 5 years, 2007 through 2011, and $27 billion for the first 10 years. Most of those costs are for the earned-income tax credit and for Medicaid and food stamp programs. Costs in subsequent decades would be greater than in this first 10-year period.
``Costs in further decades would be greater than the first decade.'' Mr. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has worked on numbers like this. He was the architect of the welfare reform. He said to us recently, a group of Senators: Senators, this is how this Government gets out of control. This is how things go wrong. You don't start out to pass a bill that is going to cost $29 billion. You don't think it through. You pass the legislation, and a new Congress 20 years from now wakes up and says: How did this ever happen? We don't have the money to pay for this. We made this obligation way long ago. How are we going to get out of it? Maybe we should cut back.
Once the Hagel-Martinez bill became S. 2611, I, along with five other Senators, asked CBO to provide a comprehensive score so we would know how much this amnesty provision would cost the taxpayers. The final CBO score estimates that, of the 2007-2016 period, 10 years, this bill would increase outlays for refunding tax credits $29.4 billion, the largest direct expenditure in the bill--$29 billion.
Something that viewers of (De)Face the Nation should've noticed this morning was appalling. Noting his darting eyes, Schumer was clearly reading from cue cards or a teleprompter off to his right during his "political speeches/talking points" he would make in response to questions from Schieffer. Did anyone not notice this ? Is this the usual M.O. of CBS to allow Democrats to get away with reading off cue cards in response to questions ? Was Schumer given the questions in advance so that he could have prepared sound-byte answers ? Would a Republican have been allowed to read from cue cards on a live news interview show from any of the major networks ? I think not. Is this something Drudge should be alerted about ?
Re Bentzen and the dead reporter:
they usually have it in their Computer just waiting for the inevitable to happen.
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I understand that, but it does tell us a lot about the page editing staff at the NYTimes to let such a mistake slip through, and the fact that they did not care enough about the man to give the obit to a living reporter to fine tune in case anything happened in the past 5 months in Bentzen's family or life.
The McLaughlin Group is one of dad's favourite we get it early evening on satelite in the UK
No disrespect meant for Tony. I've followed him or years and hold him in high regard. I was responding to #574 re a theory that Rush was hard on Tony because Rush is somehow jealous that Tony is more successful, has a stable marriage, etc. I think it was just a manifestation of a very close relationship between these men and they were very candid and frank with each other. As to reference to "talking points", I felt Rush scored some debate points on incongruity or inconsistency of WH positions, and Tony didn't have much to come back with. Rush poked some holes, and Tony was not free to cede the point. OK?
People need to get a grip on life. The Bush Administration, and the Department of Defense specifically, is better run with better results and providing a stronger and more effective military than any administration in our history. I love President Reagan, but more is being done today than President Reagan ever thougth of doing.
In addition, President is the first MBA President. He's following the Harvard School methods and he's doing a good job of it. Of course, nothing will satisfy his detractors, but they are wrong and he's right. Anytime the press fails to recognize that, they are proving once again how ignorant and biased they are.
I heard the Jimmah interview with Wolf, and heard him say new-kee-yer at least 4 times. Has anyone ever mocked him for not being able to pronounce nuclear? /rhetorical ?
I also heard Wolf address him as Mr President at least 4 times [which I know is correct protocol], but I wonder if Wolf has every addressed President Bush as Mr President, even once?
1/8th is actually a large number. These illegals are not hiding in the shadows as some would have you believe. The have no problem marching through the streets demanding their rights.
I would not argue the point. Tony is still new and Rush knows Tony was not a hundred percent sold on the WH position anyway. I just think there is no "there" there.
Did you know John McLaughlin once served in the Nixon White House as a speech writer? He was known as the Mad Monk. Later turned in his frock to marry a Nun (I believe), then married the Labor Secretary. Quite a guy. Iconoclastic, to say the least.
I see it on the Rush thread. People will post I Hate Rush rants there because he did not say what they wanted to hear on issue I or P or whatever. Then he WILL say stuff and they will post some glowing gush about how "Rush gets it now" It the "For me to win, you must lose mindset".
I simply wonder how long we can survive this way. A functioning Constitutional Republic works on consensus, NOT domination. The 100%ers do NOT get to dictate to everyone their own emotional whimsy.
We have now reached the point where anyone who trys to build a working consensus is screamed at by the feverish 100%ers and their Pet talking head media types as "betraying the base, a traitor, a sell out, a RINO or CINO".
Real sick little negative feedback loop they got set up here. The Ranters email each other and the talking heads voluminously. The 2nd and 3rd rate Talking Heads are Media Stars, not people of principals. They simply read their mail to find out what to think and say on an issue. So they see the mail and start regurgitating the talking points and factoids. Since they are now being told by their media heros what they WANT to believe, the 100%ers simply tune out any fact or position that does NOT validate their emotion based position. The people who AGREE are their side, anyone else is the "other team" and now the enemy.
No way any Civil Society can function at that level of factionalism. Like it or not, Mike Moore, Howie Dean, Babs Boxer et all ARE STILL Americans citizens. I dislike them intensely, disagree with them totally but they are still MY people. For too many people not only are the Democrats "The enemy" anyone who disagrees with them on anything is NOW "the enemy too".
Really sad that is.
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