Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker has written this interesting story on John Kerry’s background as a lawyer before his career as a politician. There is nothing earth shattering in the article, but it is nevertheless provides interesting insight into Kerry. As Toobin notes:

John Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976, when he was thirty-two years old and on the brink of obscurity. His celebrity as the former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was fading. The war was over, and his much heralded testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was five years in the past. He had entered law school after losing a congressional election in 1972, a race he was widely expected to win. A story about him in the Boston Globe during this time ran under the headline ?once a hot political property.?
Kerry practiced law for six years. During that period, he began inching back into public view in Massachusetts, rebuilding a reputation both for aggressive investigation and for showmanship which he still enjoys today. The issues that mattered to him then have dominated his subsequent legislative career, and it is his brief career as a lawyer, more than his record as a protester, that could suggest what kind of President he would make.

And somewhat surprisingly, Kerry was not a bleeding heart criminal defense lawyer:

Given his background in the antiwar movement and progressive politics, Kerry might have seemed like a natural for a public defender?s office. ?That?s a stereotype of the worst order and a total knee-jerk reaction,? Kerry told me during a recent conversation about his legal career. ?I always had a prosecutor?s mind and a prosecutor?s bent. It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school. There was a rule in Massachusetts that allowed law students to prosecute misdemeanor trials in front of six-person juries, and I got an unbelievable amount of experience before I even graduated.? For a politically ambitious young lawyer like Kerry, especially one who was known only as a protester, it also made sense to earn a law-enforcement credential.

Hat tip to Ernie the Attorney for the link to this piece.

John E. O’Neill is a longtime Houston attorney with the firm the local litigation boutique, Clements, O’Neill, Pierce, Wilson and Fulkerson and a leading Swift Boat Veteran. In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, O’Neill lays the wood to John Kerry’s judgment regarding his actions after returning from the Vietnam War. O’Neill replaced Kerry as the skipper of the six-man boat, the PCF-94 and, like Kerry, is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. The entire op-ed should be read, but here are a few highlights:

Despite our shared experience, I still believe what I believed 33 years ago — that John Kerry slandered America’s military by inventing or repeating grossly exaggerated claims of atrocities and war crimes in order to advance his own political career as an antiwar activist. His misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades.
* * *
John Kennedy’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” and Dwight Eisenhower’s “Crusade in Europe” inspired generations. Not so John Kerry, who has suppressed his book, “The New Soldier,” prohibiting its reprinting. There is a clear reason for this. The book repeats John Kerry’s insults to the American military, beginning with its front-cover image of the American flag being carried upside down by a band of bearded renegades in uniform — a clear slap at the brave Marines in their combat gear who raised our flag at Iwo Jima. Allow me the reprint rights to your book, Sen. Kerry, and I will make sure copies of “The New Soldier” are available in bookstores throughout America.

And why should Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam experience matter today? Mr. O’Neill responds:

Since the days of the Roman Empire, the concept of military loyalty up and down the chain of command has been indispensable. The commander’s loyalty to the troops is the price a commander pays for the loyalty of the troops in return. How can a man be commander in chief who for over 30 years has accused his “Band of Brothers,” as well as himself, of being war criminals? On a practical basis, John Kerry’s breach of loyalty is a prescription of disaster for our armed forces.
John Kerry’s recent admissions caused me to realize that I was most likely in Vietnam dodging enemy rockets on the very day he met in Paris with Madame Binh, the representative of the Viet Cong to the Paris Peace Conference. John Kerry returned to the U.S. to become a national spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a radical fringe of the antiwar movement, an organization set upon propagating the myth of war crimes through demonstrably false assertions. Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing their service by his dishonest testimony before the Senate?

Mr. O’Neill — who, like me, is politically independent — closes with why he is coming forward now:

Since 1971, I have refused many offers from John Kerry’s political opponents to speak out against him. My reluctance to become involved once again in politics is outweighed now by my profound conviction that John Kerry is simply not fit to be America’s commander in chief. Nobody has recruited me to come forward. My decision is the inevitable result of my own personal beliefs and life experience.
Today, America is engaged in a new war, against the militant Islamist terrorists who attacked us on our own soil. Reasonable people may differ about how best to proceed, but I’m sure of one thing — John Kerry is the wrong man to put in charge.

Probably because I did not serve in the Vietnam War, I am more sympathetic to Mr. Kerry’s explanation that his anti-American post-Vietnam activities were largely the product of youthful indiscretion. However, public skepticism of Mr. Kerry’s ability to lead the U.S. military remains a huge problem for him in the upcoming Presidential campaign. Mr. Kerry’s record as a politician on that issue is clearly more revealing than his youthful indiscretions, but frankly — unlike President Bush — his political stances on military issues have generally reinforced the public’s impression that Mr. Kerry is not a strong supporter of the U.S. military forces. Unless Mr. Kerry and the Democrats can change that public perception, my sense is that Mr. Kerry will not be able to beat President Bush in what appears to be stacking up as a very close race.

This is dispositive proof that some newspapers confuse poor judgment with First Amendment rights.

Marc Levin is associate editor of The Austin Review, a conservative monthly journal, and President of the American Freedom Center. He writes this op-ed today in the Chronicle proposing an alternative to the rather mundane public school finance proposals currently being floated in the special session of the Texas Legislature:

One almost universal assumption in the school finance debate is that everyone must pay the same type of tax. While no tax is pleasant, what if Texans could choose how they want to pay their share of the cost of public education? The Legislature should consider completely replacing the property tax for education with an increased statewide sales tax coupled with an opt-out for Texans who choose to pay a flat income-based assessment instead.
Such a system would have many benefits. First, it would allow for the complete elimination of highly unpopular school property taxes, which are subject to the vagaries of the appraisal process. As our society has become increasingly mobile and driven by technology, real property has become a less reliable measure of a person’s wealth.
The business property tax for education, which this proposal would also eliminate, is even more antiquated. Today, many highly profitable businesses have little physical property.
Furthermore, to encourage businesses to locate in Texas as opposed to the other 49 states, most economists agree that ideally there should be no state taxes on business. The current business property and franchise taxes, a gross receipts tax, or any other business tax make Texas less attractive for business investment and undermine the competitiveness of Texas businesses in exporting goods and services.
In addition to abolishing the residential and business school property tax, this proposal would also allow for full statewide equity in school funding without recapture. No longer would school districts be dependent on the taxable value of the property within their boundaries.
On the other side of the ledger, such a system would also provide greater revenue stability for the state. The drawback of a sales tax is that revenues can decline in absolute terms during a recession. However, average income tends to increase, or at least remain constant, during all economic periods. Therefore, those who choose an income assessment would provide a buffer that would help even out state revenues over time.

Read the entire op-ed, which is quite well-reasoned and, as a result, probably has a zero chance of being noticed in the current legislative session. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me rather pathetic that Texas legislators are considering basing something as important as public school finance on notoriously unreliable revenue generated from taxes on use of slot machines, consumption of cigarettes, and viewing of exotic dancers.

Eric Schlosser writes this interesting op-ed in the NY Times on the continued high costs associated with the criminalization of marijuana use, in which he observes:

This year the White House’s national antidrug media campaign will spend $170 million, working closely with the nonprofit Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The idea of a “drug-free America” may seem appealing. But it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously hopes to achieve that goal in a nation where millions of children are routinely given Ritalin, antidepressants are prescribed to cure shyness, and the pharmaceutical industry aggressively promotes pills to help middle-aged men have sex.

This earlier post reviewed a Shelby Steele op-ed on gay marriage as a civil rights issue. Now, Mr. Steele has posted this additional New Republic Online piece that responds to Andrew Sullivan’s criticism of his original piece. This is good and measured writing on a needlessly divisive issue. Review it with pleasure.

Tim Russert grilled John Kerry yesterday on his prior statements about Vietnam, and Kerry fumbled badly in answering the questions. Here is the transcript of the interview, via Powerline.

America’s most overrated movie director, Oliver Stone, has interviewed his old pal, Fidel Castro, for yet another mind-numbing documentary. The Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin has written this piece on the latest Stone-Castro lovefest, and he captures the absurdity of the moment wonderfully:

Having revived the Western with Deadwood and the gangster genre with The Sopranos, HBO is taking on science fiction/fantasy. Looking For Fidel, Oliver Stone’s latest round of pattycake with Fidel Castro, resembles nothing so much as one of those old the-land-that-time-forgot movies, with a couple of lumbering stop-action dinosaurs wrestling harmlessly in front of a crowd of natives that’s trying hard not to look bored while it waits for evolution to take its course.
Looking For Fidel came about after Castro cracked down on dissidents last May, just as an earlier Stone documentary, Comandante, was about to debut on HBO. The network, embarrassed to be screening a kissy-face hagiography at the same time Castro was carrying out assembly-line executions and clapping his political opponents in prison by the score, ordered Stone to go back to Cuba and interview Castro about the crackdown.
The result is this collision of two aging irrelevancies, an antiquarian dictator who has already outlived his ideology and a once-talented director whose face is as puffy and dissolute as his films.
Stone occasionally prods Castro with an uncomfortable question about free speech or secret trials. But followups are non-existent, and mostly Stone allows the dictator to stage his own little set pieces for the cameras. In one, Castro generously meets with some accused hijackers, who with straight faces say 30 years in prison would be a generous sentence.
In another, he walks among adoring throngs of Cubans, whose burbling praise for the Revolution was so wildly delusional (they claim, among other things, that Cuba is the only country in the world where blacks are permitted to own businesses) that I had to wonder if they weren’t a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the documentary.
At times, it’s hard to tell who is less lucid, Stone or Castro.
Stone, halting and distracted, seems to be reciting a list he learned 20 years ago as he ticks off the Latin American countries supposedly less democratic than Cuba — including Brazil and Chile, both now governed by socialists.
Castro, meanwhile, suffers through some seriously senior moments. What are we to make of this impromptu little speech? ”Today, with a computer and a dozen compact disks, you can hold all the literature ever written,” he tells Stone. “So many things have changed. I do not know why the world has been making so much progress to end up in this. I am so sorry for the younger generation.”
Other times, his meaning is all too clear. If Cuba is poor, Castro insists, it’s because of the U.S. embargo. If people are so desperate to leave Cuba that they’ll fling themselves into the ocean on inner tubes, it’s because the United States encourages them. If any Cubans oppose him, it’s because they’re on the CIA payroll. Anything and everything that’s wrong in Cuba can be traced back to a policy made in Washington, never in Havana.
If it were otherwise, Castro swears, he would quit at once: ”If you can prove to me that under the current circumstances in Cuba, that would be the best thing for the country and the most useful thing for this country, I would be willing to step aside.” Yes, comandante, we have a word for that in English. We call it elections.

Hat tip to Virginia Postrel for the link to this hilarious review.

This Journal Economic Committee report does a good job of concisely explaining the progressive nature of the United States’ income tax system. The report contains this classic observation:

Collectively, the bottom 40% of earners thus pays little or nothing in income taxes. (Like all taxpayers, however, they do face the time, frustration, and monetary costs of preparing their taxes and complying with the complex tax code.)

While I have no problem with the progressive nature of the American tax system, the complexity of the system continues to be one of those outrageous aspects of American life that seems impervious to change. The Republicans occasionally talk about tax simplification, but then do nothing meaningful about it. The Democrats don’t even talk about it. Granted, the politics of simplifying the American income tax system is fraught with interest group obstacles. However, there are few political initiatives that would do more to improve Americans’ perception of their government than income tax simplification.
Meanwhile, Penn psychology professor Jonathon Baron and USC professor Edward J. McCaffery have published “Masking Redistribution (or its Absence)”, the abstract of which provides as follows:

Research has shown that people vary widely in their support or opposition to progressive taxation. We argue here that the perception of progressiveness itself is affected by the nature of the tax system and by the way it is framed, or presented. Experiments conducted over the World-Wide Web and using within-subject design demonstrate that subjects suffer from a range of heuristics and biases in understanding and supporting progressive or redistributive taxation. After reviewing some prior results, we report three new studies. Two of them indicate that people do not sufficiently appreciate the reduction of progressiveness that results from the use of tax deductions to partly reimburse private expenditures. The third indicates that people do not fully appreciate the reduction in progressiveness that results from cuts in government services.

Hat tip to the Law and Economics blog for the link to this article.