Contrarian Pundit

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS admitted an error of more than $325 million in a high-stakes tax battle with Vi, an operator of upscale retirement communities.
The news struck me as odd, because the IRS somehow admitted error even though it continued to defend its underlying position—that so-called “entrance fees” paid [...]

Via Andrew Ross, these two Chronicle headlines tell you all you need to know about the Golden State:
(1) Budget proposal deals blow to California’s poor: on the governor’s plan to terminate welfare, education, the elderly, the disabled, and compassion.
(2) California No. 1 in spending on political ads: on our state’s “Gold Rush” of election spending, [...]

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums was for a pay cut before he was against it:
Mayor Ron Dellums told reporters last spring he would take a 10 percent pay cut as a small gesture to help Oakland balance its troubled budget.
But records show he never did.
Salary data obtained by the Oakland Tribune through a public records request [...]

The Hill is reporting that Senate Democrats have embraced a bold new Orwellian plan for immigration reform:
Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.
The proposal is one of [...]

An interesting tidbit from Garry Wills’ New York Times review of David Remnick’s biography of Barack Obama:
Later, when [Obama] taught at the University of Chicago Law School, he won the respect of conservative professors there, including Richard Posner — “especially,” as Posner tells Remnick, “after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at [...]

A follow-up to my post on the GOP’s Obama’s HCR victory …
Harper’s Magazine’s Scott Horton points us to an interesting comment from conservative writer and former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett, in his discussion of David Frum’s firing from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank:
Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel [...]

Our state representatives are hard at work fixing the budget:
This morning, the Assembly approved a ceremonial resolution turning the first week of March into “Cuss Free Week.” …
According to sponsors of the measure — inspired by a Southern California teen whose creation of a “no cussing” school club sparked an international movement — it’s more [...]