It rhymes with “reason.”

This story comes is accompanied by yet another example of Democrat site-scrubbing (two previous ones on unrelated matters within the past week are here and here). For the record, here’s what was scrubbed (bold is mine):

Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president’s foreign and national security policy.

The bolded text is a textbook definition of the word that rhymes with “reason.”

Bryan at Hot Air says it best for those who wish to read posts rated PG-13 or cleaner. Many others (here and here for starters — consider yourself warned) are not so sparing in their language.

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UPDATE: Wizblog is on it, as is Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion.

UPDATE 2, Feb. 15: At OpinionJournal.com –

Awaiting the Dishonor Roll
Congress “supports the troops” while emboldening the enemy.

….. A newly confirmed commander is about to lead 20,000 American soldiers on a dangerous and difficult mission to secure Baghdad, risking their lives for their country. And the message their elected Representatives will send them off to battle with is a vote declaring their inevitable defeat.

UPDATE 3, Feb. 15: A former Gore adviser understands what is at stake (HT Instapundit).

UPDATE 4, Feb. 15: Taranto at Best of the Web nails it –

So the idea is to keep the troops in harm’s way but take all steps possible to prevent them from prevailing, in the hope that the Democrats will benefit politically from American defeat.

You don’t have to agree with the president’s policies to find this appalling. If Murtha thinks he has a better way, let him run for president next year and make the case. To pursue a strategy of subversion instead is cowardly and despicable.

Leftists have officially given lie to any conceivable claim that they “support the troops.”

UPDATE 5, Feb. 15: Barnett at Hewitt — “The Cat’s out of the Bag”

UPDATE 6, Feb. 16: Ray Robison at American Thinker says it’s about De-Legitimizing the Troops. Yes, it is.

UPDATE, 7, Feb. 17: Dictionary Meets Reality — Here’s something from February 6 by the AP’s David Espo that MoveCongress.org can’t purge (HT Gateway Pundit), though AP might decide to at some point –

Apart from legislation, Democrats have embarked on an effort to undermine public support for the war by holding numerous hearings.

The News Buckit makes the important distinction here: “Of course up until this point, the pat claim was that Democrats were acting according to public discontent, not acting to cultivate it.” It’s been about “cultivation” from the very start.

Newshound’s 61st on Ohio Politics is here.

Boring Made Dull’s 33rd on Econ and Social Policy is here.

Nicely done by MSNBC’s Herb Weisbaum. Here are his Ten Commandments, most of which are meant to help people avoid getting taken in by scams. I’m only presenting the commandments, so you’ll have to go to the link for details:

1. Thou shalt not assume.
2. Thou shalt get all promises in writing.
3. Thou shalt do thy homework before making a major purchase.
4. Thou shalt not be penny wise and pound foolish.
5. Thou shalt not hire a contractor who just shows up at the door.
6. Thou shalt not be pressured into buying.
7. Thou shalt not assume a transaction can be undone.
8. Thou shalt not buy a used car without an inspection.
9. Thou shalt guard all they personal information.
10. Thou shalt be more skeptical.

Weisbaum’s wrap, though is worth noting here:

With most scams the warning signs are there, we just tend to ignore them. We let greed and gullibility replace common sense. Don’t give your hard-earned money to a con artist.

Remember these rules:
- You can’t win a contest or lottery you didn’t enter — even if the prize winning notice says you did.
- If it’s a prize, it’s yours for free. You don’t have pay any money for anything or give out your credit card number.
- You can’t make lots of money doing virtually no work on a part time basis.
- You never have to pay money up front for a credit card or loan.
- No one can “guarantee” you a credit card despite your credit history.

The Cincinnati Business Courier, the area’s local weekly business newspaper, had a front-page feature on Greater Cincinnati’s growing Hispanic community. Words/terms used: “isolated,” “suspicion,” “feeling like an outsider,” “falling behind on inclusion,” “chill,” “friction,” “prejudice.”

It’s impossible to escape the fact that indigenous legal Hispanic immigrants and recent legal Hispanic arrivals have been brutally hurt by the permissiveness of our government in allowing illegal Hispanics to flood in, especially those of the criminal variety (see here and here for two local examples; the national involvement of illegal immigrants in identity theft is covered here). This has unfairly affected the perception of all Hispanics; yet the same people who don’t understand why the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” matters now accuse those who do understand, and are very concerned about it, of bigotry. Hogwash — this country owed it to Hispanics who played by the rules to keep those who don’t belong here out. But instead our leaders turned their backs on them and insultingly dressed up their own sanctioning of illegal activity as “diversity.” I care a hell of a lot more about the welfare of those who play by the rules than I do about whether some drunk-on-PC ignoramus calls me a bigot.

One gentleman quoted in the article says he believes there may be as many as 65,000 - 75,000 illegal immigrants in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky alone, with the vast majority of them being Hispanic. If he is correct (and my instincts are that if he’s wrong, it’s not by much), that would be well over twice the number here legally cited elsewhere in the article (28,628 in 2005, per the Census Bureau). Again if this illegal-to-legal proportion is correct or close to it, a presumption in the absence of evidence to the contrary that a given Hispanic person seen in Greater Cincinnati is here illegally can be described in two words: Probably Correct.

The judgment (again in the absence of contrary evidence) is not disputable. And it is not the presumers’ fault that they must sometime make that judgment. But it is a real shame. We can thank the illegal-immigration permissives of the past 20 years for creating the tense, divided situation that has devolved to the terms described in the first paragraph. A pox on them, from the past two Presidents of the United States, to most of the congressmen and senators of both parties during that time, to the country’s leading newspapers, on down.

How bad is it? On Saturday, I heard the current House Minority Leader, supposedly a leading light in the secure-the-borders-first agenda, tell a group of high school students during an informal Q&A that during the past few years — not few months, which is conceivably possible — we’ve been doing a better job of controlling the borders now than we have in 20 years. While he may have been referring to legislation instead of actual enforcement efforts, I still can’t help but thinking — “Baloney, John.”

A truly harebrained idea (HT Volokh).

You can direct that your tax refund be directly sent to one or more tax-deferred accounts before you get your hands on it:

The federal government is making it simpler for us to save for retirement: if you’re due a refund on your 2006 tax return, you can instruct the IRS to send all or part of this amount directly to your IRA.

Starting this year, you can tell the IRS to split your refund and send it to up to three different accounts by attaching Form 8888 , “Direct Deposit of Refund to More Than One Account,” to your tax return.* Potential accounts eligible for direct deposit include checking and savings accounts, a Health Savings Account, Coverdell Education Savings Account, and, of course, your IRA.

(But, a word to the wise — Ed.) In the case of IRA contributions, it’s up to you to verify that your IRA custodian has credited the deposit to the correct year. The IRS will not provide any information about this.

Follow-up idea: If you are getting a big refund, that means you lent Uncle Sam the money for a year interest-free, and could have had that money working for you; of course, you might have spent it if you’d had it, which is why tools like CYMnow.com exist, and naturally need to be combined with willpower, to help prevent that. You should increase the withholding allowances you claim with your employer to avoid putting in too much from this point forward. The IRS has a Withholding Calculator that may help, and it also has Publication 919 (a PDF, not linked; got www.irs.gov to find), which is supposed to help you slog your way through the process.

But, IF (emphasis IF) your income and tax situation in 2006 (marital status, number of children, home owned, etc.) aren’t going to change much or at all during 2007, it may be best to download the actual withholding tables from IRS Employer Circular E (first item listed at this search; actual document is a PDF) to see exactly what will happen to your withholding each pay period with each additional exemption you claim. There are tables for almost all filing statuses and pay frequencies.

Just say this (link is to KeepMedia version containing about 30% of the article; original Forbes link requiring subscription is here):

Men think hard work determines success. Women think it’s luck. Maybe that’s why women aren’t getting to the top.

Ah, ah, ah — Don’t come after me. I didn’t say it. Maura O’Neill (Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley’s HAAS School of Business and Chairman of Cafe Scribe, a Company that Converts Textbooks into a Searchable Digital Format) did. That would be Maura O’Neill, female.

You can attempt to strike up a polite conversation on this matter with Ms. O’Neill by starting here, though I don’t see a direct e-mail contact on the page.

The way Michigan’s governor instinctively wants to tax, like the French Socialist candidate noted in the previous post, she must be (HT Boring Made Dull):

Michigan residents would pay a 2 percent sales tax starting June 1 on everything from haircuts to movie tickets and legal fees under a proposal by Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

The proposal for a new sales tax on services announced Wednesday would cost a family of four with the median income of $57,300 about $65 more a year, according to administration officials who briefed reporters but would not allow their names to be used because the official announcement was to come Thursday.

The new tax would not be charged on health care services and educational services. No sales tax would be charged on child care, and government and school purchases would be exempt from the tax on services. Tickets to college sporting events would be exempt from the tax, but not those for professional sporting events.

The tax also would be tacked onto business-to-business services, which some had said should be exempt from such a tax.

It’s also obvious from the article that Granholm believes in tax first, cut spending (maybe, if at all) later.

This will hasten the decline of the Great Lakes State, which has already been left out of the economic growth almost all of the rest of the USA has been experiencing.

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UPDATE: There’s at least a partial explanation — Wiki says that Granholm has a degree in French.

Possibly (HT Open Market Blog), in the form of Ms. Ségolène Royal:

A substantial part of her speech was dedicated to social and economic issues, on which Royal took a hard-left line.

“The unfettered rein of financial profit is intolerable for the general interest,” she said. “You told me simple truths. You told me you wanted fewer income inequalities. You told me you wanted to tax capital more than labor. We will do that reform.”

Royal said she would tax companies in relation to what share of their profits is reinvested in equipment and jobs, and what portion is paid to shareholders. She also promised to abolish a flexible work contract for small companies and hold a national conference in June on how to increase salaries.

If Ms. Royal gets enough votes to garner real power, there will probably be another kind of vote that will accelerate. That would be the ongoing voting being done by entrepreneurs and the country’s more productive people — who are voting with their feet.

From Community Press:

MASON - This Valentine’s Day servicemembers in Iraq will get special greetings from Mason.

Mason Middle School, to be exact.

Students at Mason Middle School made and mailed some 600 Valentine’s Day cards to the men and women serving in Iraq as a way of thanking them for their sacrifices and to let them know they are remembered back home.

The project to send the cards was organized by the student council at the school.

Liberty Tax Service in Mason offered materials and postage, free of charge, for the pink paper, handmade cards.

Student Karen Martinez, who thought of the idea to brighten up Feb. 14 for the soldiers serving in the war zone, said she was happy about how her peers came together to help out.

“I feel really proud that our school had a chance to show how much we care,” said Martinez.

Student Alyssa Marsteller hoped that the sentiments shown by those at the middle school will help vindicate the work of the soldiers, in their minds.

“Maybe they’ll think, ‘These people actually do care. This is what we’re fighting for,’” said Marsteller.

A sense of appreciation was on the minds of other students, too.

“We’re proud to have them out there defending our freedom and rights,” said Abraham Muhlbaum.

Helping others close to home - and now far away - is regular business for the student council, according to its teacher adviser Kim Shaffer.

“They’re amazing. We have a great group of hard-working kids,” Shaffer said.

“They’re always looking to make a difference.”