Three Way News
Your Source. For everything. Really.
Contributors
- Hammer
- Jambo
- Libby Mae
Current Poll
Recurring features
Hammer's Favorites
- Dobson v. Sponge-Bob
- Calvin, the nest egg
- Pat's predictions
- Bachmann spins Cupertino
- 205 atheists assume the bench
- Fox spins Oil for Food
- Fact check: highest taxed state
- Gen. Myers v. Reality
- Janice Rogers Brown
- Killing Field
- Kline hates Big Bird
- Vote Luca Brasi!
- Cornyn's Stalinist Supreme Court
- Rumsfeld's hidden metrics
Jambo's Favories
- Dolphin research updates
- We all shine on
- If you have to write...
- Columnist NY Times should have
- Truth about taxes
- Fourth of July
- Movie objects
- Lost in supermarket
- Dysfunctional Farmer Labor party
- Punks you hated
- Some preacher from east
- Winning issues
Friday, April 22, 2005
Empty Suit Thursday: The Straddle
Blogger was down last night, so your Empty Suit Thursday had to wait for today.
Running out the clock on DeLay
Does Smilin' Norm support the ethically bankrupt Tom DeLay? Who can tell?"I'm a member of the United States Senate ... so I'll leave it at that," Sen. Norm Coleman said Thursday.
Pressed, Coleman said, "I fully support him today, there's no question about that," adding, "You're innocent until proven guilty."
Coleman also said "there are some questions out there, they need to be dealt with ... everything should be laid on the table, whatever the accusations are."
Last rat off the sinking ship
Looks like Smilin' Norm understands two things. First, Republican primary voters want to take a flamethrower to the United Nations. Failing that, they'll settle for John Bolton, but nothing less. Second, never turn your back on a Bush:"We hear the same things, and we come to different conclusions," Coleman said. "In the end, I think the question is, why does the president want to appoint him? It is about reforming the U.N."
Smilin' Norm can straddle this issue, too. He supports Bolton and Voinovich:
Whistleblower protections
Coleman is co-sponsoring a bill to strengthen whistleblower protections. We need to protect people who risk their livelihoods to expose serious wrongdoing. I'd like to see some sort of prizes attached, but given how often the administration breaks the law, prizes would brankupt the federal government even faster than privatizing Social Security.Naivete of youth
This from the student newspaper of Luther College:Perhaps when it really comes down to it, we all need to change our focus. Had I taken the time to look for common ground, I would have known that Coleman and I agreed on these issues. Perhaps there are other as-of-yet undiscovered similarities that I should seek out and encourage action on now.
Help for farmers?
This is little more than a press release:As initially proposed, the quality loss program would not have fully compensated Minnesota wheat farmers for quality losses they sustained, leaving thousands of Minnesota farm families exposed to huge losses.
Refund anticipation loans
Coleman supports predatory lending by credit card companies. He opposes the much smaller predatory lending practiced by tax preparers:Last year, more than 4,000 low-income Minnesotans who obtained an RAL were hit with surcharges by such companies, for a total of $40,000, Coleman said. The interest rates they paid were far higher.
"In addition to being costly to consumers," the senator told about 40 people at the hearing, "my investigation has determined that these products are highly profitable -- generating over $200 million in revenue in 2004 for H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, the two largest tax preparers in the country."
The RAL process works this way: When a taxpayer is due a refund and wants an RAL, he or she can authorize the IRS to send the refund to the bank that's issuing the loan. The bank deducts the tax preparation charges and the application fee and sends that money to the tax preparer. The bank further deducts a fee for setting up a bank account, as well as a finance charge and any outstanding balance that might be due from a prior RAL. The taxpayer gets what's left.
The sweet release of perfect legislation
Smilin' Norm supports a plan to screw trial lawyers and help out Hallibutron (2001 story):The measure would compensate thousands of victims who now collect little or nothing on their claims because of the bankruptcies of 74 defendant companies, he said. The sickest victims could go to court if the fund fails to compensate them within nine months of the bill's enactment.
Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said he expects to vote for the bill. He noted that it also would benefit 3M, which has been swamped with asbestos claims over a face mask it sold for 25 years, and the St. Paul Cos., a major insurer. ...
It still faces tall hurdles. It drew opposition last week from insurers and several victims' groups, including one led by Susan Vento, the widow of Minnesota congressman Bruce Vento, who died of asbestos-related mesothelioma.
Asbestos plaintiffs' attorneys, who would all but lose their franchise under the legislation, have launched multifaceted lobbying efforts to try to kill the bill.
And the last word goes to...
Some French guy
Some French guy doesn't like Smilin' Norm, either:During the August 2004 Republican Convention in New York, Lévy visited a yeshiva in Brooklyn, N.Y., and encountered Coleman, R-Minn., and Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., pounding the pavement for President Bush's re-election campaign.
The "two strange characters'' -- as Lévy describes them in a cover story on his U.S. travels for the May 2005 issue of The Atlantic -- made a less-than-favorable impression on the writer, who called Coleman "a sort of blond yuppie with exceeding white teeth and the smile of a wolf."
More importantly, Coleman is less a wolf and more a hyena. Less predator, more scavenger. Less Blato, more Ed.
