Penalty Killer

The California Franchise Tax Board explains that if you meet certain legal requirements, you may qualify for relief of payment on all or part of your unpaid income tax balance. California's Franchise Tax Board will work with you to determine if you meet the requirements for relief. One approach is to complete and submit a "Request for Innocent Joint Filer Relief".

The Obama administration has revamped the terms of its emergency aid to troubled financial firms that could lead to the government nationalizing some of the country’s largest banks. With nationalized banks on the horizon, we speak to Robert Johnson, former chief economist of the Senate Banking Committee, and former investment banker turned journalist, Nomi Prins.

Last September in St. Paul, Ramsey County prosecutors formally charged eight members of the group RNC Welcoming Committee with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism. The criminal complaints reportedly do not allege that any of the defendants personally engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. Instead, authorities are seeking to hold them responsible for acts committed by other individuals during the RNC’s opening days. We speak to one of the defendants, Luce Guillen-Givins, and RNC 8 Attorney Jordan Kushner.

As President Obama is scheduled to announce his $50 billion foreclosure prevention plan today, we go to Minneapolis to speak with Cheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. The group is taking matters into its own hands and finding housing for homeless people in foreclosed and vacant homes. We also speak to Dwayne Cunningham, a homeless man who recently moved into a vacant home.

The name of John Yoo should go down in history as one who not only hated the foundations of our Constitution, but actively tried to undermine it.

Many of Yoo's deeply flawed, corrupt, and frankly anti-American rulings which defined the powers George W Bush had have been known for quite sometime.

Indeed, one of the more surprising and depressing facts of our time is that John Yoo continues to have a bully pulpit to spread his treasonous garbage.

Just last month, the Dean for Chapman University School of Law in Orange County defended his decision in bring John Yoo on board thusly:

In a letter to faculty and students last December, Law School Dean John Eastman said “Chapman University officials have received several notes of concern about my decision to offer Professor John Yoo a distinguished visitorship at the Chapman University School of Law.

“I would encourage those who object to Professor Yoo’s appointment here to read his scholarly work on the subject of executive power, and in particular the memos he authored while serving in the administration,” Dean Eastman wrote Dec. 18, 2008. “You will find that Yoo’s position, while disputed, is far from ignorant or disrespectful of the Constitution.”

One wonders whether Dean Eastman's opinion changed when he had a chance to read some more of John Yoo's legal memos where he determined that George W Bush has the power to create a dictatorship within the United States of America.

Clearly, Yoo had no respect for the Constitution or he would never have created such despicable and outrageous documents that transformed the Constitution under which we once lived to documents that supported the same tyranny for which our founding fathers fought against and died to repudiate.

The United Nations estimates that 215,000 Tamil civilians are trapped in northern Sri Lanka as intense fighting continues between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. We speak to Nirmala Rajasingham, founder of Sri Lanka Democracy Forum. In the early 1980s she was an active supporter of the LTTE and was the first woman to be arrested under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act. She later left the LTTE over their serious human rights abuses.

The District of Columbia has moved a step closer to getting a vote in the House of Representatives. On Thursday, the Senate voted 61-to-37 to expand the size of the House by two seats, giving Washington, D.C. a single seat and giving Utah a fourth seat. We host a debate between D.C. Vote’s Eugene Dewitt Kinlow, who calls the Senate’s vote as a historic victory, and Anise Jenkins of Stand Up! for Democracy in DC, who opposes the bill because it falls short of making Washington, D.C. the nation’s fifty-first state.

Every year has its buzzwords, the phrases that people say over and over again that come into the general vernacular that we use in daily life.

One of those buzzwords is “transparency.” The concept: Everyone sees what’s happening. Somewhere, generally on a website or in an office or somewhere, the public can find out what’s being spent by someone on somebody and for what.

It’s like letting everyone see the change in your pocket or the contents of your wallet, and while nobody wants their friends and neighbors or people with an Internet connection to know what’s in his/her wallet, it’s all different when it comes to government.

The transparency fans want virtually everything done by or for or with government to be accessible to everyone. That’s probably not a bad idea. It would be better if all that information was somehow given some context by…hey, how about reporters who work for newspapers which sell subscriptions to people who need some context for just what that transparent information shows, but that’s a different story.

But transparency probably makes sense. We don’t know whether the last time you went to a government office and saw coffee and cinnamon rolls if you would have thought to ask whether the rolls were paid for with your tax dollars or brought in by the guy who wants the contract to service the copying machines…someday, that’s probably going to be on-line. Just in case you care.

But it got a little different last week in the Kansas Legislature, this transparency business.

The House, probably in an extreme demonstration of transparency, did a publicly recorded (that’s rollcall for you insiders) vote on an amendment that would require many special interest groups to report to the state where they get their money for those attractive  ads and postcards that cite some candidate for public office for doing something, well, nice.

The campaign materials don’t specifically say “vote for” someone, or even mention whether the nice thing some candidate did is what the third party group is interested in…just that he/she is nice and ought to be thanked, though not specifically voted for…

That transparency in the House? It told the political organizations who voted for transparency and who didn’t. And it allowed those political organizations to target the transparency fans by lobbying to change their votes to prevent the public reporting of where their campaign money came from. Oh, it worked. The transparency bill was defeated the next day.

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