Are you familiar with the “use” tax? Michigan has one. I venture to guess that most other states do, too. The basic idea is, that you have to pay Michigan sales tax on any item that you purchase out of state and plan to use in the state. So for example, the $500 I spend on a rental car in Seattle, WA is not taxable in Michigan. But the $500 snowboard that I bought from a vendor in Colorado, and had shipped to my house in Michigan, is. I’ve bought alot of things online. And I do so for various reasons – not the least of which is to avoid paying sales tax. Face it, when a vendor is offering free shipping on your … Read entire article »

Apparently, $300,000 USD. For those of us who are appalled by some many of the broad-reaching, reactionary measures put into play in this post-9/11 America, the New York Times is reporting a nice little tale of one man, wrongly imprisoned detained for the color of his skin, who has finally received some semblance of justice. True to form, however, and rejecting even a modicum of accountability: “The government had argued that the lawsuits should be dismissed without testimony because the extraordinary circumstances of the terror attacks justified extraordinary measures to confine noncitizens who fell under suspicion, and because top officials need governmental immunity to combat future threats to national security without fear of being sued.” “This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government … Read entire article »

According to Penn Jillette tonight, on his radio broadcast which we get in Detroit on Free FM (97.1 FM) what will it take to get a Libertarian majority? Simple enough: You need to convince the gun guys that the drug guys are OK, and you need to convince the drug guys that the gun guys are OK. And we can do that by spreading the idea of Freedom. Just a little something to think about – the gun guys, of course, draw largely from the political right, and the drug guys are largely the political left. Take a good chunk from both sides… … Read entire article »