''The income tax is not the monster under the bed that it's made out to be,'' said Erik Cole, executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action, a government watchdog group that is a member of TFT.

w1ld: isn't more tax a monster?

Study says 60% would pay less under income tax

NEW YORK-This is fair to say: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a 55-year-old Pashtun warlord, is a bad man. Evil, even. "What we're talking about here is someone at the absolute margin of violence in Afghan society-in his own way someone as extreme as Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)," Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview. "He has a history that has proved about as conclusively as anyone can that this is a violent, vicious man who deserves to be a target."

A target of what? A target of whom? Hang tight through the next 124 words:

George W a gangsta?

STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.

It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.

First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.

If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.

The Case for the Empire

As Fox's hit espionage thriller 24 draws to a close, the theory that the good guys use Macintosh computers while the bad guys use Windows PCs appears to be reinforced.

24's Good Guys Do Use Macs

SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 — Uncle Sam is wearing a Santa cap this year, doling out billions in special tax rebates to select corporate citizens. Thanks to a law Congress passed this spring, Cisco is in line to get around $350 million, United Airlines $1.2 billion and CNF Inc. roughly $337 million. And those are just a few examples.
UNDER THE NEW LAW — H.R. 3090, a.k.a “the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002” — companies that posted a net loss for fiscal year 2001, but were profitable in previous years, can dig back as far as their 1996 tax returns and apply 2001 losses against income and reduce taxes accordingly. Previously, companies could only apply losses two years back.
Individual companies’ tax records are sealed, but their published financial information shows the benefits are potentially enormous.
For example, San Jose-based Cisco posted a $874 million net loss before taxes for 2001. Under the new law, it can subtract that from its $1.46 billion net income for 1996, reducing it to $590.8 million.

New law gives firms huge tax break

After three years of haggling over the state budget and taxes, the House may vote today on whether it wants a revamped approach to the state sales tax, a 4.5% flat-rate state income tax, or none of the above.

Either tax bill would produce $1 billion-plus, the amount House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh says is necessary to adequately fund state government.

New services tax proposal proffered

Nassim Taleb offers an argument about why we lose money in his controversial book Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life. According to him, many traders believe they rule the roost simply because they were in the right place with the right strategy for that moment in history. Unfortunately, these so-called experts wash out as soon as times change because their foolproof strategies crash and burn.

Does Taleb's argument sound familiar to you? It zeroes in on all the bull market genius that's evaporated since the burst of the bubble. So why do you still chase stocks in the same way you did back then? The obvious answer is that you want to believe those days are returning, and you're willing to sacrifice hard-earned cash over and over again to make that happen.

This is 2002, and we are right in the middle of the worst bear market since the Great Depression.

Sun Microsystems is working hard to ensure that Linux and Solaris play well together.
The server seller is continuing its effort to integrate Linux interfaces into its Solaris operating system, a move that would make it easier to bring programs based on the Linux operating system to Solaris machines. But Sun has also begun work to bring Solaris features to Linux, said Vivek Mehra, vice president and general manager of Sun's Cobalt group.

The work indicates that Sun's push to embrace Linux is becoming more than just a publicity stunt. For years, Sun dismissed Linux as an inferior relation to Solaris, but the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company this year bowed to market forces and announced full-fledged Linux support.

Sun works to converge Linux, Solaris

NEW YORK, May 13 (Reuters) - Standard & Poor's on Monday removed WorldCom Group (NasdaqNM:WCOM - News) and US Airways Inc. (NYSE:U - News) from its benchmark S&P 500 index, saying shares in the two struggling companies were no longer representative of their industries.

The change removed the two worst-performing shares in two badly battered industries -- telecommunications and airlines -- from the closely followed S&P 500 index.

WCOM is sinking fast...next will be NASDAQ delisting

WorldCom, US Airways dropped from S&P 500 index

WASHINGTON, May 13 — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a key part of the government’s effort to give Americans choices for local telephone service. The ruling keeps costs low for companies that want to get into a market and could eventually lead to cheaper service for consumers.

High court clears local phone plan