If you’ve tried and failed to wrap your mind around the “repeal” of the federal estate tax, here’s one reason it’s so complicated. Chicago attorney Susan Bart writes in the January issue of the Illinois Bar Journal, “Congress wanted to take credit for ‘repealing’ the ‘death tax,’ but did not want to make the spending cuts to replace the decreased revenues that would result. Thus we ended up with absurd legislation that, if not amended, will repeal the estate tax only for 2010.”
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Want to make it shorter? According to its spring catalog, the University of Wisconsin Press is publishing a 328-page book entitled The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750: The English Phallus, in which author Thomas King “proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men’s resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty.”
One region, one card. State representative Julie Hamos of Evanston has introduced legislation that would order the Regional Transportation Authority to get regional, by moving toward a single “smart card” that “would be usable for all 21 different fare structures to create seamless travel on buses, rapid transit, commuter rail and paratransit services throughout the region.” In a January 21 release Hamos noted that more than 100 agencies in Hong Kong have been linked with one card.
