House conservatives passed a bill last week that combined a minimum wage hike with a dramatic cut to the estate tax (aka the Paris Hilton Tax).

By my calculations, the minimum wage hike will increase the incomes of full-time, minimum wage workers by $84 a week, or about $4,368 a year. This would bring their income up to just over $15,000 a year (assuming 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year.)

By contrast, the heirs of multimillionaires would receive substantially more by way of benefits. Consider the heirs who stand to receive a $10 million fortune through married parents. Under the new proposed law they would receive a tax break of as much as $2.76 million (compared with the 2006 estate tax law.)

Put another way, the heirs of the $10 million estate would get a tax break worth as much as 183 years of the income of a full-time minimum wage earner.

– John Irons, Director of Tax and Budget Policy

Cross-posted at BudgetBlog. Check out BudgetBlog every day for real-time analysis and commentary on the federal budget.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “supported an effort last year to block Mr. Bolton’s nomination from gaining a full Senate vote, but he confirmed that he is considering changing his position,” the New York Sun reports.

The right-wing blogosphere is up in arms over a Rolling Stone article about prominent neo-conservative Michael Ledeen. The article, written by James Bamford, argues that Ledeen was using unreliable intelligence to push the Bush administration into military action against Iran. The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy and Mark Levin claim that the premise of Bramford’s article is flawed because Ledeen opposes military action against Iran:

Yet, anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael’s work knows that he has opposed military action against Iran “” notwithstanding that he was years ahead of most experts in accurately portraying Iran’s role as the terror master at the center of the jihadist network.

Ledeen makes a similar argument is his own response to Bramford, claiming “I’ve openly and consistently opposed military invasion.”

Actually, writing for the National Review on July 11, Ledeen said the United States should attack Iran:

But one thing I do know: I would insist that my soldiers have the right of “hot pursuit” into Iran and Syria, and I would order my armed forces to attack the terrorist training camps in those countries.

The National Review has every right to defend Ledeen. But they should at least make a modest effort to get their facts straight.

The Israeli army says its air force has struck southern Lebanon despite an agreement to halt air raids for 48 hours, the AP reports.

“of aerial activity over southern Lebanon after its bombing of a Lebanese village on Sunday that killed a number of children.” The AP reports, “It was not immediately clear how much Israeli military activity the suspension would end. [An Israeli] official said only that the agreement covered aircraft, which would not rule out the use of ground troops or ground-based weapons systems.”

Chris Matthews, at the conclusion of his Sunday morning talk show explored the impact of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Matthews said that Iraq used to be “a country which has fought revolutionary Iran for eight years to a bloody stand still.” Now, it’s a “Shia dominated ally of Iran.” Matthews concluded: “Our brave soldiers have fought, died and been dismembered in Iraq only to connect the disparate pieces of Shia radicalism into a frankenstein monster that has come to life right there on our TV screens.” Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel a trip to Beirut Sunday after an Israeli airstrike killed more than 50 people, mostly women and children, in the southern Lebanese town of Qana in the bloodiest attack since the hostilities began between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia. But she did not call for an immediate ceasefire. Rice will abandon her Middle East negotiations at least temporarily to return to Washington Monday.”

Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria ripped into Donald Rumsfeld this morning on ABC’s This Week. Watch it:

Transcript:

[If I were running against conservatives,] I would make up a campaign commercial almost entirely of Donald Rumsfeld’s press conferences, because the man is looking — I mean, it’s not just that he seems like a bad Secretary of [Defense]. He seems literally in a parallel universe and slightly deranged. If you listen to what he said last week about Iraq, he’s living in a different world, not a different country.

Zakaria may have been referencing Rumsfeld’s “glib” remarks last week when asked whether Iraq was getting “closer to a civil war“: Read more

in Lebanon. “Lebanon is facing an environmental crisis after an Israeli air strike on the Jiyeh power station, about 20km south of Beirut caused 10,000 tons of oil to spill into the Mediterranean sea.”