Pimps: It Takes One to Know One

Having tasted the bitter fruit of defeat on such compelling issues as same-sex marriage and American flag burning, The Greatest Deliberative Body in the World has now turned to -- not immigration reform, dealing with the health-care crisis or forcing the president to develop an Iraq war exit stragey -- but a law to tax pimping.

Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa, Republican, thinks that the sex trade could be stamped out by taxing pimps and prostitutes, then jailing them when they don’t pay.

The Senate Finance Committee is expected to vote Wednesday on the pimp tax. If passed, the provision will authorize at least $2 million toward the establishment of an office in the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation unit to prosecute sex workers for violations of tax laws.

A BURNING QUESTION

In the wake of the defeat of the flag burning amendment, I asked last week when was the last time that an American flag was burned.

Nobody seemed to know, although last month a drunk in West Haven, Connecticut ripped up two small flags, threatened a bystander with a racial slur and then chugged beer in front of police officers as they tried to arrest him.

Robert Justin Goldstein, a retired poly sci prof at Oakland University in Michigan and an expert on flag desecration, notes that in all of American history there have been a few hundred flag burnings, while other forms of desecration like ripping and defacing not covered in the failed amendment are just as common.

Ahem.