Republicans in the Missouri legislature are schedule to begin impeachment proceedings against Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon on Wednesday because he has said that same-sex couples could file state returns jointly, allowing them to receive the same tax breaks as straight couples.

Although Missouri does not allow same-sex couples to marry within the state, Nixon announced last year that couples who were married out of state could file jointly. The governor argued that because Missouri's tax system was so closely linked to the federal system, it made sense to follow federal guidelines.

According to Ituit's TurboTax tips, filing jointly allows married couples to receive one of the largest standard deductions possible.

"On the other hand, couples who file separately receive few tax considerations. Separate returns may give you a higher tax with a higher tax rate. The standard deduction for separate filers is far lower than that offered to joint filers," Intuit noted.

For more than a century, May 1 has been celebrated as International Workers' Day. It's a national holiday in more than eighty countries. But here in the land of the free, May 1 has been officially declared "Loyalty Day" by President Obama. It's a day "for the reaffirmation of loyalty" - not to the international working class, but to the United States of America.

Obama isn't the first president to declare May 1 Loyalty Day - that was President Eisenhower, in 1959, after Congress made it an official holiday in the fall of 1958. Loyalty Day, the history books explain, was "intended to replace" May Day. Every president since Ike has issued an official Loyalty Day proclamation for May 1.

The presidential proclamation always calls on people to "display the flag." In case you were wondering, that's the stars and stripes, not the red flag. Especially in the fifties, if you didn't display the stars and stripes on Loyalty Day, your neighbors might conclude that you were some kind of red.

During the 1930s and 1940s, May Day parades in New York City involved hundreds of thousands of people. Labor unions, Communist and Socialist parties, and left-wing fraternal and youth groups would march down Fifth Avenue and end up at Union Square for stirring speeches on class solidarity.

Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters said the comparisons between present-day Israel and Nazi Germany in the 1930s were "crushingly obvious."

Waters, a longtime critic of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, told CounterPunch magazine on Saturday that the powerful "Israeli propaganda machine" had influenced U.S. policy in the region and shaped the mainstream media narrative.

"The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock 'n' roll, as they say," Waters said.

He has called on musicians to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, which he also compared to ethnic cleansing and South African apartheid.

After a few days of extended verbal foreplay, it was only a matter of time before Ukraine finally snapped and resumed a military operation to regain the lost cities in the east, especially once the warmongering IMF made it explicitly clear that should Ukraine lose control of pro-Russian controlled cities the $17 billion bailout package would be lost too. Sure enough, early this morning Kiev launched a military operation to regain control of the pro-Russian separatist stronghold of Slovyansk, overrunning numerous roadblocks and surrounding the city, officials said, but meeting stiff resistance from militants who managed to shoot down at least one helicopter.

© Alan Porritt/AAP

Brendan O'Neill meets the Voltaire-inspired attorney general of Australia

Ever since Captain Cook set foot here, Australia's exotic creatures have wowed the rest of the world. Mammals that lay eggs! Marsupials that hop! Well today, Australia contains what must surely count as the most exotic, rarely sighted creature of the twenty-first century: a politician who believes in freedom of speech. Extinct in Europe, seriously endangered in America, this most hunted of the modern era's political beasts still survives Down Under, and it goes by the name of George Brandis.

'I'm a John Stuart Mill man', Brandis tells me, over too much booze and amazing food at one of Sydney's oldest political haunts, which is called - wait for it - Machiavelli's. Brandis is the senator for Queensland for the ruling right-wing Liberal Party, a key cog in the government of Liberal PM Tony Abbott, and, most importantly, the attorney general of Australia. This basically means he's in charge of Australian law and justice. And since taking office with the election of Abbott in 2013, Brandis has doggedly, and often controversially, devoted himself to reforming the section of the Oz Racial Discrimination Act that forbids people from 'offending, insulting or humiliating' a person or group on the basis of their racial or ethnic origins. Why has he done this? Why is he so determined to rip up restrictions on insulting ethnic minorities? Why has he allowed himself to be branded by many on the Australian left as a 'friend of bigots' who is using his power to help 'unleash Australia's racists'?

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators' demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry's eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year's disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.

Russia will not engage in political bargaining with the Ukrainian government over its decision to cut off Crimea's water supply, Russian natural resources minister Sergey Donskoy said.

"The situation clearly shows that Kiev is unfriendly towards the people of Crimea. We're not surprised by this as recent developments characterize the regime in Kiev as anti-popular," Donskoy said, as quoted by Itar-Tass news agency.

Moscow will not take part in political bargaining because "it's the ordinary people who suffer" from water shortages, the minister said as he arrived in the city of Sevastopol.

Donskoy stressed that Crimea's agricultural industry is most affected in the current situation, but added that "we'll find ways to compensate the water demands."

"In Crimea, a lot of water is wasted. It's dumped into the sea. There's no water recycling in place, which would enable us to use water for technical needs after preliminary processing," he said.

The minister added that Crimea's water supply system is in rather bad shape after decades of Ukrainian rule.

Secretary of State Kerry gets to say whatever half-truth or fiction comes into his head about Syria, Russia or other "designated villains," but when he cites the inconvenient truth of Israeli "apartheid," he must scramble as fast as he can to retract and apologize.

It is a mark of how upside-down Official Washington has become over facts and evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry, who has developed a reputation for making false and misleading statements about Syria and Russia, rushes to apologize when he speaks the truth about the danger from Israeli "apartheid."

After public disclosure that he had said in a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state," Kerry hastily apologized for his transgression, expressing his undying support for Israel and engaging in self-flagellation over his word choice.

Secretary of State John Kerry speaking to the AIPAC conference on March 3, 2014.

"For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn't just speak words in support of Israel," Mr. Kerry said in his statement. "I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight."

He then sought to clarify his position on the A-word: "First, Israel is a vibrant democracy and I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid state or that it intends to become one. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that without a shred of doubt."

Kerry added: "If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution."

Kerry scurried to make this apology after his remark was reported by The Daily Beast and condemned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which said: "Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate."

The only problem with AIPAC's umbrage - and with Kerry's groveling - is that Israel has moved decisively in the direction of becoming an apartheid state in which Palestinians are isolated into circumscribed areas, often behind walls, and are tightly restricted in their movements, even as Israel continues to expand settlements into Palestinian territories.

According to a new report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, more than 2,800 IRS employees facing disciplinary actions received more than $2.8 million in monetary bonuses.

In addition to the millions in bonuses, those IRS employees also received 27,000 worth of additional time-off bonuses and more than 175 quality step increases (which allows employees to receive promotions faster, according to the Office of Personnel Management). The report, written by J. Russell George, looked at a period between October 1, 2010 and December 31, 2012.

Of those employees with disciplinary actions during the time period, more than 1,100 of them with "substantiated Federal tax compliance problems" received over $1 million in cash awards, $250,000 in time-off awards and 69 quality step increase awards within the same year the IRS proved the employees hadn't paid their taxes.

Earnest moralists lament Americans' distrust of government. What really is regrettable is that government does much to earn distrust, as Terry Dehko, 70, and his daughter Sandy Thomas, 41, understand.

Terry, who came to Michigan from Iraq in 1970, soon did what immigrants often do: He went into business, buying Schott's Supermarket in Fraser, Mich., where he still works six days a week. The Internal Revenue Service, a tentacle of a government that spent $3.5 trillion in 2013, tried to steal more than $35,000 from Terry and Sandy that year.

Sandy, a mother of four, has a master's degree in urban planning but has worked in the store off and on since she was 12. She remembers, "They just walked into the store" and announced that they had emptied the store's bank account. The IRS agents believed, or pretended to believe, that Terry and Sandy were or conceivably could be - which is sufficient for the IRS - conducting a criminal enterprise when not selling groceries.

What pattern of behavior supposedly aroused the suspicions of a federal government that is ignorant of how small businesses function? Terry and Sandy regularly make deposits of less than $10,000 in the bank across the street. Federal law, aimed primarily at money laundering by drug dealers, requires banks to report cash deposits of more than $10,000. It also makes it illegal to "structure" deposits to evade such reporting.

Because 35 percent of Schott's Supermarket's receipts are in cash, Terry and Sandy make frequent trips to the bank to avoid tempting actual criminals by having large sums at the store. Besides, their insurance policy covers no cash loss in excess of $10,000.

In 2010 and 2012, IRS agents visited the store and examined Terry's and Sandy's conduct. In 2012, the IRS notified them that it identified "no violations" of banking laws. But on Jan. 22, 2013, Terry and Sandy discovered that the IRS had obtained a secret warrant and emptied the store's bank account. Sandy says that if the IRS had acted "the day before, there would have been only about $2,000 in the account." Should we trust that today's IRS was just lucky in its timing?