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BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - The centre-left party of former Slovak prime minister Robert Fico looks on course to win an outright parliamentary majority, giving him a mandate to deliver on pledges to tax the rich and cut the budget deficit, early election results showed on Sunday.

Results from 67 percent of districts showed Smer took 46.2 percent of the vote on Saturday, which would give it 86 out of the 150 seats and displace a centre-right cabinet that collapsed in October after a liberal party refused to back a plan to beef up a fund to help crisis-hit euro zone countries.

A government led by the pro-European, 47-year-old lawyer would please Slovakia's euro zone partners, who were upset by the outgoing coalition's refusal to contribute to the first bailout of Greece and the delaying of the rescue fund.

"I predict that Smer will have won the vote ... and will receive the mandate from the president to form a government," Fico said after exit polls earlier showed him far ahead of all rivals.

Fico's strong showing would knock his reformist rival Mikulas Dzurinda's centre-right SDKU out of power after the SDKU-led coalition fell apart after less than two years.

Damaged by allegations of graft, Dzurinda's party would win just 5.5 percent, according to the partial results, a third of what it won in the last election in 2010. But it was likely to avoid being knocked out of parliament altogether.

Another centre-right party, the Christian Democrats (KDH), had 8.8 percent in the partial results.

The partial results may be somewhat skewed in Fico's favour because larger urban districts, where Fico's Smer party has traditionally been weaker, tend to be counted later. But his lead seemed wide enough to secure an unprecedented victory for any single party in Slovakia's 19-year independent history.

Final results were expected to be released later on Sunday.

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Slovak left looks set for sweeping election victory

Published: Sunday, March 11, 2012 at 5:27 p.m. Last Modified: Sunday, March 11, 2012 at 5:27 p.m.

Recent tension between health care advocates and predominantly Catholic institutions about preventive health care measures that include insurance coverage for contraceptives has again highlighted conflicts involving religious freedom. It's not a new debate.

Religious organizations have sought and occasionally received exemptions from rules that apply to others. Courts have examined religious exemption clashes case by case; for example, protecting the ability of churches to make core religious decisions, but denying broader claimed exemptions from health and safety regulations.

Lawyers, scholars and civil libertarians have differed on how to resolve conflicts between sometimes competing values: an individual's right to exercise religious expression free of government regulation; the need to uniformly enforce neutral rules on important issues like rules barring employment discrimination, the obligation of government not to interfere in the core mission of religious institutions and the need to safeguard the religious freedom of those of one religious faith (or no religious faith) from being subjected to the rules of others' faith. The government's efforts to ensure that all women have access to contraceptives as part of the national health care law is creating conflict with the Catholic Church and some religiously affiliated organizations. The government's current plan is to require that insurance companies provide coverage for contraceptives for women not only to regulate fertility but that doctors also prescribe to treat a variety of medical conditions. (This includes women whose religious principles do not bar the use of contraceptives.)

But this most recent flare-up is especially troubling in Florida. Here, some of the same groups that are demanding exemption, based on religious freedom, from parts of the national health care plan are, at the same time, asking voters to give them long-forbidden access to tax dollars to help fund their religious activities.

This radical departure from Florida's 125-year constitutional tradition of "no aid" to religious institutions will appear as proposed Amendment 8 on November's ballot, written by the Legislature in a cleverly deceptive way that is designed to seduce voters into supporting "religious freedom." On closer inspection, "religious freedom" means the "freedom" to get access to tax dollars.

These Florida groups want to exempt themselves from some government laws if those laws conflict with their religious practices, while insisting that government fund those very same religious practices. They want the money but not the rules.

That position seems a bit hypocritical. It is also short-sighted. Many defenders of religious liberty and far-sighted faith leaders oppose government funding of religion in part because government money comes with government strings. It's naive to think that government will not require recipients of public funds, including religiously affiliated institutions, to account for how those funds are spent.

By asking to be let out of rules that apply to everyone else, churches also are creating a slippery slope. If churches can opt out of policies that infringe on their beliefs, taxpayers might claim the right to opt out of paying taxes used for religious practices they don't support. They also may want to opt out of having to pay taxes for even nonreligious uses they disagree with or that violate their conscience, such as funding wars or providing foreign aid.

But we can't. Taxes aren't optional.

Link:
Having it both ways on ‘religious freedom'

UPDATE: The Senate passed the bill 39-1. It now heads to Gov. Rick Scott.

Tax changes designed to help Verizon Communications and other telecom companies suddenly seem poised to pass on the final day of session, just two weeks after the measure appeared to stall.

At 7:42 p.m. last night, an amendment was filed to SB 1060 that would restore a controversial provision to the legislation, which deals with the states communications services tax.

Specifically, the language would give telecom companies more freedom to bundle together items that are subject to the CST (such as phone service) with items that they are not (such as home-security monitoring) into a combined package with one price for consumers. But they would only have to calculate taxes based on the hidden prices of the items that are subject to the tax.

Telecom companies say the legislation would ensure that they and their customers dont wind up being unfairly taxed on products that were never meant to be included under communications services and they say allowing them to package it all for a single price is a convenience for customers. But some tax-policy experts say the legislation creates a loophole through which companies will be able to deflate their tax bills, by minimizing the price of anything that is subject to the CST and maximizing the price of anything that is not.

State economists have struggled to understand the magnitude of the bundling provision, estimating it would cost the state and local governments a minimum of $35 million a year. A separate analysis by the Department of Revenue estimated the hit could be more than $300 million a year. The telecom industry disputes the estimates.

In addition to Verizon, Comcast Corp., AT&T and CenturyLink, among others, have been lobbying for the bill.

Two weeks ago, Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, a Fort Lauderdale Republican who is sponsoring the bill, rewrote the legislation to take out all substantive changes and instead order only a study committee to evaluate the CST and recommend ways to modernize it before next years session. The amendment she filed last night would keep that committee, but also restore the bundling language.

The House bill (HB 809) is sponsored by Rep. Jamie Grant, a Tampa Republican, and it passed that chamber last month. The telecom industry has also worked on the issue with Rep. Chris Dorworth, the Lake Mary Republican tentatively in line to become House speaker after the 2014 elections.

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Tax changes for telecoms look likely to pass the Senate

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum's main message to Republican voters in Huntsville Thursday was simple. "Obamacare is, in fact, the death knell for freedom, and that's why it must be repealed," Santorum told a large crowd at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center five days before the state's GOP primary. He referred to the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama in 2010.

Santorum said the law is the "linchpin, if you will, that would tip the scales toward a country that would no longer be free." Mitt Romney, the GOP front-runner who signed a similar health care law while governor of Massachusetts, "is singularly the worst person to make that case," Santorum said.

Praising what he said was the Founders' vision of a country with limited government and maximum freedom, Santorum said, "We have a president who believes in a country that is antithetical to that country.

"He takes more and more freedom from you, takes more and more money from you and believes, as he's doing so, that he's making your life better," Santorum said. Instead, it's "a welfare state he's growing here in America."

Defeating Obama makes the 2012 election the most important "maybe in the history of this country," Santorum said.

Speaking to a friendly crowd about twice as large as the 400-500 drawn by Newt Gingrich two days earlier in the same place, Santorum did touch on one hot social issue. Human rights don't come from the U.S. Constitution, Santorum said, but from "the dignity of being created by a loving God.

"We believe ... in the dignity of all human life, the ability of every person in America, as imperfect as we are, to continue to refine and perfect ourselves to recognize the dignity of all human life," Santorum continued, "although we still fall short in a very critical area, and that is life in the womb."

The crowd applauded loudly when he mentioned that his family home-schooled their seven children and also when he promised to balance the budget in five years, but not cut defense spending and to "invest in the technology we see in Huntsville."

"I support Paul Ryan's budget," Santorum said, referring to the Republican congressman's plan that would, among other things, repeal the health care law, cut taxes on the highest-income individuals and corporations while closing tax loopholes, turn Medicaid into a federal block-grant program, and replace Medicare with private insurance subsidized by the government.

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Santorum says health care law 'death knell for freedom'

OPINION:Media freedoms are absolutely essential to the long-term health of any democracy. New Zealand is no exception.

The production order used by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) against the National Business Review demanded that NBR give up their records, including sources, of the NBR inquiry into the South Canterbury collapse.

That collapse caused hundreds of millions of dollars of cost to tax payers. The huge losses led to allegations of improper behaviour by South Canterbury Finance.

Serious questions were also raised about incompetence of the Government and its Ministry (the Treasury).

They allowed the size of that risk to grow by hundreds of millions after the Crown guarantee was granted, and rejected alternative ways of solving the problem which may have saved tens if not hundreds of millions.

NBR was right to inquire into what had gone wrong. The SFO interference in the NBR proved beyond doubt that the SFO powers are excessive and undermine the important role of a free media.

The SFO issued that order against the NBR with no outside oversight.

The excessive powers of the SFO mean that they do not have to get a warrant from a judge. Records they take are kept by the SFO. Refusal by the media to comply with an order from the SFO put the journalist and the NBR automatically in breach of the law, and at risk of criminal prosecution and fines. Just for protecting their source!

In contrast the similar power proposed for police investigating of even more pernicious organised crime requires the police to get a warrant from a Judge, which may be declined.

For the police any disputed records taken are to be secured and held by the High Court (not the SFO or the police). A High Court judge then decides whether the protection of media freedom provided for in the Evidence Act means the medias records and sources should remain confidential.

Link:
Media freedom and independence under threat