Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare;
To-morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Mary Kelly cast her vote early — on January 29^th, 2003. She went to Shannon Airport in Ireland, which the U.S. was using to ferry troops and supplies to where they would begin the invasion of Iraq, and she took an axe to a U.S. Navy 737, doing, in the Navy’s opinion, 1.5 million dollars worth of damage to the aircraft.

Arrested and taken to court, her first trial ended in a hung jury. The judge then changed the rules so she could not present evidence about the war in Iraq to support her claim to be acting to prevent worse crimes there. She was convicted on a 10-2 jury verdict last Thursday.

Her site lists a number of other votes:

• October 2002 — Eoin Dubsky sets a fine example by spray-painting anti-war slogans on a US Hercules transporter at Shannon, stopping it for a week
• February 2003 — the Pitstop Ploughshares 5 extensively disarm a US warplane at Shannon
• February 2003 — longtime peace activist Ulla Roder single-handedly rips an RAF Tornado fighter jet into little bits!
• March 2003 — the Fairford Five peace activists disable 35 trucks for refuelling B-52 bombers at Fairford US military airbase in England
• April 2003 — the Alliant 28 peace activists protested at DU weapons manufacturing plant in USA, declared not guilty by a jury on basis of the Nuremberg Principles
• The Trident Ploughshares aim carefully to chop the nukes out of Britain — they have notched-up some truely amazing legal victories, as well as deep notches on the subs themselves

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is good about puncturing the IRS’s bluster about how it’s getting tough on tax enforcement. This time, they’ve taken a look at how much effort the IRS is putting in to auditing corporate tax returns — it turns out they’re spending 30% less time conducting 26% fewer audits in the six months between October 2003 and March 2004 than they were in a similar span the year before. The amount of extra taxes these audits are uncovering? Also down: by 36%.

You can find the report, and a summary of its findings, at the TRAC site, as: Corporate Audits Continue to Slump.

The Chicago Tribune yesterday printed a profile of activist and war tax resister Kathy Kelly — The Peace Warrior.

Kelly decided one way to do good was to lower her income below the taxable level of $3,000 per year [sic]. She didn’t want to contribute in any way to the military budget, what the citizens of her do-gooder’s ghetto called “the death machine.” She was making $12,000 at the time and officials at St. Ignatius distributed the $9,000 difference among other programs and staff at the school. “I was Lady Bountiful,” she jokes.

She says she has not paid a dime of federal income taxes since. “It was one of the simplest decisions I’ve ever made, and one of the easiest decisions to maintain,” she says. “I can’t imagine ever changing my mind.”