It's not just Phil Mickelson — plenty of high-income athletes want out of California taxes.

Mickelson was just the one who was PR-deaf enough to let us know how he feels.

Why do you think Tiger Woods lives in Florida?

In November, voters in California approved a ballot measure raising the top rate on income over $1 million to 13.3% (the increase applies retroactively to last year). ... Mr. Woods grossed $56.4 million in 2012. As a Floridian, he will keep about $7.5 million that he otherwise would have owed to the state of California. His net tax savings over his 16-year career come to about $100 million. Mr. Mickelson last year earned $60.7 million. Paying the 13.3% California rate, he will owe the state $8 million.

That takes Mickelson down to $52.7 million, putting him behind Woods, when he was ahead of him on the money list. Aggravating! (I know, I'm failing to take account of the way state taxes are a deduction on your federal income taxes and everything else that affects after-tax income.)

The benefit of living in a state without an income tax can be diminished by the "jock tax" that states impose on money earned by athletes when they're playing or training in the state. (Luckily for baseball players, spring training is in no-tax Florida or low-tax Arizona.) But in sports like tennis and golf where athletes can train anywhere in the world, a preponderance happen to migrate to states without an income tax.

These celebs — with their endorsements — need good PR, as the Mickelson slip proved. State tax proponents could get proactive and actively shame the sports stars who live in Florida without an adequate cover story. 

For instance, Serena and Venus Williams grew up in Compton, Calif., but moved with their father to Florida in the early 1990s.

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Aggressive prosecution #2: Internet activist driven to suicide.

The Wall Street Journal delves into the prosecution of Aaron Swartz:

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time....

With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial....

He knew what he was doing was criminal, and he was a very intelligent man who chose to do it anyway and conceived of what he was doing as actively virtuous. Wouldn't a public trial serve his purposes in critiquing the laws he opposed and arguing for the liberation of the data files he tried to set free? (I'm picturing Swartz as a bit like those animal rights activists who steal into a mink farm and open all the cages. They believe that they are serving a call of morality higher than the interests embodied in the law they willingly violate.) It's civil disobedience, which — in classic form — demands that you take the law's punishment. That's part of the acted-out argument that the law is immoral.

"It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public," [his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman] said. "One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money."

His crime was about making more information freely public, and yet he cringed at publicity about his own plight, even where his plight was something he invited into his life and believed in as an especially good thing to do. Why the shame? Why not expose yourself as a martyr to laws you oppose?

Swartz's girlfriend and family released a statement saying: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy.... It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Understandably, they want to infuse their loss with meaning. But did the prosecutors go wrong?

The Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office declined to comment Sunday, saying it wanted to respect the family's privacy. But in a news release from July 2011, when the charges in the case were announced, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar."...

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

But he knowingly and willingly committed numerous felonies, did he not? I'm not hearing the lawyer say that Swartz didn't do what the prosecutors said he did. The argument was that the law ought to be different. If you break the laws as a way to make that argument, how is the prosecutor supposed to respond? Your argument is to the public and to the legislators.

To say he didn't want to be a felon is to express a wish about the past. And it's a wish that wasn't even true. Swartz wanted to be a felon who eludes prosecution. Who gets that wish in a system of law? The intelligent, educated, nice-looking, good guy with lovely friends and family? The person who credibly threatens self-murder? The activist capable of articulating why the crime he committed should not be a crime? 

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The Clinton clot plot thickens... or thins... with anti-coagulants.

So we were just talking about the oddities of the Clinton clot story. We noted that no sooner was it said that Hillary Clinton would testify, as Secretary of State, on the Benghazi attack, than there came an announcement that Hillary Clinton had entered the hospital with a blood clot. The coincidence raised suspicions of an effort to engineer an evasion of this testimony.

And we weren't told where the clot was, which is a crucial bit of information when assessing how serious this health scare is. Clinton had recently suffered a head injury, which makes one think the new problem would also be located in the head, but she'd also had a blood clot in her leg years ago, which makes that alternative seem plausible. If the clot were in the leg, withholding that information suggests a strategic choice to incline the public to view the problem as  more serious than it really was.

Later, Clinton's doctors released a statement saying that the clot was in a vein inside her skull, and that she's "making excellent progress" and likely to "make a full recovery." The Washington Post repeats the information that she's being treated with anticoagulants. You may remember that the analysis I discussed at that first link contained the assertion that "anticoagulation is never given to persons with clots around the brain." But that WaPo story says: "The conventional treatment is an anticoagulant drug for at least six months."

I know some of my readers are doctors. Can you help us out with that inconsistency about the anticoagulants? [ADDED: Here's what Dr. Pogo says. And here's some useful detail. I think the crucial distinction is whether the clot is in the brain or in the space between the brain and the skull.]

And, by the way, I've gotten some pushback in email and on the web, saying that it was "shameful" and "appalling" for me to tie Clinton's health problems to a possible intent to avoid testifying about Benghazi. Let me tell you that a core motivation to my blogging — and I've been going at this for 9 years now — is to stand tough against people who try to cut off debate with this kind of shaming. So I'm glad that this performance of outrage was directed at me. I know it when I see it, and it fires me up. You want silence? You want backing down? You want me not to dare say a thing like that? That's how you want to control political debate in the United States? Thanks for reminding me once again how deeply I hate that and for giving me an (easy) opportunity to model courage for the more timid people out there who are cowed by the fear of shaming.

ADDED: Here's something I would dearly love to do with this blog: I want to make it so that emotive, intimidating outrage like that backfires. I want people to learn that they can't get away with empty assertions like "I am aghast" or "You are despicable." You have to give reasons for what you think. Even if you really feel those feelings. And, of course, many of these hack writers don't actually feel the feelings they scribble about. They just don't want to have to talk about the actual issue. They want to make it something that everyone feels they'd better not talk about. But that should be a loud signal: We need to talk about it!

And let's get back to basics: What we need to talk about is Benghazi.

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