According to Humans For Sale, I am worth $2,368,190.00. If I die, my fiancee will be able to claim that from the website. Or something like that.

I'm going to Boston next week, and will be updating rarely or not at all.

God damn them. I don't know what else to say.

Mr. Show is being released on DVD. If you haven't seen Mr. Show, it's the best TV there has ever been, even better than the Simpsons. I mean it.

"The first discs are due out on Feb. 27th. It will consist of the four original episodes of "Season" One (The grand experiment) and the six episodes from the second "Season". (Still an experiment at that point) But slightly better wigs. So come on everybody, let's all pitch in and help HBO. They've assured us that nearly all of the proceeds from the sales of the Mr Show Dvd's will go directly to on-set catering for "Sex and The City". I love that show!!!! Did you see the episode where the slutty one wouldn't blow that one guy unless he drank the wheatgrass, and then he did drink the wheatgrass and then she had to blow him to prove a point, and it didn't taste good and then she made a face!! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! It was a funny face she made! "

Sweeeeeeet.

Andrew Sullivan has re-posted an interview in which he elegantly states that the conflict between his faith and his homosexuality is essentially unresolvable.

"I do try and live a life that is not in complete internal conflict. But I don't believe that any Christian or any person trying to live a life of faith expects a life which is not full of conflict. One of the things I've tried to resist is the temptation to resolve contradictions. There are some convictions which cannot be resolved or explained away that have to be lived with. It would be, I think, an insult both to the intellectual coherence of a great deal of the church's teaching and to what I hope may be the moral integrity of my own and many other people's lives, to say that contradiction can easily be avoided."

He's talking about homosexuality, but in fact, almost every Christian lives in contradiction of their faith. The Bible clearly and unambiguously condemns homosexuality. Of course, it also condemns working on the Sabbath, leaving home during menses, adultery, borrowing or lending money, masturbation, etc., etc., etc. It has a fairly elaborate code for the treatment of slaves. Five minutes on Betty Bowers should convince you that the the Bible, literally applied, is not a terribly useful guide to life. It seems to me that homosexuality is no more of a contradiction with Christianity than using a credit card. Less, really; Jesus ignored homosexuality but really went after the money-lenders.

I hope to have more on this later.

"12 Things You Must Know to Survive And Thrive in America".: Really interesting advice from an older black man to younger blacks about how to succeed in the world. I don't think we'll see them on a Successories mousepad anytime soon.

Matthew Yglesias makes the obvious but important point implied by this article. Jeb Bush's daughter needs help, not punishment. So do the rest of the nonviolent drug offenders in Florida. Bush absolutely deserves privacy as they work through this unfortunate time. But he does not deserve to be shielded from public policy questions about whether the system he's created is good enough for his own daughter.

Yglesias says, "I think it might be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if the drug laws on the books started getting enforced against rich white people's kids. I'm guessing we'd have legalization within six months." Sounds about right to me.

Very, very funny obscene photoshopping of children's books, via SomethingAwful.

Matt Welch has an excellent post that many bloggers are rushing to link. I sound the blogger call: Me Too!

Wicked awesome picture on Talking Points.

In Bizarro World, where Gore is president, Ann Coulter just wrote a column:

“Did you hear about what the tax-and-spend Democrats are up to now? They want to spend $100 million dollars of your money to pay welfare queens to get married! Why do liberals think that poor people won’t fall in love unless Nanny Big Government acts as a matchmaker? Liberals are so prejudiced- they think that poor people won’t get married unless you throw money at them. Liberals have no appreciation of personal responsibility- they think that poor people should have to be bribed with your money to make basic life decisions. Meanwhile, hard-working Americans who are actually pulling their weight instead of sucking at the public teat get a tax increase as a reward for marriage. Liberals baaaad!”

In our world, it’s actually one of Bush’s initiatives. Well, never mind. But I’m warning you Democrats- if there’s a deficit, it’s still somehow your fault.

Bush's plans to change 401(k) requirement looks pretty good to me. The Democratic alternatives would cap the amount of own-company stock that an employee could hold, which doesn't seem like such a good idea. Companies will generally find it to their benefit to match employee contributions with their own stock. Employers, of course, are under no obligation to match 401(k)s in any form, so those caps would probably mean that a lot of people would just lose their matching contribution from their employer. Clearly a net loss for working people.

Although honestly, I don't understand why there needs to be a waiting period at all for selling stocks held in 401(k) plans (it's shortened to three years in the Bush plan).

This is part of a letter to Bushwatch:

"This morning both my daily newspapers announced in triumphant headlines, 'The Recovery is Here! Hallelujah!' The headlines have an asterisk, of course: this 'recovery' has already been pre-announced as a 'jobless recovery,' meaning now I can go out......and still not get a job. Funny thing though; as one of 50,000 laid off by my tech employer, my unemployment ran out, um, about a month and a half ago, and as such, according to the 'accepted accounting standards' used by the government, I am no longer counted among the ranks of the officially 'unemployed.' The continued unemployment of myself, and the many millions in my situation, is now a debt that's been moved off the books; a reality unrecognized by everyone but ourselves."

If this was true, it's clearly an insane bookkeeping methodology. It looks like a pretty deliberate method of undercounting unemployment, right? Furthermore, it looks like a way to make it look like welfare reform has dramatically decreased unemployment, when it really jut shifted the unemployed off the books.

I was curious enough to look it up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which seems to directly contradict what this guy is saying. It looks like they do a survey of 60,000 households and calculate their statistics from the responses:

"People are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria: They had no employment during the reference week; they were available for work at that time; and they made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons laid off from a job and expecting recall need not be looking for work to be counted as unemployed. The unemployment data derived from the household survey in no way depend upon the eligibility for or receipt of unemployment insurance benefits."

Was the letter writer just wrong, or is there anything to what he's saying?

Bush Policy on Releasing Records Differs in Case of Clinton Ones:

"President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have said their refusal to give Congress information about the administration's contacts with energy industry executives was based on the executive branch's fundamental right to receive "unvarnished" advice from people outside the government.

But two months ago, the Bush administration authorized the release to Congress of thousands of e-mail communications by senior White House officials in the Clinton administration, including messages sent by outside advisers and senior aides to Vice President Al Gore.

With the approval of the Bush administration, the National Archives and Record Administration turned over to the House Committee on Government Reform 2,000 pages of Clinton White House e-mail messages. The committee is headed by Representative Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who requested the records in September....

The information from the Clinton administration includes internal discussions between Mr. Gore and his staff members, as well as a National Security Council transcript of a conversation Mr. Clinton had with Mr. Barak.

Associates of Mr. Clinton said it was the first time in history that a transcript of a president's conversation with a head of state was released. An associate said today that Mr. Clinton was not consulted about releasing the Barak conversation."

To their credit, most of the conservative pundits I've seen have called on the Bush administration to release their records about the Energy Comission, so they aren't obligated to explain this. It's seems pretty clear, though, that the only principle behind disclosure in the Bush White House is self-interest. I'd be interested to see if the contortionists at the Wall Street Journal take up this one.

I installed a hit counter today, with predictably humiliating results. I'd probably be better off walking up and down the street wearing a hand-lettered sandwich board. Oh well.

Here's a quick peek at Bush's budget priorities:

Proposed increase in funds for absintence education: $33 million dollars

Proposed cut in funds for job training for young people: $180 million dollars

While I'm on the subject, there was an article that Tim Blair posted a while back (before I started this blog) about Bangladeshi workers who are losing their garment making jobs after Bangladesh's exports fell sharply following September 11. Predictably, they didn't feel liberated; rather, they wanted their jobs back.

There's a lesson here: so-called "sweatshops" are the best option or only option that many Third-World workers have. We would love to see these working conditions improve, but anti-globalization is about the worst way to make this happen. Bangladeshis need to work to live. Clearly, agriculture can't provide enough jobs to support the population. Foreign investment is the best way we've ever seen to create jobs, and investors are not going to invest in Third-world countries unless they offer some advantage. The biggest competitive advantage Bangladesh has is cheap labor. It's awful to see kids working long hours in garment factories. But if you shut down the sweatshops or make it unprofitable to open them in the first place, the kids aren't going to be going to school or going back to the farm. They'll be out of options. Why else would they have taken the jobs in the first place?

Incidentally, I would heartily agree that the US should be providing more foreign aid, but that's an entirely separate question.

Unfortunately, Tim had to ruin it with some seriously dumb rhetoric in his post:

"Those ex-slaves should be grateful to the wealthy Western activists who've protested so long on their behalf, and to quota-loving Western clothing unions. Thanks, student protesters who refuse to wear any school garment produced by sweatshop labor and don't understand how developing economies develop! Hooray, anti-globalists! Three cheers, feminists!"

Any remotely fair reading of the article makes it clear that activists, unions, protestors and feminists didn't have a goddamn thing to do with it. While you're at it, why not blame pro-choice activists, gays, and the ACLU? Why not skip the middleman and blame Hillary directly?

Old topic, but it really bugged me at the time.

For a marvelous, readable look at Third-world economies, check out The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto.

It's interesting; I've looked at quite a few blogs recently, and no one, left or right, likes the anti-globalization protestors. (I can't stand them either.) Even Michael Moore and Tom Tomorrow aren't defending them anywhere I can see. Maybe they're waiting until the shit goes down.

I know that there aren't very many anti-globalization activists, but they have lots of websites. Just no blogs that I can see. Is this just a matter of Glenn Reynold's "anti-idiotarian" slant in bloggers? The widespread "New Democrat" tendencies in left-leaning bloggers? The inability of anti-globalization activists to put together a coherent blog? Or just my limited reading universe?

Vodkapundit has some appropriately strong words about the bastards holding Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, hostage.

Latest news from CNN is that the deadline has been extended.

I hope that I don't read anything dumber today than this editorial blaming video games for violent WTO protestors:

"Weaned on video games such as Urban Chaos and Grand Theft Auto III, which are virtual seminars in sociopathy, and neurologically conditioned through hours of practice to indulge their basest urges, it makes sense that today's extremists behave badly in the real world--a world they no doubt have difficulty distinguishing from their free-for-all fantasies."

Oh, no doubt. And the protestors at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in the 60's were neurologically conditioned by the anarchic free-for-all of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

I think that Shamed is making a bit of a tortured analogy when he says that preserving Bush's tax cut is a matter of minority rights, and that a progressive income tax system is sort of equivalent to racism. He asks, "Under Barlow's logic, is there any principled reason not to just explicitly tax homosexuals more than heteros? Just like the rich, homosexuals are, at least in most political debates, (in the brilliant words of Kenneth Sherrill) 'outnumbered and despised.'"

Well, jeez, I hardly know where to begin. First of all, if I had the choice to suffer the slings and arrows of the rich vs. gays, I'd rather be rich. I don't have anything against the rich. I know lots of liberals, and I don't know anyone who despises the rich. In fact, most of us are trying to become richer ourselves. (I don't know anyone who's trying to become gayer, but then I haven't been to college in a while.)

Second of all, there's a whole bunch of reasons why the rich can justly be taxed more, while gays or blacks cannot. If you want a much smaller government, great, but that's not the world we live in. In this world, a highly conservative president just proposed a $2 trillion budget, and we've got to pay for it somehow. I don't see any practical way to do this other than a progressive income tax system. If Bush gets everything he wants, we'll still have a progressive income tax system. Should not then we tax blacks extra, etc, etc.?

I think he's reacting as if my argument was this: There are more of us proles, so we can do whatever we want to the filthy rich! Let me restate it: Republicans are going to try to convice middle class voters that they won't get their tax cut if Dachle and Kennedy get their way. But it's not true. Poor, middle class, upper middle class, and upper-upper middle class voters have gotten all the tax cut they're going to get under Bush's plan. If Democrats can communicate this, we can win this debate.

He also writes, "If it's wrong for governments to have (for example) a poll tax on black people even if the money goes towards education, then it's also wrong to keep taxing the rich over and above what everyone else is taxed, even if the money is spent on prescription drugs. "Progressive" taxes, whether on income or booze or cigarettes, are wrong and highly illiberal."

If Shamed believes in a flat tax, I don't think that we have enough in common to fruitfully debate. A flat tax, by its very definition, would mean a massive tax increase for almost everyone. It would raise the taxes of almost everyone I know. It's a political non-starter. If everyone but flat-taxers are as bad as racists and gay-bashers, I guess I'll be in the immoral majority.

Whatever you're doing would be improved if you were listening to the Hives right now. The first time I listened to this album, I wanted to quit my job and form a Hives tribute band. I pretty much have that reaction every subsequent time as well.

Matthew Yglesias has a good point about Punditgate. The parallels that a few people are trying to draw between campaign finance reform and pundit finance reform are pretty bogus. The absolute worst thing that can come from a bought-out pundit is bought-out commentary, which I think the Republic will survive nicely.

When politicians get bought out, on the other hand, they can pass or hold back laws that affect all of us. Generally, they improve the situation of a lucky few while imposing costs on the rest of us. It's hard to see how the public benefits from (say) tariffs on sugar, or lax accounting standards, or the ethanol subsidy (most farm subsidies, really), or spending taxpayer money to promote Sunkist products abroad.

We all pay for these. They make a few columns look like a joke.

Kausfiles had a link to the extraordinary column that Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote on September 11th. I remember this column vividly; it's worth a link.

The Daily Howler is one of the best left-leaning press watchdog sites out there. I can't wait for this guy to finish his book.

Senator Kennedy's proposal to roll back some of the upcoming tax cuts would only affect 2.5% of taxpayers. Almost everyone in the country has much more to fear from budget deficits than from tax increases. According to Robert S. McIntyre:

"It seems that the right is preparing to run a disinformation campaign of enormous proportions about what the relatively timid Kennedy plan would actually mean. Here are a few salient facts.

- Fully 97.5 percent of all taxpayers have no direct personal stake in keeping the tax cuts that Kennedy wants to eliminate. In other words, the vast majority of Americans will get every penny of their Bush tax cut even if the Kennedy plan is enacted.
- Some 95 percent of those who would pay more taxes if Kennedy's plan is adopted are in the top 1 percent of the income scale.
- Broken down by income group (in 2001 dollars, after the full phase-in), the average tax cut forgone annually under the Kennedy plan is zero for the lowest 20 percent, zero for the next-highest 20 percent, zero for the middle 20 percent, zero for the next 20 percent, $17 for the next 15 percent, $432 for the next 4 percent, and $42,949 for the top 1 percent."

It's hard for liberal pundits and politicians to maintain the moral high ground when we talk about how Bush is "Enronizing" the economy or subscribes to "Enronomics." I don't like Bush's economics, but they bear very little resemblance to Enron's business plan. If I were king, those phrases would be sent to the netherworld, along with "Dachlenomics/ -ization".

I've read it (I didn't watch it) and I don't have much to say about the State of the Union that Jacob Weisberg didn't say better. I don't know how Bush thinks we're ever going to pay for his sizeable new spending proposals if he wants the tax cuts to be permanent, and I thought that his attempt to pre-emptively shift the blame to Congress for deficits is completely disingenuous.

As far as the plan to smoke out terrorists all over the world, starting in Iran, Iraq and North Korea... well, I'm extremely skeptical. But that's one of the luxuries of being an unpaid blogger; I don't have to come up with solutions.

And I guess I just don't believe that he's serious about avoiding Enron type collapses in the future. I remember a few days ago when he said how angry he was about Enron, then proceeded to make a speech about how the government overregulates business. If he was serious, he'd appoint a new head of the SEC, because the bastard he's got in is the same bastard who lobbied extensively to weaken oversight of accountancy practices.

Real reform, in the short run, would be intensely painful. The kinds of legal accounting shenanigans that Enron was up to- moving debt off the balance sheet, avoiding corporate taxes through international partnerships, massaging profitability and deductions through overly optimistic assumptions, conflict of interest in auditing- are very common. If we closed these loopholes, how many Fortune 500 companies could meet earnings expectations? I expect that many, many companies would see their stocks falling and their debt downgraded. We could see a wave of bankruptcies, the likes of which hasn't been seen for decades.

Will a wildly pro-business Republican party leaders have the guts to do this in the middle of a recession? Or will they bluster, delay, propose sham bills, and hope that this blows over? I don't have high hopes.

How screwed up and evil would I have to be to get a top-notch legal firm to take on my case pro bono?

Okay, I read the Drudge Report story about Global Crossing pretty carefully, and I'm... puzzled. A company contributed some money to politicians, and more of it went to Democrats than Republicans. Terry McAuliffe invested in the stock, which increased greatly in value. (Drudge doesn't know if he's still holding it.) Later, it went bankrupt.

So f***in' what? There are no allegations that Democrats did anything at all for Global Crossing; no laws that favor GC, no regulatory black holes that specifically benefit GC, no interviewing of federal regulators, nothing. There are no allegations that Global Crossing was engaged in anything illegal or unethical, or that it punished its employees, or that the top executives (or McAuliffe) profited illegally from insider information.

Imagine that Amazon (or whoever) goes bankrupt tomorrow. Every public figure who ever invested in it could wake up to headline that said “John Doe turned X into X*Y with bankrupt Amazon stock!” Even if they sold it, even if they never saw the money, even if they never did anything wrong at all. Or is it only ethical to invest in stocks that fall?

What is Drudge's point here? That it's unethical to receive contributions from companies that will someday go bankrupt? That it's unethical for public figures to buy stock and hope for a profit? That, somehow, every company that goes bankrupt is just like Enron? If there's a scandal, Drudge ought to let us know what it is. This report, as it stands, is just a dumb smear.

Sgt. Stryker posted this a few days ago, and I found it well worth passing on in its entirety. I hope he doesn't mind. My brother is in the Army, and it's important to keep perspective.

-----------------

I'm going to come right out and say it: I'm a sentimental bastard. Sometimes you come across something that stops you dead in your tracks and stuns you. That's what happened when I was reading about Sgt. Chapman in an article at CNN.com a few days ago. I was scrolling down, reading about his life and adventures when I saw the picture of him and his family. It's hard to describe my reaction to it, but I just stopped and stared at it for a few minutes. Normally when one of us dies, they show the Basic Training photo or various pictures of you in your uniform doing your job. It gives off the impression that we're these uniformed warriors whose life was the military. Its very impersonal.

When I saw the family photo of Sgt. Chapman, I saw someone who was exactly like me. Like me, he had a wife and children. He had a life outside the army. He was a father and a husband. I looked at that picture, and I couldn't stop thinking about how those two little girls would never see their daddy again. That family had lost the most important person in their life to this war. You can say he died a hero, fighting for his country and all that, but that doesn't replace the fact that his family is no longer whole. Those kids won't have their dad to raise them and tell them everything's going to be alright, and his wife won't have anyone to confide in and share life's experiences with.

As I was thinking all of this, I couldn't help but think of my own family. What would they do without me? How would my son deal without having his dad around? I haven't deployed that much since I settled down, and I've never given any real thought to how my family would feel about it. If I get the call and go away for awhile, I'm no longer a young single guy. I've got a family who'll be worried sick about me and I'll miss periods of my son's life as he grows up. I'm starting to realize how my own father must've felt when he went off on his 8 month deployments and left us behind.

I've often looked at my own family photo since reading about Sgt. Chapman and his life and I have to resist the urge to tear up. It's a wierd world we live in. I want to protect my family and make sure they can live in a safe world, free from fear and fanatics, yet the very means of accomplishing that requires that I leave them and possibly die doing it. It's a cruel irony we face. We help give them a world worth living in, yet if we die we destroy the world they knew. It's a very sad and depressing thought and I often wonder if it's worth putting them through that kind of pain and emptiness.

I thank his family for releasing that photo. It showed his human side and it made me start to think about a lot of stuff I took for granted.

Check out Sophismata, a conservative-leaning blogger who actually understands statistics and economics, and who rails on innumerate journalists. Good stuff.

Another thought about Cheney's energy secrets: Everyone remembers when Clinton's health care task force tried to keep their deliberations secret, right? Everybody remembers the furious attacks they took from Republicans for it. But does anyone remember what happened when the health care task force finally released their records?

I sure don't. Maybe I wasn't paying sufficient attention, but I don't remember anything scandalous in the files. It killed the taint of "scandal" that the Republicans had been striving to attach to health care reform. If there was a downside for the Clintons, I don't remember it.

The Bush administration knows all this, and they're still holding back. In the process, they're making hypocrites out of a lot of their allies, as well as creating an unmistakable appearance of impropriety. Why would they do this?

(Thanks to kausfiles for the link.) Fox News has just published some really bad news for Bush. At the high point of his popularity, after months of fawning treatment in the press and shirking by Democrats, only 49% of respondents say they would vote for him if the election was held today. As kausfiles says, "This is the stunning finding that will have Karl Rove hurling pretzels at the wall (and looking for new demographic groups to suck up to). ... Take it away, Dick Morris! ..."

Furthermore, "When compared to Bush, 42 percent think Gore, if he had been elected, would be doing a better job or the same job handling the war on terrorism as Bush is doing and 46 percent think he would be doing worse than Bush. The numbers are more favorable to Gore on handling the economy — 53 think Gore would be doing a better or the same job as Bush and 34 think he would be doing worse." Bush has just a 4% lead on handling the war, and a 19% deficit on the economy, against a guy who hasn't been heard from in a year.

Wow. Democrats are stronger than they think.

PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES FAITH-BASED ECONOMICS: "ERASING THE STAIN OF THE CLINTON SURPLUS"

And, weeeeee!

Much kudos to Alexander Bolton of The Hill for this article about the shamefully bought-out judgement shown by our Senate before Enron collapsed. (And thanks to Talking Points for the link.)

These senators sent letters to Arthur Levitt, then-chairman of the SEC, to abandon a proposed rule that would have barred accounting firms from doing both auditing and consulting work for the same client. Except for Gramm, they threatened to withhold funding if he pursued the rule.

Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Robert Bennett (R-Utah)
Evan Bayh (D-Ind.)
Phil Gramm (R-Tex.)
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.)
former Sen. Rod Grams (R-Minn.)
Wayne Allard (R-Colo.)
Jim Bunning (R-Ky.)
Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.)
Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)

Let me repeat- they threatened to cut the funding for the SEC if he pursued a rule that would have eliminated a major conflict of interest in accounting. Whose interests did they think they were looking out for?

Is there any reason we should trust any of these crooks again?

This just in: John Ashcroft demands long skirts for White House piano legs. News at 11.

Waaahh, waaaahh, waahhh.... I think that it pays off to keep the moral high ground in the aftermath of military conflict, and I don't think that we've done too badly in this situation. Glenn Reynolds has done a good job of keeping on top of this; British observers who visited the camps found nothing to complain about, and the actual Al-Queda captives didn't complain about their conditions, either.

Luckily, the Al-Qaeda agents in captivity were soldiers, not whining journalists, and I'd like to think that they would consider a column like this just another example of Westen decadence. Finally, something that we can agree on!

UPDATE: Tim Blair, who first linked to the Mirror story, has this post on his blog that is too good to leave out:

"WHILE we're on the subject of the deserving oppressed (see post below) reader Tom Perry has noticed something alarming in The Daily Mirror's photograph of journalist Stephen Moyes, who last week clothed himself in Gitmo Gucci for a Mirror horror story about prison conditions. Tom writes:

"Mr. Moyes is shown kneeling in his orange jumpsuit and other gear, in what looks to be a carpeted hall, on some unrolled paper towels.

"He appears to have wet himself.

"The towels are soaked through in the region near his hinder parts. Of course, a jumpsuit is less humiliating if it's not soaked in piss. But why were the towels there? Was he planning to wet himself?"

I've just checked the picture. It seems Tom is right. Wonder if Sharkie ever has this problem?

Cheney's refusal to comply with the GAO is just the kind of smarmy behavior that could only be pulled off by someone who thought the rules didn't apply to him. Let's see how long it takes conservative pundits to defend this newly-discovered "principle." Remember: if politicians are forced to obey the laws governing their actions, and be accountable to the public that pays their salaries, then the terrorists have won. Or something like that.

The American Prospect has just the kind of well-researched report which ought to be enough to shut up any honest conservative who wants to complain that September 11th was Clinton's fault. I've read Andrew Sullivan's Salon piece where he blames Clinton for it all, and it doesn't hold up with what we know now.

So it took one lousy year for a Bush to give us back $100 billion + deficits, while a "small government" Republican turns out to (surprise!) grow the government by more than 10% a year. Who woulda thunk it? (The New Republic, for one. And Al Gore, and Paul Krugman, and probably Bush and his advisors, actually...

The New Republic article is an oldie but a goodie; I just came across this:

"Bush's favorite example of who would benefit from his tax cut--repeated countless times over the last 18 months--is a single waitress with two kids who earns around $20,000 per year. "Under my plan," he likes to boast, the waitress "will pay no income tax at all." That's true. Because the waitress almost certainly doesn't pay any income taxes to begin with. (The only exception would be if she had no child care expenses at all--unlikely for a working single mother of two--in which case she would owe no more than $120.) It is typical of the duplicity Bush has brought to the subject that the people whom he claims would benefit most from his tax cut would not, in many cases, benefit at all.

When pressed on this, the White House has responded with a shrug. "If you don't pay taxes," sighs Larry Lindsey, Bush's main economic adviser and the ghostwriter of his tax plan, "it's very hard to get a tax cut." But this is another deception--while low-income workers may not owe income taxes, they do owe payroll taxes. Nearly 80 percent of the workforce, in fact, owes more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. If Bush truly wanted to help the working poor get ahead, he would propose cutting payroll taxes. But these are among the few federal taxes Bush has shown no interest in cutting."

And this:

"The real reason Bush isn't helping the working poor is that he doesn't want to. By this I don't mean just that his administration doesn't want to waste scarce surplus dollars on the poor that could be more usefully given to the rich, although that's probably true as well. What I mean is that Republicans actively desire that the tax burden of the poor not be alleviated. Why not? Because they believe, with some justification, that as taxes on the middle and lower classes fall, government seems like a better and better deal to these voters, turning them into Democrats. Conservatives whisper fearfully of this prospect. "With the lower- to middle-income taxpayers paying so little," a spokesman for the conservative Tax Foundation told The Washington Post last year, "there won't be pressure" for tax cuts. Before Bush unveiled his tax cut plan, National Review explained why he should avoid cutting taxes for low-income workers. "Taking still more people off the tax rolls might look good today," the conservative organ advised, "but it creates political headaches tomorrow: People who pay next to nothing for big government are easy pickings for the tax-and-spend party." The calculation here is almost admirably devious. On one hand, Republicans need to promise working stiffs a tax cut to win their votes; but they must never actually deliver on this promise, because then the stiffs would cease to vote Republican. As the example of the waitress making $20,000 per year illustrates, Bush has straddled this dilemma skillfully, claiming that he is wiping out the tax bills for low-income workers while actually doing nothing for them at all."

And this:

"The Bush tax cut is essentially an attempt to roll back the Clinton tax hike. It is therefore logically and necessarily true that if you believe the Bush tax cut will help the economy, you must believe that the Clinton tax hike hurt the economy. Since it demonstrably did not, we can be pretty sure the Bush tax cut will do little good for the economy, and, by precluding other economically efficient uses of the surplus (like debt reduction and education spending), it may well do real harm. "

Jacob Weisberg has an excellent column about the budget debate:

"Today, the essential difference between Democrats and Republicans on fiscal matters lies not in how big the federal government should be—the 2002 budget bills Bush signed increased spending 13 percent and early indications are that his 2003 budget will ask for more huge increases. The main difference is that Democrats want to pay for all the government they want, while Republicans don't."

(Since he wrote that, Bush proposed a budget for 2003 with a 9% increase in spending over 2002.)

This is an essential point, and it turns Republican scare tactics about the "tax and spend" Democratic boogeyman on its head. Who needs Demoncrats to blow up the budget if a Republican president, Senate and House can grow the budget this much on their own? Social Security and Medicare are tremendous priorities to many Americans, which is why Bush pretended during the campaign he was dedicated to preserving the SS surplus. How hard will it be to convince swing voters that Democrats are the party who will protect Social Security and lead the country away from deficit spending?