Go read Charles Kuffner on former Texas Commissioner of Health William 'Reyn' Archer. I didn't know about this guy, and I'm glad Charles took the time to look him up.

Two outright mistakes (picking on Louis Freeh and attributing an article to the wrong author*) and one wildly mistaken speculation (Trent Lott might survive), all in 24 hours. I probably do need an editor. I wonder if Mickey Kaus will lend me his imaginary friend.

*although that William Saletan/ Michael Kinsley thing was awfully weird. I could swear that the website was changed, but... who knows.

Atrios links to some great comments from a legal immigrant about the INS round-ups. A sample:

5. There are many progressive moderate Middle-Easterners in the U.S. who could play a major role in convincing the rest of the world that there is a moderate and democratic Islam practiced in places like the U.S., that there are places like the U.S. where freedom and rights mean something. If you look at the article above you will see that Iranian Jews and Muslims are a significant contingent amongst those arrested. Why is this important to point out? Progressive Iranians are revolting against the fundamentalist mullahs in Iran, for freedom and liberty, and have been mentioned in positive light in the U.S. on many occasions. (Is there also not talk about Iraqis who might be willing to overthrow Saddam? - we need their help too). We need the support of moderates to remove the fanatics in the Middle-East! We need as many voices of Muslims to sound moderate and supportive of the U.S. internationally, to help bring about changes at a lower psychological and monetary cost to us, because we cannot spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting battles all the time, when it financially costs much less to win umpteen times the good will constant war will generate.

Via Instapundit, a horrifying story of FBI incompetence and mistaken priorities.

In the mid-1990s, with growing terrorism in the Middle East, the two Chicago-based agents were assigned to track a connection to Chicago, a suspected terrorist cell that would later lead them to a link with Osama bin Laden. Wright says that when he pressed for authorization to open a criminal investigation into the money trail, his supervisor stopped him.

"Do you know what his response was? 'I think it's just better to let sleeping dogs lie,'" said Wright. "Those dogs weren't sleeping. They were training. They were getting ready."

The FBI says its handling of the matter was appropriate at the time.

Read the whole thing. I agree with Glenn, it sounds all too plausible.

[my partisan sense is tingling] ...and remember that this is literally a question of life and death. I'm sure that the touchdown blame dances being written already ("Mid-90's? This is all Clinton's fault!" or "And no one's been fired yet? This all Bush's fault!") The world will little note, nor long remember what we say in these blogs.

Question is, what are we going to do about it? If the answer is "divert the blame and ignore the problem," then we haven't learned a God-damn thing.

UPDATE: All I know is what I read in the news, but it seems like there are at least two actions that are appropriate. The first, if the ABC interview is correct, is to fire the Muslim agent who refused to wiretap other Muslims. That kind of insubordination just has no place in the FBI.

The second is to fire Louis Freeh [UPDATE: ...who has already been replaced by Robert Mueller, you stupid, stupid Ted.] . Businessweek lays out the case well. I made these comments over at Nikita Demosthenes's blog; he's trying to blame Clinton.

"Bill Clinton's FBI" had a director, Louis Freeh, who had been appointed to a federal judgeship by George Bush, and was picked by Clinton to head the FBI as a gesture of bipartisanship. The head of "Bill Clinton's FBI" actively hated Bill Clinton, repeatedly lobbied for more independent council investigations of the President, and aggressively curried favor with Orrin Hatch and other GOP leaders to make himself politically untouchable. "Bill Clinton's FBI" had 200 agents investigating Bill Clinton full time. "Bill Clinton's FBI" sent agents to fucking Japan to find a woman who used to know Bill Clinton.

Let me tell you a story. Robert Hanssen was a double-agent who sold our secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia between 1979 and 2001. He might have been caught if someone had realized that he was spending money far beyond his salary- he paid cash for a major addition to his house. Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12963 requiring financial-record checks for government employees who work with classified information. But Louis Freeh disregarded the order and failed to notice anything wrong with Robert Hanssen's spending pattern.

If "Bill Clinton's FBI" had followed Bill Clinton's orders, as they were obliged to do under law, they would have found a double agent much sooner.

Source

Bill Clinton shouldn't be above suspicion or criticism, God knows, but let's remember who's been running the FBI for ten years.

The circle of life:

Dave Koppel at National Review says something stupid.

1. Lott praised Jefferson Davis.

Well, Davis's birthday, May 2, is still an official state holiday in Mississippi. One should not condemn an elected official for praising people who are formally recognized as heroes by the state.

The same goes for Hawaiian politicians who praise Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole (March 26), even though Kalanianoale, like Davis, led a 19th-century rebellion against the United States (in 1895). Unlike Davis, Kalanianole was actually convicted of treason (technically, "misprision of treason"). Later Kalanianaole founded the Civic Club of Honolulu, a politically powerful association which excluded blacks and others on the basis of race. (emphasis added)

Similarly, we should not condemn Texas politicians who praise Lyndon Baines Johnson (August 27), even though Johnson wiretapped Martin Luther King, massively enriched himself through corruption, and lied constantly to the American people.

- The New Republic tears him a new one.

- The Flaming Moderate points out another reason why Dave Koppel might want to pick another example. (If that link doesn't work, try this.)

To be repeated every few days.

(insert clever segue) Rob "Get Donkey" Humenik mused today that Lott's chances of survival seem to be increasing every hour. I agree. By the middle of last week, commentators on both sides of the aisle were united in their disgust with Trent Lott. Only the most loathsome of right-wing toads (Hannity, Novak, Limbaugh, Buchanan) tried to excuse Lott or say the real story was Robert Byrd, or Clinton, or Democratic overreaction.

But the center couldn't hold, and a week later, conservatives are showing the strain. I'm seeing more and more of these pieces putting Lott in "perspective." The conservative media is shifting away from Lott, diverting attention away from any recognition of more widespread problems with race in the Republican party. This is a natural defensive reaction, I suppose, but I don't think that it's a good sign. The media will lose interest in this story by January 6, Democrats might make an (immoral) tactical decision that they're better off with Lott, and Republicans might decide that a leadership struggle isn't worth Trent Lott poisoning the well. Advantage: Lott!

A week ago, I'd never dream that Lott could have survived. Now, I'm not so sure.

UPDATE: Hey, I'm an idiot! Trent Lott is stepping down!

Michael Kinsley's piece about Republican new-found scorn for balanced budgets is just about perfect. I'm considering it my Christmas present from Mr. Kinsley.

Side note: One thing that drives me nuts about Mickey Kaus is the disconnect between his writings and the awareness that he shows in this quote from the article on Paul Krugman:

"The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it's not enough to criticize a policy to say that it's based on lies. You have to say whether it's good or bad for the country."

I think that Krugman hasn't neglected to argue why the Bush economic plan is bad for the country, but whatever. If you accept that the $1.3 trillion tax cut is based on lies, shouldn't that get your goat a wee bit? If there's only one guy in the press who's calling him on it, is it the best use of your time to spend 1/3 of your posts nitpicking him? I don't get it.

EDIT: * not William Saletan. Sorry.

Professor Cooper, we'll leave the light on for you.

A few things that I learned studying transsexuals

(Next in a series)

My senior thesis was about gay male-to-female transsexuals (that is, biological males who live as females and are sexually attracted to men.) My professor was an evolutionary psychologist who studied homosexuality. He had done a large study about the mating strategy of gay vs. straight males vs. gay vs. straight females. He had found that gay and straight men were indistinguishable- they were both more interested in more numerous, younger, more attractive partners, regardless of their social status. Gay and straight women were more interested in a monogamous relationship with a partner with higher social status. They were less interested in having a younger, physically attractive partner, and were much less interested in pornography than men.

We were curious to see how transsexuals would respond to this study. Transsexuals are the most feminine men in the world. They frequently describe themselves as having a woman’s brain in a man’s body, and often undergo tremendous sacrifices to make their body match their self-image. Before gender-reassignment surgery was possible, transsexuals would occasionally risk death by taking a DIY approach, a la “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” We were interested to see, on this measure of mating strategy, would they react more like men or more like women?

Read on to find out, true believer.

1. The difference between straight and gay transsexuals is a matter of night and day. They’re entirely different species. Straight cross-dressers are most often married men who discover a fetish for women's clothing as adults. Most cross-dress entirely in private, or conceal women's underwear under men's clothing. When they dress up and go out in public, their clothing tend to emulate women like Barbara Bush- conservative dresses, pearls, old-fashioned wigs or hairdos. Straight transsexuals tend to go through a long period of escalating fetishistic cross-dressing. If they take hormones, they tend to start them as full adults, so the hormones aren't as effective as they could be in changing their appearance or voice. They are not likely to fool an onlooker. Straight transsexuals think of themselves as lesbians, and transvestites often have fantasies that they and their wives are lesbians.

Gay cross-dressers or transsexuals are not fetishistic about women's clothing, and would not be likely to wear women's underwear under men's clothing; they wouldn't see the point. Gay transsexuals tend to realize that they feel like women in their teens. They are more likely to start hormone therapy in early adulthood, leading to a much more feminine appearance and voice. They are more likely to wear cocktail dresses and short or slit skirts and act in a flamboyant, even cartoonish version of femininity. (Think RuPaul.)

I don't want to overgeneralize about groups of highly disparate people; there are individuals who confound many of these individual points. But there's no arguing that straight and gay transsexuals have very little to do with each other. They look different, act differently, and dress as women for entirely different reasons.

2. Gay transsexuals are extremely hard to find. The only way that we were able to recruit was by going to gay bars and drag shows and asking individuals directly to participate. We tried ads in the gay press, fliers at electrolysis shops, and attending a meeting of the Chicago Gender Society. We got a fair number of responses, but they were all from straight transvestites and transsexuals. The Chicago Gender Society had exactly one gay member, and he was highly ambivalent about the group.

3. I think that stories about transsexuals picking up unsuspecting straight guys and surprising them when they get home are urban legends. The people that I interviewed honestly answered some very personal questions, and every one of them denied that they would ever do something like that. There was widespread agreement that a stunt like that could get them killed.

3a. I also have to say that gay transsexuals do not exactly lack for partners. A few of the people that I interviewed brought in a fair amount of money as prostitutes. If I had continued on in academia, I would have loved to interview some of the guys who are into transsexuals, because I don't understand them at all.

4. It usually wasn't hard to tell transsexuals from biological women- the illusion was rarely flawless, and biological women don't often wear hyper-sexy dresses to gay bars. Nonetheless, it did happen. When I accidentally asked women in a gay bar if she was a cross-dressed man, I would have thought that they would get very upset. But they never did. Thank you for your understanding, women in gay bars!

5. People often ask if I got hit on a lot when I went to gay bars. The answer is no. In a year of frequent attendance, I never got hit on, not once. Either I'm horribly unattractive to gay guys, or I project a blinding aura of heterosexuality near which gay men fear to tread. I remember going to a Hispanic drag club with a bisexual translator. He was propositioned within 30 seconds. Frankly, I was a little hurt. (In my defense, my mom says I'm handsome, and she has never lied about anything.)

6. Quite a few little boys like to dress up as women as they're growing up. Very, very few of them grow up as transsexuals. (More than a few grow up to be gay men, but you never can tell.)

7. Most transsexuals do not get gender-reassignment surgery. It's extremely expensive and produces genitals that many find highly unsatisfactory. I was surprised to find out that transsexuals who have had the surgery are no longer eligible for competition in drag shows.

8. Small drag shows can actually be a lot of fun, if they have a witty emcee and the performers sing live. But I didn't have any fun at professional cabarets aimed at a straight audience like The Baton in Chicago. The performers are often stunning, but all they do is lip synch.

9. At the same time, there's an element of superficiality in drag competitions that I found somewhat dispiriting. In the end, they're no better or worse than other beauty pageants, but I remember some of the rhetoric about the "accomplishments" of the performers as being way, way over the top. Transsexual triumphalism, if you will.

In the end, we found that transsexuals, the most feminine men on Earth, had scores that were indistinguishable from straight or gay men. We couldn't support the thesis that transsexuals are women in men's bodies.

(edited slightly, as per comments)

Tbogg has some absolutely hilarious submissions for the Top Twenty Badly Written Holiday Stories. My favorite:

Mark my words, the Lakers will be back or I'm not Larry King... Jesus Christ: class act... Eggnog tastes just as good in July... Remember this name: Jack Black... Last time I hung an ornament was '76... I finally saw Smallville, and it's one smart show....

(By the way, I'm aware that I'm just linking recently. I'll have something original up soon. It involves transsexuals and gay bars, so hang on.)

Go read Atrios. Here, too.

Engaging in mass roundups of a particular ethnic group can only be counterproductive on so many fronts. It sends a message not to come forward - ever - and to drive people underground. It creates resentment among their relatives and sends a signal that they are second class citizens as their relatives on expired tourist or student visas aren't simply escorted to the airport, as a European might, but thrown in jail. . And, all of this needlessly. If these people needed to be deported there were ways to do it other than rounding them up suddenly, en masse, ensuring that an overloaded processing system remains overloaded leaving them in limbo - in jail - for who knows how long.

Two things I wish I'd said about race:

Sam Heldman*:

One bad side-effect, though, is that we will now hear and read the phrase "played the race card" about a zillion times tomorrow, and that phrase grates on my ears. People who use that phrase pretend that it means something clever, but really it means nothing more than "said something about race and racism, from a pro-minority stance, that I don't agree with and that I therefore think nobody should ever ever say."

Jeanne D'Arc:

My daughter had just gotten a new Barbie (I'm a feminist and my daughter has a box full of Barbies -- how politically incorrect!) and was showing it off to everyone. She proudly displayed it to our Republican friend, who took one look at the doll's sleek black hair and Asian features and snapped, "What's that, the politically correct Barbie?" To be honest, the comment didn't even make sense to me until after he left and it had time to sink in that "politically correct" had evolved into nothing more than a synonym for "minority." It just makes anything that is related to minorities sound rigid and authoritarian.

* Sam Heldman's superb blog Ignatz has belatedly entered the blogroll; please welcome him.

Via Armed Liberal, here's the original paper about differences in respose to white and black-sounding names on resumes. I may or may not have more to say after I've read it.

via Just One Minute:

Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist, said, "I don't remember liberals being this indignant about the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Ann Coulter, everybody! Please, tip your waitresses generously and drive home safely.

UPDATE: It just occured to me why I could never be a reporter. "Hello, Ms. Coulter? This is Ted Barlow calling from the New York Times. You once said that you wished that my co-workers and I all died in a bombing, remember? Do you have a comment about Trent Lott?"

This is pretty funny: a list of plural names for professions as if they were flocks of animals. For example:

"A gaggle of female porn stars."

"A herd of gossip columnists."

"A categorizing by species is artificial, and degrading to the uniqueness and authenticity of each individual, and therefore this entire excercise is empty and moot of deconstructionists."

"A brood of McSweeneys contributors and/or independently-owned coffeshop employees."

Those are some pretty high standards, but let me try. Please forgive my liberality with the term "profession":

"A waste of comic book store guys."

"A screech of sopranos."

"A Spandeu Ballet of 80's nostalgists."

"A grizzo of MCs."

"A toiletfull of people who worked on the film Rollerball."

"A hunka hunka Elvis impersonators."

Jane Finch at the Daily Rant links to this article about musicians intentionally adding vinyl crackles and hisses to their digital recordings. She rants against it, in a daily fashion. I don't know. Almost all of the recordings mentioned in the article use it in the introduction then lay off of it. The rest of the songs are as digitally pure as the CGI snow. It seems like harmless nostalgia, and I wish them well.

This is certainly no big deal, and I bring it up only because it allows me to shoehorn in two fond memories of pop rap:

- DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince used vinyl noise in a creative way on one of the songs off of He's the D.J., I'm the Rapper. I think it was "Charlie Mack". There was a vinyl sample that DJ Jazzy Jeff kept cutting in, in shorter and shorter bites, until he was playing nothing but the vinyl noise before the sample started. I thought that was pretty cool.

- There was a summer where you couldn't go twenty minutes without hearing Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Gin and Juice." If you listen closely, there's a track of sleigh bells that lasts the whole song. Rather cheery for the Doggfather.

I agree with John Cole; the New Republic really have no business picking on Ted Turner for giving only $500 million* to the UN. (I never thought I'd be united with John Cole in defending Ted Turner from an attack from the New Republic. Interesting times.)

Let me add to John's argument: TNR says "Turner's current net worth, according to Forbes, is $2.2 billion. This means he could easily keep his word, give the $500 million immediately and remain filthy rich, instead of endlessly promising." Do they think that he keeps his net worth in piles of gold in a safe somewhere, a la Scrooge McDuck? I don't know anything about Turner's asset allocation, but I feel pretty confident that he doesn't have $500 million sitting in cash to hand over "immediately".

* Corrected, via Patrick Nielsen Hayden- "million" not "billion". This guy must be an editor or something.

E.J. Dionne says:

Oddly, Gore becomes a stronger and more important Democratic spokesman for not running. While other Democrats scramble for advantage in the 2004 nomination contest, Gore can make arguments -- for national health insurance, for fiscal responsibility, for social justice, for a foreign policy that wins rather than loses allies -- without anyone saying he's fermenting sour grapes. Gore is free as no Democratic candidate for president will be free.

I don't think that I understand this position. Technically, of course, of course Gore is free in a way that no presidential candidate is. So's E.J. Dionne. So am I. I could devote this blog entirely to the argument that we should put Toledo under a dome, and never have to worry about how much support it will cost me. So what?

The media is not exactly in love with Al Gore; he's had a megaphone because he was a contender for the Democratic nomination in 2004. Now that he's renounced the Presidential race, I suspect that the TV invitations will go to actual candidates. I rather suspect that we'll hear about Al Gore's speeches only when conservatives find a sound bite to pick on.

In my lifetime, I can't think of another politician who maintained a large public profile once out of office. Not Reagan, Bush, Donald Regan, Gingrich, Meese, Tip O'Neil, not even Clinton. It's hard for me to imagine that Gore will be the guy to break the mold.

Sam Heldman has a great post springing from a blogger who said both of these things on the same day:

The equation of opposition to affirmative action or hate-crime laws or any other number of leftist policies with racism strikes me as a massively cheap shot

and

MR. LOTT, HE GONE: And the critical sign is, as Josh Marshall notes, he just "absolutely" endorsed affirmative action. He is the worst of all possible worlds: once a devotee of the old racism; now an enthusiast for the new racism.

If you don't know already, try to guess who said them both before you click over. Winners will recieve a plum duff. Losers will recieve a plain ordinary duff.

Hesiod has information about the links between Bill Frist, Mitch Daniels, and the provision in the Homeland Security Act protecting the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly from lawsuits stemming from the mercury content in Thimerosal. (More about that here.) Thanks to this provision, Eli Lilly is not liable for possibly ignoring the link between their use of mercury and autism. They will not have to open their files to reveal what they knew.

I haven't written much about this issue. Partially because Dwight Merideth at P.L.A. has covered it carefully, and partially because contemplating it makes me want to sit down and cry. Dwight, I'm so, so sorry.

Dwight asks the right questions, I think:

First, what does preventing parents of autistic kids from suing drug companies that put poison in vaccines have to do with Homeland Security?

Secondly, who is more concerned with protecting special interests than with the security and safety of the American people?

CalPundit on Lott:

Republicans need to put Lott to sleep quickly even if he does threaten to resign his seat over it. He's like a mob boss who's been turned by the feds, and if they don't do something quick there's no telling who he could take down with him.

Wow, Paul Krugman mentioned Atrios today!

And the influence of the religious right spreads much further. The Internet commentator Atrios, who played a key role in bringing Mr. Lott's past to light, now urges us to look into the secretive Council for National Policy. This blandly named organization was founded by Tim LaHaye, co-author of the apocalyptic "Left Behind" novels, and is in effect a fundamentalist pressure group. As of 1998 the organization's membership contained many leading Congressional figures in the Republican Party, though none of the party's neoconservative intellectuals.

Woman files sexual assault/harrassment lawsuit against President

December 11, 2002
Fort Bend Southwest Star

A Fort Bend County woman files a lawsuit on former Governor and current sitting President George W. Bush. Margie Schoedinger of Missouri City, Texas has filed a lawsuit against George W. Bush in Fort Bend County Court. In her suit she is alleging "race based harassment and individual sex crimes committed against her and her husband." The suit lists numerous offenses and asks for actual damages, punitive damages and judgments against George W. Bush.

I don't know where to start on this one...

UPDATE: ..except to say that every indication is that this woman is a nut, it didn't happen, and only the most partisan of us would want to see this blow up into a huge bullshit scandal entailing an open-ended investigation of the President's past that paralyzes the executive branch, based solely on the assertions of one person. I'm actually not kidding; I wouldn't want to see it.

As if that would ever happen. As if the Democrats would make a fuss about it. As if the Supreme Court wouldn't give themselves whiplash, issuing a decision 180 degrees different from the one they saddled Clinton with. As if I'll ever hear another freakin' word about this in the liberal media. I'll be bitterly chuckling myself to sleep tonight.

There are plenty of good reasons to regard Henry Kissinger with disgust, and to breathe a sigh of relief that he's resigned from the 9-11 committee. There's at least one bad reason, too.

With uncanny accuracy, Mark Kleiman mops up a whole bunch of thoughts I'd been having about the Trent Lott affair. I love it.

I've already referenced this (or rather, Chad Orzel did), but remember who promised to bring honor and integrity to the White House, and compare and contrast:

Gore on Bush:

(While preparing for Saturday Night Live) he also dismissed a joke about Mr. Bush and cocaine as "unfair."

The White House on Gore:

A senior Republican official said Gore "wants to keep his position in history as the guy who should've been president" and that "to run again and get trounced would diminish that."

Something's in the water, because I'm noticing a rash of excellent posts and articles:

- Instapundit on the indefensibility of the Dixiecrat platform

- Jeff Cooper's heartbreaking tribute to his beloved dog

- TalkLeft on Don Nickles' unlovable voting record; Atrios has a good post on the same subject

- Every single thing on Through the Looking Glass

- Matt Welch on Bush's appointments of Cold War criminals

Finally, most of the buzz about the Two Towers is quite positive, but this review gave me pause.

Update: Josh Marshall's takedown of the National Review's bogus cover story about voter fraud in South Dakota is outstanding.

Another Update: Uncertain Principles makes a good catch about "changing the tone" in Washington.

Yet Another Update: Jeanne D'Arc has a challenging post that begins with Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and segues into a discussion of race and signals.

You don't have to start with a work of art to sing one song in different ways. You can start with words like "states' rights" and "traditional values." There's nothing wrong with the words themselves. Here in the central California suburbs, when Republicans I know hear politicians talk about things like "states' rights," what they hear is a message of smaller government and more local control. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to be in favor of. In some instances, I'd even agree with them.

But that arguable, respectable message is not what people in many parts of the country heard when Ronald Reagan, for instance, proclaimed his belief in "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers -- James Cheney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman -- had been murdered in the early sixties, and where there were still many people who deeply resented their state's loss of its "right" to segregation and intimidation of black voters. It does not make the tiniest bit of difference whether Ronald Reagan was a racist. Signaling that hard-core racism was acceptable was despicable. For many people who regard themselves as liberals, it remains, more than twenty years later, unforgivable. Maybe it gnaws at moderate Republicans, and even many conservatives, as well, but I haven't heard any complain about it.

What Reagan did was a mirror image of what Billie Holiday did. When she wanted, as she put it, to "bounce something off that cracker," she used a song to send a message of defiance (real defiance -- as she well understood -- would have landed her in jail, or worse). Reagan, facing the descendents of Lady Day's nasty hecklers (and quite a few even more dangerous sorts) sang a cozy little lullaby of acceptance. Compare Billie's unspoken, but nonetheless clear I can't hit you the way I'd like to, but here's what I think of you, cracker to Reagan's equally clear I can't come straight out and agree with you, but you boys know I'm on your side. It's the same technique, with vastly different results.

It's amazing -- sometimes appalling -- what an artist can accomplish with a few words.

And Reagan is far from the only one to use the device.

And another thing: A lot of libertarians and small-government types support Republicans because they believe that Republicans support smaller government. Many supported the Reagan and Bush tax cuts that look (to me) like they're blowing a hole in the deficit. They support them because they think that tax cuts puts necessary pressure on future budgets. I think that they're throwing a party with my future tax dollars. I think that if Bush was a serious leader, he'd put up a fight for a smaller budget right now and pay the political consequences, rather than rely on the wisdom and temperance of future politicians. Bush truly must be a man of great faith if he believes that a new breed of sadder-and-wiser politicians will be able to sweep into office with realistic proposals of spending cuts and higher taxes.

Since Bush's tax cuts were accompanied by a the biggest growth in federal spending since the Great Society, it's impossible for me to take Bush's talk about small government seriously.

Spending on government programs will increase by 22 percent from 1999 to 2003 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the analysis by The Washington Post and vetted by budget experts in both parties....

Measured another way, federal spending, minus interest costs on the debt, will have grown by nearly 2 percentage points of the overall U.S. economy from 1999 to 2003 -- from 16.6 percent to 18.5 percent.

I would say that this is what happens in the White House when "there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It's just kids on Big Wheels, who talk politics and know nothing. It's depressing. DPC [Domestic Policy Council] meetings are a farce." I might quote the Wall Street Journal:

Every Bush economic adviser sees what Mr. Fisher sees. Why then dangle a Social Security plan that pretends we can preserve benefits without increasing taxes, by turning to the stock market? Saving more, Bush economists say, is key to investing more, and investing more is key to keeping productivity growing. Government deficits soak up savings. So what's the Bush plan for fighting a war, protecting the homeland, cutting taxes and avoiding deficits? Health-care costs are on the rise. So where is the White House strategy for devising and getting congressional approval of a plan to make Medicare work better?

One Republican who has been in and out of government over the past 20 years quips privately that Mr. Bush's economic policy lacks only two things: a policy and someone to explain it.

But that's all groundless and baseless. (Or is it baseless and groundless?)

Anyways, it's conceivable that someone on the new economic team is acting like a grown-up, and I should be glad. It's possible that the administration is starting to accept that deficits have real consequences. But rather than revisit a tax cuts program that was designed to beat Steve Forbes, or show an actual commitment to small government and take their hits for that, it looks like they might try to sell tax increases for the poor and middle class.

Let me quote Brad DeLong (the whole post is excellent, and prescient):

Let me give you some marginal tax rates...
a mother with two kids earning $24000: 68% (she loses the last of her food stamps, and her earned income tax credit phases out)...
a doctor making $200,000: 36.4%...
an executive making $1,000,000: 40%...

Any decent supply-sider would say that the real place where marginal tax rates needed to be cut in 2001 was around the $25000 a year zone: the place where the phase out of the earned income credit makes marginal rates astronomical. We economist types were never able to interest Clinton and company in such a proposal--at a gut level, Clinton simply didn't get the importance of lower marginal rates so that people don't get hit in the nose by a 2 x 4 when they work more hours and the IRS snarfs most of it. Larry Lindsey is supposed to have led a charge to get a proposal to "deal with the EITC phaseout problem" into the 2001 tax bill, but he got absolutely nowhere. Bush, Cheney, and their personal staffs don't resonate with the problems of mothers of two making $12 an hour... mothers of two making $12 an hour don't give big to Republican presidential candidates, or show up at the $1000 a plate dinners that are what presidential candidates do day after day these days. So we got a tax cut that gives 40% of its notional dollars to those making more than $300,000 a year whose marginal tax rates are much lower than those of the mother of two earning $12 an hour. (Larry Lindsey keeps saying that they'll come back to it and fix it; but the word is that he's about to get "invited" to "spend more time with his family.")

Who could have dreamed that the administration would be floating trial balloons to increase the tax burden on the lucky duckies making $24,000 and paying 68%? The mind boggles.

If the administration doesn't back off, here are a few more phrases you'd better get used to hearing again:

"balancing the budget on the backs of the poor"
"whatever happened to compassionate conservatism"
"whatever happened to 'over my dead body'?"
"GOP meltdown"
"Democratic sweep"

Just when the Republicans impress me with a serious attempt to force out Trent Lott, they embarass themselves with an attempt to lighten the tax burden on the rich by squeezing those "lucky duckies," the working poor and middle class:

As the Bush administration draws up plans to simplify the tax system, it is also refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers.

Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes, which are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor. The White House Council of Economic Advisers is also preparing a report detailing the concentration of the tax burden on the affluent and highlighting problems with the way tax burdens are calculated for the poor.

You may think that the working poor pay a huge propotion of their income as payroll taxes. I mean, I was under that impression when I worked my first couple of low wage jobs. But how wrong I was- Social Security and Medicare don't count as taxes, you see, because you get something back from them. Everyone agrees, right?

William W. Beach, an economist at the Heritage Foundation think tank, said he was sympathetic to Lindsey's argument that the Social Security tax is not really a tax. But, he said, it was a dangerous argument for a Republican to make.

"Do I allow defense spending to offset my income taxes since I like to be defended? Do I allow road taxes to offset my profits taxes because I use the roads?" he asked. "If you do start down that road, it's hard to see anything as taxes."

Look at this quote:

Early this month, J.T. Young, the deputy assistant treasury secretary for legislative affairs, lamented in a Washington Times opinion article: "[Higher] earners cannot produce the level of revenues needed to sustain the liberals' increasingly costly spending programs over the long-term. . . . If federal government spending is not controlled, then the tax burden will have to begin extending backward down the income ladder."

What a liar! Republicans control all three branches of the federal government. The party of personal responsibility is blaming liberals for spending? Why not blame illegal immigrants, or hobbits? It sure couldn't be the Bush budget, the massive increase in farm aid, the Homeland Security Act...

If Republicans want to be demonized, they should push this through with all speed. Tax-and-Spend Republicans, anyone? Soak-the-Middle-Class Republicans? Class Warfare Republicans? Stupid-and-Evil Republicans? The slogans just write themselves.

Advocates of this new line can expect a furious backlash. Liberal commentators have already reduced the argument to an appeal to tax the poor, and even conservatives worry that the label will stick.

"It's hard to conclude it's anything else," said the Heritage Foundation's Beach.

Michael J. Graetz, a Yale University law professor and tax reform expert, said he could not figure out where the administration's arguments are supposed to lead.

"I would be very surprised if the agenda is to put more people on the tax rolls," he said. "That doesn't seem like a good political agenda."

But Democrats say that is exactly where the administration is heading. Matsui said he sees the seeds of a disastrous Republican overreach.

"The president is making the case that people who earn between $50 [thousand] and $75,000 a year should be paying a third more taxes," Matsui said. "I'd love to debate him on that."

Smart Republicans are on the phone to their reps telling them to shut the fuck up, right now. Personally, if this is Bush's idea of a bold domestic policy initiative, the next two years are looking a lot brighter.