da na na na na na
I say it's my birthday

da na na na na na
It's my birthday, ooh, yeah

da na na na na na
I say it's my birthday

da na na na na na
I'm gonna have a good time

da na na na na na
I'm glad it's my birthday

da na na na na na
Happy birthday to me

I imagine that this will be the funniest blog post I see today:

[Sasha Volokh, 7:23 PM]
Note to my co-bloggers: One of you will betray me.

Good catch from Jane, on the conservative media's reasoned, considered approach to Hillary Clinton's new book:

Emmett Tyrell goes on a tirade about Hillary lying, lying, lying, lying...and buried in the middle of this is "I have yet to read the book [empahsis mine], so I do not know if it contains a sufficient number of lies to sustain her claim of authorship."

More from Kevin Drum. I hate politics.

Remember the fake Puma oral sex ad? The good people at Patrick Cox can do much, much better than that.

(I hope this isn't a hoax, but even if it is, it's still pretty funny. via TMFTML)

The Bloviator is one of the blogs I most admire. It's an extremely useful look at the medical industry and public health from an informed insider. I don't know of a better place to get current health news.

And it's so even-handed that it has earned praise from both me and Bill Quick in the masthead; I doubt that any other blog could have done the same thing. When I get tired of vitriol and "X rules, Y drools" posts, I can always go to the Bloviator and hear the voice of a grownup.

Ross is celebrating his one-year anniversary. Please go wish him well.

New Get Your War On is a "Calvacade of Knock-Knock Jokes". I thought it couldn't be done.

From the Houston Press:

"The boycott makes no economic sense," Skopp seethes as he cuts his beefsteak. "The punishment is hurting us more than the people we are supposed to be punishing."

"How so?" I ask.

"Take this bottle of wine," he says, holding up the Domaine de Mourchon Côtes du Rhône. "You pay the restaurant $36 for it, but only about $5 of that actually goes to France." The rest is the restaurant's markup, the American importer's profit, the Texas distributor's cut, shipping charges of an American trucking company, and United States customs and duties.

"And besides, this particular winery is owned by a British guy!" he rails. "The French make nothing on it!

"Meanwhile, how many California wineries are owned by the French?" he asks. "Opus One, Windham Estates, Chandon -- they are all French." The French have also invested in wineries in Chile and Australia. And as I learned by reading French boycott lists making the rounds on the Internet, the French entertainment conglomerate Vivende owns many of my favorite single-malt Scotch brands, as well as all of my favorite Irish whiskeys.

Houston has gone beyond boycotts. Our own local terrorists are employing threats of violence and vandalism against French restaurant owners. The restaurants are reluctant to speak up for fear of further reprisals. But one confirmed casualty was the Theater District restaurant formerly known as Papillon Bistro Français.

After a broken window and several threatening phone calls, the non-French owners decided to ditch the French name. "You can't protect a restaurant 24 hours a day," owner Zack Ateyea told me over the phone. "And the harassment was getting worse. So we decided to go ahead and do it." Shortly after the incidents, Ateyea bought out his partner and changed the restaurant's name to Zin, a nickname for the decidedly American wine Zinfandel.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS:

Jokes that are not congruent with my political opinions are not funny.

(link via alicublog)

Kevin Drum has a post up about the fact that the most popular right-wing sites tend not to have comments, whereas the most popular left-wing sites do. I don't think that it means anything, but I love this suggestion in the comments, from Tom Maguire:

However, one fabulous idea seems to have been given very short shrift here - some techie could set up a mirror site to Sullivan, with comments, and let folks slug it out. Copyright issues? Even cooler.

Gary Farber links to a swell web page that I've never seen before called Red Mike's Reviews. I was hooked from the first thing I read, a review of Weekly Standard cover story "Here Lies Children's Literature Murdered by R. L. Stine America's Best-Selling Author":

The first obvious thing is that Diana West has a major screw loose about sex. To quote from her article:

...As one 10-year-old girl, a veteran of 40 Stine titles, put it to a Canadian newspaper, "I like how the creepy feelings and shivers go through your whole body." And so, reading becomes a crude tool of physical stimulation, wholly devoid of mental, emotional, or spiritual engagement.

Does that sound like a working definition of pornography? ...

It sounds more like a working definition of a roller-coaster to me.

John Scalzi notes, in a post that is regrettably not a joke, that the House of Representatives of the greatest country the world has ever known...

where we are united not by ethnicity or religion but by our love for liberty...

whose Constitution has been a model for liberal democracy across the world for over 200 years...

has just voted to...

to...

Oh, just go read it.

On my most recent little bender mini-hiatus, I started thinking about why I didn't like the movie Philadelphia. Hopefully, this will quiet the people who are constantly emailing and asking me to critique 10-year-old movies. (Watch out, Judgement Night! I don't care whose toes I step on!)

Look up Philadephia on the Internet Movie Database, and this is the plot summary that you get:

When a man with AIDS is fired by a conservative law firm because of his condition, he hires a homophobic small time lawyer as the only willing advocate for a wrongful dismissal suit.

This is, I will cheerfully agree, a good description of what the audience walked away with, and it's almost certainly what the director, Johnathan Demme, intended. Nonetheless, I like to wonder if the screenwriter, Ron Nyswaner, thought that he was writing a movie like Oleana that would leave people arguing at the end about whether justice was done. That would have been an interesting movie. Instead, Johnathan Demme treated it like a story of good and evil. Every little detail, from the mood music to Tom Hanks' loving boyfriend (yay!) to his brave mother (aww!) to the anti-gay jokes that the bad guys tell (boo!), lets you know who's David and who's Goliath. However, if you're paying attention, David's case is kinda weak.

To recap: Tom Hanks plays an HIV-positive gay lawyer (whom I will refer to as "Tom Hanks") who walks into the office one day to find that a crucial file, for which he's responsible, is missing. After throwing the office into a panic, the file is found, but Tom Hanks is fired. He's convinced that it was a wrongful dismissal, and that he was set up, because the firm realized that he's HIV+. Although he had kept his sexual orientation and his health status private at work, one of the partners had noticed a purple Kaposi's sarcoma on his forehead. Tom Hanks had also been in the room when partners were telling anti-gay jokes, which reinforced his determination to keep his personal life to himself. He hires Denzel Washington, an ambulance chaser who doesn't like homosexuals, to represent him, and they take their case to court. In the end, Tom Hanks wins his case on his deathbed.

Part of the problem is the casting. Denzel Washington is masterful in his complex role, and I really can't say enough good things about him. Tom Hanks is... not. You put Tom Hanks in a movie, you might as well give him a white hat, an angelic choir, and an APPLAUSE sign behind him. There's just no ambiguity about the guy. (His multifaceted portrayal of Rick Gassko in Bachelor Party shows a complicated side that we haven't seen recently.) Beyond that, do you remember the Oscar clip, where he's bathed in red light and slowly translating the lyrics to his favorite aria? Well, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. But when I see Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, or Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands, or Jim Broadbent in Topsy Turvy, I sit in awe of the seemingly bottomless depth of the characters on the screen. When I watch Tom Hanks mutter "I.... am.... love!", I think, "I could do better than that."

The bigger problem is that I didn't think that Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington proved their case. His dismissal couldn't have been discriminatory if the firm didn't know that he was HIV+, and I don't think that Denzel proved that they did. Their case rests uncomfortably on the assumption that one of the partners saw the Kaposi's sarcoma on Tom Hanks' forehead, remembered seeing them during his experience working with an HIV+ woman, disbelieved Hanks' explanation that it was a bruise from playing raquetball and came to the conclusion that Hanks was HIV+.

Two big problems:

1. A Kaposi's sarcoma, especially in an early stage on an otherwise healthy-looking person, looks quite a lot like a bruise. The makeup people made it look like a bruise on Tom Hanks. I can only speak for myself, but I have a reasonable layman's understanding of HIV, and I personally couldn't identify one at a glance.
2. It's unlikely that the woman would have had KS. KS are very rare among women.

So, if I was on the jury, I wouldn't buy it. That's sort of a problem in a right-and-wrong courtroom drama.

I also see at Virginia Postrel's blog that the New York Times spelled the name of the national spelling bee champion incorrectly. Do you know what this means? This sort of careless error can't help but reflect badly on the "leadership" of Howell Raines. It's obvious that the Grey Lady, under his helm, has thrown aside its tradition of excellence and become nothing more than a left-wing scandal sheet, with no standards of accuracy or objectivity. You can't trust anything from this once-great institution. Let's see...


... oh, wait, it was the Washington Post. Sorry, I guess that this means nothing at all.


UPDATE: As I read down, Virginia Postrel's blog is just generally really excellent. I'm going to stop linking everything I see, but I encourage you to read this, about her friend's appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" to talk about drug legalization:

Needless to say, Bill O'Reilly doesn't like that argument. More to the point, he didn't actually let Jacob make it. Contrary to his image as some kind of conservative ideologue, O'Reilly is just a long-winded cab driver with a TV show and no real interest in policy, ideas, or facts. (At one point he declared that the government statistics everyone in the drug policy world relies on, regardless of their policy preferences, are "just your opinion.) Now Sam Smith of The Progressive Review has used Jacob's appearance to produce a Mathematical Model of Bill O'Reilly, graphing exactly how many words each person got to say. "In the first mathematical analysis of Bill O'Reilly ever done, the Review has incontrovertibly proved what was previously believed only anecdotally: O'Reilly is a bully and a jerk," he writes. Take a look.

Via Patrick Nielson Hayden, I see that libertarian/conservative Virginia Postrel is standing up for the New York Times. It's wonderful. (Follow the links back, too.)

What he said.

To the vast majority of professional academic economists—not the economists manqués who inhabit intellectual biospheres such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and certain time slots on CNBC—the debate over the Laffer Curve is long since settled. Most people get their income from their jobs, where taxes are withheld. Reducing marginal tax rates by a few points won't magically cause people to start working 50 hours a week instead of 40 hours; and raising them won't induce those same people to cut back their hours. Indeed, for all the attention paid to rates, Americans as economic creatures simply aren't that responsive to the current regime of marginal rates. If they were, you'd expect to see incomes clustering at points where there's an abrupt change in tax rates, as people strive to keep their income just below the next jump in marginal rates. But this paper by University of California at Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez doesn't find much bunching.

Furthermore, Goolsbee argues that the data from the '80s are an aberration because the tax cuts coincided with a long-term secular trend—dating back to the late '70s—of income inequality. In other words, the rich would have been getting richer, reporting more income, and paying more taxes, even without the tax cuts.

More damaging to the supply-siders is the record of the last 13 years. Remember, in 1990, Bush, under pressure from a Democratic Congress, raised the top rate from 28 percent to 31 percent. In 1993, Clinton created two new upper brackets, one at 36 percent, and the other at 39.6 percent. Confronted with such higher rates, did rich people suddenly start working less, or reporting less income? Did poorer people stop trying to get rich? Did the lucky ducks who paid lower marginal rates catch up to the better off? No, no, and no. Income inequality increased in the '90s, and the wealthy's share of national income (and share of income tax paid) grew sharply. Meanwhile, since Bush started reducing marginal tax rates in 2001, national income growth has been relatively stagnant, and tax revenues have plummeted—especially tax revenues paid by the wealthy.

The last 13 years have been frustrating times for the supply-side wing of the Republican party. First, they were betrayed by their own president in 1990. Then, neither their hysterical warnings of doom in 1993 nor their enthusiastic predictions of boom in 2001 came to pass. The seven fat years of the '80s, when their theories were put into practice, are receding into memory. The irony is that Republicans may have been so successful at flattening out the tax code in the '80s that today's further rate reductions (and the one Bush wants next year, and the year after …) won't help their cause.

Mac Diva has a depressing post on anger in the blogosphere. Nothing gold can stay.

A commentor over at South Knox Bubba has a dang good question about the trucks that = Iraqi WMD:

It seems the pipes are made of the wrong materials; the joints, whether screw threaded or flanged, would allow the escape of all those WMDs; the commercial grade air conditioning unit installed at the front end of the truck bed couldn't possibly maintain accurate temperature controls; the a/c unit has no external exhaust system, so the canvas covers that hid these ever so dangerous "weapons" would just return the exhaust back into the truck body, thereby raising the ambient temperatures and defeating the alleged scientific cooling of the alleged units.

And last but not least, photos released showed GIs examining the truck, and dismantling the equipment in their BDUs!

I know the WH has absolutely no regard at all for the health, welfare and safety of the enlisted men, but - shouldn't they have been in MOPP 2 or even MOPP 3 suits if there was a real suspicion these trucks were so "dangerous"?

I'm far from expert, but it's my understanding that a genuine mobile biological weapons lab couldn't work without a temperature control system that kept the temperature in the lab within a few degrees. If it didn't have that system, it couldn't be what Bush is saying it is. If I'm wrong, I'll cheerfully apologize.

Don't ask me why, but I was curious yesterday about Mallard Fillmore. So I started clicking around when I saw this strip:

UGLY BALD LIBERAL: How can we pay for this war without a tax increase?
MALLARD FILLMORE: When President Reagan cut taxes, revenue doubled!
UGLY BALD LIBERAL: But how can we pay for this war without a tax increase?
MALLARD FILLMORE: Did you hear what I just said?
UGLY BALD LIBERAL: How can I hear what you just said without a tax increase?
MALLARD FILLMORE: You have a serious problem.
UGLY BALD LIBERAL: Nothing a tax increase wouldn't cure...

What have we learned? Liberals are dumb and ugly, they love taxes, and (most importantly) when President Reagan cut taxes, revenue doubled. I'm not going to argue with the first two statements, but the third one is something that people take seriously. Is it true?

Well, no. Look at federal tax revenues by year. Reagan came into office in 1981, federal tax revenues were $599,272 million. During his presidency, Reagan did, indeed, cut federal income taxes, and in 1988, the last year of his presidency, tax revenues were $909,303 million. It's an increase of 52%.

(Advocates of this position will often pick their base years carefully. Commonly, they'll choose 1980-1990, a period in which revenues nearly double. If I remember correctly, Reagan wasn't president in 1980, 1989, or 1990.

On the other hand, sometimes advocates just lie. Here's Rep. Pat Toomey: "Following President Reagan's 1981 tax cut, federal revenue grew enormously. By 1989 tax revenue had nearly doubled." In fact, tax revenues increased by 65% between 1989 and 1981. If Rep. Toomey thinks that $991 is "nearly double" $599, I'd very much regret letting him do my accouting.)

The problem with this analysis is that we're apparently supposed to do it in the dark. We're supposed to ignore economic growth, population growth and inflation, all of which push up nominal tax revenues every year regardless of tax rate. Furthermore, we're supposed to ignore history. If you start to look at any time period other than 1980- 1990, it quickly becomes apparent what a fraud it is. Here are federal tax revenues in the period from 1976 to 2001, in millions. (These numbers represent all federal revenue, including income tax, payroll taxes, tarriffs, etc.)


1976 $298,060
1977 $355,559
1978 $359,561
1979 $463,302
1980 $517,112
1981 $599,272
1982 $617,776
1983 $600,562
1984 $666,486
1985 $734,088
1986 $769,215
1987 $854,353
1988 $909,303
1989 $991,190
1990 $1,031,969
1991 $1,055,041
1992 $1,091,279
1993 $1,154,401
1994 $1,258,627
1995 $1,351,830
1996 $1,453,062
1997 $1,579,292
1998 $1,721,798
1999 $1,827,454
2000 $2,025,218
2001 $1,991,030

What have we learned? If we judge presidents from the first years of their presidency to the year after they left office, here's how the last four presidents stack up:

Carter (1977- 1981): 69% growth in tax revenues
Reagan (1981- 1989): 65% growth in tax revenues
Bush (1989-1993): 16% growth in tax revenues
Clinton (1993-2001): 72% growth in tax revenues

If we judge them from the first year of their presidency to the year they left office, here's how they stack up:

Carter (1977- 1980): 45% growth
Reagan (1981-1988): 52% growth
Bush (1989- 1992): 10% growth
Clinton (1993- 2000): 75% growth

Using this data, I don't see any way to demonstrate that Reagan's tax cuts grew revenue more than Clinton's tax increases. In fact, it looks like Reagan saw as much proportional growth in non-adjusted revenue in eight years as Carter did in four.

There's an article worth reading by Bernard Sherman called Why Reagan's Tax Cuts Didn't Boost Tax Revenues or Unleash the Economy here; although I can't vouch for it. I can vouch for this: If someone says, "When President Reagan cut taxes, revenue doubled!" in defense of Reaganomics, they're either intentionally decieving you, or they don't know what they're talking about.

UPDATE: Sam Coppersmith, in the comments, says:

You forgot that Reagan increased payroll taxes significantly during his term--part of the Greenspan-Moynihan-Dole bailout of Social Security. Revenues from income taxes actually declined after the Reagan tax cuts, and significantly enough that total government revenues actually declined from 1982 to 1983, until the 1983 and 1985 increases in Social Security and Medicare taxes started kicking in.

Which is true, I did forget that. Thanks, Sam.

The sound you may have just heard is me laughing my ass off at Andrew Northrup's brilliant NRO Corner parody. We are not worthy.

I'm a big fan of SpinSanity; I think that they do as good a job of staying non-partisan as can be reasonably expected from human beings with an interest in politics. I've noticed that conservative bloggers have no problem citing them when they provide evidence of spin or false statements by liberals.

So maybe we can all agree that this stinks on ice:

In response to increased criticism that the United States government has so far not found any evidence to support its repeated assertions that there were banned biological, chemical, and/or nuclear weapons in Iraq, President Bush's is now claiming that "we found the weapons of mass destruction."This statement is flat out false according to the evidence presented by his own administration, however. So far, the U.S. has only found evidence of weapons labs that likely could have been used to create biological weapons, but has found no actual weapons banned by the United Nations.

In a sane time, this would be a big, big deal.

SpinSanity also has a useful series that tries to give the best and most current answers to these questions:

Have weapons of mass destruction been found in Iraq?
Has evidence of links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda been found in Iraq?
Were thousands of items looted from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad?
Where did the American flag come from that was placed on the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad?
What actually happened to Pfc. Jessica Lynch?

Admin Note: This post was about a series of bizarre posts and Amazon reviews by a person calling himself "Pat Lillis" or "FearlessPatLillis". The real Pat Lillis has written to tell me that he has not written these posts; instead, an ex-friend/stalker named Tim Ready has done so. This person poses as Pat on the internet and writes abusive nonsense. If you see a strange or obscene post or email from Pat Lillis, it is probably coming from the stalker.