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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Thursday, May 29, 2003
Defining Terrorism Down Labelling opposition to the right wing agenda as "terrorism" is becoming a common theme, both in law and spin, and it is likely to get worse. The Volokh Conspiracy notes a proposed law in Texas (where else) designed to criminalize environmental activism. The bill is quite specific in its intent to target political activity: "`Animal rights or ecological terrorist organization` means two or more persons organized for the purpose of supporting any politically motivated activity intended to obstruct or deter any person from participating in an activity involving animals or an activity involving natural resources. `Political motivation` means an intent to influence a overnmental entity or the public to take a specific political action." Advocates are equally open about the purpose of the law and the spin being used to support it:
[Advocate Mike Flynn claims] the language separates violent criminal actions from what some legislators see as less serious offenses. "The fact that you are brought up on trespassing charges is not same as if you are convicted of undertaking a terrorist act," Flynn explains. "When these incidents come up, the local DA [District Attorney] might not prosecute the violation. He might treat it like some high schoolers caught in the mall after dark. We believe they are more serious and deserve a more serious response....Let's all agree that these people are terrorists and move on." Flynn is less honest about the scope of the bill:
The bill's language is specifically intended to separate the volunteer who writes a check to the local Sierra Club or other environmental organization from someone who would commit acts of violence, Flynn says. In fact, the bill makes no real distinction between persons who commit violent acts and those committing non-violent civil disobedience. The claim that the "language is specifically intended to separate" them is a blatant lie - in fact the language is explicitly intended to eliminate that distinction. The following are defined as "ecological terrorism":
Numerous non-violent activities - tree-sitting, sidewalk blocking, road blocking, etc, clearly come within the scope of the bill. Even a labor union striking against a mining or forestry operation would arguably be included.
The bill is equally explicit in including any person involved with "ecological terrorism" as a criminal: "A person commits an offense if the person knowingly provides financial support, resources, or other assistance to an animal rights or ecological terrorism organization for the purpose of assisting the organization in carrying out an act described by Subsection (b)." This would almost have to mean that any person who assists in any way the activities of a group which carries out any acts of environmental civil disobedience could be charged with terrorism.
Unless I'm mistaken, that would include the Sierra Club, which I believe does sometimes support sit-down blockages of logging roads and other non-violent but illegal protests. And since there is no doubt that the Club does engage in "politically motivated activity intended to obstruct or deter any person from participating in an activity involving animals or an activity involving natural resources", the Sierra Club is plainly a terrorist organization under the terms of this law. Any environmental group which engaged in 99% legal advocacy and 1% non-violent disobedience would at the very least be forced to keep 2 completely separate sets of accounts, facilities, etc. Otherwise, anybody who wrote a check, donated equipment, or otherwise assisted the group knowing that some part of the assistance could potentially contribute to the illegal activities would become a criminal.
The bill also provides for violators to be placed in a registry, essentially making them environmental equivalents of registered sex offenders. The record "must include the individual's name, residence address, and signature and a recent photograph of the individual", to be placed in "an Internet website containing each record described by this section". The record is to be kept for at least three years, but can be retained after that for as long as the state chooses. If any registered environmentalism offender "makes a change in name or address, the individual shall, not later than the 30th day after making the change, provide to the [state] written
This was one of the bills that died, at least for this year, when Texas Democrats ran out the legislative clock in an Oklahoma hotel. One more reason why those refugees have earned the country's thanks.
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
I have a lot of respect for Josh Marshall. His Talking Points and Atrios' Eschaton are probably the only truly must-read left blogs - maybe the only truly must-read blogs, for that matter. But even Marshall, as good as he is, can write nonsense. And this explanation of why the media is ignoring the recent conduct of Tom Delay qualifies:
Journalists have given DeLay a wide berth for a distinct but related reason. For most of them, the story reeks of what people in the business call dog-bites-man. In other words, it's just not surprising enough to be news. DeLay is widely-known -- even relishes his reputation -- for hardball, envelope-pushing tactics. The exploits of his money and access machine are both legendary and notorious. So, in a sense, where's the story? This and the Lott debacle are different in many ways. But in this respect they are similar. At least in the first few days, no one gave the Lott situation much attention because pretty much everyone knew that Lott was fairly unreconstructed on racial issues.... DeLay is reaping a similar advantage because of what people in town already know about him. If it were Tom Daschle, and not Tom DeLay, I guarantee the reaction would be quite different. But it's not simply a partisan or bias issue. It wouldn't be the same with Bill Frist or Denny Hastert either. Some of this -- no doubt -- is due to the lack of a Republican mau-mau to stir up interest and push the press to pursue it. But a lot of it is the prism through which journalists themselves are seeing it.
Does this make sense if you look at it for much more time than it takes to read it? Is that really the standard by which Washington scandals are picked up or ignored?
You can't really blame Josh Marshall for making these excuses for the media. After all, the reporters who go along with this are his peers. And the editors who make the choices to play up every phony Clinton scandal while burying real GOP misconduct are the people he has to go to for paid work. So be tolerant of Josh's foibles. But remember what it says about the reliability and honesty of the media that even Marshall, who's among the very best, can accept such a transparent excuse for the latest media failure. Monday, May 26, 2003
Online magazine Flak (via TMFTML) gets it right about the overrated Television Without Pity site. I lost interest in the site after a few visits, so I may have missed something, but I never saw anything on the site positive about any of the shows they cover. If you're just going to bash everything, what's the point? Having nothing nice to say about anybody may make you an interesting gossip and, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth pointed out, an amusing dinner companion, but it makes for a terrible critic. Thursday, May 22, 2003
Taxing Issues Calpundit asked what taxes would be low enough to satisfy wealthy Bush supporters. John Cole responded by asking at what point taxes would be high enough to satisfy liberals. What these are both missing is that Bush's tax cuts, while they have had a relatively modest impact on most, are clearly designed to eliminate federal taxation of the very rich and are coming quite close to doing so. Already they have guaranteed, if the various cuts with different sunset provisions become permanent, that it will be almost impossible for the very rich to pay higher proportional taxes than lower middle class workers. The key point here is that real wealth in this society doesn't come from income, but from equity ownership. There are a few freak cases, Barry Bonds or Ray Romano, who make $20 million or more a year in earned income, but they're exceptional. All billionaires, and most multi-millionaires, are essentially stockholders.
Stocks aren't taxed at all when they go up in value. There are three points at which taxes capture some portion of the wealth that stockholders own:
This means in essence that Bush's program is to create a new class of equity aristocrats who will never have to pay taxes on any significant portion of their wealth, and then be able to pass it on to their children in a similarly untouched state. So while John Cole is whining piteously, "And if we take nine out of ten dollars from this millionaire, and there are still sick people and still poor people, should the millionaire still feel guilty?", he is impressively disconnected from the real issue.
In general, it is quite striking how disconnected many conservatives are from reality. In both John's comments and the vast comment section on Calpundit, you can find numerous conservatives complaining about how liberals want to take their money. To the few of those conservatives who will read this post, let me put this more bluntly than politely: you are a mark. Have you noticed that your side has been dominant for most of the past 20+ years? Have you noticed that they have passed loads of tax cuts, yet your tax burden doesn't seem to be going down? Have you noticed - will you ever notice - that it's a feature, not a bug? The massive tax cuts for the very rich leave no room for anything but token benefits for the middle class, but one Republican strategist even admitted a few years ago the Republicans wouldn't really cut middle class taxes meaningfully even if they somehow could. It's in their interest to keep gouging middle class taxpayers, because those who feel their taxes are too high are more likely to vote Republican.
Bush, like Reagan, has passed massive tax cuts while increasing spending. Reagan cut progressive taxes, especially rates for the highest brackets, then followed up with a very substantial increase in withholding taxes, the most regressive tax. Bush is cutting estate taxes, dividends taxes, capital gains taxes, and high bracket rates, massive cuts that will save millions and even billions for a few of the very wealthy. In addition, he is tossing in tokens such as an increase in child allowances which will mean a few hundred dollars a year for those middle class voters dumb enough to believe he will help them. The largest surplus in history turned almost immediately into the largest deficit in history, which was running at about $1 bn a day before the last set of tax cuts came through. Inevitably, at some point the bill will come due and there will be hefty new taxes to bring the budget back towards balance. Those taxes will take away all the benefits that middle class payers received from the Bush tax cuts, and perhaps far more. Your taxes will rise again, the Republicans will blame 'tax and spend liberals' again, and you will probably believe them again and vote for them yet again. To paraphrase Barnum, there's a Republican born every minute. Tuesday, May 20, 2003
The most bizarre part of the terrorist attacks in Morocco was that, according to all stories I've seen, one of the targets was a Jewish cemetery. I can understand how it makes some sort of twisted sense to attack a hotel or a community center. But I can barely comprehend why anybody, without the aid of adolescent hormones or substantial alcohol, usually both, would want to desecrate a cemetery. And a suicide attack - giving up your own life to ruin some graves - is just beyond any kind of comprehension. Monday, May 19, 2003
Calpundit asks, "Is there anything — anything at all — that George Bush actually takes seriously? Or is everything in the world nothing more than an excuse to play partisan games?" There is one answer, and only one that I can come up with. Bush truly does believe in reducing, reducing, and reducing again taxes for his wealthy supporters.
The most recently passed cut is remarkably unpopular. Not just Democrats but conservatives and even intensely partisan Republicans, even the Wall Street Journal are openly contemptuous of the bill. More criticism comes from the slavishly pro-Bush NRO:
The Senate legislation will do little for the economy and is incompatible with the House bill. Rather than attempting to narrow differences with the House in the Senate, the White House insisted on making them as sharp as possible.... How did we get to this point? A lot of the problem dates back to the earliest days of the Bush administration, when a conscious decision was made to blur the administration’s economic philosophy. On different days, it used supply-side arguments for its economic program, on other days Keynesian ones. While all administrations use contradictory arguments for their policies at times, they usually know themselves which ones they really believe in.
The probable answer is that they don't believe in either of the arguments; they just believe in the policy and aren't prepared to make the honest argument that their economic priority is to help the very rich and the consequences for the average American are not important to them.
Bush's dedication here really is quite striking. He has the worst record on jobs of any President since Hoover; all of his supporters and opponents are agreed that this is the major threat he faces in 2004. And yet, he has never produced a stimulus program - he has simply adopted stimulus as his favored talking point for the pre-determined class warfare programs which even his supporters don't believe will produce any real stimulus. (This doesn't mean, of course, that his supporters take the logical next step and admit that he is lying about his programs and motives for supporting them.) Tuesday, May 06, 2003
More Buffy Ampersand has listed Joss Whedon's top ten episodes along with his own. Looking at Tvtome's Buffy guide, you can draw up a consensus list of the most popular episodes with fans:
My own list would vary from time to time, but looks a lot like it:
The list naturally includes Touched, which is tonight's episode, because the best is the one I haven't seen yet. The Gambler Michael Kinsley has the best take on Bill Bennett's little secret. This is no surprise - if anybody better than Kinsley is writing on American politics and society I don't know about it, and if anybody was, I probably would. Kinsley: He's not a complete idiot. Working his way down the list of other people's pleasures, weaknesses, and uses of American freedom, he just happened to skip over his own. How convenient. Is there some reason why his general intolerance of the standard vices does not apply to this one? None that he's ever mentioned.
Open, say, Bennett's The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, and read about how Americans overvalue "unrestricted personal liberty." How we must relearn to "enter judgments on a whole range of behaviors and attitudes." About how "wealth and luxury ... often make it harder to deny the quest for instant gratification" because "the more we attain, the more we want." How would you have guessed, last week, that Bennett would regard a man who routinely "cycle[s] several hundred thousand dollars in an evening" (his own description) sitting in an airless Las Vegas casino pumping coins into a slot machine or video game? Well, you would have guessed wrong! He thinks it's perfectly OK as long as you don't spend the family milk money.
Stanley Kurtz is defending Bennett from Kinsley on the Corner. Kurtz's defense of his fellow rightist is predictable and predictably wrong:
Michael Kinsley’s case against William Bennett today contains a logical trick. According to Kinsley, Bennett can’t defend himself on libertarian grounds because he’s condemned libertarianism in all other things. Bennett, for example, condemns marijuana use by the healthy and wealthy, because it erodes social norms that keep more vulnerable people from drug abuse. So, Kinsley says, if Bennett admits that there is such a thing as problem gambling, why doesn’t even Bennett’s own affordable gambling erode the norms that prevent problem gambling in others? The flaw in Kinsley’s argument is that gambling is legal, while Marijuana use is not. Bennett does not oppose drinking by those who can hold their liquor, or gambling by those who don’t deprive their families, nor should he. It’s perfectly fair to argue, against Bennett, that society ought to legalize Marijuana. That’s a judgment call in which we balance the potential social harms of Marijuana itself, and of a general weakening in anti-drug norms, with the benefits of personal freedom. But since gambling and alcohol are already legal, and since Bennett doesn’t want to ban either, I see no hypocrisy in his actions.
The fault in Kurtz's argument is that he has pretended that it is simply an issue of legal versus illegal. In fact, Bennett has condemned a raft of behaviors for causing alleged social harm which are legal in most or all of the US: homosexuality, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, even gangsta rap and tv violence. All of these are more generally legal than gambling - the slot machines Bennett favors are illegal in most states; of the above items only homosexuality is illegal anywhere in the US; laws against consensual adult homosexuality exist in fewer states than laws against gambling, and unlike gambling laws are very rarely enforced even when they do exist.
Kinsley is aware of this and mentions marijuana only in one paragraph and mostly in passing. Kurtz has pulled one argument from Kinsley and used it out of context to produce his dishonest critique.
Incidentally, whatever other problems Bennett has, he is obviously in serious denial:
Bennett claims he's beaten the odds: "Over 10 years, I'd say I've come out pretty close to even." "You can roll up and down a lot in one day, as we have on many occasions," Bennett explains. "You may cycle several hundred thousand dollars in an evening and net out only a few thousand."
Slots are pure mathematics. If you play them over a sustained period, you will come out behind, unless you are freakishly lucky and get a huge score to offset your losses. If you play them for large sums over a sustained period, you will always come out behind. It has nothing to do with luck - it's simply a statistical fact. (Brad deLong broke away from his Calpundit obsession long enough to run the numbers.) Spot the Lie Hesiod invites readers to refute this claim: "We need aggressive action out of the United States Congress now," Bush said. The president said that under his plan a family of four making $40,000 a year would see their federal taxes reduced from $1,178 to $45 a year. As he did Monday, Bush urged supporters to call members of Congress and urge action on tax cuts.
A married couple with two children and income of $40,000 will see their taxes reduced by $1,133 (from $1,178 to $45) in 2003, a decline of 96 percent.
The White House refers to 'taxes', CNN to 'federal taxes'. As seems to be often the case, the media has reworded the GOP spin point but carefully not improved the accuracy.
In fact, this refers only to federal income taxes. Income taxes are not, however, a major portion of the tax burden borne by most working families. The main tax they pay is the FICA or Social Security tax. This is the most regressive part of the tax system because it is assessed only on the first $84,900 of earned income, meaning that a janitor working for minimum wage pays substantially more as a percentage of income than an executive making over $1,000,000. Not surprisingly, it is one tax that George Bush has never proposed to cut by a single penny.
Along with the FICA, there is also the Medicare tax, 1.45% without an upper limit. The combined cost of these two taxes to a family with an income of $40,000 is $3,060. So, making the generous assumption that the numbers are otherwise accurate, the said family's federal taxes are reduced from $4238 to $3105, a cut of 26.7% rather than the 96% promised by the White House.
But the employee's FICA contribution is matched by the employer. Although the direct cost of this is borne by the employer, it is in effect an added cost of the employee's services which the employer is willing to assume. This means that it is ultimately borne primarily by the employee, who would otherwise be likely to receive those costs directly. Using that calculation, the payroll tax on a $40,000 income is $6120, making a total federal tax of $7298 which goes down to $6165, a tax cut of 15.6%.
This doesn't take into account the family's state and local taxes, or the very real possibility that the family has other deductions - for instance, if this familiy does manage a mortgage, admittedly a strain for a two child family at that income, they probably are already paying next to 0 in federal in income taxes, and would receive no benefit from the Bush plan.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
Welcome back to Avedon Carol, who is now recovered enough from her recent surgery to go from her temporary blogger blog back to her regular space at the Sideshow. Thomas Spencer has the lowdown on an innovative plan by Missouri legislators to raise sin taxes and: Generat[e} $5 million by imposing a 5 percent tax on adult entertainment. The tax would apply to sales of sexually explicit material and services, such as live nude performances and actual or simulated sex acts....
At the sime time, presumably, the state slogan will be changed to: "I'm from Missouri. It'll cost you to show me."
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