Scuzzy math. The Republican-led House of Representatives passes its new Mandatory Welfare for Millionaires bill (WaPo):

...the bottom 80 percent of households would receive 15.8 percent of the House tax cuts' benefit. The top 20 percent would receive 84.2 percent of the benefit. Households earning more than $1 million a year would get 40 percent of the tax cuts, or an average reduction of nearly $51,000.

Think of the Treasury as a piggy bank for the very rich. The mathematics involved are actually fairly simple, but they require a generous use of negative numbers: Subtract hundreds of billions in war costs while subtracting hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Pretty soon there are no pennies left in the piggy bank for healthcare or levees or pensions or roads or schools.

The question must be asked: Is our representatives learning?

{ 10:48 AM }

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The Cheney slaughter, revisited. It was two years ago today that Cheney shot 70 captive pheasant in a single binge:

Cheney arrived at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe on Monday [December 8, 2003] to do some hunting at the Rolling Rock Club and Game Preserve -- a private club with farm-raised pheasants; but some say it was no hunt -- it was a slaughter.

"Your average hunter may shoot more than three pheasants a day; Vice President Cheney shot more than 70 -- and an untold number of mallards... We're appalled that so many animals were killed for target practice essentially."-- Wayne Pacelle, V.P.- Humane Society of the US

Five-hundred pheasants were released in front of Cheney and his men; and the ten-man hunting party killed 417 of the birds. Vice President Cheney alone shot over 70 pheasants.

The birds were then plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight back to Washington, DC.

This is entirely consistent behavior for a hawk who had "other priorities" during Vietnam and who sanctions torture now — that is to say, a craven coward.

{ 11:54 AM }

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Art, Truth and Politics. Harold Pinter's outstanding Nobel lecture: "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."

{ 9:51 AM }

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Dixie Chicks for the Supreme Court. The distinguishing thing about the relationship between Republicans and entertainers is that, while Democrats use entertainers to foster debate, Republicans seem to want entertainers to take office, regardless of qualification.

{ 12:31 PM }

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"Are we having democracy yet?" It's tough to talk democracy abroad when we can't even practice it at home (WaPo):

The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines' reliability.

Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills.

These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.

[...]

In North Carolina, more stringent requirements -- which include placing the machines' software code in escrow for examination in case of a problem -- have led one supplier, Diebold Inc., to say it will withdraw from the state, where about 20 counties use Diebold voting machines.

A different type of showdown is brewing in California, where Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says he might force makers of the machines to prove their systems can withstand attacks from a hacker. One such test on a Diebold system -- Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a 2004 California primary -- is planned.

The state has been negotiating details with Harri Hursti, a security expert from Finland who uncovered severe flaws in a Diebold system used in Leon County, Fla. (He demonstrated how vote results could be changed, then made screens flash "Are we having fun yet?")

The simple fact that Diebold withdraws from a state that wants to place its code in escrow reveal its total unreliability. And the simple fact of our high tolerance for voting unreliability exposes American democracy as a sham. And, finally, given the evidently flimsy foundation of American democracy, all the White House rhetoric about spreading democracy around the world amounts to nothing but a lethal pack of lies.

And yet Americans remain blissfully complacent, despite the observation that "A quarter of the American public are voting on machines where there's very little protection of their votes."

The fish indeed rots from the head, but the body isn't complaining nearly enough.

{ 9:12 AM }

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Where liars live. Dick Cheney's new house in St. Michaels, Maryland, was recently bought for $2.7 million on his vice presidential salary of $208,100. That's equivalent to a $270,000 house being bought by someone who makes $20,800 — in other words, unlikely, except for the fact that he's still drawing money from Halliburton, the principal benefactor of the Iraq invasion after he invented the "intelligence" on Saddam's nonexistent WMDs.

Thanks to Cryptome, we can see the property, the realtor's listing, and all kind of other interesting information, such as the permanently restricted airspace that newly surrounds the tree-lined estate where will he soon write his Kissingeresque war-criminal memoirs.

So here's the new Cheney crib, just down the road from another brand new war-criminal neighbor, Secretary of Offense Donald Rumsfeld:


Nine acres, very private. Tree lined drive off private road. Separate 3-bay garage with office. New 150 foot dock. Extensive gardens and ornamental pools. Fantastic waterfront property.

{ 10:41 AM }

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Civil wars of commerce. It's becoming increasingly probable that the next American civil wars will be fought with consumer dollars, and that's why what AmericaBlog is doing to stop the AFA's insane boycotts is so significant.

In an era when Disney engineers an explicitly Christian marketing campaign for a movie as covertly and religiously coded as any Bush speech, it's important to let sellers understand that post-Enlightenment buyers will not always roll over and play dead.

Let your everyday purchases do your fighting for you — check out BuyBlue.org.

{ 11:23 AM }

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