The GOP met this weekend to plan a series of emergencies that are going to arise just in time for the 2008 elections. It's a looooong list.

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va., Jan. 29 - Republican members of the House and Senate turned their attention to the politics of changing the tax code and the lessons of President Bush's campaign on Saturday, the second day of a party retreat here.

Party leaders and White House officials who gathered at the Greenbrier resort also discussed a new rhetorical twist in their campaign to remake Social Security. In meetings on Friday, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and Representative Bill Thomas of California, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, discussed redirecting public attention on 2008 as an imminent danger point for the Social Security trust fund because baby boomers will begin retiring, people present said. Even the most dire analyses say the fund will remain solvent for a decade or longer after that.

House Republicans heard a report on Saturday from the National Republican Congressional Committee on the potential politics of changing the tax system, saying that there was broad support for "simplification," but not for a flat tax, a national sales tax or abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, people familiar with the report said. Members also discussed potential opposition to the alternative minimum tax, Congressional aides said.

Relatively few Americans are wealthy enough to owe the tax now, but the House Republicans emphasized that inflation would gradually extend the tax to more people, and called it a "ticking tax time bomb," aides said.

Inflation is going to move me into a higher tax bracket? Am I wrong or are the rationalizations for their 'crises' getting lamer by the day? 'A ticking time bomb.' Right. Or an alarm clock, either one.

You can thank the Kool-Ade Drinkers for this one. They have faithfully swallowed so much bunkum in the last four years that cynical Publican strategists clearly are getting to the point where they don't even feel they have to think up good excuses any more because the KADs will parrot even the silliest of memes.

• Social Security is in imminent danger of exploding into a crisis. Any day now. Really. We're not kidding.'


• 'The torture in Iraq was no worse than a fraternity prank.'


• 'Rice is competent.'


• 'Bush never went AWOL because the documents were faked.'


• 'There's no Iraqi insurgency, it's just a few bad apples bused over from Iran.'


• 'We didn't find WMD's in Iraq because Saddam trucked them all over the border to Syria in the dead of night and buried them in the sand.'

There isn't a morsel of the most toxic nonsense the Pubs can come up with that the KADs aren't willing not only to digest but to shove down everybody else's throat while they're at it. Is there a shred of evidence? No, but that's the beauty of the KADs--they don't require any. They don't even ask for it. The Emperor's word is good enough for them.

Thanks, kids. You just convinced the Pub fantasists to let their imaginations go hog-wild because you guys will believe anything they squirt out their noses. 'Gullible' doesn't begin to cover this. You're rubes, nimrods, open-faced hayseeds, turkeys drowning in the rain. If Rummy told you lizards from the 8th dimension were plotting the destruction of capitalism from their base under the Venezuelan oil fields, you'd be buying anti-lizard sprays on HSN and demanding that Congress give him $$$80 Billions$$$/yr in new funding for the War Against Anti-Capitalistic Lizard People. If Cheney told you the Iranians were really aliens from the Planet Zog who had a ray-gun that would turn all your children into Gobots wrapped in cellophane and for sale at the nearest Wal-Mart, you'd be blaming Clinton for not stopping this menace to humanity back when he was Pres. If Bush sent you a letter that began: 'I am the wife of Sonny Abacha...', your check would be in the mail the next day.

When questions and doubt are out-of-bounds and proof that we're all traitors (Anna Banana said John Walker Lyndh should have been shot 'so liberals will understand it could happen to them' for casting doubt on the Emperor's 'success' in Iraq), you're asking to be hoodwinked. Snowed. Conned. Slickered. Bamboozled. Taken for a ride and dumped by the side.

In the Blue States, we know enough to check the mule's teeth. In daylight. We don't buy pigs in pokes. We don't sign contracts we haven't read just because the salesman says it's OK and he has such a nice smile. And we don't vote for idiot parrots just because they've managed to memorize a few words we're fond of: 'Freedom. March. Flag. Freedom. Terror. Freedom. God. Freedom. Awwwwk!'

We look inside the bag. We examine the fine print. We notice that the parrot isn't really saying anything and that everybody around him is either totally incompetent or as crooked as a dog's hind leg.

I think it's time that the right to vote in the Red States be revoked. You're just not ready for it yet. You're ready, maybe, to vote for your 8th grade class council--IF there's a teacher standing over your shoulder when you do it and IF you prep for it with a few years of studying American history and politics and stuff.

I mean, let's face it: you're the ones who elected Tricky Dick--twice--and Ronnie Rayguns (the one who thought trees pollute)--twice--and now a junior Emperor--TWICE--who's done nothing but lie to you for four solid years. I think you've pretty successfully demonstrated your complete unreadiness to live up to the responsibilities of citizenship. I think it would be a kindness to you to take this burden from your weak and ignorant shoulders until you grow up a bit more and understand that a football coach is just as liable to be a perv as a priest. When you can stop judging a book by its cover and learn how to actually open the damn thing and read it, then I think maybe--maybe--we can restore your rights. Sure, you're so far behind at this point that it's going to take generations, but I have faith in you. I believe if you buckle down and stop taking the easy way out, you, too, can learn how to spot a con-artist with his hand in your back pocket.

Believe me, this is for your own good. You'll thank me later on--or your grandchildren will.

The New York Times' Lizzie Bumiller, digging deep, has discovered that the Emperor, Our Great and Dear Leader, is the only one who understands why the insurgents are so bitchy about the election in Iraq: it's a 'vision' thang.

"The terrorists and those who benefited from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein know that free elections will expose the emptiness of their vision for Iraq," the president said in his weekly radio address. "That is why they will stop at nothing to prevent or disrupt this election."

'Monitoring' the elections (probably via Fox and CNN) from the safety of his perch 6000 miles away, Our G&DL has put his crafty finger on the pulse of the opposition and seen a flaw in their 'vision': it doesn't include US. It's not because they're against Our Glorious Occupation that they're killing people and blowing up polling places, it's because their vision is 'empty' and they don't have a solid platform and good pro-American programs to offer.

Why didn't somebody think of this before? That clears it up. If Sistani ( a name that hasn't crossed his lips, probably because he can't pronounce it but maybe because it sounds like 'sissy') and the Sunnis stayed away in protest to rigged elections (PBS reported yesterday that there is only one international elections monitor in Iraq and she's deep in the Green Zone) of Allawi's puppet govt, it isn't because they've been frozen out of the process, it's because, unlike us, they have no 'vision' for our 52nd state.

By contrast, Lizze makes sure we know that an important puppet-envoy was busy meeting with the member of the National Security Council who's in charge of arranging Iraqi politics so she could explain to him what a 'constitution' is and how it should be written in order to include Our G&DL's Great Vision.

On Friday, White House officials said that Megan O'Sullivan, the official on the National Security Council staff responsible for Iraqi political developments, met with a leading Iraqi envoy, Feisal al-Istrabadi, to discuss the process of writing the constitution. Iraq is now operating under an interim constitution, and one expectation is that a subcommittee of the 275-member national assembly to be elected Sunday will write the permanent version and make sure that the minority Sunnis have substantial involvement.

Mr. Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy permanent representative at the United Nations, said in an interview on Friday that he fully expected there to be problems with the election, but echoed White House officials who said that the voting itself was victory enough.

(Note the bolded word.) Right. Don't pay any attention to the rigging of the vote or the absence of a huge bloc of voters in protest, just close your eyes and hold your nose and repeat after me:

'The voting is the victory. The voting is the victory. It doesn't matter if the voting is a sham. The voting is the victory.'

Because that's all the WH wants, you see--to point to a vote. They don't care if it's a dishonest vote or a disrupted vote or a partial vote of the 2% of the country in US hands. That's NOT IMPORTANT, get it? The vote is all that matters. That's what we promised, and by god that's what they got. Actually, it's fairly clear at this point that an honest election would either a) have gotten us thrown out of Iraq on our butts, or b) installed a semi-religious mullah-style govt, or c) thrown Allawi's puppet regime out and stopped the rampant corruption of the pro-American party we've been throwing. Any one or all three of which results we wouldn't have cared for.

The IMPORTANT thing, as Mz Bumiller so gratefully reports with a sigh of profound relief, is that it's almost over and the Emperor and His staff are 'of one mind that this constitutes progress.' So there you go. Everybody back to your homes. There's nothing going on here you need to worry about. If forty people in the center of Baghdad with American guns pointed at them vote for Allawi, by god that's good enough for us.

Whew! Thanks, Liz. For a minute there, I was worried.

I'll be doing my usual David Brooks lampoon as soon as I figure out what the hell his latest column is about.

See you next week.

Well, they're at it again. These closet theocrats never give up. A Federal court struck down the stickers so now they're coming at it from another direction: a bill to force Georgia teachers to challenge evolution in class.

A bill filed Thursday would require Georgia's teachers to introduce scientific evidence challenging evolution.

State Rep. Ben Bridges (R-Cleveland) introduced a similar bill, unsuccessfully, eight years ago. He said the idea makes common sense. "It's just trying to teach our kids what's right, not what probably could be wrong."

Like science, for instance.

The measure would require teachers, when covering the origins of living things, to include "factual scientific evidence" for and against evolution. The state science curriculum requires teachers to cover evolution as supported by mainstream scientists — that all living things evolved from common ancestry through the gradual process of natural selection. Bridges, and many critics of evolution, see that as a biased approach.

"Since I was a child, it was taught as a theory." Bridges said. "But over the years, teachers have taught it so long, they're now teaching it as a fact."

Maybe that's because since Bridges was a child, the scientific evidence has been piling up. But don't let that stand in your way, Ben.

The good news is that the bill looks to have little support.

The House Republican leadership said the bill is not a GOP priority, and Bridges filed the bill without co-sponsors. "Each member of our caucus is elected by their district and they have every right to introduce bills they feel their constituents want," said House Speaker Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter (R-Alpharetta).

Apparently the Georgia House has had all the pounding and sarcasm on this issue that it can take for the moment and doesn't fancy attracting any more. That's good because there's a fundamental flaw in the bill:

Eugenie Scott, director of the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education, said there is no "factual scientific evidence" against evolution.

Amen, as Ben would probably say.

On a lighter note, the UCC has responded to Fruitcake Dobson's homophobia by inviting SpongeBob to join them. Bob recently toured UCC headquarters. Pictures of his visit are here.

SpongeBob meets with the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's general minister and president, in his office. Explains Thomas, "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, SpongeBob, you're welcome here."

(Link courtesy of Digby)

Howard Dean's candidacy for the post of DNC Chair replacing the unlamented Terry McAuliffe has lefties twittering about 'saving the party' and 'having a liberal in charge again' (example here). We need to get a grip. Reality check for the 'reality-based' party:

1. Liberal? Hardly.

Whatever else Howard Dean might be--and he's a fairly interesting pol--one thing he isn't is a liberal. I live across the border from Vermont and watched him all the time he was Gov. He's basically a centrist, one of the NE types we get a lot of: left on social issues, right on fiscal ones. The liberal label is undeserved, mostly a result of his passionate anti-war stance combined with the fact that he sounds like a liberal next to the right-wing DLC corporatists who run the Democratic Party these days.

I backed Dean early and have a lot of respect for his ability and his charisma (which is startling in person) but let's not kid ourselves: this guy isn't Paul Wellstone. He'd be just as happy as a Pub moderate, if such a thing was allowed to exist by the radcon leadership. As a liberal icon, he leaves a lot to be desired.

Having said that, I will add that his committment and passion aren't fake, and he genuinely wants to see the Mule move in a more solid direction--toward its core principles. I'd support him for almost any position, including DNC Chair if he really wants it, but I'd rather see him loose to run again in 2008 after the Bush Fantasist Administration implodes.

2. DNC Chair? Why?

I honestly don't know why fans of Dean want him to take this job, or for that matter why he wants it. DNC Chair is almost exclusively a fund-raising job. It isn't involved with either direction or policy making; it isn't a position of power. Ron Brown didn't have any, neither did McAuliffe. Dean won't either. If anything, it's liable to lock him into adopting the corporate-friendly positions that will keep the money flowing. If the DLC wanted to get Dean off their backs by co-opting him, giving him the DNC Chair would be a good way to do it.

People seem to be making some kind of tie-in where Dean's credibility = more Democratic victories, but I think everybody's on the wrong track, and not just about Dean. The whole discussion seems to revolve around how and/or which way the Dems have to change to win: who do we pander to, the core or the swing voters? how many right-wing positions do we have to adopt and how far do we have to go? which issues will win for us? All of this misses the point.

If the Democrats want to start winning elections again, the one thing they must do is to stop worrying about winning elections and start concentrating on communicating what they believe. More than anything else, they need to convince voters that they've got integrity. All this talk about 'how do we have to change to win?' just convinces people even more that the Dems have no guts, no core beliefs, and will change their minds with the polls--which is exactly how the Pubs branded them as opportunistic wimps.

They need to go back to their core values circa FDR and sell people on their agenda all over again--presuming they can decide what that agenda is. But even more important, they have to sell people on the beliefs behind the agenda. We're at a place now where people have to be re-sold on concepts like fairness, tolerance, and equality; when we have to remind them why sexism, racism, and getting religion involved in the state isn't a Good Thing. It's sad but that's where the Pubs have brought us over the past 25 years.

I don't think swing voters are anywhere near as crucial as a lot of people do but I'll say this: if you want them, don't pander. Swing voters are wimps and they tend to gravitate toward the side with the strongest opinions and the firmest beliefs. To overcome the Pub appeal to what's worst in us--fear, greed, intolerance--the only answer is for the Dems to appeal to what's best--tolerance, generosity, courage--and to do so forcefully and with passionate conviction. It can't be taken for granted any more.

Dean could be a lot more helpful to that effort outside than inside the DNC. It's his strength, it's what he does best. As the DNC Chair, he'll be wasted even if he isn't buried under the compromising he'll have to do to keep the coffers full.

I like Dean, so I'm hoping he doesn't get it.

Thanks to a hint (and the gift of the formula, which I didn't know) from cosa nostra, I reconstructed the BT Entry Page from a Google cache (Thanks, cn!). Unfortunately, there is no cache copy of BT02 itself. Only a third of it exists, unpublished, on Verizon's server. They appear to have re-booted by going back to the status of the server as of Dec 1, because everything done after that date has vanished. That means all of the first Aardvark Monthly and all of BT03--which was almost done--no longer exist.

The Good News--such as it is--is that I am told 'they' are still working on it, and indeed, I have been shut out of my webspace for the past 3 days. At the moment, Reality Check and Trench Warfare are still viewable, as is BT01. For those of you aware of it, Ponsonby is still viewable but episodes added after Dec 1 are gone, which I realize isn't much help.

From what I can gather, this was not all due to some routine glitch but a massive server failure on several different fronts. At least one of the people I spoke to hinted at an attack from the outside that had brought everything to a crashing halt. I can't speak to the validity of that--I know nothing about how such things are done or what limitations attackers might have--but what is clear is that this was no normal malfunction. And if it did come from the outside, it would seem to still be going on. I have read zero reports of this in the press, but that may be because Verizon is hushing it up. It doesn't seem to have affected any of their services except for the webspaces, which is either because those were the only servers affected or they're spending all their time keeping the phone and DSL operative and webspaces simply aren't a priority.

But all this is pure speculation. The point is that all the zines are on indefinite hold until this problem is resolved one way or the other. For the time being I will try to be patient and see how this gets worked out--I don't want to blame them because they were, maybe, a target for malicious hackers or the victims of some giant server meltdown--and hope that they get things back to normal soon. In the meantime, I'm removing the links to BT02 and BTHome from the sidebar. The BT01 link will remain for anyone still interested.

I realize this is small potatoes in a world where the Middle East is imploding and in a country where a total incompetent is Sec of State, an advocate of torture is going to be Attorney General, and the Emperor has just sold the entire state of New Mexico to the oil and gas industry for contributions rendered. No one is (or should be) waiting breathlessly for something as inconsequential as a blogzine, nor will anyone be terribly disappointed by its absence--or even likely to notice it. Still, when one makes promises, one should at least explain why one can't keep them.

As soon as the situation is resolved, I'll let you know. I don't have the money to pay for space from a different host, so I'll just have to deal with whatever I'm left with when the dust settles. I may simply delete BT02 and start from scratch. I don't know yet.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast, theoretically already in progress.

I was going to do this as a correction but it turns out there may be nothing to correct.

An anonymous commenter found an exact copy posted on a BBS in Nov of 2000 and left the link. it was posted by one Kassandra Calhoun, but she didn't write it. She says it was passed on to her by email. She apparently didn't know who wrote it.

But the piece was then published and signed by Cleese in the Dec 15 issue of Bellaciao--last month.

Did somebody attach Cleese's name to it? Was he the original author in 2000? (It shows up, unattributed, in a collection of English jokes about the 2000 election on a British website.)

It certainly reads like Cleese, and I suspect he wrote it originally in 2000 and then simply recycled it when we did it again and Bellaciao wanted a response. But I can't find a reference from 2000 with his name attached to it--they're all anonymous so far.

So did he write it? Or is it the work of an anonymous Brit wit?

I'm going with Cleese. His style is very distinctive and this piece is swimming in standard Cleese-ish word-play and the outraged uber-Britishness of Basil Fawlty, a character he created and wrote all the dialogue for.

Those two or three of you who may be waiting with baited breath for the 3rd issue of Blog Tower, originally due out about now, have a right to be advised that it ain't gonna happen fo' a while. My webhost--or so it laughingly calls itself, apparently unaware that hosting entails some, you know, duties besides collecting the monthly fee--had a few little problems the last couple of weeks. First, it cut off access to several of my sites, posting a big FORBIDDEN notice if you tried to view them. Unsatisfied with that as lacking in severity, it then completely lost them for about a week. All of them. Finally, after frantic phone calls were exchanged, they found them again, but everything I had changed or added after Nov 15 has for some reason vanished and would appear to be gone for good. This includes, of course, all the work I did on Issue 03, which now no longer exists in any form.

This is depressing. I'm forced to start all over again from scratch. Meanwhile, Aardvark Monthly, the humor zine, and an as yet unnamed zine of original material from blog writers of note, are hovering in Limbo--should I put them together and risk losing all that work while my host attempts to get its act together?

Part of the problem here is that everybody is disavowing all knowledge of responsibility. Verizon says it's not their problem, it's Trellix, the site builder. But Trellix has been cut into four different pieces and none of them will admit to having responsibility for maintaining Verizon's webspaces. 'Site Technical Support' goes straight back to Verizon, who tell you they don't know what to tell you but 'They' have been having problems. Who is they? We don't know. What problems? We don't know. Well, who's fixing it? We don't know. Then who do I talk to about this? We don't know. They're very nice and very friendly but they don't know much.

They're still working on it, supposedly. I'm going to give them a couple more days and then if the rest of my work isn't restored, make a decision about where to go from here. I swear, if this wasn't the cheapest deal around ($7/month for 100mgs of space and unlimited bandwidth), I'd be looking for a replacement. The good news is that in the, what, 8 months or so I've been actively using their hosting, this is the first time anything like this has happened, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them.

Still, it's a bummer losing all that work.

Stay tuned for further developments. Otherwise, go on with what you were doing before I interrupted you.

This is really Rob's territory, but I couldn't help noticing that the Bobbsey Twins of the NYT political staff, Nagourney the Noble and L'il Dick Stevenson, who have between them written almost as many stories flattering Bush as Dan Bartlett told them to write, teamed up today, combining their considerable talents for a) toadying Bush and the GOP, b) dissing the Dems back-handed, and c) devising silly political narratives almost but not quite divorced from recognizable reality. In the new NYT double-bladed soap opera, they have at last, after four years of an arrogance unparalleled in American politics since the days of Hayes, noticed that the Pubs are maybe over-reaching just a tad.

The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his Inaugural Address on Thursday, Mr. Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.

But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who invoked his experience serving alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans captured the House in 1994. "Hubris is deadly," Mr. Sanford said.

And to prove it, they quote no less an authority than--wait for it!--Gary Bauer. Now there's an expert witness.

And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Mr. Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals - overhauling Social Security and the tax code - those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Mr. Bush's long-term goal for the party.

"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Mr. Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."

Bauer, a far-right crackpot who looks extraordinarily like a cross between an evil Hummel and Phil Gramm on heavy tranqs, is so far out that he's on the fringe of the fringe, along with Alan Keyes, Man-on-Dog Santoro, and what's-his-name from Oklahoma, the one who's so concerned about lesbians in school bathrooms that he ran a campaign based on it. He's just the sort a couple of star reporters from America's top newspaper should be going to for inside information and 'the real scoop' on the future of the Bush Administration, yes, sir.

By their sources shall ye know them.

Note: Edited to eliminate an egregious error as brought to my attention by eRobin. Too bad, tho. It was one of my better moments of scatological snark.

"People would just come up to me and say, 'How'd you lose your arm?' " Mr. Acosta said. "And I'd say, 'In the war.' And they would be like, 'What war?' "
--Robert Acosta, who lost his hand when a grenade was thrown into his truck in Iraq.