Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor 36% approval ratings, nor over 2,400 dead U.S. troops in Iraq, nor record high gasoline prices, nor most especially a record high federal budget deficit poised only to get worse can stop these Republicans from their appointed rounds of tax-cuts for America’s most affluent, today, a $70 billion extension of 2003 tax cuts on dividends, capital gains, and other measures intended to be redistributive toward those most affluent, while affording minimal tax relief to anyone else, though of course, pressure to slash social spending will increase. The GOP official statement is that it...

Senator Joseph Biden (D-MBNA) joins with former Council on Foreign Relations chairman Leslie Gelb to write an op-ed in the Grey Lady to… wait for it… suggest that Iraq be divided administratively into its three religio-ethnic (Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish) regions. Jebus. Never heard that before… except perhaps here… I, of course, make no claim to original thinking on this point… It has really been an issue since the British and French smashed Iraq together shortly after World War I out of ethnically mutually-hostile pieces of the defeated Ottoman Empire… Of course, this sort of internal break-up was the subject...

That observation was famously by the late John Maynard Keynes; the economist believed to be the greatest of all Keynesians, American giant John Kenneth Galbraith (for more reasons than his 6’8″ stature.) has died, at age 97. Galbraith gave our vocabularies terms like “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power,” he gave our libraries The Affluent Society, he gave our nation service as an advisor of Presidents from FDR to Clinton, and as Ambassador to India in the 1960’s, and he gave academia decades of service as an economics professor at Harvard, not to mention numerous seminal works of economics, including probably...

And so we find ourselves starting to reach down to characters like Barnyard Dawg, protector of the chicken-house from such predators as right wing chickenhawk Henery Hawk, and Southern blowhard rooster (my guess is a Zell Miller-type DINO) Foghorn Leghorn. Some of you have suggested that I consider Snoop Doggy Dogg for this feature, but I have learned that he is not a talking dog at all, but a rather troubled human being. Hence, the rap on him is he ain’t a dog… sorry Snoop fans. The thing with Barnyard Dawg is, like other Warner Brothers talking dogs such as...

Hard exactly what to make of the third major A.Q. figure to recently release a videotape, today, on an “extremist website”, in this case a video by Al Qaeda overall “number two” and the man widely viewed as its “operational” head supervillain, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. This taunting videotape arrives shortly after similar tapes from OBL himself and Al Qaeda in Iraq (TM) leader Zarqawi… coming as it does in a bloody April for American troops, as well as a particularly bloody political period for the Bush Administration as the lethal combination of high oil prices, GOP corruption, legislative malaise… and that...

Nope. Republicans of the current era could never, ever be accused of that. The uninformed electorate is our best customer, to paraphrase a New York area men’s clothing store’s tagline. Thus, it should come as no surprise that some of the brilliant ideas for dealing with high oil prices that have emerged from the geniuses in the Republican majority in the senate include a $100 “gas tax holiday” (in the form of a Treasury sponsored rebate check… thank you for driving an SUV) or more funding for “alternative fuels”… the President, down on the Gulf Coast for another photo op...

I’m sure you’re all aware that the original name of the Excellent Iraq Adventure (TM) was none other than “Operation Iraqi Liberation (TM)”. The problem with such a name is obvious: it creates a subliminal dissonance in constantly saying “it’s not about oil” when the brand name you chose for it has a convenient acronym of O.I.L. (Hence “Operation Iraqi Freedom”– OIF– was born.) Anyway, I guess we need to come up with something like “Operation Hold the House” or “Operation Fool the Rubes So we can Win the Mid-terms” or something like that. Because reminiscent of the old SNL...

Banking that there is no limit to the stupidity of at least a plurality of the American people (and on this point, I may well agree with them), the Bush Administration announced an investigation into possible price-gouging-at-the-pump as the reason for the nation’s record high retail gasoline prices (in marginal, not-inflation-adjusted) terms. This, of course, follows the kabuki-like “pressure” to do so from GOP Congressional leaders which I recently alluded to in this post over at the American Street. Oy. Bush foreign policy and energy policy have almost been designed to drive up the price of oil (just as his...

Such is the rather upbeat take by our friend Scott Lemieux of a trend among recent lower federal courts to ignore the weasel words of the infamous Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision, and actually use the decision itself for the proposition that the precious rights of voters shall not be diluted by legislative schemes intended to do so, such as recently, one in Ohio duly voided by the Sixth Circuit (based in Cincinatti). The Supreme Court, much like some of my employers used to do when giving some particular day as a holiday, would say “this applies today, but...