Fox News is doing a heckuva job countering the impression that they’re just a mouthpiece for the Republican party (via TPM) :

On another front, Republicans said that Tony Snow, a commentator for Fox News and a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush’s father, was in negotiations for the job of White House press secretary. Mr. Snow would replace Scott McClellan, who announced Wednesday that he was resigning.

In other words, his job will change from lying through the press to lying to the press. I’m not very familiar with Snow, but if he’s anything like the rest of the talking heads on Fox News, then we can expect the White House press office to get a heavy dose of belligerence and condescension. Those gaggles are going to be even more exciting than when Ari was around.

I’ve made an effort to avoid falling into the habit of patting the Democratic party on the back just to be disappointed a week later, but this one’s too good to resist :

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) today unveiled an advertising campaign that sets the record straight on where Democrats and Republicans stand on immigration reform. In a new Spanish language radio ad, Democrats hold Republicans accountable for trying to criminalize immigrants, doctors, and churches, and for blocking real progress on immigration reform. The ad campaign coincides with Congress’s return next week.
. . .

Democrats support tough and smart immigration reform. We want to strengthen our borders; as well as U.S. workers and their wages. We want for immigrants who obey the law and pay taxes to be able to apply for U.S. citizenship.

That’s immigration reform that matches American values: tough and smart.

Now Republicans are lying to us.

They control Congress and the White House, and in five years have done nothing. They’ve failed.

If they wanted comprehensive immigration reform and to protect our borders, they would have done it already.

But what Republicans and President Bush supported was a plan that would criminalize immigrants, families, doctors, and even churches just for giving communion.

Call Republican Senator Bill Frist at 202-224-3135 and tell him to allow a vote on immigration reform.

That should be the theme of this election cycle. The Republicans have been in charge for five years and haven’t done a thing. If they really cared about ______, they would have done something by now.

This is one of the sickest, most repulsive things I’ve ever seen in my life. A flash-based “game” in which you try to murder as many immigrants as possible, including a pregnant woman and her children. I don’t know who made it and haven’t bothered investigating who’s hosting it (though it can be found here as well), but this is a pretty clear reminder of the truly evil mindset that we’re up against. I will never understand how someone could be so filled with blind rage that they’d sink to dehumanizing their fellow human beings to the point that they could make jokes of their violent fanatasies.

Gotta love how the press is spinning Karl Rove’s second change in job title as if it were a big deal.

White House political mastermind Karl Rove surrendered a key policy role Wednesday and press secretary Scott McClellan resigned in an escalation of a Bush administation shake-up driven by Republican anxieties.

Rove gave up his responsibilities as chief policy coordinator, a position he assumed just over a year ago that strengthened his influence over matters ranging from homeland security and domestic policy to the economy and national security. The promotion had left him stretched too thin in the eyes of some officials, as the White House grappled with mounting problems.

With Wednesday’s change, Rove will be able to focus more on politics, fundraising and big-picture thinking with the approach of the November congressional elections, officials said.

He “surrendered” and “gave up” his policy role? Well, that’s one way to spin it. A more accurate way to spin it would be to say that the Bush White House has never really given a shit about policy and that Rove’s function is and has always been to bully people around and win elections. Of course, with Dubya’s poll numbers in the toilet and the pressure for Republican incumbents to distance themselves from the White House’s string of failures, Rove’s part-time job of threatening potential GOP traitors is quickly becoming full-time.

In the midst of a debate with Ezra Klein over how conservative John McCain is, Jonathan Chait offers this interesting dismissal (via Kevin Drum) :

Ezra cites McCain’s ACU ratings. But I think that, especially in recent years, those ratings do a lousy job of showing who’s liberal and who’s conservative. Don’t they show Hilary Clinton to be one of the most liberal Senators? There’s an article to be done debunking those ratings, but I’m guessing that the changing partisan dynamics of the current era has rendered the old system worthless.

Kevin goes on to suggest that the ultra-partisanship of the modern political climate results in so many party-line votes that it makes the American Conservative Union’s ratings essentially worthless, but c’mon this is John McCain we’re talking about, a maverick leader above petty partisanship and political posturing. Even if he did vote with the Republican party 80% of the time, it’s surely because Mr. Straight Talk agreed with the conservative position 80% of the time.

Chait’s right, however, on the larger point that the ACU ratings are skewed, but not in a way that helps his larger point that McCain is essentially a “moderate Democrat”. The missing context in Congressional scorecards isn’t just the fact that they ignore everything but some carefully chosen up/down votes, but the fact that Republicans control everything. Republicans lead every committee and have been playing hardball for the past few years, so absent any real “liberal” legislation of course Hillary Clinton is going to look left-wing. If bills for public financing of elections, single-payer healthcare, and gay marriage made it to the floor of the Senate, you might get a better idea where Sen. Clinton fits on the left/right scale. More importantly, considering that McCain get 80% when scored against a heavily conservative agenda, a more balanced and reliable ratings system of the sort that Chait seems to want would likely make McCain’s conservatism undeniable.

Besides, the real debate we should be having isn’t about whether McCain is conservative, but the extent to which he’s a complete phony.

A president invoking national security to defend wrongdoing? I dare you to not think of George Bush while watching this video.

Interesting applause line there, Mr. President.

Here’s a re-run of one of the Easter Eggs I dyed a couple of years ago. When you’re celebrating someone raising from the dead, this seemed oddly appropriate.

And since it’s been a while since I’ve posted any bunny pictures, here’s a photo of Dig-Dug that my wife took :



Next year, I need to figure out a way to crash a Passover Seder.

Josh Marshall has this odd bit of news :

Grover Norquist said he was trademark the phrase ‘K Street Project’ and would sue anyone using it in an improper fashion. It turns out Norquist is just trademarking the ‘K Street Project’ logo. Norquist will be able to make exclusive use of the logo to produce “product ratings of the consumer goods and services of others in the field of posting the most recent job hires in Washington DC’s premier lobbying firms, trade associations, and industries.”

It’s bad enough that these guys built an organization around the revolving door culture that rewards public servants with jobs in the private sector, but now they’re trying to turn it into a brand name? I’m sure they just want to put the logo on a few souvenirs….

But why stop there? I’m sure there are plenty of products that would cater to K-Street’s clientele :

Or maybe they’ll just start a line of K-Street branded “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. They’re gonna need ‘em.

I’ve had this fantasy for a little while now that at some point in the mid-60’s, John Lennon turned to Paul McCartney and said “We’re the biggest band in the world and we’re named after a fucking bug.” Or maybe I read something like that somewhere. I don’t remember. Either way, it’s funny how something that starts off as an inside joke or an off-the-cuff idea ends up being something you’re stuck with forever. Who knew that a tribute to Buddy Holly’s backing band The Crickets and a play on the word “beat” would end up being the word used to describe the most famous and influental band on Earth? Or that a blog title pulled out of nowhere and kept because it seemed memorable…

That’s right, I hate the name of this site. When I started blogging over three years ago, I wanted something simple and easy to remember. As I was thinking up ideas, I remembered how much I love watching the Spelling Bee every year with my friends. Writing for an audience of strangers for the first time, I felt like those kids on stage, confused, awkward, shy, etc. It seemed like a pretty good fit, though somewhere through the brainstorming process, “The Spelling Bee” turned into “The Talent Show”.

Fast forward to now and every time I see the words “Talent Show”, I feel like everyone assumes I chose this title because I’m an arrogant prick, when really I still feel like I’ve got more in common with that kid who sounds like a musical robot. The name of the site seems so far removed from that tiny nugget of a not-very-good idea I had in 2003 that I can’t help but think the words “Talent Show” conjure images of a self-righteousness egomaniac who’s set up a blog to highlight his own brilliance. The idea that the name of this site might give people the exact opposite impression of what I want to convey really bugs me.

So that’s that. I’ve been thinking about renaming the site for a while now, but every idea I have is either taken or stupid or fraught with its own problems. At the very least, I wish the name of the site had something to do with politics. Should I even bother?

The Republican scumbags in Washington and their well-trained Democratic toadies can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard to hide my rage over the fact that the poverty rate has gone up every year of the Bush presidency, yet we’re greeted with infuriating news like this :

IBM, for example, is banking a $2.8 billion refund—well, better to call it a “tax savings”—because instead of paying the normal corporate tax rate of 35 percent on $9.5 billion in profits it earned overseas, the company paid only 5.25 percent. That’s the magic of the American Jobs Creation Act, a piece of legislation that passed with comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush just two weeks before the 2004 elections.

The AJCA, which was pushed through during the last fit of panic about outsourcing, was ostensibly designed to encourage companies to add jobs here. It gave a small tax deduction to American manufacturers, and it offered a one-time tax holiday in 2005 when corporations could repatriate their foreign income at a massively reduced tax rate. This repatriation, the theory went, would encourage R & D and capital investment in the United States, leading to new positions down the road. But, like President Bush’s creatively named Clear Skies initiative and Healthy Forest Restoration Act, the American Jobs Creation Act has not lived up to its title.
. . .
Analysts anticipate that American companies will have repatriated around $350 billion in 2005 as a result of the law. While it’s hard to make a straight calculation because of the vagaries of the tax code, that works out to a savings of roughly $104 billion on corporate America’s tax bill. At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriation—$37 billion—the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn’t list employees by region. But the company’s total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004.

I know I’m sounding like a shrill liberal here, but screw it. The American government should never, ever trust corporations. No, not because of some cartoonish fantasy of a CEO devising new ways to poison the environment and eat babies, but because looking after our best interests isn’t their job. Their job is to make as much money as possible, period. I’m not making a moral judgement here. Getting rich isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we shouldn’t ever expect corporations to put aside their own financial interests for ethical concerns.

Which is why it’s so damn frustrating to see this supply-side bullshit pop up again and again. It seems like a truism that businesses care more about the bottom line that anything else, but that level of common sense is absent from our government today. I’m all for capitalism and I think the stated goals behind a lot of conservative economic incentives are pretty good. Give tax breaks to corporations to reinvest in the country and help create jobs? Sounds like a great idea. Yeah, I said it, I agree with the Republicans. I just wish the Republicans agreed with the Republicans.

When a politician tells you they want to cut taxes to help jumpstart the economy, create jobs, or whetever, they’re lying to you. Yes, there are schools of economic thought that support their trickle-down theories, but these aren’t honest differences of opinion, they’re shameful lies. If they really thought their tax cuts would benefit working Americans they’d put it in writing. There’s nothing stopping politicians from making their tax cuts only apply to companies who create X number of jobs or invest a certain percentage of their profits within the U.S., but that never happens because conservative politicians are for the most part too craven to put their money where their mouth is.

Now corporations are laughing all the way to the bank with $104 billion in tax refunds and all we can do is sit back and wonder why people still believe a word that comes out of the mouths of the corporate whores in Washington D.C. Of course, that’s just how they wanted it. It doesn’t matter whether or not we feel robbed, the getaway car escaped a year and a half ago.