I found the above words up this morning, inspiring me to think back a few days. (Why ESPN managed to mispell "role" is beyond me.) Though a review and advice column are due, I thought I'd sneak in a little sugar first. After years of watching television reporters spin the annual super-bowl commercial wrap ups, I decided that they're all bad critics. For some reason reporters are drawn to commercials with

• a) celebrities
• b) lots of money
• c) easy to understand jokes

Tate, in his commercial, proceeds to beat the stuffing out of whatever poor soul has been playing solitaire, failing to refill the coffee pot, or lowering productivity. The combination of stooge-like violence with genuinely annoying office habits created an amusing spectacle. (In my mind, both Terry Tate and the Sierra Mist Monkey commercials were clearly the best of the bunch.) In a sign that Reebok had wasted its money, more people remembered the name of the fictional office company, Felcher & Sons, than realized Terry was hawking Reebok products. (What products I can't remember...shoes? The shirt from the spot is evidently being sold online now...but it's a novelty item, not something Reebok normally makes.

In a gesture towards the success of the spot (which I don't really care about, except that if people like it..) more commercials are being created now to show Mr. Tate on vacation or up against a rookie office linebacker. I say bring on the pain.

UPDATE: I added this in the the next post but some people are having a hard time finding it, so here it is: the full, un-edited version of the terry tate movie. It's un-censored, and in quicktime format. So don't let the kiddies see it, but laugh it up yourself! (Okay, some jokers can't even figure out that you're supposed to click where it say "terry tate movie". Some people need to stay away from technology, IMHO!)

Okay, after watching the SOTU I had several thoughts. But let's get the highlights out there quickly. From the speech itself:

(...)Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail, terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.

This threat is new; America's duty is familiar. Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit. In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America. (Applause.)

Now, in this century, the ideology of power and domination has appeared again, and seeks to gain the ultimate weapons of terror. Once again, this nation and all our friends are all that stand between a world at peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm. Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility. (Applause.)(...)

Hmm. Let's see. Isn't Pakistan a valuable ally who sold WMD to North Korea because they ran out of money? And is it just me, or is the line about the "small groups of men...set out to dominate the weak" oddly man-in-the-mirror-esque? And since when were people at war against "Hitlerism"? Is our President Don King? Does he coin new words instead of using traditional ones? He could have easily said "fascism, totalitarianism and communism" and omitted the "ambitions" part. But maybe he thinks the Great People of America don't understand complicated words like fascism or totalitarianism. Go figure. And finally, last time I checked, we lived in a world of chaos and constant alarm. We just didn't wake up until 9/11.

At the speech itself I thought of an idea for next year: if a powerful group got the speech, put it on a five-minute tape delay, and then broadcast it along with little pop-ups (ala VH1's pop-up video technique) to rebutt Bush's claims, I bet lots of people would watch it. You'd need a big staff and people who were fast on their feet, but you could put together a nice little show that hungry dems like myself would love to tune into. A sort of political MST3K, if you will.

For a text-version site that does just this (albeit mostly partisan rhetoric rather than good solid facts...which my show would rely upon without any additional commentary, much like when CNN ran little captions under the Representatives during the Enron hearings which showed the name of the Rep or Senator along with how much money they'd received from Enron over the years.) go to this website.

There's a great piece in the post this morning about an initiative with momentum in Oregon to raise income taxes or cut the budget drastically. I'm excerpting a lot from the story, but it's necessary to the point I'm trying to make. (All you non-lazy people should go and read the article itself. Here we go:

"My husband and I will probably vote by the pocket instead of by our gut, but our gut says to vote no," said Sue Jeremiah, a school district purchasing officer who lives in the suburb of Milwaukie. Her district would close five days early, she said, a loss of income much bigger than the tax increase.

"I will support it just because kids are important and their education is important," said Jorine Rollins, a Republican and a nurse who said her own children are grown. "It's time to be honest and say there is a value to these government services."

Even if the referendum fails, the fact that recession-weary Oregonians came close to raising their own taxes is a barometer of a political storm tossing state governments amid their deepest fiscal crisis since World War II. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that 70 percent of voters nationally believe their state has serious budget problems, and well over half of those blamed their governor and state legislature as well as the national economy. Forty percent also put significant blame on President Bush.

With revenue sinking, unemployment rising and demand for services increasing in almost every state -- all against the backdrop of a shaky world order -- the old rules hardly seem to apply.

"We live in cognitively dissonant times," observed Phil Keisling, a former Oregon Democratic state legislator and secretary of state, now a business executive.

While almost every state faces yawning budget gaps, Oregon's crisis is one of the more severe. A trophy state among anti-tax activists, Oregon used direct democracy and referendums in the last decade to reduce its state and local tax burden from 12th-highest in the country in 1992 to 41st in 2002, according to the Tax Foundation. By comparison, Virginia's rank moved from 41st to 40th; Maryland's fell from 21st to 37th.

Okay, let me get this straight: it took 10 years, during one of the largest economic booms in this nation's history, for anti-tax activists in Oregon to lower taxes to the point where they were finally able to overtake Virginia as the 10th least-taxed state in the nation? (Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he gets elected every few years to promise you the magic of repealing taxes without cutting services.) And only then, after drastically cutting taxes, did they come to the moment of truth where one of them could idiotically utter "my gut says no" to raising taxes, despite knowing that it would cost them several times more money to pay for the services they need themselves instead of raising their taxes. Where do these people come from? (The answer, of course, is Oregon! Virginia voters would never have stirred from their anti-tax slumber long enough to think long and hard about why their previous DMV stations were shuttered last month. Trust me, though they may have lost their spot in the top-ten, Virginia citizens are still more rabidly anti-tax-increasing than Oregon, or almost anyone else.)

The simple fact is that, much like shopping at Costco, the government is able to do things cheaper than the private sector because it can purchase services in bulk, streamline in bulk, and collect revenues in bulk. In addition, unlike private companies, most governmental functions are available for public perusal, preventing the sort of coporate larceny that has dominated headlines the past few years. The only real problem with government is that, should public officials do something unpopular, they can be voted out of office. Why is this a problem? Because any mention of tightening the budget belt (a good idea) results in dismissal. The incentive, then, is to lie to the voters about what is or is not fiscally possible.

Perhaps Virginia should take a cue from Oregon, then. Perhaps budgetary battles should be fought with a clear cut measure: either raise the income tax on all, or lose the precious services that everyone loves. You can't have it both ways. And it's about time that people's pocketbooks started making decisions instead of their gut.

Yeah, another night, another sponge cd. Perhaps I'll break down and buy the one they came out with five years ago. Perhaps not. Work has started to get a little intense, with hours spent doing mindless activities while other similar don quixotic ventures lurk in the wings. And there's me, the hapless sancho panda stuck playing second fiddle to an idiot, whether it be the user who wants their silly instant messenger to work or help purchasing the latest computer. I wonder if used-car salesmen get hit up by co-workers for help buying a vehicle. For some reason I doubt it.

Fast forward through bad song. Anastasia's next. Damn, that's a good name. Those Russians may not have been great at achieving a marxist utopia, but they did have a fairly stable state monopoly on cool names. Ivan the Terrible? Catherine the Great? Sonja the duck? (Played by the oboe, perhaps?) Czar Nicholas? Rasputin? That and some wickedly messed up fairy tales, second only to those crazy Grimm brothers. No fairy tale can quite catch the allure of a princess trapped in a commoner's body. It's sort of the inverse joe-millionaire effect (yes, I watched tonight's episode and was surpringly pleased at the turn of events) whereby an ordinary person is actually royalty and yet has nothing to show for it. How many women would swoon over the prince of royal birth with not a penny to his name? Or the princess without the castle? There's something still intriguing there, as if the years of serfs and lords had ingrained in our heads that somehow those of noble birth were better than the rest of us, rather than being lucky or malevolent. Nothing's more eternal than the conflict between new and old power, European lineage verus American up-and-comers, east against west egg. But in the end, all money pools together in a melting pot of nepotism and conflicts-of-interest. Even the Russians weren't immune to the seduction of greed and influence. So why are we any different?

Perhaps because Americans want an even shake. It's not the pursuit of wealth that disgusts us so much as the manipulation needed to hold onto it. We'll root for the underdog at every chance, but nothing feels quite so heady as seeing the dynasties disrupted by an upstart, especially one without much on their side.

It's an early day tomorrow, so I better get started. The coldest night so far of the year is coming with lows approaching zero degrees. That's brisk.

No, I'm not referencing any movie. I'm actually referring to the increasing ability of your low-level spambot. These automated guys scour the net for e-mail addresses that are unprotected (typically listed in webpages) and then add them to their lists. Point in case: I recently posted a piece which included an e-mail address on the website. Now normally, whenever I post an e-mail address, I make sure to do a little bit of trickeration to hide the actual address from spambots. It involves encoding the address into numerical html references, then splitting it up into a javascript array. The technique is quite simple and easy to paste into any blog entry.

But I was lazy this time.

Therefore, I just posted the regular address into the body of the blog. The result? Within a few hours, spam began to trickle into my mailbox, (because the address in question was redirected to my regular address) slowly at first and now starting to gush. Luckily, I can turn off the address at any point, letting the spambots eat a bunch of non-dels for their trouble. But imagine if I had posted one of my real addresses? The consequences could be deadly.

Computer stuff aside, today has been super-busy, so no review and no waxing philosophical. Just work work work. Jack may be a dull boy, but he's too busy to go insane right now.

Another Sunday night ending. The normal routine would call for sleep, dreams and a painfully cold morning punctuated by the knowledge that an entire week would need to elapse before the next break. Even though certain moments (the laughably unclose Super Bowl, or the Highly Anticipated SOTU speech on Tuesday) tend to stand out this week, I think it's fairly typical overall. Except that this week, unlike those previous, has a high expectation behind it. For the first time in awhile, I think things are going exceedingly well, despite a lack of emperical evidence to subtantiate said claims.

I should be posting a movie review up sometime Monday, along with a full digression into the opcoming SOTU speech on Tuesday. Word on the street is that it'll have something to do with Medicare. I'm thrilled. (Insert sarcasm.) Despite the fact that we may be going to war soon, the economy is in the toilet, our current administration seems more concerned with turning the government into a giant hose to spray the wealthy with money, tons of work that was due on Friday I'll have to explain on Monday and the absurdly cold weather here in the district, I still feel good. Perhaps it was cooking cheddarwurst over a grill with falling snow all around. Perhaps it's watching my neighbors deposit their trash in the street as I sit listening to sponge sing robert frost and typing away in the warm nook of the 'werkz that I've claimed as my own.

Sometimes, weeks simply reflect their owners. And this week's reflection is looking damn good. Bring on the morning.

So, yesterday I was invited by a co-worker to attend part of the Democratic Mayor's meeting during which the Democratic presidential hopefuls would all speak. This was my first chance to see each of them square off, live and in-person. It was well worth it. Below, a few thoughts about each. I'll be updating and adding to this throughout the day, so check back if they're not all there...

John Kerry

Kerry has been getting a bad rep in the press, much like Al Gore. He's described as elitist, as out-of-touch, and as a New England liberal. All of these are code words in the media for "we hate you and we'll stop at nothing to bring you down". A good example can be found in today's washington post article about Kerry in which his policy positions are ridiculed as being a copy of Al Gore's. (The position's themselves aren't really debated, as usual.) When he spoke, however, he seemed like a fairly decent guy. (Remember, the presidency is more about a popularity contest than a "who should lead the nation" contest.) He didn't get terrifically passionate about items, but he looked and spoke like a legitimate presidential candidate. Overall, I still think the press loathing will hurt him, but he wouldn't be a bad person to have as our president.

Dick Gephardt

Gephardt came out of the blocks quickly. He spoke with a fury and passion that didn't relent for his entire period. After Kerry, he seemd much more animated, but like the Senator, he also is fighting against media "conventional wisdom" which says that his time has passed. Why? I'm not sure. But unless he can climb over this hump, (perhaps with a resounding victory in Iowa) he won't make it far. Gephardt spent most of his time decrying the Bush tax cut packages, and reminded everyone of the Clinton budget which raised taxes on the wealthy and helped usher in the largest peacetime economic expansion ever.

Howard Dean

I've been favoring Dean for some time, even before I saw him. His policy positions seemed nuanced but easily communicated, on issues from health care to tax cuts to education funding. His candor was refreshing. (As opposed to Sharpton, Dean's biggest laughs came from his criticism of an actual policy, rather than a strawman.) With so many specific policy recommendations, he was almost the anti-Lieberman, a good thing to be in any race. Finally, he struck a clear distinction between himself and the other contenders, whom he said had failed to take Bush's bad ideas head on. If he were to pick up an early victory in New Hampshire, my guess is that Dean would take fire. Unlike the Bush/McCain rivalry in the last cycle, there's no easy front-runner with loads of cash (yes, I know about Kerry!) who's willing to get down in the muck and sling it at Dean. Call me crazy, but if any Dem did what Bush did in South Carolina to McCain, they'd be crucified in the next primary for their dirty tricks.

Al Sharpton

Sharpton was interesting. Much like all of the candidates, Sharpton's media image is quite different from his personality in public. I was expecting a oratorical genuis who harped about inner-city issues. (This was, after all the Conference of Mayors!) Instead, Sharpton started slowly and constantly checked his notes before saying lines, like the first high-school rehearsal of a Shakespeare play. Seeing him made me realize that I hadn't noticed either Gephardt or Dean using notes during their presentations, which was a major plus. Sharpton didn't actually lay out many policy points at all, which was disappointing, but did manage to get some laughs after he warmed up, especially when he demanded that the government put more cops on the street "to arrest protestors like me". Instead of specific recommendations, he dabbled in the banal tropes of "job-creation", "infrastructure improvement" and a few other notables. To be honest, though, other than Dean I can't remember any real specific policy recommendations from any of the candidates, so it's possible that Sharpton said some things that just weren't memorable.

Joe Lieberman

Lieberman...was awful. He had a cold, which isn't his fault, but his speaking style was simply boring. Halfway through his speech I realized I had completely tuned him out. As fiery as Gephardt got, Joe was mellow. He also, even more so thatn Sharpton, tended to speak in silly cliches and flowery language rather than mention specific policy points. Despite high name recognition, I suspect that Lieberman won't make it far on the campaign trail.

John Edwards

Edwards showed up too late for the main mayoral meeting, although he spoke afterwards. But I didn't see him, so I can't comment.

That wraps up my thoughts. Overall, I was very pleased with Dean, and other than Lierberman or Sharpton, I think any of the choices could theoretically knock Bush off. People underestimate how much Bush resentment there is among the far-left. Now if we could just prevent Nader from running again...

I'm not that big a fan of The New York Times in the same way that I am of The Washington Post. (Although both, to be sure, contain far too many simple errors for professional publications. A hand-coded blog like this one has about as many errors.) However, occasionally the Times does a really great story. That story is right here and was written by Daniel Altman. From the piece:

Corporate dividends, however, are not the only kind of income that is taxed twice. Other taxes create a double, triple or even quintuple burden. And unlike the double taxation of dividends, which mainly affects the wealthy, the burden of other forms of multiple taxation - sales taxes, import taxes, payroll taxes, among others - often falls most heavily on poorer Americans.

These taxes may not be associated with inefficiencies in the capital markets, but can still take a hefty bite out of paychecks and reduce the incentive to work. Democrats and a few Republicans outside the White House have proposed cutting at least one of those taxes, but no one is talking about eliminating them altogether.

The double tax on dividends is really a double tax on corporate profits. The federal government taxes companies' profits and then taxes the money again when it passes to shareholders as dividends. The double tax affects about 54 million Americans. Economists agree that it also gives companies an incentive to issue debt - with the interest counting as a pretax cost - rather than equity.

Multiple taxes also affect the other 236 million Americans who would see no immediate benefits from elimination of the tax on dividends. For example, import tariffs, sales taxes and federal and state excise taxes can add to the price of a product.

Nearly all such taxes are extremely regressive, said John S. Barry, the chief economist of the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit educational group. Low earners spend a larger share of their income on alcohol, gasoline and tobacco, as well as inexpensive imported textiles and manufactured goods, than high earners do.

Want the kicker? (For those of you too lazy to read the article, of course. If there was one thing I learned from college, it was that you should never rely on people to read an article when they could just look at the picture & caption instead, especially if the combination was extremely offensive.) Here's the graph accompanying Altman's article: . Wow. Talk about an eye-opener. This further reinforces my own tax beliefs.

If it were up to me, I'd eliminate the sales tax and property taxes right from the start. I'd also work to eliminate tariffs and duties on everything coming into the country. What taxes would I leave? Corporate and personal income taxes. That way you'd have only one tax to pay a year. (In Edward's perfect world, the one tax would be distributed back to the states so you wouldn't have a federal and a state tax system. What can I say? It's a utopian ideal!) Simple, easy, hard to futz with. Would the income tax be progressive? Of course. But the sheer simplicity would make the code much easier to enforce. Eliminate all the special write-offs and just go back to basics. Plus, the reliance on income taxes would mean that you wouldn't get taxed for what you have, only for what you earn. There's something wrong about being taxed for what you already own. At the same time, taxing income would mean that the estate tax debate would be moot. If a large estate was parcelled up among four people, they'd be taxed for the influx of wealth that they just accumulated. Any income would count, so the system would still work perfectly.

Implementation? I'd start by trying to get a state's tax system in line with this belief. Eliminate the sales tax and the property tax, knock out write-offs and get back to basics and a solid corporate and personal income tax system. Once that's done, move the model to the federal level. How about it?