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?

Amazing. Simply amazing. In an episode that is the perfect example of what is wrong with this administration, President Bush delivered a speech in St. Louis about his tax package. The problem? Let's go to the article to see why:

Addressing employees at JS Logistics, a trucking and warehouse firm in St. Louis, Bush appealed to Congress to quickly pass his $674 billion tax cut package, including benefits for cash-strapped small businesses, "for the sake of economic vitality and growth."

"There's still uncertainty about the economic future of this country," Bush said. But he added: "I'm confident they (lawmakers) will hear the voices of the people ... to immediately get money in your pockets and into the economy."

Bush delivered his message in front of a fake wall of cardboard boxes stamped "Made in U.S.A." The real boxes, set to Bush's side, had their "Made in China" stamps blotted out.

The White House said it did not intend to cover up the markings on the boxes. "It appears it was an overzealous volunteer. We'll take it up with the appropriate channels," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.

An overzealous volunteer? The tax cut package, like the boxes themselves, is merely a sleight-of-hand designed to trick people into thinking that tax relief is on its way. The real tax relief, pushed to the side, benefits the wealthy who own plenty of stocks that aren't in retirement packages. This is far more egregious than the flag-factory episode a few weeks ago.

Be sure to keep checking out updates at unblinking for more astroturf related news. A quick thought though, from Gary Stock himself: (I'd take credit for this but that would be wrong, right?) why not use the automatic e-mail engine built into the gopteamleader website to deliver a cold dish of astroturf deception revenge? It's simple to do and you'll feel much better afterwards. Just follow the directions from the previous post and log into the gopteamleader website. Go ahead and choose a newspaper (or a few!) to send a message to, but instead of sending the form letter, write your own. Be sure to mention that the paper in question has been an unwilling victim of gopteamleader's predatory e-mail astroturf campaign. There's nothing like stealing the enemy's thunder to make him dance around...we'll shut these suckers down for good!

So, the definitive page on the astroturf menace threatening our democracy appears to have been created by Gary Stock over at his unblinking website. The site is quite exhaustive, detailing the multiple transmissions that have occurred over the past few months. Evidently this practice is in widespread use. I was going to attempt to locate the source of all this madness, but it appeared that someone already did!

Here's the evil source of all the craziness. Evidently, the gop team leader site is actually encouraging sending astroturf to newspapers. Much like the famed marlboro adventure prizes, which encouraged people to smoke by offering them gifts that ranged from cigarette lighters to the awesome marlboro adventure raft, (It only required 7200 cigarettes to win!) GOP TeamLeader will give gifts to people based on the amount of astroturf they send out. Talk about disingenuous. Want to see for yourself? It's easy. First go to: http://www.gopteamleader.com/index.asp.

Next, log in. Use the username: gop@dredwerkz.com and the password gopgop. Got it so far?

After logging in, go to the action center and then click on the "contact print and television outlets". This will take you to a screen where you can search for newspapers to astroturf. Let's try the washington post, shall we? Just click this if you're too lazy. Then select the Post and click "compose message". You'll be presented with multiple copies of astroturf letters. Choose the one you want and you're all set.

This is sick. Trust me. Try it yourself. And tell everyone you know how pathetic this is.

So I'm out last night, feeling good and enjoying some choice conversation with the regular triumvirate (a group which hasn't actually hung out as a single entity for quite some time) at Old Ebbitt Grill. Stories are passed around (some better than others), complex conundrums are batted back and forth, the lyrics to Disney's Gummybears are examined and a good time is had by all. It's almost as if I've never come down from the weekend, as if a continuous streak of good fortune has decided to blow my way. And hey, if lady luck's blowing on your dice, you better keep rolling, right? So we move to a new location, meet up with another person, and keep things going. Eventually, as the evening wore on, one of our party bowed to the pressures of work and headed home. At short amount of time later, the rest of us decide to pack it in and call it a night.

After an uneventful cab ride home, I walk up to the door and see a small note taped on the entry to the dredwerkz. The note says that the water heater has exploded and that rapidly cooling water is now all over the washer/dryer room of the house. Damn. I go inside and find, sure enough, that the hot water heater has apparently rusted from the inside out, reducing its usefulness to zero, and letting water stream out through the opening until the entire hot water is shut down. (Thankfully one of us went home early, right?) After some brief discussion, the body politic elects to call our landlord in the morning (due to the fact that, though technically "morning" already, it's far too early for civilized phone calls) and deal with the problem then.

I didn't really need any hot water that night, and I figured that I'd make do the next morning, and that things weren't actually all that bad. (It's the landlord's problem, right? Not mine!) So the streak, though tempered, didn't appear to have ended.

At six o'clock in the morning, when for some absurd reason my alarm goes off (I really should reset it to the proper time one of these days), I wake up and notice that the house is cold. Really cold. Normally, the dredwerkz is kept at a icy temperature throughout the house, in order to save money. But one of the odd flukes of the building is that if I keep my door closed, the temperature gauge which sits right outside it will stay much colder than my room. The radiator in my room will continue to pump warm energy into the air (aided by a properly placed fan) so that I typically sleep in an environment 15-20 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. If it's sixty degrees in the hall, it's probably 75 degrees in my room. Nice, eh? But this morning was different.

You see, although we were fortunate to have someone arrive early at the house to shut off the flow of water, same said person was slightly confused about how the heating system functioned in our house. Believing that the radiators were tied into the water heater system (as opposed to the gas furnace nearby), this individual shut the heat off for the entire house, thinking he was doing us all a favor. I didn't think to check at the time, but someone else did, placing her hand on a radiator shortly after we arrived home and concluding, incorrectly, that the heat was still on because the radiator was still warm. (In fact, the radiator was probably already beginning to cool down and just hadn't had enough time yet.)

And so, at six in the morning, a scant hour and a half before I'm supposed to wake up, I walked out of my freezing room into the even colder hall to discover that the temperature was below 45 degrees and falling. I immediately turned the heat back on, retreated to my room and attempted to get some fitful rest. By the time I got to sleep, almost an hour later, it was time to wake up again. The house had warmed up only 10 degrees during the duration, to a cozy 55. Nicely, though, my room had gotten much warmer as usual, so things seemed to be looking up.

Not so fast.

After getting up, brushing my teeth and other stuff, it's determined that someone will call the landlord. Helena picks up the phone and calls his number (we'd procured it the night before after finding the flooded room) to ask him to come by and help. She's already agreed to work from home during the day in case things need to be helped along. So after calling the landlord, she speaks to him for a few minutes. I can only hear one side of the conversation, which goes something like this:

"Yes."
"I understand."
"No, I'm really sorry."
"Of course, I understand."
"Well, I'll be here if you get a chance. You have our number."

Thinking that somehow our landlord had made it appear to be our fault, I'm slightly miffed. Then she explains: apparently during the night, while we were out cavorting, our landlord was in his house, enjoying a roaring fire with his family. Just as they're about to call it a night themselves, he notices the smell of burning pine that isn't coming from the fire. Apparently, the old house's chimney has a problem: the fire has escaped from the chimney and caught his office on fire. In minutes, the ceiling is alight and at the end of it all, his entire office has burned down to the ground. So he is a little bit distracted when one of his tenants calls to complain about a burst water heater.

End streak. Right there. Our landlord said he'd try to be up and running again within twenty-four hours. (Although, what he actually does it beyond me, other than make money off of us and others. It's not like he runs an assembly line producing cars or anything.) He hopefully will have time to send someone by to repair our water heater. I wouldn't count on it. If I were in his shoes, we'd be the last people I'd be worrying about. Which is what worries me.

So I drag my tired, cold, improperly cleaned body into work, only to discover that my metro stop entrance into the building has been flooded out. So I'm forced to take another exit and walk through the freezing wind to get to my building. Nail in the coffin. It has to get better from here, right? It can only go up, right?

Absurdly, I'm still in a good mood. It's almost comical, the series of events that have been going on.