Lileks on that coastal elite, nanny-statist Andrew Sullivan in today’s Bleat:

Okay.
As you may know, Andrew Sullivan has famously proposed hiking gas prices by a dollar to reduce the deficit and pay for the Iraq campaign. Don’t get me wrong – I have a great deal of respect for Andrew.

But.

Here I disagree. Low gas prices are bad for the economy and bad for drivers, he says – the sort of statement that makes you read everything that follows with wry detached amusement, the same way you’d regard an article on canine training that began “dogs respond remarkably well to feng shui.” You read on because it can only get better.

He refers to gas as “woefully undertaxed.” If one uses the phrase “woefully undertaxed” one may be correct, but one should not be surprised when one’s conservative bona fides are called into question. You could make the argument that cable TV is woefully undertaxed. Peanut butter is woefully undertaxed. Once
you’ve identified a good that can be cured by additional taxation, well, everything is woefully undertaxed. There aren’t any pro-war movies being made! We could fund them with a movie tax! Popcornn is woefully undertaxed! He says:

The truly needy tend to consume less gas than their middle-class compatriots. Others say it penalizes those in remote and rural areas. So what?

Some conservatives say it’s antithetical to the American Dream. Hooey.

Lileks must have made it further into the piece than I did to discover Sullivan’s contention that it’s okay to disproprotionatlely tax the people in the heartland (that is, everyone between the Rockies and the Appalachians) because we don’t matter.

Bollucks on Sullivan, again.

Andrew Sullivan has actually gone mad:

TAX GAS MORE: All of your opposition merely convinced me I was right. Here’s my Time column on why raising gas taxes would be a very good thing. Here’s Ramesh Ponnuru’s critique. Make your own mind up.

Make your mind up, but the more you oppose me, the more I convince myself I am right? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed? Yeek.

Here’s his argument for greater taxation to improve your behavior, citizen:

The worst knock against a gas tax is that it is, well, a tax. Who likes that? But with soaring deficits and a war to pay for, taxes are not an option — they’re a necessity. The only relevant question is, Which taxes? The case for a gas tax is a straightforward one. Gas prices are strikingly lower in America than anywhere else in the world; such taxes are relatively easy to collect; since an overwhelming majority of Americans drive, few avoid the tax; and by adding a cost to the wanton consumption of gasoline, you actually encourage conservation, accelerate fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, cut traffic and help wean Americans off the oil that requires the U.S. to be so intimately involved in that wonderful cesspool of rival hatreds, the Middle East. So what’s not to like?

As a source of tax money, recognize that money will be spent on programs with an ongoing basis, and that if the government successfully modifies the behavior of its foolish, short-sighted, and lesser mortal citizens, the government will need to make that amount of money up elsewhere. Which means deficits or other tax increases down the road.

Pretty soon, we’re going to have to stop calling Sullivan a “conservative,” aren’t we?

Reason’s Hit and Run links to an official proclamation that warns hapless American citizens (a redundancy in the mind of Those Who Are Noble Enough to Rule) about Canadian pot:

“Canada is exporting to us the crack of marijuana and it is a dangerous problem,” Walters told reporters in Miami, where he kicked off a campaign to cut marijuana use by Hispanic youths.

Let’s examine that metaphor. Canada (Canada!) is exporting to us the most addictive drug of drug. Crikey, it’s the cornflower blue of all blues! The Super Bowl of football games!

I think somewhere Walters has opened a rift in the Space-Metaphor continuum. Sure, it’s small now, but it’s growing, and someday soon discourse will be sucked into incomprehensibility.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Slate has a wonderfully insightful imaginative piece on the Alternative Minimum Tax as Bush’s Secret Tax on Democrats:

President Bush and the Republican Congress, who believe fervently in cutting taxes for the rich, are quietly presiding over a most remarkable kind of tax increase for high-income Americans.

The Alternative Minimum Tax is becoming a miserable annual tradition for a growing group of prosperous taxpayers. (If you’ve just received a nervous phone message from your accountant—that’s probably what she’s calling about.) The AMT traces its origins to a minimum tax enacted in 1970 when Americans were scandalized to learn that some 155 high-earning taxpayers owed no income taxes in 1966. The AMT was originally designed so that people who had a lot of income but loads of deductions—through the standard exemption, the ability to write off property taxes and state income taxes—couldn’t reduce their taxable income to next to nothing. Historically, it applied to a tiny minority of taxpayers. But with every passing year, more and more citizens are ushered behind the velvet ropes. This congressional backgrounder suggests that 1.8 million Americans paid it in 2001. Newsweek‘s nearly infallible Allan Sloan wrote earlier this month that “about 2.3 million returns for 2003 got nipped by the AMT.” The numbers are set to rise exponentially in the next several years. A two-income couple in New Jersey—he’s an accountant, she’s a public school teacher—with combined income of $230,000, three kids, and annual property taxes of $15,000, could easily fall into paying the AMT. Even government bureaucrats get nailed. Last year, IRS Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson paid the AMT.

Got that? It was enacted in 1970, and it’s Bush’s secret weapon. Maybe that’s what he was doing when he was AWOL from Viet Nam, wot? Working in a secret laboratory devising a tax scheme to punish Michael Moore and Barbra Striesand in 2004.

I know about the AMT because I once worked for a startup and got stock options, and the AMT could have hit me badly if that company’s options had been worth exercising. It’s a crazy tax, but then again, I think most taxes are wasteful and most tax revenues are wasted. But the author of this bit “analyzes”:

Republicans don’t want to fix the AMT because fixing the AMT would require undoing their beloved tax cuts. Without the billions generated by millions of taxpayers getting slammed by the AMT, the marginal rate cuts would be impossible to sustain for the next several years, let alone make permanent. Without the AMT, the deficit picture would look far worse than it does.

No, actually Congress, which includes both mean Republicans and the kind-spirited but misunderstood by the ignorant heartland Democrats could cut income taxes AND eliminate the AMT if it would only cut spending, which is a far less palatable choice to the political porkivores.

The author of this piece, undoubtedly, is one of the persecuted residents of an enlightened coastal state s unfairly targeted for the AMT simply because he’s a nutbar the Republicans want to punish the Democrat-voting states. Tax and spend works much better when only the “spend” part touches you, ainna?

(James Joyner has more, albeit less snarky, about this article.)

South Milwaukee’s mayor was reelected by a single vote after a hand recount.

It goes to prove that your vote has the possibility of being the one that makes the difference.

Of course, the loser is planning to take the count to court, which further proves that no election will ever be settled in the future by mere vote-counting alone.

Overlawyered.com rounds up a summary of groups suing Wal-Mart. Why? Because it’s there. Now shut up and give me some free money, and my lawyers more free money.

Everyone wants to beat on Wal-Mart and Microsoft because they’re successful. Looks like we’ve about bred capitalism out of the country. Good work, social engineers.

The Palm Beach Post reports on the scourage of the sex bracelet:

The multicolored set of plastic bracelets many Palm Beach County middle and high school students are sporting these days aren’t just a fashionable fad.

At some schools, boys and girls snap off one of their classmate’s colored gel wrist bands in exchange for a corresponding sexual favor, health department officials told school board members Monday.

For example, a person wearing a white band may mean she is willing to kiss to the person who pulls it from her wrist. A red band means a lap dance and black is intercourse. The meanings may vary from school to school.

::Yawn:: Back in the eighties, we wore Satanic worship bracelets, wherein the color of the band indicated the animal (white means pigeon, red means chow puppy, and black meant kindergartner, but the meanings varied from school to school) to sacrifice.

I guess we in Generation X didn’t get the cool faddish urban legend.

In other news, Boots and Sabers will soon have more comments in their infamous Bracelets for Sex post, dated October 19, 2003, which the the Palm Beach Health Department probably used as in-depth research.

The Agitator reports that the definition of binge drinking has been revised:

Now, the NIAAA has backtracked a bit.
It now defines a binge as five drinks in two hours or less for men,
four in two hours for women. Seems more plausible, and seems like a
definition that would at least put most people over .08.

That’s good news, and it makes it easier for us at MfBJN to keep from binge drinking. As part of our non-binge drinking program, we recommend no more than four tallboys in two hours. That way, if you inadvertently consume an additional 40 ounces of cheap beer during the movie, you’re still within the bounds of reason.

Think you can do better than Congress? Here’s the National Budget Simulation, where you can set budget priorities and adjust taxes. Your hero, or mine anyway, scored thusly:

Budget Totals

Old budget was $3251.488 billion
($2264.172 billion in spending, $987.316 billion in tax expenditures and cuts).

New budget is $1727.29 billion
($1318.51 billion in spending, $408.78 billion in tax expenditures and cuts).

You have cut the deficit by $1524.2 billion.

Your new deficit is $-1167.19 billion.

Oops!

You’ve cut so much that the federal budget now contains a substantial surplus. Many economists warn that this budget may help induce or prolong a recession,
and ordinary citizens demand a refund. You might want to cut taxes or raise spending.

Oops? That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

(Link seen on The Agitator.)

Neil Steinberg, of the Chicago Sun-Times, jumps on the anti-Wal-Mart bandwagon today:

Wal-Mart is a thing of evil

There is great irony that the Wal-Mart proposed for the South Side would be located on the site of the shuttered Ryerson steel mill, a bit of symbolism that would be too obvious in fiction, but in real life just sits there and smirks at us: the good-job, good-salary past of America bulldozed to make room for the penny-shaving gulag of Wal-Mart. Of course it’s our own fault. We rhapsodize the small town past of America, with good old Mr. Henderson standing behind the oak counter at Henderson’s Drugs, wrapping our box of cotton balls in brown paper and twine. But when forced to act on our convictions, it turned out we’d rather save a few pennies on our cotton balls by buying them in a 55-gallon drum from an indentured servant at Wal-Mart with Mr. Henderson greeting us at the door for minimum wage.

Tales of Wal-Mart excess — from forcing illegal immigrants to work unpaid overtime to triple-charging customers through a credit card snafu — were already piling up when a truly frightening story arrived from Inglewood, Calif.

The Inglewood city fathers, sensibly enough, blocked Wal-Mart from importing its Third World employment practices to their community. The Bargain Behemoth responded by getting a referendum on Tuesday’s ballot with a proposal that would basically create a sovereign Republic of Wal-Mart in the heart of Inglewood; if you think I’m exaggerating, the New York Times said the measure would ”essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood’s planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules.”

My bet is that voters pass the measure — what is the integrity of your government compared to the lure of buying stuff really cheap? — and no doubt Wal-Mart will find a way to jam itself into Chicago next.

The most telling detail of the California nightmare is this: The goons Wal-Mart hired to gather signatures to get their measure on the ballot were paid a far better wage than the clerks in its stores.

How disappointing. Steinberg takes a couple of isolated incidents, mixes them together, and decides that the free markets aren’t good. Or at least great success in the free markets aren’t; maybe Steinberg prefers only moderate success mixed in with enobling failure. Granted, I’m putting words into his keyboard here, but people who hold up Wal-Mart as an example of what’s wrong with capitalism are poor thinkers. I don’t know what those people want, probably just something else, and heaven forbid if we ever get it.

Wal-Mart got to where it is by building stores where others wouldn’t, by selling acceptable quality products at low prices to people who weren’t being served by other department stores or boutiques. Although some portions of the corporation have done wrong (skimping overtime pay, hiring un-driver’s-licensed illegal aliens) and some unfortunate incidents occur (accidental overbilling), it’s not a force for evil. Its customers can shop at higher-priced stores if they get better service there or if that’s important to them; its employees can get other jobs if it’s important to them. Wal-Mart’s the intersection of free wills in this little thing we call commerce. If it bothers you so damn much, bobos, take up substinence farming and start whining about your aching backs instead.

Wal-Mart is just the Microsoft for those who don’t pretend to be technical.

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Others weigh in:

• Kim du Toit thinks “Wal-Mart is a tool of Satan (not to mention Communist China’s best client).”
• The Meatriarchy Guy agrees with me that “They are a friggin’ department store and no one is forcing anyone to shop there.”
• The ORACULATIONS guy recognizes So as a lifetime job WalMart sucks. As an entry level job while you are looking for something else or while going to school it’s great.”

In today’s SFGate.com, Emil Guillermo looks at the microphenomenon that is William Hung and finds what he expected: anti-Asian American racism. (Hurry, that’s a perishable link.)

For those of you who don’t know, William Hung wanted to be a contestant on the television show American Idol, but whose cover of a Ricky Martin song, “She Bangs”, proved so awful that he didn’t make the cut. Instead, he was thrown out at audition, but since these auditions aired, became an anti-star of sorts. He’s made the rounds of the television shows and has a CD coming out. America likes an earnest, but ultimately undertalented, performer. Sure, it’s funny, but it’s also endearing. A lot of us can project ourselves into William Hung.

What does Guillermo project? Seemingly, a lack of virility:

With William Hung, is there any other reason to extend the joke on America except that it plays to a racist image of the ineffectual Asian-American male?

What is Hung but an infantilized, incompetent and impotent male image? Strong? No. Virile? No. Sexy? The guy’s a virgin.

You know what, Emil? A lot of people are virgins, and some of them don’t care for it. The modern message indicates you’re a freak if you’re not getting head in third grade. I haven’t seen William Hung in action–I get my entertainment and pop culture news on the Internet– but I wouldn’t be so quick to call him infantilized, incompetent, and impotent. As a matter of fact, those words don’t tend to come to mind for most people unless they’re writing television ads for male supplements. Those men are incompetent.

Guillermo hits the v-word again with this bit:

It wouldn’t be so bad if we saw positive images of Asian-American males in the media. But, for the most part, we’ve been invisible, and the images have usually come with martial-arts enhancements.

Bruce Lee’s combative persona has been the most virile and most enduring icon for Asian-American males. But the stereotypes that predominate are the sinister and inscrutable or ineffectual and effeminate.

Jeez, buddy, give it a rest. You’re so caught up in making William Hung’s name ironic that you fail to see what makes him iconic: that he’s an underdog member of a multicultural society that appreciates underdogs.

Guillermo might want me to prove it:

You certainly wouldn’t see them glorify a black man who couldn’t sing and dance on “American Idol.” Nor would they prop up a clumsy, tone-deaf white person.

He’s wrong. For starters, Don “No Soul” Simmons was a joke in 1987. But that’s not the point.

America braces people who sincerely try, often even if they’re not the most talented. When I look to my hometown sports teams, I see that the fan favorites are often blue-collar players, not the superstars. The St. Louis Cardinals have had Joe McEwing and Bo Hart; the St. Louis Blues have had Tyson Nash, Mike Danton, and Dallas Drake. They play their hearts out, but they’re not eight-figure players.

Still, we lesser mortals can see ourselves in their positions and can root for them to succeed beyond their ability.

Well, some of us do, anyway. Others, like Guillermo, have other projections to see.

Oh, how they mocked me last year when I shook my head about St. Peters, Missouri, arresting underage teenagers for taking pornographic videos to sell to their fellow high school students. (I went into greater detail about the absurdity the next day.) Can you get any more absurd than charging children for exploiting children?

The Meatriarchy Guy links to a story in story in USA Today:

A 15-year-old girl has been arrested for taking nude photographs of her self and posting them on the Internet, police said.

Her crimes?

She has been charged with sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography.

She has been charged for abusing herself for having and distributing naked pictures of herself.

You know, Government could better protect The Children and the little inner The Children by straight-jacketing us and putting us in dark closets, where no carcinogenic sunlight need blemish us.

Here’s an Associated Press story for you: Consumers rein in their spending. The online version doesn’t carry the subtitle the print version does, but the lead drives the message home:

WASHINGTON – Consumers, a key force shaping the nation’s economic recovery, grew more restrained in February, increasing their spending by only 0.2 percent.

These are the same people who say that a slower increase in government spending is a cut.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t trust a reporter to tally a split check at a restaurant, much less explain the world or commerce to me.

Newt Gingrich wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post outlining a GOP strategy for job creation. His basic premise:

The Democrats think they’ve found the perfect one-sided debate by presenting themselves as the party that opposes “outsourcing” of American jobs. They hope the Republican Party will be dumb enough to take the bait and be the side that favors outsourcing.

That kind of binary argument, in which the Republicans take the role of defending the loss of jobs overseas, would be a dead loser for the GOP. Republicans must set up a new, winning argument by focusing not on the loss of old jobs but on the creation of new ones.

Sounds good, until he issues the fighting words:

Republicans, therefore, should insist, as President Bush has, that real economic growth depends on the right tax incentives and litigation reform to create even more investment, so that the next multinational company will choose the United States as the place to open a new location or headquarters.

He better mean lowering taxes across the board and not just lowering taxes for big corporations who will continue to play municipalities against municipalities, states against states, and nations against nations, each individual corporation sticking up the taxpayers for subsidies and corporate welfare to provide a pittance of jobs which the rest of the smaller companies and individual entrepreneurs in the area will pay for.

No, wait, he’s a former politician. Of course he means the latter.

What’s not to like about the headline and lead for this St. Louis Post-Dispatch column?

Buyer’s vision is 100 apartments for Pet Building

It’s happening. Mothballed for months, downtown’s distinctive Pet Building has a buyer – and a metamorphosis in the works. Balke Brown Associates has the property under contract.

Sale terms are not public, but here’s the vision: to turn the 15-story office building into 100 apartments for an estimated $30 million.

Yay, team! Go development! Build! Build! Capitalism, rah!

Until the dreaded Fine Print strikes:

The hurdle – and it’s a big one, says Land – is securing the state and federal historic tax credits to make the deal work.

Never mind. It’s not capitalism–it’s crony capitalism. Any company that can even conceive of buying a property for $30 million dollars should not count on sucking from the government teat, and I mean should not count on my personal tax contribution to make it work.

Who died and made you Suharto?