Get it while it’s hot (and remind me to update the link after OAV archives the link) — an interview with the irascible Dave Sim. I remember starting my Cerebus reading with the monthly issues (before I became too impatient to handle a monthly series that never came out on time) and one of the best parts was Dave’s column. He reluctantly started the column thinking it would cut down on the fan mail he recieved but much like a Kanuck Liberal Rush Limbaugh it only ‘fan’ned the flames and he spent month after almost month arguing feminism and socialist politics with his readers.

O: Would you advise new readers to start with the first book and read all of Cerebus in sequence, or is there a better starting point for the series?

DS: I’m not sure that I would advise a general readership like yours to read Cerebus.

Which president told the biggest whoppers? Washington monthly put together a list that shows W as the biggest liar but it’s a close margin with WJC coming in fourth behind Reagan and Bush I.

Today’s reason: jobless recovery.

Despite claims otherwise suggesting that joblessness isn’t an issue, too many Americans who had well-paying silled jobs are working in unskilled positions to pay their bills. Call centers and manufacturers for U.S. companies are increasing their skilled headcounts but few (if any at all) of those jobs are on U.S. soil. Yet, Bush would have us believe the economy is doing great. Why is the economy recovering but jobs are stil an issue?

What exactly did the Bush tax acts do to create this problem? They granted an enormous tax cut to big business in the form of “bonus depreciation.” Under bonus depreciation, the more corporations spend on equipment, the less tax they have to pay on the same economic income. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. Business spending on equipment has skyrocketed, corporate tax collections have plummeted and no one’s being hired.

Unfortunately, economists’ ignorance of basic tax law is not limited to the bonus depreciation rules. Recently, the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, opined that the movement of American jobs to other countries was a good thing. Indeed, back in Econ 101 we learn that free trade and the law of comparative advantage support Mankiw’s views.

But here again, our chief economist appears to be ignorant of basic U.S. tax law. When a U.S. corporation manufactures in the United States, its income is subject to U.S. tax at a nominal rate of 35 percent. If the same corporation moves those jobs to some other country, it can normally structure the deal to reduce its U.S. taxes to zero. That’s right, zero.

I don’t think it is political, and I’m not trying to score anything with this.

But Americans were killed in Fallujah today, and apparently Iraquis burned the bodies, dragged them through the streets, dismembered them and put the body parts on display on power lines.

And the Washington Post is doing what it can to keep people mindful of the American human cost of this war.

This will keep jank occupied for hours so that he won’t have time to argue his points effectively. A traffic simulator that lets you play with lane closings, traffic lights, on-ramps, hills and much more including variable sliders.

Auren Hoffman’s editorial is making the blog rounds because it’s funny and true.

“There’s a problem in Liberia … we want America to send troops. There’s a situation in Haiti … America, can you send some of your nice troops? We’ve got to keep American troops in Germany, in South Korea, in Bosnia, in Columbia … “

Previously, it was posited that Kerry was a flip-flop artist as an argument that Bush was not. I suggested that Bush, being a non-voting politician, simply never had the opportunity to flip-flop. I may have to change my position somewhat since Fox-bane CNN published an article showing Bush’s flip-flops over the last 3 years.

Check out this Flash©-based graphical map of Google News. Colors represent categories, shades represent age and size represents popularity.

Ah, there is Justice in the world.

After Steinbrenner goes on an offseason spending spree second only to GWB’s brazen attempts to buy votes with prescription drugs, the Yankees lose this year’s baseball season opener to the reigning world champs, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

So on the next sunny day, grab the AM radio, some flat, cheap, domestic beer, and a bag of peanuts, and go sit out on the porch listening to the game, spilling a little beer on your shoes, and wondering at the circular nature of the diamond, the interplay between ones, threes, fours, and nines, and the inevitability of gravity.

My most recent reply to this post

> Is motive 100% unimportant?

To say I’ve been mulling this over all day is an understatement. Just before I posted last night, I knew that this would be the quick and easy hole in the argument. But, a good night’s sleep, a quality day at work, and an evening with a glass of box wine and a little inhalation of combination stain/polyurethane from finishing a desk, and I may have a reply. I don’t think you’ll like it much, though.

I’ve hit on this in the past without apparently getting my point across, but I’ll try a different tack: Motive is/should be unimportant on a human scale because motive is something that ultimately is between an individual and their diety.

Today’s reason: you’re not alone.

Were you once a strident Bush supporter? When the supreme court appointed Bush to the presidency, did you decide to put partisan rancor aside and support the president? Do you, now, regret supporting Bush? You are not alone.

Wietrak says the White House criticisms have only helped the book. Against All Enemies was ranked No. 1 on Amazon.com’s list of best sellers as of Tuesday afternoon and has raised sales for other works attacking Bush, including Kevin Phillips’ American Dynasty and Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, a collaboration with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

Anti-Bush books have been popular since last fall, when liberal pundits Al Franken, Joe Conason and Molly Ivins were among those with best sellers. Now the best sellers are being written by historians such as Phillips and former Bush officials such as Clarke.

…

Books unfavorable to Bush will continue coming out, including Worse Than Watergate, by John W. Dean, a former aide to President Nixon, and The Politics of Truth, by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who has criticized the White House’s uses of intelligence before the Iraq war.

This fall, a book on the Bush family is due from Kitty Kelley, known for her gossipy best sellers about Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra. Former President Clinton’s autobiography is also expected some time this year.

Should I start a weekly column entitled “Don’t Tell Becky I Bought This”?

Here’s a review for a CF(Compact Flash) card reader and software package that turns your Gameboy Advance into a video player. Since I’ve got a few CF(Compact Flash) cards laying around I bought this setup. I figure it’ll be the only way I’ll ever get around to watching the Clone Wars and Spiderman cartoon serieses.

I’m having a hard time believing anyone could actually be so brazen. Someone could teach an entire course on dishonest rhetoric using just this column.

When I first read this in Harper’s, I could only think “Was he high?”

I must admit it’s pretty funny, but a tad inappropriate, considering.

Christian turned me on to boomer deathwatch which is apparently a site dedicated to bashing the baby boom. Typical rants go like “It’s no surprise that a generation raised to value youth more than experience, to obsess over their adolescent traumas and fetishize rebellion, even in its most commodified form, should try to re-engineer the school system to coddle, not challenge, their kids.”

Warms my heart, it does. The next is better:

Boomers are generally considered to have had their major effect in the cultural realm. Certainly, their effect on music has been profound: Rock and Roll would have begun with Elvis and ended with skiffle if not for millions of eager rebels and their allowances. They wrecked jazz, turned the blues into a museum artifact, and wrenched folk music from the backwoods onto the campus and hopeless irrelevance.

That job done, they’ve moved on to politics, which is as we speak being recast by the Democratic party as a way to project self-satisfied virtue and a narrow vision of guilty “tolerance” onto the world. They managed to make sex omnipresent and oppressive, family an implicit realm of psychodrama, and added a cheerily hopeless new genre to literature: self-help.

That said, Hendrix does rock.