OT: According to Dean Social Security tax isn't an acutal tax. By his logic a 15% tax to pay for universal health care would not count as a tax. Health care for all!!!!!

I'm not sure why you would post this in this thread. But my answer to you is that you need to educate yourself on the structure of Social Security, and its history.

If you declare that Social Security is merely a tax, then you are also in effect declaring that social security checks are really merely welfare checks, and that the entire system is not any longer truly a retirement pension at all, but merely a transfer of wealth. For you will also be declaring that what you pay in to the system has no meaningful relationship to what you take out of it.

It may well be arguable that this is what we should do with Social Security, but the fact is that at the moment that is not how Social Security is structured or treated by the government. It has never been treated that way. This is why it's treated separately in budget calculations, and this is why the payroll and self-employment taxes are kept completely separate from income tax.

It is the height of dishonesty to suggest that there was "no cut in income tax" unless you acknowledge that it's fatuous to expect people who pay 0% income tax to get a "cut." It is also the height of dishonesty to pretend that social security is the same thing as income tax, because it's not.

I have further explained to Steve why he is a complete idiot over on the North Georgia Dogma weblog. You can read my response to this idiot here, if you really want to.

I am probably something of an idiot to bother trying to explain these things to such an idiot, but hey. What the hell. I was bored.

Well, getting back to the comand post--
They've got someone in the comments column that knows a hell of a lot about this current offensive in Afghanistan.

The other "war blog" with extraordinarily good comments at times is "Little Green Footballs" although the paranoia runs high over there (I hope it's paranoia!). Some guy on one of their threads knew about Saddam's capture twelve hours before it broke.

Sometimes these blogs get you info you really cannot get in any other way.

I have mixed feelings about Little Green Footballs. The info is often very useful and stuff that's hard to find elsewhere. Yet some of the commenters scare the crap out of me. "Paranoia" would be the nice way to put it, Dani. I've known Arab muslims, my doctor is an Arab muslim, and Rosemary used to work for Arab muslims, and none are as nuts as the LGF crowd would make them out to be.

But you're right--you find stuff on blogs you'd never find anywhere else unless you made scanning news sources a full-time job. That's the power of spontaneous collaboration over the internet for you.