Thankfully, we’ve not yet taken one of the last steps toward creating a permanent, inherited aristocracy in this country. Yesterday, Senate Republicans were unable to push through a repeal of the estate tax.

I keep a blogroll of news links about layoffs on the front page of this site. Those of you who read it through the RSS feed never see that. I really wish that this country had found some way to turn the anti-trust trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries into a cultural tradition. There are few things I hate more than watching competing companies merge. It’s always bad for the workers involved. The “efficiencies” that are gained are really just a way to redistribute more wealth from workers to owners.

We’ve been seeing towns and regions devasted by this kind of thing for so long that people have grown used to it, at least when it’s not happening to them. But every time I read about some company ceasing production in the town where they were founded or have been in business for 80-150 years, it makes me literally a little sick in my stomach.

The details are coming out slowly, but it looks like some of what I heard about Kmart is coming true. So far all of the news stories I’m seeing are basically a restatement of the one I linked. They’re not making it sound quite as sinister as the rumor I got two weeks ago, but that may be because there aren’t a lot of details yet.

I’m gonna be mostly offline for the next week as I have been for the last few days. I hope everyone’s enjoying the holidays.

See ya in ‘06.

My little experiment here over the last few months has been satisfying enough that I want to start customizing the site a little bit. I’ve put a new theme on and customized it just slightly tonight. I’ve also added some plugins. You may find me toying with the site a bit over the next few weeks. If something really goes wrong with the site, feel free to contact me about it. I may have made some change and not realized that it screwed something up. If you see little things that are just a bit screwy, you may notice that it’s back to normal a few hours later or the next day.

I love David Cross.

In today’s Washington Post, Terry Neal quite thoroughly addresses what I wrote about in my October 18th post on the now apparent hypocrisy of the GOP and their respect for the rule of law. I also saw a nice little piece on The Daily Show, I believe, where a number of anchors and talking heads on FuxNews dutifully spouted the GOP’s talking points decrying the “criminalization of politics”. And, of course, I have specific memory of about 90% of those folks spounding off about the “rule of law” during the Clinton scandals.

Orwell proves out again.

Screw democracy, it’s salsa music that creates peace and love among the peoples of the world. One thing I can say for sure is that it’s hard to root your sexual repression in this music.

It’s interesting that after so many hundreds of years, the latin world and the arab world are still so intertwined.

The governor of Louisiana has “taken responsibility” for the failures in the state’s response to Katrina. That particular meaningless gesture must have played well with the right demographics or the right part of the media for Bush if it convinced Babineaux Blanco to follow suit. Sanctimonious windbag Rush Limbaugh used to love to say say that words have meanings and those meanings can have consequences. Clearly, this was just one more thing he was wrong about.

Any brief, unexpressed hope that I had that the catastrophe in New Orleans would change the direction of things in this country has been crushed by the conservatives in my office this week. Most of these guys are not the hardcore, radical types. They’re solidly Republican in the “welfare types are lazy” and “what’s wrong with saying the pledge at school or having a prayer at football games” kind of way. Not terribly reflective fellows, but also not bad guys. Mostly, they aren’t armed with racist assumptions and rhetoric about liberals being traitors. The more moderate third to maybe half of them even expressed things like “I’d have voted Edwards-Kerry, but not Kerry-Edwards” after the election. They all also have at least a little bit of that “the little guy’s gettin’ screwed” populism that the GOP has somehow convinced them can be fixed by the “free market”.

These guys are mostly dismissing reports about misconduct by police and national guard in New Orleans as being conspiracy theory crap. They question whether or not their tax dollars should be going to help house and feed all of these people with no skills, who are likely to just become permanent wards of the state in their view. Moreover, some of them even question whether there’s a duty to help at all beyond evacuating people before and after the storm. They quickly dismiss any criticism of Bush’s handling of this as Democratic spin. Facts about changes in the budgets or organizational structure of the Corps of Engineers, FEMA, or the National Guard are dismissed as “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. I would imagine that the “hard right” in this country is even worse.

If what I’m seeing really represents the moderately conservative to conservative half or more of our country, we’re really screwed. In so many things, these guys have proven to be a good barometer of the more conservative half of mainstream America over the last couple of years. I hope that maybe they aren’t this time.

Also, on a somewhat related note, there’s this column in the post.