Does this look like a tax increase?

Don't belive McCain's scaremongering about Obama. McCain's Tax plan offers a much LOWER tax cut for 79 percent of Americans than Obama's according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Read about it in the LA Times.

Which begs the question - we are in the midst of the most expensive war in world history, financed entirely on our children's credit cards. Despite Republican orthodoxy, what possible justification for a tax CUT can be made under these conditions? *

Why is is that the only thing the "cut tax and spend" Republican party has asked us to do to support this illegal war is to go shopping?

Hmmm...

* Yes, I know that tax cuts do spur the economy, but so does a balanced budget, just look at Bill Clinton's presidency, which created the largest peacetime expansion of the economy in US history.

Life without Plastic?

I just read this piece from a BBC reporter who is trying to live without plastic in any form for a month. My first thought is that it will be very, very difficult to do.

Nearly everything these days comes packaged in plastic.

Reading the comments on the article it strikes me how limiting the left vs right view of the environmental issues we face really is.

Painting this issue as a left - right dichotomy misses the point, since we're all going to end up buried under the plastic waste.

How strange is it that conservatives in the US have such a rabid reaction to the idea of conservation. Isn't the concept of conservation central to their worldview?

I do understand the knee-jerk reaction. I am an environmentally minded lefty, yet on a nearly daily basis am repulsed by the smugness and holier than thou behavior I see on the left around environmental issues. If I want to smack us is it any wonder the conservatives do too?

If we could let go of that a bit maybe we'd be able make real progress. This attempt to retool the stranglehold of left / right dichotomy is part of what makes Barrack Obama so interesting to me.