The immigrant groups killed it. They have shown more political savvy in the past month than the entire non-establishment Left has in the past six years. Getting up and reciting the pledge of allegiance? Oh snap; a protest that works.

I saw some anti-immigration lady in Phoenix on, nice-seeming at first, kind of looked like Maria Schreiver, except then she got the crazy-eyes and started calling this "the genocide of America." Hey there, cryptoracistcrazy-pants.

This one's over, as it should be. People who think this is going to be the end of America sound about as dated as people who said the same when the Irish came to New York.

This is what happens when I try to go on vacation: inevitably a server goes down or a deal falls through, or both, and then I have to get on Mark's dialup and deal with stuff, and I get the crazy eyes:

After the unpleasantness, it was quite a great weekend. We got out to see the ocean and stuff, had some excellent breakfasts. Satuday night we caught The Devil Makes Three down at the 3030 club, which was a rockin' good time. Your $7 admission also gets you the right to tailgate in the parking lot, where the action moves from beer to whisky to hash to psychadellic mushrooms to BBQ sausages, and then piling into the warehouse to jump and dance and sing along. What more could a man ask for?

I think I'm going to head out there to live for the summer. The Summer of Jefferson, we'll call it. Oh hells yeah.

Is it pathetic that I get an enormous jolt out of reading my own archives?

Now, I know I can communicate, and I know I have a few ideas. I spend a lot of time straddling strange gaps, trying to deploy my mind in two areas at once. Sometimes I'm successful. It took me about two weeks to rack up 50 karma points on /. just speaking my mind, mostly about the politics of business and the business of creativity and the creativity of politics. I know I'm a smart kid, but I intensely fear ending up one of those arrogant hipster dudes who's so into the coolness of the things that he does that there's not much he's actually doing. I'm too reserved as it is: people see me as cold when I would say I'm shy. I don't want to retreat into a shallow lonlely shell of ego: I want to truly become and remain humble. I want to retain the ability to regularly be overcome by all the truth and beauty in the world, as I have many times this week. I want stike a deal with the universe that grandfathers in that that delightful sense of childlike surprise I get at strange weather or the syncopated rhythm of my music and the pedals of my bike.

I was reading Justin's Links just now, and today's entry really brought around the emptyness of what I've been working on this week. I think I've found something I can do for a while in consulting, but it's a world so frightfully awash in bullshit I don't know if I can handle it for the long haul. Every day the urge to let fly and speak real language with real meanings, even at the risk of offending someone's ego, grows stronger. What I need to do is amass a little nut and then stake out an enterprise of my own. Actually, this has been mine and Peter's plan all along. It's just that the nut-getting part is so insipid and banal. I hope I have the chutzpa to see it through.

Fuckin' A. I used to really have some mojo.

No surprise here, but still:

The first data to document the effect of President Bush's tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000.

We now officially have a regressive tax structure, even on the income tax. The interesting thing is that it's the runaway ultra-wealthy (earners of $10M or more) who screw the sorta-wealthy (earners of between $200k and $10M) who are actually paying a higher rate than the uber-right. People in the middle class on on the bottom also get fucked becase social services are deteriorating -- causing myriad other costs to emerge -- and their share of the tax burdin, while still less than those above them, is on the rise.

This also doesn't take into account the effects of sales taxes and property tax, which proportionally fall more heavily upon working and middle class folks.

With this, and the end to inheritance taxes, it looks like we're on our way towards that post-capitalist crony kleptocracy we've always wanted. Huzzah!