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Well, I love you you just baldly assert this "get more tax money by lowering tax rates" claptrap with absolutely nothing to back it up.

How about a nice graph to disprove your theory?

http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/01/do_capital_gains_tax_cuts_incr.html

On self censorship of reporting on China,there is actually a âoeReporter Guidelines for Covering the Beijing Olympics." ""found at the back of a sofa in the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) common room in Hong Kong."

Reporter Guidelines for Covering the Beijing Olympics.

1) On arrival, set the scene by saying a few nice things about the infrastructureâ"the high rises and the multilane highways, the interchanges. Developmenty sort of stuff. 2) Make an amusing, self-deprecating comment about your inability to speak or read the funny language they have in China. Play down the fact that you are dependent on a translator for quotes and newspaper reading. Never admit in print to getting story ideas or borrowing quotes from the China Daily. 3) Get story ideas and borrow quotes from the China Daily. Make sure you do this discreetly. For background only. 4) Now for reportage. After saying the nice things about the new buildings, get your translator to find a Beijing yam seller whose slum was knocked down to make way for the Olympic badminton hall. Do a few paras on him, and how all the money thrown at the Games is not helping the poor, and how terrible the huge income gap is. Make sure you write at least three times as much about the yam seller whose slum was pulled down as you do about all the new apartments, new metro lines, the growth in car ownership, the expanding health insurance and all the other good news about China that nobody in the west really wants to know about. 5) Say how horrible the air in Beijing is, even if it isnâ(TM)t on the days you are there. Everybody says Beijing air is horrible, so play along. 6) The political bit. Interview a token party member, but reword him subtly to make it sound like he is just spouting the party line. Bend the translatorâ(TM)s words to fitâ"itâ(TM)ll be rubbish English anyway. (Ditto in all quote treatment). Then find a good Chinese, one who is fluent in English, has lived in America or Britain, and is prodemocracy. Give them lots of space, let them sing. Martin Lee types, but preferably younger and female, for the mugshot. If you can get an interview with the Olympic artist, Ai-whatsisname, who is an anti-Commie quote machine, give him full throttle. Hopefully, he hasnâ(TM)t been arrested yet.

Lastly, please remember: Chinese who love their country are called âoenationalists.â Never use this word for Americans, French, Tibetans and other civilized peoples who love their country or territory. When demonstrators protest over Tibet they are acting in a heartfelt, spontaneous way, waving pretty flags you would be happy to see woven into your grannyâ(TM)s bedspread. When Chinese counter-demonstrate, they are always âoebussed in,â the mood is âoeuglyâ, and they are draped in intimidating red flags that can be made to look a bit Hitler Jugend-ish with the right kind of photo. (They probably did arrive in buses as this is the cheapest way of moving numbers of not-very-well-off people around, but you donâ(TM)t need to prove the insinuation that the regime laid on the vehicles). Beijing is always a âoeregime,â by the way, and is not to be confused with western âoegovernments.â (But: Hong Kong is an exception. Because it was under benign, enlightened British dictatorship for a long time, it cannot be a âoeregime.â âoeRegimeâ only applies to dictatorships in rubbish countries).
Thatâ(TM)s about it. Donâ(TM)t be deceived by all that friendly smiling and optimism, thatâ(TM)s just a front. Itâ(TM)s your job, with your long days of experience of the Far East and your fluency in a language spoken by nearly 0.005% of the locals, to get under the radar and ferret out the truth. Did I mention how bad the air in Beijing is?â

Keep an eye on Jindal... He's often mentioned as a possible (though somewhat improbable) running mate for McCain, on account of his ethnic background (he's East Indian, I believe) and his youth. These details are supposed to figure into some kind of counter to Obama.

He may have been a bio major, but he's very Catholic and very socially conservative, however, and claims to be a faith healer and to have performed exorcisms.

Here's one more that may have been missed, but shouldn't be forgotten

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/02/torture_debate.html

The National Journal, the szame rag that ranked John Kerry as the "most liberal" senator back around the previous presidental election? It seems pretty obvious to anyone who pokes around in their methodology that they only reason they publish these lists is to give the right some talking points. For example, there were only two votes they scored where Barack Obama took the "liberal" side, whereas Hilary Clinton took the "conservative" side, thus earning Obama two more "liberal" points than Hilary, On one of these votes, John McCain voted with Obama, so take that as you will. Here's a source: http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/02/what_the_national_journal_libe.html.

And here's the methodology: http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/votes.htm. Some of those are quite head scratchers, for example, voting for "94/SConRes21: Raise the tax rate on income over $1 million and use the revenue to increase funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. March 22. (38-58)" earns you conservative points. Who knew?

If you run the numbers, the effect is not as dramatic as you claim - even with the extra votes, Hillary still would have come out on top in Ohio and probably still in Texas.

You can almost hear the sound of the vacuum created by bloggers thinking that their words matter when the people with control don't even know how to read the tubes.

And yet Josh Marshall and his blog Talking Points Memo managed to break the U.S. attorney firing scandal -- a scandal that ultimately led to the removal of the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in the U.S. This despite the fact that the AG's boss hardly knows how to read, much less to read the "tubes".

I'm not saying that all blogs can have this kind of impact. TPM succeeded because they did the hard work of unearthing the story and keeping it alive when nobody else cared about it; most bloggers do it for fun and don't have that level of commitment. But it's silly to make sweeping generalizations dismissing the impact blogs can have when the evidence to the contrary is all around us.