Congress and the President have gone on vacation, as if the country is having a slow month and they can just steal away to rest until business picks up again. The newspaper men are also on holiday. No leaders to interview, so their must be no news. Funny how gas has gone up $.60 a gallon while they are on break. Shouldn't someone be concerned about that? Wouldn't there be investigations if there was a democrat in the white house?

When I look at the leaders of the right wing, I wonder how anyone can line up on that side. The people are such fundamentally bad people. Even if they represent your ideals in some way, don't you want to say "Get out of my sight" and get some better people to represent those ideals? Instead, the right just claims that their people are wonderful, when it is so easy to see they are not. If I were George Bush, I'd go see the lady down the road who lost her son. I wouldn't take the limo. I'd walk over. I'd sit in a lawn chair and talk to her (after all I'm on vacation). I'd hold her hand and listen to her talk about her wonderful boy and cry with her. How could that be a bad thing?

Neil Bortz is a local Atlanta right wing hate monger, with a nationally syndicated hate talk show. He still can't get through a program without making lewd remarks about Bill Clinton. I guess he just likes the titillation he gets from it. He's in the news because he has written a book talking about how great a national sales tax would be. It'll just solve everything and make taxation fair for everyone.

Neil's argument sounds pretty good, but you have to accept some fundamental principles underlying his whole idea that are loathsomely inaccurate. Neil want's things to be "fair" for everyone, rich and poor. The problem is . . . life is not fair. It isn't fair that I was born with loving parents who took care of my needs, fostered by dreams, paid for my higher education, and continued to encourage me in adulthood, while other folks usually get less than that. I like capitalism in that it creates opportunities and generates cash for the country. It is better that socialism, way better than communism, and beats the heck out of totalitarianism, oligarchy, and a bunch of other isms. However, capitalism sucks. I took boys to the ball game last week and on the way out to the car, one of them cried out "shotgun." He of course rode in the front by the passenger window. On the way back, he called it again before his friends and got the same seat again. Capitalism is like this. It's the firstest with the mostest. It's not about hard work. It's not even about ideas all that much. It's an I got it, you don't economy. It works for some really well. Neil Bortz works it to a tee. But since someone is already on the radio being a hate monger, that space is pretty much taken up (in his time slot anyway. I'll admit there are hate mongers on radio pretty much 24/7) and you'd have to really be something to displace him. He's set. He called shotgun a long time ago. Same for Coke and Pepsi. If you start your own soda, the moment you go public, Coke or Pepsi will simply buy you and you disappear. Think Microsoft. Ask yourself if you are satisfied with your microsoft products. Are they "great" products. Naaaaaaaaw. People hate the lame way computers work. Imagine if your cars worked as well as your computers! Alas I stray.

Capitalism is fundamentally unfair. The rich give their children jobs to make them rich. They don't have to be good at their jobs. They can be C students like George Bush. I was an A student. I graduated near the top of my class in h.s. and college. I knew C students. They were drunks, they were unfocused, they had a fundamental distaste for knowledge--"like please don't bother me with that. I mean who wants to know that anyway?" That sort of distaste for learning. They did not go to class. They laid on the grass and smoked it and pondered the sky or the passing babes. They were concerned about clothes and cars and running for student senate, and fraternity events. College was just a place to wait for adulthood, experiment with mind altering substances, and score babes. They made C's. Many of them graduated and went to work for Dad, or Uncle Bill.

A cool thing about capitalism is it rewards you for being first. Call shotgun first and you are a rich republican. You think of a dollar idea. People buy it a billion times and you are wealthier than many countries. Oh there is work involved, but the key thing was being first. Go Kleenex, Go Xerox, Go brand names! Capitalism also rewards the lucky. Just sit there on your farm. Let it run down. Live in a ramshackle tumble down building and scratch yourself. Don't worry about the future. Recipe for disaster, unless. . . Peremeter Mall Properties decides the land that grand daddy left you would be ideal for their mall and wants to pay you a million an acre for it. Be a lawyer, bill at $450 and hour. Be a teacher, bill at $35 an hour. Be a plumber, bill at $68 and hour. Why are people's hour's worth different amounts? It's complicated, but it's not because they are worth different amounts.

Anyway Neil Bortz. Taxation is a way for the governing bodies of your country to be unfair to the wealthy, who have unfairly benefited from capitalism, in order to benefit others who have also been treated unfairly by capitalism. Long live taxation. Let it never be fair.

Neil fails to mention that his tax plan is basically this. If you make a million a year, you skate out on $200,000 a year in taxes you would have been paying. Nice deal. You make $20,000 a year. You pay more.