With the wall-to-wall media coverage of the Vatican funeral and the Charles/Camilla wedding (with occasional updates from the Michael Jackson trial), I was worried that Congress would employ the subterfuge to lower the minimum wage and eliminate capital gains taxes altogether. But all they did was drastically cut the estate taxes that the wealthy pay upon the death of the family head.

This will cost the treasury over 2 trillion dollars in its first 20 years, money that could have helped cover the Social Security shortfall -- or the coming Medicare shortfall. It’s been dubbed the ‘Paris Hilton Bill’, because that’s the sort of person who will gain from it. Also benefitting will be the families of almost all the people who passed the bill, the ever-richer members of Congress and the Senate, especially on the Republican side.


So, now that three study commissions have found that the intelligence agencies couldn’t possibly have done a worse job preventing the 9/11 attacks, or deciphering whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or handling the occupation of Iraq, where are the job reprisals, where are the firings, where are the demotions?

Instead, Tenet and Bremer get the nation’s highest medal, Rice gets rewarded with Secretary of State, Wolfowitz gets the World Bank plum, and John Bolton is chosen as our U.N. representative. No wonder Bush did so poorly in the business world; he can't fire anyone and can't tell when people are dangerously incompetent.