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1. Even though it was just a speech and he'll probably go back to being the Great Compromiser tomorrow morning, it was pleasing to see Angry Populist Man tonight…although he just couldn't help himself with the constant, appeasing references to debt reduction, reduced spending, and the like.

2. To quote Chief Wiggum, "Maybe lay off the Asians, Lou." He got quite a bit of mileage out of bashing China, no? I half expected him to bring kindly old Mr. Wong who owns the dry cleaners around the corner onto the podium so the assembled legislators could pelt him with tomatoes.

3. "OK, pan to Camera 2. Now back to Camera 1. Good. Let's switch to a wide shot of the presidential box in a few seconds….OH CRAP, HE MENTIONED ISRAEL! QUICK! LOCATE AND ZOOM IN ON A JEW! HURRY, BEFORE THE MOMENT IS GONE!"

4. I have no idea what speech Mitch Daniels or Ari Fleischer (who was bellyaching on CNN immediately afterward) watched, but it sounds like it was full of crazy ideas and un-American rhetoric.

5. Mitch McConnell might just be the worst person on Earth, and that's saying something on a planet inhabited by Newt Gingrich and the people who created True Blood.

Three things that aren't long enough to justify a full post on their own can, if taken together, reasonably sum to one post.

1. I just finished my taxes. My effective federal tax rate, due to some divorce-related shenanigans, reached a personal all-time high: 9%. I usually clock in between 5 and 7 percent. I earn about 80% of the U.S. median income for an individual male taxpayer, and at 33 I've never hit 10% with my effective tax rate. Mitt Romney, the multimillionaire, has revealed an effective tax rate of about 15% (comparable, as the folks at Fox are all too eager to point out, to multimillionaire John Kerry's 13%). Remind me again where all of this tax rage comes from? I do not speak from experience, but I find it hard to believe that everyone who makes an amount of money between Romney (Assloads) and Ed (Dick) is paying 30%-plus in effective taxes. Yeah, yeah, Social Security and Medicare too – which are a great deal if you're a high earner (since they're capped) and for the rest of us they pay out far more than we will ever pay in. Property taxes? Kindly blow it out your ass; nobody forced you to buy a house, and owning a home entitles you to about 1000 different writeoffs and loophole deductions. I wonder how many of these 15% Flat Tax advocates realize that most Americans are paying that share or less already. The actual numbers in the tax code are irrelevant.

2. The Republicans in favor of Voter ID laws have finally found a clear-cut case of widespread fraud on which to hang their rhetoric: it appears that 953 dead people managed to vote in the South Carolina GOP Primary.

3. The best of the Gingrich jokes so far:

- Maybe America should say it has cancer so Gingrich will leave it.
- If Republicans are so uncomfortable with Mormonism, why did they vote for the guy with three wives?
- Every time he seems like he's down Gingrich rises up again, which is fitting for a man who appears to be made of dough.

Here's something I wrote almost four years ago to the day for the Martin Luther King holiday. Seeing as how the election of a black President did not in fact end race as an issue (as right-wing commentators predicted) I see little need to update it. Instead I will quote myself liberally:

Martin Luther King, like "the Holocaust" or "the Founding Fathers", has become a perfunctory public relations tool. White America has the annoying tendency to bring him up as a form of tokenism, a la "And to show you how I'm down with the colored folk, I will now talk about how great I think MLK was." He's a backdrop for cheesy advertising, motivational speeches, and sidebars in textbooks. We bring him up a lot on our patronizing photo-op Trips into Harlem ("I support Dr. King…..and mandatory minimum sentencing!"). He's lauded for his "peaceful" and dignified approach (unlike that nasty Malcom X, who doesn't make white people feel quite so good about themselves). We remember and talk about, in essence, everything except what he actually stood for. We go as far as to innocuously call the holiday "Human Rights Day" just to completely de-contextualize and water down any potential discussion of the racial elephant in the room.

Let's not talk about how there are now more black men in prison than college – and that the black prison population has risen from 150,000 (in 1980) to 800,000 (today). A 350% increase in 25 years seems reasonable. Like many white Americans, I was raised to believe that there are more black people in the justice system because more black people commit crimes. I guess no one thought it strange that they apparently started committing all of these crimes in 1980. Maybe they had a national meeting and decided to go on a spree. We can't talk about that, because that would entail talking about how the entire "War on Drugs" is little more than a thinly-disguised War on the People We Don't Want In Our Neighborhoods. Of the black men born between 1978 and 1982, 16% are either dead or in prison. Think about that for a second.

Let's not talk about black/white income inequality, or the torrent of race-baiting we see from the media, talk radio, and elected officials, or the white hysteria about "reverse racism" and "racial quotas." Instead let's just warmly applaud a 45-second news story about that likeable man who had some sort of dream, a dream that, whatever it was, apparently worked out OK.

We live in a country in which intelligent people still raise their kids to roll up the windows in "black neighborhoods," to believe that everyone on welfare is black (and they're on it because they're too lazy to work), to think that the ignorant black people are going to unfairly take the law school spots that are rightly Ours, and to think that one can believe all of these things and somehow Not be a Racist. We live in a country where we don't debate racial issues, we debate Free Republic propaganda about how MLK, if alive today, would be rubbing elbows with Trent Lott in the GOP caucus. Can't blame the right wing for trying to claim him, since he and his message have been reduced entirely to Dalai Lama-esque mascot status.

Hard to believe that was four years ago, and hard to imagine how many years from now we will still be having this same conversation.

Everything annoying about elections gets progressively worse with time. The cost increases exponentially, the TV spots get dumber and more numerous, and the media coverage is shallower and more shrill. Personally, I find fewer things about the process to be more annoying than the endless primary season debates. And even compared to 2008, the number of debates feels out of control this time around. The news networks understand that it's essentially impossible to criticize them for having too many debates – Having the candidates talk about issues and take positions is a Good Thing! – and the entire election is one big Sweeps Week for TV news. "Special" events like debates always provide a ratings boost, although having fifty of them tends to make each one a bit less special.

The fallacy, of course, is that viewers are getting anything of value out of debates in which the candidates rarely answer the questions, usually stick to well rehearsed, soundbite-style remarks, and generally act like a bunch of high schoolers vying for Homecoming Court. Despite that, debates reel in the viewers. For example, Saturday evening's ABC debate posted "solid ratings" of 6.3 million viewers even though it had to compete with NFL playoff games. It's a positive sign that people want to tune in and watch these circuses in an effort to learn something about the political process, I suppose.

Wait. Are those ratings actually encouraging? The media reports on that subject lack context. What does 6.3 million viewers (or even 7.6 million from the highest rated of all the debates, back in December) mean?

First of all, it's obviously not a big number in the context of the voting-eligible population as a whole. It's also not a very big number in terms of…anything else on TV, really. That NFL playoff game opposite the Saturday debate had an audience literally five times larger (31.8 million). Even that highest rated debate with its 7.6 million viewers pales in comparison to the most pedestrian primetime offerings on the networks. The weekly Nielsen Top 25 shows that the current 25th-ranked show on TV is something called "Rules of Engagement" on CBS. Last week this show – a rerun episode, no less – got 8.5 million viewers. The best debate ratings can't even post the kind of ratings that get network shows cancelled. It's hard to feel great about our prospects or the level of political efficacy among the electorate when interest in what is supposedly the biggest of all electoral contests is so dismal.

Pessimistically, we could look at this as yet another indicator of how dumb, immature, and uninterested the average American is. We'd rather watch a blowout football game or some lowest common denominator CBS series than to watch debates among presidential candidates. Then again, without defending the viewing habits of the American public it is reasonable to suspect that people are intentionally avoiding these debates because there is so little content. The GOP field is a clown car of full of knuckleheads and they're revealing almost nothing of substance during the debates. Even if I feel like I should be watching, my brain understands that I'm not going to learn anything useful from doing so. So we see misleading reports of "good ratings" suggesting enthusiasm for or at least attentiveness to the election. Debates might deliver higher ratings than the network's available alternatives, but that's hardly an impressive claim.

As 2011 rolls to a close, Gin and Tacos celebrates eight (!!!!) years of providing commentary, useful information, intriguing facts, lively discussion, and dick jokes every weekday with few exceptions. Even though traffic has increased consistently over the years, the site remains and will remain free of advertisements. If you have to ask why, you must be new.

Sticking to that policy based on principle has a downside that becomes apparent in late December when the annual hosting bill arrives. So here is where I give you a number of options.

1. You can do nothing and continue to enjoy the site for free. This is called "free riding", and it's an entirely rational behavior. Follow me on Facebook if you'd like an extra daily dose of absurd humor and penetrating insight.

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Anyway, your tips and contributions are (obviously) voluntary but greatly appreciated.

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3" x 5" stickers on heavy white vinyl – $3.50 (shipping included, unless it's outside of the U.S.)

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Two vignettes.

1. Barack Obama – Democrat, man of color, and frequent recipient of the title "most liberal Senator" before his run for the White House – signs a law explicitly permitting indefinite detention of American citizens. For those of you who believe that criticism of the National Defense Authorization Act is overstated, read this thorough explanation of the provisions in the bill that make this possible. Proponents will argue that detention without due process can be applied only to suspected terrorists (According to whom? Based on what standard of evidence? Aren't these quite literally the exact same questions we had to ask under Bush?) and hey, trust us! We'd never use it for anything else.

Many down-in-the-bunker type Obama defenders cling to the 11th-degree chess theory of his presidency, that his seeming preferences for neoliberalism, neoconservative foreign policy, and Unitary Executive Theory are actually a series of strategic decisions – so complex and layered that our pedestrian minds could never understand it – engineered to produce liberal policy outcomes. The only way his decision to sign the NDAA could fit that explanation is that he and his Justice Dept. realize that this is so patently unconstitutional that the Supreme Court will reject it summarily while Obama scores some political points for being Tough on Terror.

Do you trust the Supreme Court? Does anyone? Can someone remind me one more time why I should care which moderate Republican wins in the titanic struggle between Romney and Obama?

2. Campaign Mode Obama^tm announces that each state can choose which parts of his health care reform legislation they will enforce. While some types of coverage are mandatory, states are able to define and set limits during the implementation – for example, pharmacy benefits are mandatory but states get to decide what level of benefits will be offered. Let's all guess what Mississippi's going to provide its residents. Under this "mandate".

Essentially, then, due to pressure from Republican governors and attorneys general he has backed down…on his signature legislation, and possibly his only substantial accomplishment during his first term.

Hey, at least the Iraq War is over! As long as replacing troops with tens of thousands of unaccountable, legally immune private contractors meets one's definition of "over".

I usually don't let the day-to-day aspects of my job get me down. Academia, yes. That gets me down sometimes. But it's rare that I walk out of the classroom feeling bad about what I do for a living. Yet this semester (we are currently in finals), grading research papers has kinda broken me. Not completely, of course – I'm not out on the ledge or typing up my resignation letter – but I'm second guessing myself even more than usual and not feeling particularly good about it right now. Perhaps my fellow educators out there can appreciate reaching the end of a semester or year and dealing with the nagging feeling that your students did not actually learn a damn thing.

These papers, nearly 90 in all, are among the worst things I've ever graded. A few are outstanding. Some are pretty good. Some are decent. But most of them are terrible. I feel bad about this for two different reasons. First, I tend to blame myself first and foremost when things vaguely within my control are not successful. Of the students who approached me for help in advance of the due date – you know, the good students who were responsible enough to take some initiative and put a little effort into it – I feel like I did not do a good enough job of helping them. If they're working with me and the final product has flaws, that is at least partly my fault. I failed them and I failed myself, but I can live with it because I know that I'm not a perfect teacher and it's a useful reminder that I need to continue improving. It knocks me down a peg. That's a good thing.

Second, I feel bad because sometimes these end-of-semester assignments have a way of making me feel like I was wasting my time. You know that one student who asks when the final exam is even though you mentioned it in class 15 times and the date/time are on the syllabus? He makes you feel like you're wasting your time talking because he's not paying the slightest bit of attention to you. Now imagine that he's half of your class. Maybe even more than half. I must have gone over the basics of this assignment a dozen times. I walked through example after example. And it's really obvious that some of these people did not hear a single word of it. They might be in class, but they're staring at their laptops and I'm ultimately background noise. Consequently I can't help but question the value of what I do. It feels like there is none, bluntly. We could stick a board with a painted-on smiley face at the front of the room and play audio recordings of the Oliver North hearings and it would not change the amount that many of these students learn in their classes. I feel about as useful as a travel agent sometimes.

It's hard to feel good when I am forced to realize that A) there are things I didn't do well enough, B) an appreciable portion of these students lack even adequate high school-level writing skills, and C) not many of them are putting effort into their classes, paying any attention to me when I teach, or both. Oh, and it's even harder to feel good when you read "charter schools and home schooling are more effective because the pace of instruction is not slowed because of minority and disabled students" in a paper.

That's not the kind of thing one overcomes to have a good day.

Usually I have a half-decent and not-too-cheesy answer to the "Why do we do this?" question that educators so often ask themselves and one another. Today I don't. Today I'm unsure what, if anything, that 17 weeks of hard work accomplished.

Front-running presidential candidate Newt Gingrich knows a good idea when he sees one, particularly when it originates in his adopted home state of Georgia:

Speaking to about 200 employees at Insight Technology, a defense contractor in New Hampshire, the former U.S. House Speaker called for funds workers pay into unemployment insurance to be diverted to training programs.

"I am willing to continue unemployment compensation, but I would attach to it a training requirement," the Georgia Republican explained. "So if you sign up for unemployment compensation, you would also sign up for a business to get trained to learn a new skill. Because by definition, the reason you're signing up for unemployment compensation is you're not finding a job at your current skill level."

"Now if you took all the money we spent in the last five years for unemployment compensation, if that had been a worker training fund, you'd have a dramatically better-trained work force. We have thousands of jobs available that people can't fill. You have people over here that want a job, but they don't have the skill. You have jobs over here that requires a skill that's not currently available," he added.

"I don't want to pay people 99 weeks to do nothing."

The former House Speaker was most like referring to a program called "Georgia Works" where companies are provided unemployed trainees for free. The state provides a $240 stipend — cut back from $600 last fall — to the trainee each week for up to eight weeks.

So let's review the mechanics of Georgia Works. Businesses can take unemployed people, get eight weeks of work out of them train them on the public dime, and then decide whether to hire them at the conclusion of eight weeks. From the perspective of the unemployed, this program offers…well, eight weeks of work at a sub-minimum wage pay rate. Oh, plus "training."

If this sounds like a publicly-funded temp agency to anyone, that isn't quite the case. Temp labor can be employed for extended periods of time whereas Georgia Works expires in about two months. Sure, it could be used as a long term source of free labor if an employer decided to keep bringing people in for eight weeks of – *cough* – training before letting them go and replacing them with another Georgia Works recruit. But that would never happen. Unless of course there was a large, permanent population of the desperate and unemployed.

Yeah, this is the plutocrat approved post-New Deal vision of the social safety net. I mean, it stands to reason that the most effective way to get businesses to hire the unemployed is to set up a state-subsidized program that gives businesses free labor. Ideas like this make me thankful that we still have a robust two party system.

Democratic President Barack Obama has also praised the program.

"There is a smart program in Georgia," Obama said during an August bus tour. "You're essentially earning a salary and getting your foot in the door into that company."

Jesus titty-fucking christ…

From the Associated Press:

Mary Power is 92 and worried about surviving another frigid New England winter. Deep cuts in federal home heating assistance benefits mean she probably can't afford enough heating oil to stay warm.

She lives in a drafty trailer in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood and gets by on $11,148 a year in pension and Social Security benefits. Her heating aid help this year will drop from $1,035 to $685. With rising heating oil prices, it probably will cost her more than $3,000 for enough oil to keep warm unless she turns her thermostat down to 60 degrees, as she plans.

"I will just have to crawl into bed with the covers over me and stay there," said Power, a widow who worked as a cashier and waitress until she was 80. "I will do what I have to do."

Thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

"They're playing Russian roulette with people's lives," said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts.

The issue could flare just as New Hampshire votes in the Republican presidential primary.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she hopes the candidates will take up the region's heating aid crunch because it underscores how badly the country needs a comprehensive energy policy.

Several Northeast states already have reduced heating aid benefits to families as Congress considers cutting more than $1 billion from last year's $4.7 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that served nearly 9 million households.

The first thing that comes to mind: thank god the Pentagon's trillion dollars weren't affected.

The second thing: I thought turning the thermostat down to 60 was just something one does when winter arrives. Are there people in this country who can actually afford the luxury of not being balls cold in their own home for the entirety of winter? If I had my thermostat set to a reasonably warm temperature my electric bill would be about $600/month.

And that brings me to the third thing: I have electric heat and the subject of this news item lives in one of the many older homes in the northeast with oil heat. These are two of the least efficient, most expensive ways to heat a home. The percentage of homes in this country with badly antiquated heating/cooling systems must contribute mightily to the vast amount of energy resources we consume in this country. We tend to focus inordinately on cars and our consumption of gasoline, but something tells me that making sure homes and shared buildings have heating systems that post-date the Industrial Revolution would accomplish nearly as much to "reduce our dependence on foreign oil" and other energy-related buzzwords.

But I'm overlooking the most obvious aspect of this story. Namely, the ongoing quest to figure out what in the holy hell is wrong with us as a country.