Why would you pay $111 for a bird feeder? Because it has a motorized perch that flings squirrels to the ground when they try to filch the seeds. As reported in today's Los Angeles Times, the site also sells a video with 60 minutes of squirrel-flipping action. The sample (in Windows Media or RealPlayer, but not yet QuickTime) is pretty funny if you hate squirrels.

Inhofe, one of the Senate's most conservative members, said he believed Lott had a 30 percent chance of being majority leader when the new Congress convenes next month, but predicted Lott would not step aside. He also criticized Lott's apology for voting against a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., saying it was a responsible conservative position.

Someday soon I'll collect all the evidence of what a moron of a demagogue Inhofe is on one page for easier reference.

(You might well wonder what the Oklahoman had to say about this little policy position, but you can't find out without paying: the paper covered it but moved the story to the archives, not even making it available in the "more news" page that, as I write this, covers days before the story ran. Guess they don't want Oklahoma black voters to know too much about the policy positions of the man the paper recommended just one month ago...)

What would you say about a senator who calls the NAACP and the National Council of Churches "un-American" for their civil rights support? A US Attorney who called a fellow US Attorney - one who was black - "boy" in the 1980s? One who said in 1981 that the Klan was "OK" until he learned that some were "pot smokers?" A prosecutor who vigorously pursued voting fraud charges against three civil rights workers on flimsy evidence that 14 out of 1,700,000 ballots might not be kosher in counties where black get-out-the-vote drives were working, but ignored similar charge of suppression of black votes? A man so far to the right that the Republican-controlled senate of 1986 rejected him for a federal judge position, who has consistently earned "F" ratings from the NAACP on civil rights legislation, and who said a white civil rights lawyer was a "disgrace to his race" for prosecuting voting rights cases against black people?

Meet Senator Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama. Sarah Wildman has the scoop in the New Republic on how Trent Lott isn't even the most blatant racist in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Yeah, it's a Salon Premium article (again), but it's a good take-down of one of this season's most ridiculous arguments yet: the poor and middle class don't pay enough taxes. The argument, first floated in last month's Wall Street Journal, was so widely ridiculed that the Journal doesn't even keep the column online in its free "OpinionJournal.com" site. The idea is that since people who earn under $12,000 a year pay only 4% of their income in taxes, they get to benefit from evil "big government" programs but don't have to pay for them. They won't see how evil such programs are until they bear their "fair share," so these "lucky duckies" need to pay more taxes.

Farhad Manjoo of Salon (formerly of Wired) does a good job of pointing out the ridiculousness of this argument. First, when you include payroll taxes, the US tax system is only mildly progressive and poor people pay a lot more than 4% of their income in taxes -- one reason that some conservatives are now outlandishly claiming that the payroll tax is not really a tax. (It's just money you have to pay to the government whether you want to or not.) Second, "the poor don't pay enough in taxes" is really just the other side of "the rich pay too much in taxes" combined with the current administration's distaste for shrinking the size of government, the traditional reason the right wants to reduce federal income. It's laying the groundwork to eliminate the progressive tax altogether.

Third, as these tax-the-poor advocates don't want to point out, the rich pay more in taxes now because they've gotten so much richer in the past 20 years than any other part of US society. It's truly class warfare when not only do the rich get richer, they want the poor to pay for the services they use that helped make them rich. Incredible, and worth reading -- this could become a rallying cry like protecting millionares from the Estate Tax became the "death tax."

It looks like Dan Piraro has the right idea in this cartoon: