Check those talking points before the press conference!

Washington state Republican legislators unveiled their legislative priorities for 2006, but they forgot to do their homework on one of them. Calling for an end to the "death" tax, as the GOP likes to call the estate tax, they claimed that the tax was especially hard on family farms. Getting rid of the estate tax was a top priority for them, they said, because of it's impact on agribusiness.

There's only one problem. Farmland and farm equipment are exempt from Washington's estate tax, on top of the $2 million exemption all estates get. No matter how much farmland is in the estate, no matter the value of the farmland, it is unaffected by the estate tax.

Oops.

It's interesting to see the difference in coverage of this gaffe. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer devoted an entire article to the error. The Olympia Olympian mentioned it in a paragraph of an article laying out the GOP agenda. The Seattle Times didn't mention it at all; their only reference to the GOP announcement was about gay marriage; Republicans think the legislature should settle the issue, not the courts.

Kudos to the P-I for doing their homework.

Power

It's all about power.

Everything that President Bush has done over the last 5 years has been about power, not ideology. He has no consistent ideology, other than acquisition and maintenance of power. I realize that every presidential administration is to some degree or another driven by desire for power, but this one is taking it to new heights. Most administrations are a blend of policy wonks and political operatives, but this administration has no policy wonks. Any policy wonks who did somehow find themself employed by this White House soon discovered that their job was an exercise in frustration, that their inconvenient facts would be hidden and they had no influence to actually get anything done.

Instead, political operatives hold all the jobs in this administration, and boy are they doing a heckuva job! The President just took advantage of Congress being out of session to make 17 recess appointments. These were people so unqualified for the jobs he's giving them that even the Republican controlled Senate wouldn't approve them. But they're definitely qualified as cronies and political operatives!

For all his talk about doing whatever it takes to protect the US from terrorist attack, you'd think that if President Bush actually cared about that, he'd at least not use the Department of Homeland Security primarily for patronage. While 9/11 may linger in the collective mind as a frightening tragedy, for this administration it's been an excuse to grab more power. Because of the War on Terror, with no defined enemy and therefore no chance of ending, President Bush believes that he can do whatever he deems necessary, regardless of what laws Congress passes, treaties the US is a signatory of, and even the Constitution. From "enemy combatants" to torture to warrantless wiretapping, this administration has made it clear that the White House alone gets to determine what is legal.

President Bush can rightly say he doesn't apply a litmus test on abortion for his Supreme Court nominees, because Roe v. Wade isn't really that important to him. What does matter to him is that his nominees won't check the power of the Presidency. One thing that John Roberts, Harriet Miers, and Samuel Alito all share in common is a deference for executive power. I would suspect that Michael Luttig has lost his place on the short list after his recent 4th Circuit smackdown of the government attempt to move Jose Padilla to civilian courts to avoid a potentially inconvenient Supreme Court ruling.

Trying to model President Bush based on an ideology consistently fails. The way to predict what he will do is ask what will give him the most power. Nothing else matters.