If you read this blog regularly you know that I go back a good ways with Josh Kornbluth, the San Francisco monologist/performer (“Red Diaper Baby,” “Haiku Tunnel”). Josh’s most recent show — a hit here in the Bay Area, and soon to open in New York at the Bank Street Theater — is titled “Love and Taxes,” and it recounts, in excruciating comic detail, the consequences of Josh’s many years of failing to file, and what it took him to make things right.

One of the points of the show — beyond providing two hours of great, neurosis-fueled entertainment — is to get audiences to think a little more deeply about taxes, to get beyond the simple knee-jerk of resentment. Cut through the right-wing rhetoric about waste, acknowledge the real problems of government giveaways to corporations and special interests, and you’re left with the very real fact that our taxes pay for important public goods — like education, and medical care, and research, and public safety, and defense, and… You get the point. When the Bush administration’s tax-cutting orgy finally exhausts itself and the nation wakes up with a multitrillion-dollar-deficit headache, we will all miss those things our taxes purchased.

So it’s a propitious moment in history for Kornbluth to begin a new blog, I R Us, propounding the case for taxation. (Full disclosure and/or proud credit-taking: I put it online for him.)

Now, taking arms against America’s long hate affair with taxes may seem a little quixotic, but then Josh, as a child of Communists and a creator of live theater, is no stranger to lost causes and long shots. I think you’ll find his writing hilarious and his ideas provocative. I don’t doubt that he’ll attract a certain number of gawkers who will find the notion of a “pro-tax blog” impossible to take seriously. But then, I think Josh has years of experience dealing with hecklers.

If you want to go straight to some good posts, there’s a running dialogue, a kind of faux-FAQ, that begins here and continues here and here.

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a column by Daniel Henninger arguing that the war on terror is going to be as long a slog as the Cold War, and that we’d better create Cold-War-style institutions if we hope to win it.

Even as the ashes of the World Trade Center were raining down on New York, the right had begun piling long-cherished projects — like the neoconservative dream of regime change in Iraq — onto the new war-on-terror bandwagon. The essential maneuver here has been to take what could and should have been a very specific war the U.S. had to fight with the people who attacked us — a war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida — and expand its scope and definition. The first step in this process was turning the “war with al-Qaida” into the “war on terror.” Never mind that “terror” is a notoriously ill-defined word; never mind that a “war on terror” is a war without clearly defined goals or well understood conditions for victory.

That’s the whole point: First, declare war on terror; then, label whoever you want to fight as a “terrorist.” That lets you keep the war going as long as you want; that lets you redefine it on the fly. It also helps you distract people from seeing that we haven’t done a very good job of prosecuting the real, specific war on al-Qaida, whose leader we still have not killed or captured.

Back to Henninger, and his definition of our new Cold War-style destiny: “The threat is the proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations. That, in sum, is terrorism.”

This is an extraordinary paragraph. Why in the world is Henninger resorting to such convoluted language? “The proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction”? Is that what we’re fighting?

Note that Henninger’s definition — which seems practically tailor-made to cover historical events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki — bizarrely excludes the 9/11 attackers themselves: Their weapons were box-cutters, and it took no particular arcane technical knowledge (beyond some basic piloting lessons) for them to transform innocent jetliners into machines of terrible destruction.

But Henninger has to write this way if his definition of the war on terror is going to cover the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. And we now know with near-certainty that Iraq had essentially no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Ahh, but somewhere in Iraq was “the technical knowledge beneath” such weapons, and in time that could be turned against us.

It’s a slippery slope, Mr. Henninger. Once you leave behind the clear-eyed truth that al-Qaida attacked the U.S. and al-Qaida is who we should be fighting, there is no end to the mischief you can get the nation into. President Bush cast us in a global war with the Axis of Evil; suddenly, thanks to 9/11, we were fighting Iran, Iraq and North Korea, too. Now, according to Henninger, we are at war with nothing less than “the proliferation of technical knowledge”!

Alas, wars undertaken against the proliferation of knowledge don’t have a very good track record in human history — just ask the book-burners of the Reformation. You could lock away all the nuclear-bomb formulas and recipes for sarin, you could shut down the entire Internet, you could plunge half the world into the Stone Age — and angry, dispossessed or malicious people could still figure out ways to kill and destroy on a frighteningly large scale. The real war is against ignorance, not knowledge.

So now we know how President Bush and the Republicans plan to spend their obscene $200 million uncontested-primary-season war chest: By repeating lies.

Today’s New York Times reports on the first Bush campaign ads that are scheduled to run beginning this Sunday in Iowa. Predictably, the ads extol Bush for his “strong and principled leadership,” suggest that the Democrats are calling “for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others,” and “urge viewers to tell Congress ‘to support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.’ “

But the most outrageous claim — one truly Orwellian in its rhetorical sleight-of-hand — is a line that reads, “Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.” (So much for all the claims Bush once made that he would not play politics with the “war on terrorism.”)

Now, there are probably some people who have “attacked the president for attacking the terrorists” — meaning, criticized the president’s response to 9/11 in going after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. But there aren’t many. None of Bush’s leading rivals among the Democrats are among them. Nor are the vast majority of Democrats. When “attacking the terrorists” really meant attacking the terrorists — when it meant trying to apprehend the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden and his sponsors — America and its allies were as close to united as they have ever been. (Bush’s postwar failures in Afghanistan are another story. And bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. Wait — I hope saying that doesn’t count as “attacking the president for attacking the terrorists”!)

What “some are now attacking the president for,” of course, is not for “attacking the terrorists” but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq. The president’s Iraq policy is now hurting him politically, given the utter collapse of the administration’s case for the war and the continuing carnage in the post-war war. So the Karl Rove prescription now emerges: (a) Revive the lie that preceded the war — the equation of Saddam Hussein with 9/11’s al-Qaida plotters; (b) ignore the many ways it has been discredited; (c) repeat until re-elected.

Rove’s thinking is cunning: After all, if the pre-war bluster was successful in persuading two-thirds of the American people that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, why shouldn’t the Republicans keep playing that card for all it’s worth? Turn “The Terrorists” into an all-purpose bogeyman: The President is attacking The Terrorists. If you attack the president, you’re helping The Terrorists. Case closed. Election won.

The scary thing is, it has a good chance of working.

Congratulations to Real Live Preacher, who has landed a book deal.

[this post had to be deleted in order to fix my RSS feed, so I’m reposting it here.]

Calpundit Kevin Drum walks us through how to make use of the special arrangement between Userland and the New York Times to create permanent links to archived NYTimes content. That deserves a permanent link of its own for my future reference. And yours, if you like…

I also lost this comment from Christian Crumlish, so here it is for posterity:

Still trying to fix my RSS feed. Life, late 2003…

For reasons that I am unable to fathom the new posts to this blog since late in the day yesterday are no longer showing up in my RSS feed. Any Radio experts have an idea what to do? I haven’t changed any preferences…
ADDENDUM I think I’m figuring it out… more if I’m right…
MOREI know what went wrong (bad system clock setting for 2004 screwed up a post, and that’s munging the feed), but I don’t think I can properly repair it till I am at the office tomorrow. Curse of the client-side blog tool (there are many blessings too, of course).

Longtime Salon readers may recall a feature we ran in the late ’90s known as the “21st Challenge” — a reader-response humor competition that had its 15 minutes of fame in the form of our “Error Message Haikus,” which went round the world on a million e-mail lists and wound up being mentioned in the Microsoft trial (without credit, alas!).

Charlie Varon was the co-creator of those contests. He’s better known in the Bay Area as a remarkable playwright and performer responsible for some of the past decade’s most original political theater (his shows have included “Rush Limbaugh in Night School,” “Ralph Nader is Missing,” and “The People’s Violin”).

I’m a little biased here, because I’ve known Charlie since we were in high school together and worked on the weekly student paper (he was my first editor, and still one of my best), but so what? I think Charlie is making some extraordinarily original political comedy in these dark days: it’s angry without succumbing to cynicism, hilarious without resorting to sarcasm.

You can hear it for yourself on a new CD he has self-published, titled “Visiting Professor of Pessimism.” It’s a live recording of a show in San Francisco that Varon performed in the middle of the Iraq invasion last spring. The pieces are character-sketch monologues that look, with clear-eyed, heartbreaking humor, at the terrible compromises of the war on terrorism, the awful deadlock in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and the dilemmas facing Americans committed to peace.

And it kicks off with a parody BBC newscast announcing, among other things, a new breakthrough in genetic engineering, mixing genes from root vegetables and business leaders: “The goal is to breed a humble corporate executive — or, failing that, a ruthless potato.”

You can listen to free samples here, here, or here. Or read more here.

The New York Times reported that Microsoft talked to Google about acquiring the company. Bill Gates denied the report. Who’s lying? Dan Gillmor walks us through the possibilities. Dan sounds like he thinks it’s more likely that the lie emanates from the Google side, since Gates, as a public-company chairman, has to follow some pretty strict rules — and the investors who are plotting an IPO for Google have a “pump and dump” incentive to talk up Google’s prospects.

I dunno. Google was a pretty hot item before anyone read any headlines about a Microsoft acquisition. Anything is possible here, but Microsoft has a long history of FUD — sowing “fear, uncertainty and doubt” — and concern about regulatory wrist-slaps would not seem high on the list in Redmond in the wake of the Bush administration’s roll-over-and-die approach to the Microsoft antitrust settlement.

Great piece by Greg Costikyan on the philosophical question of whether MMGs (massively multiplayer games) are games at all — or something new in the way of imaginary-world creations:

Greg’s an experienced game designer, and he takes the long view, with a historical perspective that goes all the way back to Habitat — arguing that, if you’re designing an MMG, you’d better make it a good game, or people won’t want to spend time in it.

For a somewhat different perspective, Salon contributor Wagner James Au has been serving as a kind of in-world reporter/blogger over at Second life. His Notes from within that MMG make for a fascinating glimpse inside one virtual play-space.