Tell us, Tim, what's your plan for the economy?

Congress should reject federal legislation that places additional burdens on growth, such as the proposed health care overhaul, cap-and-trade bill, labor union card check and tax increases. Instead, lawmakers should support policies that promote economic growth. For example, the Bush tax cuts should be made permanent and tax burdens on individuals and businesses should be further reduced.

Ding ding! Tax cuts. That he started his Politico piece by railing against, ahem, BUDGET DEFICITS hardly matters. He said the magic words.

Tax cuts. Like a farm kid hypnotizing a chicken.

Once Pawlenty learned the trick, he couldn't get over how easy it was. Sat there all day in the barnyard, hypnotizing the chickens.

Just a kid, really. Just a kid who knows one dumb trick.

Meh. It's an interesting analysis, but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

I generally like Whedon's writing, but I disagree that his shows tend to get cancelled before they've had a fair chance.

Firefly was a brilliant show that was famously killed by a gaggle of numbnuts Fox execs. But that was the exception. Buffy The Vampire Slayer ran a total of seven seasons on two networks; its spinoff Angel ran five. Dollhouse was renewed for a second season despite its dismal ratings; that the show only began to find its narrative feet at the last minute is the fault of Whedon himself, not the network.

I've complained about the Dollhouse concept's biggest flaw before: we are asked to believe that a large corporation has secretly developed technology that allows the mind of any person to be "imprinted" into the body of any other, as easily as swapping out computer hard drives. I suspect this would require developing several Nobel prize-worthy technologies all at once, but has the corporation in question even patented any of these fantastic processes?

Nah, apparently not.

Anyway, as the series starts, a pretty young woman named Caroline has signed away five years of her life to become a "doll", a person whose mind will be wiped clean and replaced each week with a new personality for a new purpose.

So one week she's a dominatrix, the next week she's a biker chick, the next week an outdoorswoman, etc. Occasionally she is implanted with skill sets that could be more easily (and more cheaply) obtained elsewhere: hostage negotiator or super-spy or backup singer / dancer for a Beyonce-esque diva. Most often, though, she is just rented out to high-class johns to give the man who has everything what he most desires: a hooker who believes in the fantasy even more than he does. Or something.

As a business model, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Like Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (and its antecedent Westworld), once the questions start, they never stop: how much would each client have to pay each day to keep this operation afloat? How long could such a business be kept secret? How much would you have to pay to maintain that secrecy -- assuming that it could be maintained at all? How could you possibly handle the legal and liability issues? And wouldn't the ability to transfer human minds from one body to another have much bigger implications than renting out bimbos to rich playboys?

To his credit, Whedon eventually quit dancing around these questions and attacked them head-on, building an elaborate conspiracy backstory that retconned the Dollhouse into a sideline operation to a much larger global enterprise. And since this is Joss Whedon, a much larger sinister global enterprise.

Yet in spite of his efforts to bring his story to a slam-bang conclusion, Dollhouse ended as something less than the sum of its parts. Its many, many moving parts. Come for the clunky metaphor, America, stay for the spectacular mess. Too often, that's Whedon. But everyone is pretty, and the dialogue is quick, and the fights are merciless. That has to count for something.

Via Andrew Sullivan's blog, we get this report on the dreams of small children:

Preschoolers’ dreams are often static and plain, such as seeing an animal or thinking about eating. There are no characters that move, no social interactions, little feeling, and they do not include the dreamer as an active character...Preschoolers do not report fear in dreams, and there are few aggressions, misfortunes and negative emotions. Children who have night terrors, in which they awaken early during the night from SWS [slow-wave sleep] and display intense fear and agitation, are probably terrorized by disorientation owing to incomplete awakening rather than by a dream. Thus, although children of age 2–5 years can see and speak of everyday people, objects and events, they apparently cannot dream of them.

When I read this I thought back on the sorts of dreams I'd had as a pre-schooler. They certainly didn't seem static or plain. Often, these dreams were filled with the anxieties common to children trying to make sense of an unfamiliar world. Of course, it's difficult to judge the age at which your childhood nightmares occurred. So, I thought, maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe children really do have very static, very plain dreams.

A few hours later my five-year-old daughter told me of a nightmare she'd had the previous evening. In the dream, she said, a bad man had taken over the world. He had filled all the holes in the world with snakes, and had covered all the oceans with plastic, so that the fish couldn't breathe.

Okay, I thought. That's pretty intense, for a five year old. Or for anybody, really.

E.D. Kain of the Ordinary Gentlemen blog lays it all out for us:

And yes, even though it may cause healthcare reform to die in its tracks, I still think that the right person won in Massachusetts. I also think that there are ways the Democrats could scale back reform and get some conservatives on board with a much more modest, more market-friendly reform that still helps a lot of people who need help.

Does Kain really believe the Republicans would have voted for a more modest bill?

Kain and his fellow Republicans claim that they are not advocating obstructionism except as a way to protect the Constitution from the machinations of Obama and his socialist agenda.

So let's put that idea to the test.

Here's what I propose: let's go through the Constitution, line by line, and look for the word "filibuster". If the Constitution doesn't provide for it, it doesn't exist, so our strict-constructionist friends on the right claim. So maybe we can dispense with this nonsense that a supermajority is required to pass legislation in the Senate.

Last night, having been struck by how polyglot Paris has become, I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French (which probably added in a few Brits and other Europeans) versus everyone else. I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians.

Ah, the "native" vs. "non-native" French.

Setting aside the un-self-conscious racism and the paranoid implications (you're next, America!) the really weird thing is Murray's lazy-ass research methods. He starts doing a head-count of ethnic groups while walking down the street? And assumes that everyone he sees lives in Paris, and isn't a tourist? And further assumes that all the whites he sees are native-born, while all non-whites are immigrants?

And is it possible that Murray's sample wasn't exactly random? It is possible he decided to begin his head count at a moment in which he was struck by the multi-ethnic crowd he found himself in, because that would assist him in making the case he and his cohorts are always making -- that Europe has fallen to the Muslim hordes, and that America is the last bulwark against their insidious campaign of cultural assimilation?

I have to assume that the French government conducts a periodic census, and that the information Murray is looking for could easily be obtained by, you know, looking it up.

But really, where's the fun in that?

We had a lot of comic book adaptions in the zeros, and the best of them, contrary to what you might have heard, is Iron Man. I promise you that this is a better movie than The Dark Knight. Go back and watch them again if you don’t believe me. I’m not sure what’s led people to get confused about this—I think maybe people have decided that the use of a darker color pallet makes Dark Knight more serious, which is itself a lot sillier than using bright colors in your comic book adaptation. Dark Knight isn’t even as good as Batman Begins!

There is no question that The Dark Knight was overrated. At the time of its release a lot of ink was spilled about the mythic, Shakespearean dynamic of the film's central conflict, but I found that sort of chatter embarrassing. This was, after all, a movie about a guy who dressed up like a bat fighting with a guy who dressed up like a clown.

Moreover, the Harry Dent / Two-Face subplot added so much weight to the narrative that the movie nearly collapsed .

While I agree that Iron Man was a delightful movie, it's easy to forget how much it owed to Sam Raimi's Spider Man, which captured perfectly the blend of mythology, action, personal angst and humor that defined Marvel comics in the Silver Age. Even so, to my mind Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins was the best comic book adaptation of the decade; it made the entire Batman mythos plausible for the first time.

As long as we're on the subject -- and what the hell, everyone is doing it anyway -- here are my picks for the ten best movies of the decade, arranged in no particular order:

Mulholland Dr.

Amelie

The Man Who Wasn't There

Brick

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Prestige

Wonder Boys

The Incredibles

Downfall

TV Series of the Decade: Mad Men

Band of the Decade: The Soviettes.

Now that I have slaked your thirst for my opinions, off with you! Go play in our shiny new decade.

"They just took my money."

That's what my 8-year-old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift card from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it.

This is how conservatives are made.

Er, except that conservatives are always crying for the elimination of income taxes, estate taxes and capital gains taxes, to be replaced (when they concede the revenue must be replaced) with a simple regressive VAT.

So if John J. Miller Sr had his way, little John J Miller Jr's Clone Wars book would be hit with state and federal sales tax.

The point is, we can disagree about how taxes are levied, and at what rate, and what the tax money is used for. But in any society, taxes in one form or another are inevitable.

A sensible father would see this as a teaching moment, and could explain that while taxes aren't fun, they are the price for living in a civilized society; they pay for the police and the fire department and the streets and the sidewalks.

Instead, I imagine that Miller just told his kid that all taxation is theft. And that someday, no one will have to pay them.

That is how conservatives are made.

Today is December 29, the fifth day of Christmas, which runs to January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. Our word Christmas is derived from the Old English Cristes Maesse or "Mass of Christ". It is neither the most important feast day on the Christian calendar nor the oldest. In fact, the day was apparently not officially recognized anywhere before the sixth century.

In the early days of the Church, celebrating the birthday of a divine being was considered a bit unseemly, the sort of thing the pagans did. And unlike Easter, there was no definitive date for Christ's birth anyway (in fact, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that "there is no month in the year to which respectable authorities have not assigned Christ's birth".

At some point Christ's birthday got lumped in with the feast of the Epiphany, which the Eastern church celebrated in Early January. This is apparently because of a copying error in Luke 3:22 that crept into some ancient Greek manuscripts. Instead of the voice of God saying, Thou art my beloved son, in thee I am well pleased, the error changed the passage to Thou art my beloved Son, this day have I begotten thee.

As the custom of celebrating Christ's birthday with Epiphany spread, the leaders of the Church were troubled that many Christians took part in the pagan custom of lighting candles on December 25, to commemorate the birthday of the Sun and celebrate the solstice. The Church wanted to make it clear that the only true Light was Christ. Therefore, the celebration of Christ's birth was moved from January 6 to December 25.

Even though the Epiphany (which roughly translates to appearance of the divine) was associated with Christ's baptism in the Eastern Church, the Western Church interpreted Epiphany differently. It was sometimes connected to the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus began his ministry, but it was more often linked to the arrival of the Magi to the infant Jesus. So today, tradition holds that Christ was born on the 25th and visited by the Magi on January 6.

And you thought you had to wait a long time to open your presents.

Hope you all have a merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year. Thanks for walking with us along the streets of the Lost City and for being willing to listen to the nutty guys shouting from the soap box.

Well, so what. Big deal.

Enjoy your hollow victory while you can, Barack HUSSEIN Obama! Andy McCarthy is biding his time:

Though the point of mad-dash cash-for-cloture was to give the President his monumental "achievement" in time to brag about it in the State of the Union address, the administration realizes it won't happen — too much opposition in the House, too problematic on abortion, too much outrage in the country. So healthcare will be tabled until February, giving us all at least a month-and-a-half to find more of its buried treasures, ear-marks, mandates and power-grabs.

Not to mention more time for Andy to find evidence that Obama isn’t really an American citizen, and that Dreams From My Father was ghost-written by Bill Ayers.

Yep, with a razor-sharp legal mind like Andy McCarthy's on the case, I'm sure Obama is shaking in his boots.