Nothing But Words

After you click a picture, you’ll need to come back here to get to the next one – don’t use the navigation arrows. Sorry about that. Turn up the volume on the movie clip!

Eidan’s been crawling for a couple of weeks now. He had a lot of trouble with it at first, as he didn’t do his “swimming” practice before trying to crawl. When Kai was an infant he – like most babies – would get on his stomach and flail his arms and legs, building up his strength and coordination before trying to crawl. But Eidan always hated being on his stomach, so in his first attempts at crawling, he had a lot of trouble holding himself up for any length of time, and he couldn’t control his arms and legs very well. But now he’s built up his strength and has his arms and legs doing what he wants them to, and he has become the master of his domain. As you might expect, he’s into everything – if you let him loose in a room, he will explore every corner of it. He’s also smart as a whip – he studies everything that goes on around him. For example, I showed him a matchbox car the other day, and rolled it in front of him. He immediately picked it up, turned it over, and stared at the wheels while carefully spinning one of them with his finger. He’s also entirely too happy – at any given moment, you’re most likely to see a smile on his face. But recently he’s also started showing he has a temper: if he gets his hands on something he shouldn’t have, and you take it away and replace it with something else, he’ll probably scream at you and throw the thing you gave him. I’ve also noticed that he’ll play by himself in a way that Kai never did at this age. As long as he knows you’re nearby, Eidan will feel free to venture out of the room on his own, or he’ll sit and play with toys without demanding you get involved (as an infant, Kai always wanted someone right there with him). So, while Eidan may look an awful lot like Kai, his personality is definitely different.

Cross-posted to TPMCafe

Seeing the collapse of the Senate Republicans’ effort to make political gains on the gas prices issue has been like watching a slow motion train wreck. By last Friday the tactics were clear: the Senate Republicans were supposed to get behind this idea of offering $100 checks to 100 million Americans to help them pay for gas (which I commented on last week). They also proposed a couple ideas for extracting more revenue from the oil industry to cover the costs of these checks. But those tax plans were almost certainly phony: Bush had already signaled he would veto them, and House Republicans were conspicuously silent. So the Republicans in the Senate knew from the outset that any plans they came up with for rolling back any of the oil industry’s multitude of tax breaks would go nowhere. I think the game plan was to push through the $100 payment plan (with checks that would arrive around Labor Day, right in time for the peak of the Fall campaign season), make some noises about greedy oil companies, but in the end finance the $100 checks with deficit spending rather than actually passing tax increases on one of the GOPs biggest financial supporters, the oil industry. As evidence of this, look what happened when a Democrat in the Senate came up with an idea that wasn’t part of the Republicans’ script:

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, tied up the Senate for almost five hours on Thursday in an effort to force a vote on his proposal to prohibit oil companies from escaping federal royalties for drilling on public lands when oil prices exceeded $55 per barrel. (Prices recently rose above $75 a barrel.) But Republicans blocked that effort. “You cannot get a vote up or down in the United States Senate on a rip-off of taxpayer money,” Mr. Wyden said.

Wyden’s proposal was actually a remarkably sensible one, but the Republicans blocked the vote because they didn’t want to reveal their true colors, and have to go on record as actually opposing rolling back one of the many tax breaks and subsidies they’ve given to the oil industry over the years.

Blocking Wyden’s proposal was just a small bump in the road – it was after that when a couple things went seriously wrong with the plan.

One was that voters saw the $100 payment plan for what it was, and this started to make the GOP Senators nervous:

“The conservatives think it is socialist bunk, and the liberals think it is conservative trickery,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, pointing out that the criticism was coming from across the ideological spectrum. Angry constituents have asked, “Do you think we are prostitutes? Do you think you can buy us?” said another Republican senator’s aide…

The other was the tax proposal they came up with. It was so broad based that it affected any businesses that worked with large inventories, not just the oil industry. The business community caught wind of it, and they got scared:

Major trade groups quickly and vociferously registered their disdain for the tax provision, saying the plan amounted to a hefty new tax not only on the oil industry, but also on many manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers that rely on large inventories as well.

“This just came out of the blue,” said Dorothy Coleman, vice president of tax and domestic economic policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. “Before you make a change in longstanding tax policy — I am talking 70 years or so — you don’t just up and do it in an energy bill.”

At the National Retail Federation, Rochelle Bernstein, vice president and tax counsel, said lobbyists there immediately raised a red flag with lawmakers and aides. “Our concern was did they understand what they were doing, did they know this was a proposal that could have wide-ranging implications?” Ms. Bernstein said.

I’m not sure what the answer to Ms. Bernstein’s question is. My guess is that it was just a massive miscalculation. A broad-based tax increase like this goes way beyond the problem at hand, and besides that, Republicans just don’t do big tax increases on businesses. Like I said, I don’t think the proposal was serious to begin with (which may be why the Senators didn’t do their homework on it), but that’s not something that’s necessarily obvious to those who aren’t in the game, so the business community’s reaction is understandable.

These problems sent the plan off the rails, and it was reported today that it appears to be dead, with a fair amount of finger-pointing going on among the Republicans. This was a pretty big screw-up on a key election year issue. Since Bill Frist was the architect of the plan, I don’t think it bodes well for his Presidential ambitions in 2008.

A year and a half ago, I posted some exterior shots of our house – it was after we had replaced the windows and ripped out all the old, overgrown shrubs, but before we had painted. If you’re too lazy to click the link, here’s one of those pictures:

Before painting:

Last fall we had the house painted. I didn’t do it myself, as it would have taken me forever, and because I try to avoid spending time on tall ladders (it comes from knowing more than one person who’s been seriously injured falling from a ladder or a roof). We picked the same colors that we used on our house in California. We spent a fair amount of time picking those colors, and since we painted right before we moved, we never got to enjoy them. Even though our house here is quite different from the California house, we felt the colors would work just as well. We also had the front door replaced and shutters installed.

Last month I planted the small shrubs you can see there. I would have done more, but that’s all I had time for. We figured we’d get the “big” plants in now, so they can start to grow in, and we can put in smaller plants when we have more time in the future (yes, I know, that imaginary future that has “free time”).

If you’re wondering about the bright, garish flag, it’s for the Japanese May 5th holiday, Boys’ Day.