There was an arresting line in a recent AP article speculating on Kerry’s VP choices: that he would need to pick a running mate with less charisma than him. That’s a very tall order.

Of those who are running for president, who has the best and worst tax plans? The worst plan is easy: President Obama's.

By way of disclosure, I was part of the small team that developed and helped market President George H. W. Bush's economic platform back in 1988. The first President Bush won, in part, because he had a clear, understandable plan - ‘Read my lips: No new taxes' - and a ‘flexible freeze' to control spending.

Unfortunately for him and the country, he abandoned the ‘flexible freeze' soon after taking office and the tax pledge two years later. His reversal played a big part in his subsequent defeat in 1992.

Mr. Obama seems not to have learned from the mistakes of the first President Bush. He has repeatedly pledged not to increase taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year and to do everything possible to increase jobs. Yet, in fact, he has already signed 21 tax increases into law.

It's easy to have a tax plan better than this.  So let's look at those of all four GOP candidates.

She’s pretending to be John Kerry’s biggest supporter, but no one is rooting for George Bush to win in November more than Hillary. She got behind the best straw candidate Bush could most easily demolish, Dizzy Howard Dean. When he imploded, she looked around and asked, “Who’s the next worst?” A no-brainer: obviously, an egomaniacal gigolo with more negatives than an Algebra student who fantasizes he could be another “JFK.”

Persistence pays off.  At last, after my bugging him for so long, Jack Abramoff has joined the TTP family of writers.  It's not just that he's been my buddy for 30 years.  It's that nobody can expose what slimy things crawl around under the rocks of Washington like him.  Now we get to see him expose that slime on a regular basis.

There was a lot of acclaim for his first column (7/04), Why Lobbyists Love John Roberts.  And was he on the money: we learned the next day after Jack's column (7/05), federalie lawyers have prepared 13,000 pages of new fascist regs for Zerocare, with Zero marshalling an army of IRS agents to enforce Zerocare punishment and fear. K Street is in heaven.

We have another announcement:  The 14-Day Free TTP Trial.  You can tell your friends they can now try out TTP for free for two weeks.  Bring them in to our TTP family!

Meanwhile, the blowback against Judas John Roberts ruling on Zerocare continues to mount - so much that it's giving the Pub Congresspussies some fire in their bellies.

President Obama has just presented his new budget, which again ignores reality. It contains another trillion-dollar deficit, which assumes a large increase in revenue resulting from a tax-rate increase on ‘the wealthy' and corporations. He knows, and so does everyone else, that Congress is not going to pass the tax increase.

Corporate taxes are paid by consumers in higher prices and by workers in lower wages - so much for the promise not to increase taxes on those making less than $250,000. Every good tax economist knows this, but the president chooses to ignore reality and demagogue the issue.

Even more disturbing is the lack of discussion about a contingency plan if his projected economic scenario does not work out - and the probabilities are that it will not work out. The reality is that the United States and most other governments, particularly the Europeans, have reached or are close to reaching the limits of their ability to tax and borrow.

This situation means there is going to have to be either massive cutbacks in government spending or very high inflation.

At a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan on February 12, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin announced that France will be “increasing its military participation in the international security force” in the war-stricken country. A NATO army unit called Eurocorps, composed by France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, and Luxembourg, will be deployed in Afghanistan by August. “We want to do more,” Villepin declared. “We want Eurocorps to take the lead.”

This was the wire story carried by AP. What was not disclosed is the particular nature of France’s participation. While other countries will be providing soldiers for Eurocorps in Afghanistan, France will be providing intellectuals.

Week after week for two or three months now, it's been a no-good lousy week for Zero.  We couldn't expect this to last, so this week we got kicked in the teeth. The bitter irony is that it was done by someone we were sure was one of our own:  John "Judas" Roberts.

I don't buy for a New York second the too-cute-by-half tortured rationalizations of Roberts' defenders like Charles Krauthammer or George Will - just as tortured as Roberts' desperate reasoning.  The proof that Roberts is a Conservative Judas goes beyond his ruling on ZeroCare.

Why are Roberts' defenders failing to mention his other over-the-top-disgusting ruling yesterday (6/28) invalidating the Stolen Valor Act?  Every pathetic scumbag in America now has the Constitutional right to claim he won the Medal of Honor or wear a Purple Heart pin on his lapel.  It's hard to imagine a more revolting insult to American soldiers and veterans.

Why are Roberts' defenders failing to connect the dots between these two rulings and a third this week, when on Monday (6/25) he provided the deciding vote to substantially invalidate Arizona's immigration law?

These are all of a pattern.  Judas John Roberts has joined Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  He's now on the Dark Side of the Force. There are only three constitutionalists on the court now, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.  Roberts is not brilliant, nor a genius.  He's a coward afraid to stand up to the bullying of Zero.

Government corruption can take many forms. Last week, most of those forms could be seen in the actions of the Obama administration:

Everything from government officials taking simple bribes, to covering up wrongdoing, to using taxpayer money to pay off political supporters, to using government prosecutors to punish enemies, to failing to fulfill its fiduciary duty to citizens by not performing cost-benefit analyses before taking actions.

Promulgating policies that knowingly hurt millions of people is far more serious than a government official requesting a cash bribe - as despicable as that may be. Pushing for tax increases without first getting rid of counterproductive or useless programs and cleaning up mismanagement is an example of policy corruption.

The results of the extensive moral, intellectual and policy corruption in the United States in recent years can be seen readily in the accompanying chart, which includes data from both right- and left-leaning organizations.