I'm still ticked off about taxes.

Nobody seems to have noticed this--and the mainstream news media is too afraid to report this with the emphasis it deserves. With the recent congressional action to reform the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), they essentially gave a huge tax cut to families making between $150,000 and $860,000 (more or less--those numbers are very hard to pin down).

Democrats in Congress apparently wanted to either raise other taxes to pay for the tax cut, but the president and Republican legislators wouldn't do that. So now the federal budget deficit will increase by about $50 billion dollars because the president and his party's anti-tax crazies would rather try to pin the "tax-and-spend" label on the opposing party and borrow money to pay for his mis-managed war from China (Chinese banks and investors are the largest purchasers of federal treasury obligations, I gather).

Not only are we financing a war by borrowing from other countries, we'll not make 7% interest payments on the AMT to the tune of $3.5 billion--to foreign investors.

CDs listened to today:

• Gyorgy Ligeti: Requiem
• Elliott Carter: Symphony No. 1
• Garbage: Version 2.0
• Lightning Bolt: Hypermagic Mountain
• Henryk Gorecki: Quartet for Strings No. 2
• Kaiser Chiefs: Employment