There's a new person on one of the bulletin boards my wife reads. She has four images in her signature. They're hosted on msnusers.com. You can't get content from msnusers.com without having a Microsoft .NET Passport account.
So every time my wife reads one of this woman's posts, she has to dismiss this dialog four times:
My wife doesn't want to get a Passport account, and I don't blame her. The supremely annoying thing for me is that this looks like a "real" dialog, not a web page. So something in Microsoft's msnusers.com service is using some ActiveX control or some part of the Internet Explorer browser to toss up this image. Which means, of course, that just about anyone could figure out how to access that control if they spent a few seconds at it. Thanks a pile, Microsoft! You've installed a means for people to throw up login dialogs on my machine!
Of course, my wife could make IE prompt her for scripting and ActiveX controls. That would mean that she'd spend all of her time dismissing dialogs like this:
This is the situation I have come to, but it's not acceptable to her.
So I modified our proxy server's configuration to totally ban requests directed at msnusers.com. I found the instructions for how to set up a porn site block list, and I'm using them to ban msnusers.com.
That seems appropriate.
So yesterday I claimed that it's wrong to call people who want their taxes lowered "greedy". You can only be greedy, I claimed, when you are trying to get more than a fair share of some shared resource.
So far I've tried it out on my wife, who was too nice to comment; and on a liberal of my acquaintance, who disagrees with it. So the focus groups are pretty negative.
Webster's defines greed as "excessive or reprehensible acquisitiveness". This does not have the restriction I placed on the word ("of a shared resource"). But it does require "acquisitiveness", and I don't see how you can really be acquisitive of your own property.
So I think I understand it now. These people who want their taxes lowered are in fact showing their meanness, cheapness, stinginess, what have you, when they ask for their taxes to be lowered. But they're not being greedy then. No: they proved they were greedy by getting all that money in the first place.
So in this worldview they are, in fact, greedy rich people who don't give a damn for anyone but themselves. They're greedy just because they're rich. If they weren't greedy, they wouldn't have gotten rich. And wanting lower taxes is like not wanting to share -- mean.
So the answer to John Cole's question
At what level of taxation will Democrats agree the rich are no longer greedy?is:
The fact that rich people are greedy is independent of the tax level.
I'm glad we've cleared that up.