A week-ending roundup of recent doings among our Republican overlords:

• Alan Greenspan testified yesterday that the tax code has become overly complicated in the past 20 years, and needs to be simplified. He also said that he likes consumption taxes, and that many economists think that that's a better way to build a tax code if you're starting from scratch. But in subsequent Q&A he suggested that lawmakers not "try for purity" in switching to a consumption tax, but rather phase it in so that for a time, we'd have two federal tax codes rather than one.

  So Greenspan -- looking more and more like a political shill for the Republicans -- proposes to simplify the tax code by complicating it.

• Alberto Gonzales reportedly told the Hoover institution that he'll be giving the same priority to fighting obscenity as he will to fighting terror. (Via Jim Henley).

  We already know from the torture memos that he doesn't have a problem with obscene things being done to suspected terrorists. I guess he just doesn't want us to talk about it.

• Speaking from the bench of the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia proclaims that the government that does these things derives its powers not from the consent of the governed, but from God. I guess he'd know better than that Jefferson fella.

• Dubya's crew is floating two candidates to replace James Wolfensohn as head of the World Bank: Paul Wolfowitz, who based his plans for the Iraq war on the premise that there was no ethnic strife in Iraq, and Carleton Fiorina, who recently got bounced out of HP when her ill-conceived merger with Compaq proved a flop.

  Put these two together, and we can see what they seem to be looking for in the position: a candidate who has ascended to a major leadership position, and failed in that position due to a loose grip on reality, but who is not currently under indictment.

• And while the clown show goes on in D.C., the American military is packing 'em in to prisons in Iraq, and discussing the matter with reporters as if the supposedly sovereign government which is supposedly governing the country doesn't even exist.

I'm so glad we replaced what we had under Clinton with responsible, sober governance.