Huh? Headline of the Day

Newt Declares Obama ‘A Paul Krugman Presidency’

"If only!" Krugman replied by e-mail, when asked about Newt's claim by TPM.

If only, indeed.

Democrats Accept Major Cuts to Their Balls

[WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) August 2, 2011 – After weeks of wrenching negotiations that went right up to the wire, Democrats in the House and Senate today accepted major cuts to their balls.

The cuts, which are expected to pass both houses of Congress on Tuesday, will give Republicans' total custody of the Democrats' cojones through the next election cycle.

The final hitch in the negotiations centered on how long the Republicans would keep the Democrats' family jewels, with Democrats wanting them returned by 2012 and Republicans insisting on keeping them longer.

After much wrangling, a compromise was worked out in which the Republicans would keep the Democrats' balls "indefinitely."

After the deal was hammered out, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was philosophical about an outcome that surprised no one.

"You win some and you lose some," he told reporters. "Except that, as Democrats, only the second part is true."

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said that the historic deal set the stage for more compromises between the two political parties: "Tomorrow we begin negotiating for their lunch money."]

(High squeaky voice): No comment.

Murdoch Hacked Us Too

A 'must read' by Daddy Frank on Murdoch, the New York Post, and News Corp's shady dealings on this side of the pond. All the usual suspects and more. Links at site.

[...] You must know something about Rupert Murdoch, I said, feeling quite upbeat about our white knight from Down Under. Jane would have none of it. “He’s bloody why I left Australia!” she replied.

The wholesale buying of elected officials is such a staple at Fox News we don’t think twice about it anymore. [...]

If Murdoch is to be undone in America, as in England, it won’t be politicians who take the lead. It will take aggressive journalism, law enforcement, and civil actions to force jettisoned News Corp. executives to sing. [...]

Which is to say, it will take a lot of heavy lifting to overturn all the rocks under which Murdoch’s secrets are buried. As in Watergate, the process of discovery will ebb and flow for months and possibly years: A 26-month interval separated the arrest of the low-level burglars trying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters and Nixon’s resignation. The most important first step down this road will be for Americans to fully recognize that what happened at News of the World was no isolated virus but part of a larger culture that didn’t remain quarantined on the other side of the ocean. Once that realization sinks in, it can only hasten the day when the long national nightmare of the Murdochization of America, now well into its fourth decade, will be over.

Pops tamps Murdoch's shit into a nice neat felonious brick. Do not miss this.

Update:

From RawReplay:

Quote of the Day

Perfesser Krugman:

...

Third, the idea that a temporary disruption would permanently damage faith in US institutions now seems moot; if you haven’t already lost faith in US institutions, you’re not paying attention.

...

Heading up to Harry's to service the Mrs.' car. Later ...

The crux of the biscuit ...

...

This is the key point that most commentators, and virtually all politicians, seem to overlook. Never mind the deal's content--as horrible as it appears to be--the simple fact that Republicans have been successful in extorting such concessions from the Democrats, who lest we forget, still form a majority in government, constitutes a catastrophic failure of democratic governance. [my em]

...

Some call it extortion, I call it treason.

So tell me ...

Why we're still wasting our soldiers' lives, and a whole buncha our money, trying to bring this shithole into the 21st Century?

...

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community.

...

If they get out, their families will kill them anyway (if they're not killed while in confinement).

Like I've said many times before; there should never have been a single American boot on the ground in Afghanistan after September 11. We should have carpet bombed them for 6 months, kill a half million or a million of them, and then left a note advising them that if they harbored any more terrorists, we'd come back and kill the rest of them.

It's time for the American people to realize that war isn't about "nation-building", it's about vengeance. It's about destroying your enemy's ability to attack you anymore, not "winning hearts and minds". Let the UN mop up the mess after we're done making our point.

These people have no clue and if we stay 50 years, nothing's gonna change. Democracy comes from within and the Afghans don't have the will, nor do they even understand the concept. We certainly can't impose it on them with a puppet in Kabul and tons of cash. Loyalty there lasts as long as the money does and as soon as we leave, they're gonna go right back to what they've done for the last 1500 years. People have to want a democratic, civilized nation and the Afghans have proved, over and over again over the past decade, that they don't.

It's time to bring our people home now and let the Afghans kill each other, riot in the streets, and fuck their children and goats. We supposedly can't afford to take care of our senior citizens or our poor, yet we continue to dump money (by the billions) into that horrible place.

Fuck them.

Addendum:

And as far as Pakistan goes, it's time to bomb their nuclear arsenal into subatomic particles and cut them loose too. We can't afford it.

Good thing ...

The FBI is wasting time on a 40 year old cold case instead of, say, chasing after our modern day corporate criminals.

SEATTLE — The FBI’s “promising lead” in the D.B. Cooper hijacking case has led to a man who died about 10 years ago, an FBI spokesman said Monday.

Special Agent Fred Gutt said the bureau’s Seattle office has been investigating for more than a year a lead that has "more credibility and detail" than other tips regarding the unsolved hijacking of a Seattle-bound flight on Thanksgiving Eve 1971.

Gutt declined to identify the man, who died of natural causes.

...

Yet the people who flushed our banking and investment system down the tubes still walk free. Gotta love the priorities of the Obama administration.

Great thanks to They Gave Us A Republic for the link.

Good for us ...

The owner of the New York Islanders hockey team threatened to move the team out of New York if the people of Long Island didn't build him a new arena to the tune of $400 million. This in a place that already has some of the highest property taxes in the country. The referendum was yesterday and the message was given. "See yas!":

Voters in a suburban New York community already paying some of the highest property taxes in the country overwhelmingly rejected a referendum Monday to borrow $400 million for the construction of a new hockey arena and ballpark.

With 99 percent of the vote counted, the referendum failed 56 percent to 43 percent, according to unofficial returns from the Nassau County Board of Elections.

Supporters of the referendum called it a last-ditch effort to keep the New York Islanders playing in the Nassau Coliseum. The team's lease expires in 2015 and the hockey team's owner, Charles Wang, has hinted he may have to move off the team off Long Island unless a new facility is built to replace the 39-year-old building.

...

Don't let the door hit ya in the ass.

And a note: You know he ain't moving the Islanders out of the biggest sports market in the country. Let's see him get the same ticket prices and TV deals in Frozen Butt, Saskatchewan or some shit.

The one good thing ...

That came out of this debt ceiling mess. It was great to see Gabby on the House Floor:

WASHINGTON — The total number of votes on the historic debt-limit bill was 430. One vote was more memorable than any of the others.

Seven months after she was shot in the head, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returned to the House on Monday to cast her vote. Thunderous applause and emotional hugs from her Republican and Democratic colleagues greeted her.

...

Another Take

Josh Marshall

From TPM Reader RW ...

Let me get this straight. The President kept revenues on the table, did not touch the sunset provisions in the Bush tax cuts, ensured that military cuts keep the GOP honest, protected Medicare by adding in only provider cuts in the trigger, made the reduction apparently enough to stave off a debt downgrade, got the debt ceiling raised, wounded Boehner by demonstrating to the world that he is controlled by the Tea Party caucus, took out the requirement that a BBA be passed and sent to the states and got the extension through 2012? What exactly is wrong with this deal?

The fact that there are cuts? If people don't like that, why in God's name didn't they turn out to vote and bring back our Congressional majority? Once these nut jobs were in there, it was inevitable that this crap was going to happen. Whether or not it is advisable to cut spending, what exactly was going to stop this from happening? My experience is that the primary factor in all negotiations are the facts on the ground. The complaints center on a ridiculous notion that if the President had only said "no" harder, that these guys would have caved in. This isn't negotiating over who gets the side of the bed near the A/C. This is a complex matter involving 3,000 members and staffers. Negotiations in these situations don't work like this. That's why I'm irked by the constant parade of people comparing the negotiations to movies and card games. These comparisons obscure more than they reveal.

The GOP came out of this looking unreasonable--I've been getting E-mail messages from friends saying they are back with the Democrats because the Tea Party is "destroying this country." Nate Silver tweeted last week that local conservative talk radio in Kansas was filled with callers attacking the Tea Party! The Wall Street Journal ran two editorials which called the GOP delusional and "childish." The vaunted GOP message discipline broke down--I read stories all over the "inside baseball" papers here in DC where GOP House members went on the record after the Friday vote wondering out loud if the party had been damaged! I don't know if you noticed, but John Boehner spent last week negotiating with himself. No new proposals came out from the Dem side, but he produced two proposals, one of which he had to pull after he didn't have votes. A congressional Dem staffer told me his dad, an urban Catholic who voted for Nixon over Kennedy and has always voted Republican suddenly thinks the GOP is out to lunch and supports the President.

Hey, we all hate the pain, but this is an ongoing process. They are going to try this again with a government shutdown. When that happens, I'm pretty sure that the country will be resoundingly against a repeat of these types of hijinks.

All that said, the "deal" hasn't been voted on yet.

All you need to know ...

About this debt ceiling deal:

Grover Norquist Backs The New Debt Deal

Fundies in charge of the nukes

In Pakistan? Sure, and closer to home as well. Fucking swell.

Truthout

The Air Force, in response to an exclusive report published by Truthout earlier this week, has withdrawn materials used in a training session that relied upon passages from the New and Old Testament and a quote from an ex-Nazi SS officer to teach missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons.

From the link in the quote:

A senior Air Force Space and Missile officer who reviewed the materials, said the teachings are "an outrage of the highest order."

"No way in hell should this have been presented as a mandatory briefing to ALL in the basic missiles class," the officer, who requested anonymity, said in an email. "It presumes ALL missile officers are religious and specifically in need of CHRISTIAN justification for their service.

A no-brainer 'no shit'. It is noteworthy that an officer who tells the truth has to be anonymous to protect himself from the fundie higher-ups.

Former Air Force Capt. Damon Bosetti, 27, who attended missile officer training in 2006 and was stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, said he and his colleagues used to call the religious section of the ethics training the "Jesus loves nukes speech."

Weinstein said the combination of citing fundamentalist Christianity and a Nazi scientist as a way of explaining to missile officers why launching nuclear weapons is ethical is a new low for the Air Force.

"Leave it to the United States Air Force to find a way to dictate the 'ethical' value of nuclear war and it's inevitable role in the 'natural order' of humanity's existence, to it's missile launch officer trainees by merging unadulterated, fundamentalist Christian end times Armageddon doctrines with the tortured 'people who are guided by the bible endorsements of a former, leading Nazi SS official," Weinstein said.

From the top link:

"We are not going to commend the Air Force for doing something they should have done a quarter-century ago," Weinstein said. "It's an outrage and a deliberate attempt to torture and distort our constitution when the US Air Force mandatorily teaches its nuclear missile launch officers that fundamentalist Christian theology is inextricably intertwined with the 'correct' decision to launch nukes."

Son. Of. A. Bitch. One End Times-seeking christowhackjob with a wild hair up his ass could end it all with one finger.

Heads should roll over this. They won't.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Distillery to Make South Carolina’s First Legal Moonshine
Still operators call it a “job killer.”

Study: A Good Cry Doesn't Make You Feel Better
Or garner support from right wing of your party.

Merck to Cut 13,000 Jobs
Will retain only sales force and lobbyists.

Doughnut Bacon Burger Big Hit at New York State Fair
With New York State funeral directors.

Quote of the Day

Fez:

...

I guess it is a "victory" so far as Obama is concerned as his wife and daughters were not given up in the deal.

...

So ...

According to what I hear on the news in the wee hours, it seems as if the powers-that-be have reached a deal on the debt ceiling. I got a suggestion for President Obama, once this bullshit deal is signed:

Direct the FBI to arrest the Republican leaders of the House and Senate on charges of treason for attempting to circumvent the constitutional budget and legislative processes.

This was treasonous and if the debt ceiling isn't raised it will do serious harm to the American people. They were perfectly willing to destroy our way of life and to me that deserves a bullet.

As for our spineless, nutless, self-serving President. Don't expect my vote next Election Day.

Update:

Via our pal Montag, Dr. Krugman:

...

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

...

Proud to be an American when our representatives are either losers or criminals.

And just a thought: I can't wait until this evening when Lawrence O'Donnell comes on and tells me what a genius the President is at playing 11-Dimensional Chess. I know a couple 3-Card Monte players who are just waiting for Obama to come down their street.

Fox News Reports: Obama Starting to Wonder Why He Moved to U.S.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – According to the Fox News Channel, President Barack Obama is so weary of the debt ceiling stalemate in Congress that he is beginning to wonder why he moved to the United States in the first place.

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith broke the story today, reporting that "sources close to the President say he's increasingly nostalgic for the land of his birth."

"To someone like President Obama, this wrangling in Congress must seem very foreign," said Mr. Smith. "In Kenya, debt ceilings are raised automatically by the village elders, who then celebrate with a ceremonial feast of cabbage, mangoes and goat."

While Mr. Smith stopped short of saying that Mr. Obama planed to leave Washington and return to his native Kenya, "his birth certificate does allow him to return at any time he sees fit."
...

In other debt ceiling news, by unanimous vote the House of Representatives passed a bill raising Speaker of the House John Boehner's medication.

As for the debt ceiling negotiations, they are "right on schedule," according to the ancient Mayans.

No Banker Left Behind

Quote is from a different video version:

"No Banker Left Behind" is the opening track of Ry Cooder's 2011 album "Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down," available as a free download when you pre-order the album at http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/pull-up-some-dust-and-sit-down. The album is out on August 30, 2011.

Thanks to biamaku, Spain.

Which one's Thelma and which one's Louise?

Unconfirmed Sources

Unconfirmed sources report that Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor are in stable condition this morning after a late night auto accident. The accident occurred when the vehicle, a classic convertible driven by Cantor, plunged into the Potomac after hitting the Debt Ceiling. The pair miraculously survived the crash, but they both received serious injuries to their credibility.

Hey, no credibility to begin with, no damage, but wreckin' a '60 T-Bird is inexcusable.

"They were really cooking," says night watchman Keith Barnes, who saw the whole thing. "They tried to pass the Debt Ceiling, but they didn't make it. The car hopped the sidewalk, hit a parking meter and went airborne. It was horrible to watch."

Actually, except for the grudgingly acceptable collateral damage to the T-Bird, I think it'd be FUN to watch.

Stop Outsourcing Security Act Introduced

BuzzFlash

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) today introduced legislation that would phase out private security contractors in war zones.

The legislation recognizes that the United States increasingly has relied on private contractors to wage our wars, wasting taxpayer money, damaging military morale and hurting our reputation around the world.

There are 155,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan today, but only 145,000 uniformed service members.
...

[...] By some estimates, every position converted from a private contract to federal employment saves on average $44,000 per year.

Check my arithmetic, but that sounds like about $7B savings per year to get rid of mercs. Plus the bill gets rid of mercs, whom I detest.

Too bad this bill will be buried by merc lobbyists and won't go anywhere, but thanks anyway to Bernie and Jan.

Ah, Schadenfreude...

SC Tea Party Leaders Arrested For Selling Pirated Computer Software