O & SS

Jon Talton with more reasons to hate Obama:

The Robert Rubin wing of the party, of which Mr. Obama is a member, has long wanted to welsh on the government’s obligations to younger workers, including by giving part or all of Social Security to Wall Street. As for the right, they are fervently in favor of privatization, notwithstanding the shellacking George W. Bush received for attempting this. And, oh, what a great nation we would have if your Social Security had been hostage to the stock market casino. We’re told that we’re living longer. But that’s hardly true for everyone. We’re told the baby boomers are too big an obligation. How is that in a nation of 310 million people? America is broke! Hardly. It’s the richest nation in the history of the world, even richer than in the 1950s through 1970s, but the wealth has been redistributed up. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme! If so, why hasn’t it collapsed with the chief administrator making off the with proceeds?

They just keep stacking it higher and deeper. [TBogg]

And Wall Street keeps crashing. Today it was Morgan Stanley adding their no shit Sherlock take to S&P’s downgrade of the USA’s credit rating. [Yves Smith]

How bad is it? Even Pope Natzinger says enough is enough: end self-regulation, protect labor unions and redistribute wealth! I can’t wait to hear what Rick Perry has to say about that!

emptywheel has a video of Americans given a choice of unlabeled pie charts describing an ideal economy, Sweden’s and ours. Almost everyone picked Sweden’s. The only person who correctly identified our pie chart was a foreigner. Maybe he was an escaped student from the Hershey work camp in Palmyra…. [h/t Rob from Chicago] (Didn’t we used to mock the students who traveled to Cuba to help with the sugar cane harvest?)

Chuck Grassley confirms Matt Taibbi’s story about the SEC destroying documents, yet can’t seem to find it in himself to threaten anyone with prison or even a tongue lashing. Hell, we can’t even get our courts to stop cut and dried price fixing! [emptywheel notes the establishment media is linking to Chuck and not Matt]

Mormons continue to be one of the least popular religious groups in America.

Mormons are fighting back, PR-wise, but Jon Huntsman offers a model for how Mormons can get elected to national office: call yourself a Mormon and a Christian. (A better choice than owning up to being a Bolivian Mennonite, imho.)

John Kasich declared it “my way or the highway” season in Ohio, and then after the polling numbers came in, switched to “so yeah, let’s talk.”

Is the GOP already tiring of Perry and looking elsewhere? Looks like it. And the existing players are upping the ante. If media asks a question they don’t like, they walk off the set. (Bachmann’s been evading questions for years.) What happens in Wingnutterdonia stays in Wingnutterdonia!

Patrick McHenry eats a townhall.

What is acceptable to talk about? Totally made up bullshit is still OK. Rush can toss his biracial cookies into the mix as often as he likes.

Here in Minnesota, it looks like Senator Amy will get a free pass next year. Republicans would rather run against Al Franken. Shouldn’t this be telling us something about the kind of job Amy’s doing?

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Another Supreme Borks decision results in a dreadful lower court ruling. An enterprising foreign student was buying textbooks overseas, then reselling them to American college students on eBay. Not the easiest way to make money as greedy textbook publishers are constantly updating or replacing textbooks, so you really need to know the market to make money this way.

Now the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that this kid now has to pay John Wiley & Sons $600,000 for selling eight textbooks on eBay.

When you give corporations all the protectionist legislation they want, you end up with a nightmarish system hell wouldn’t have. Getting rid of Obama won’t fix this. We need aggressive progressive leadership that will do the dirty work of impeaching and removing Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy from the Court, and a strong enough majority in the Senate to confirm new, not insane Supreme Court justices.

And no, I don’t see that happening either so just figure that before you sell anything on eBay ever again, you’ve tripled checked with the maker of your item to make sure that your physical possession of their product allows you resale rights. So far the Borks have decided that you can’t re-sell digital music or movies or books, and you can’t sell dead tree editions of books printed overseas. I’m sure that’s an incomplete list but don’t worry about it. If you screw up, their lawyers will get in touch.

Meanwhile, a new report finds that big ISPs do well by bittorrent traffic. Torrents are designed to use what bandwidth is available, and doesn’t put any strain on the system (which Netflix’s streaming strains considerably). Not that the big ISPs are showing any gratitude. Don’t expect AT&T to stop trying to cap bandwidth (even as the Baby Bells mostly go with the flow).

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Etc.:

Epic Rap Battles of History: Dr. Seuss vs Shakespeare [video]

Six new things on a stick at this year’s MN State Fair

Still more new science that can’t find any problems with pot

Ridley Scott inexplicably decides to remake the best science-fiction movie of all time

Cool! Google maps now lets you toggle weather information on/off

Did MPR just hire Garrison Keillor’s replacement?

Trailer for Hysteria (which appears to be a very funny movie) [video]

Best sniper rifle in the world? Try Accuracy International, a small British firm

Another Kindle owner whines about his inability to adjust the type size on real books

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And that’s that for a while. I guess I really do need to focus exclusively on clients and the book for a while. Doing this makes me get my mad on, and that’s not where I need to be right now.

See you after Labor Day.

• Obama