Congratulations to the folks at UMKC for giving us a new addition to the deficit aviary. Until now the media only had mind space for “deficit hawks” and “deficit doves.” Deficit hawks include folks like Mike Pence, and Judd Gregg, who insist that the Government run deficits only for wars, and tax cuts for rich Americans, but insist on paying for extensions of unemployment insurance, health care reforms, infrastructure, jobs programs, educational programs, transportation projects, and any Government spending for regular folks with taxes.  Read more…

First I’ll point to a few books, but note that most people will not be able to obtain these, let alone read them, in the short period of time left. I therefore include a modest number of links to shorter, online material in the second half.

This is really sad, and we need PZMyers. Maybe some progress.

By

Warren Mosler

MISSION:
To deploy an army of MMT proponents to respond to deficit terrorism on the web.
Go to offending articles. Neutralize flaws. Report back to home base.

MERIT AWARDS:
An MMT heart ( ♥) will be awarded for each successful strike.

PRIZES:
In November, prizes will be awarded to those with the most MMT ♥, including an all inclusive trip to the Center of the Universe, St. Croix, USVI.   Read more…

I notice the "pros" over at Open Left somehow can't manage to attend Netroots Nation and blog at the same time -- call me crazy, but isn't that exactly the level of skill you'd expect from a professional? -- and so they're rerunning "Golden Oldies."

Well, at Corrente we're always willing to help a former English major out, and so here's a Golden Oldie from Chris Bowers that Open Left hasn't gotten around to, yet: May 2008's "Changing of the Guard," -- which, in everything but it's career "progressive" triumphalism, has proven to be laughably, ludicrously wrong. Oh well.

This is an amazing story.

JERUSALEM – It seems almost Kafkaesque: Ten safety deposit boxes of never-published writings by Franz Kafka, their exact contents unknown, are trapped in courts and bureaucracy, much like one of the nightmarish visions created by the author himself.

The papers, retrieved from bank vaults where they have sat untouched and unread for decades, could shed new light on one of literature's darkest figures.

Irony aside, holy moly. Ten boxes of unread writings by Kafka!

After the smoke clears, it should be an fascinating historical find.

Via Beata at my place.

Dinner, before weeding: Fresh cut herbs, a chopped just-dug-up onion, and local butter for frying them, then scrambling local eggs very very slowly. Then pepper, fleur de sel.

Yes, I know the fancy salt sounds expensive, but the nice thing about excellent ingredients, at least for me, is that I use less of them. And smaller portions are good for weight loss (just like eating dinner before weeding is better than eating dinner after weeding, especially when I've been sitting at the computer all day).

Oh, and the onion was a lot sweeter, and practically tearless -- I guess because it was fresh?

Anyhow, to my question: Now I've got eggshells, and am going to have more of them. Are eggshells any good in the garden?

White House apologizes to Sherrod. And here's the statement that should really have gotten her in trouble, via Charles Lemos at MyDD:

The experience made Mrs. Sherrod realize that "it's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know and they could be black, white, they could be Hispanic, and it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people, those who don't have access the way others have."

"The only difference is the folks with money want to stay in power. It's always about money, y'all," she said.

Indeed. I hope Sherrod goes on to better things than The Big O's Ag Department.

Excellent!

Oakland, CA approves industrial-scale marijuana farming.

A useful list from Americans United.

By David Swanson

The most massive and brutal crime committed on this planet during the past decade has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And we're seeking to wash the blood off our hands without so much as an "Out, damn spot!" Nowadays "looking forward, not backward" is supposed to take care of everything, even as the crimes continue. What that takes care of is the leading perpetrators who begin to sense that the coast is clear and creep out of their holes to declare, as did Karl Rove this week, that their biggest mistake was not more aggressively attacking those who pointed out their crimes.

... but if you're not, a top-to-bottom guide to saving money around your house.

Go read Jack Crow: "Power always means power over."

[Sorry to pay attention to this, CD, but as Thoreau didn't say, when you see fish in a barrel....]

At Booman Tribune:

It wasn't right but when has that ever stopped Breitbart or Drudge or FOX or Limbaugh from defaming good people to advance their agenda? They wanted to attack the NAACP after that organization's resolution condemning racism in the Tea Party. The fact that Ms. Sherrod was an employee of the Obama administration was a bonus for them. Ms. Sherrod could be made to appear to be a "black woman who hated white people and refused to help them" by taking her remarks from a speech she gave to the NAACP out of context and implying that she and the Obama administration was deliberating discriminating against poor white people.

Classic. That's the lead. What Brietbart said is more important than what the White House did -- which was to throw Sherrod under the bus at Brietbart's behest. Sort of the reverse of the old "sticks and stones" adage, eh?

But here's the real beauty part. Notice -- and this is a tell of real cognitive dissonance for tribalists -- the extreme confusion around "we" and "they":

There's a chain convenience store near my house, and until I implemented the dreaded lifestyle change and started eating a lot more vegetables and fruit, I used to buy cookies there -- let's say, Pecan Sandies, just to disguise my identity slightly -- all the time. (I know, expensive, but we don't have a lot of stores in town.) So much so that the counter kids and I used to joke about it all the time. "Your Pecan Sandies are in!"

Well, in the last six months or so, the chain got sold to a bigger chain, and the new corporation started making a lot of inventory changes, rearranging the displays, downsizing the packaging, bringing in new people, and all that. And the Pecan Sandies dwindled in their packaging and then disappeared from the shelves entirely.

So, last night, I had the following conversation:

LAMBERT: No pecan sandies. It's like they're taking away everything I want.

COUNTER KID: Welcome to America.

Ouch.

And the counter kid was not a college kid or a irony-drenched hipster, but a gangly, unfashionably stubbled, slow-moving twenty-something from up in the County; this wasn't his throwaway job; this was his job*. Thin, in his ill-fitting corporate golf shirt. And, needless to say (or not?), we'd never discussed politics.

So Bob Herbert is right:

Aristotle (again) said it:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit

The Ds are doing what they want to do. They are doing what they think is best.

Digby's almost there:

After ACORN and now this [Breitbart/Sherrod] , I really have to wonder if the Democrats and Brietbart aren't actually working together on a whole Sistah Soljah campaign. It's a little bit hard to see why anyone over 10 years old would fall for the same ruse over and over again.

But then she falls back on the old familiar narrative of Democratic weakness:

Seriously [Damn!], this shows tremendous weakness. Andrew Brietbart is a con artist and and right wing entertainer whose antics should always be met with a cynical laugh and a shake of the head. To fall for his schtick more than once is political malpractice

"Malpractice" for whom?

As Aristotle said:

Archive:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries...

Note: based on an earlier blog post.

Goldman Sachs profits fall 82 percent.

Good.

I should have linked to this great post from Violet on the anniversary of Seneca Falls yesterday.

Friggin Japanese (rose) beetles -- though not many -- chewing up my raspberry leaves. What to do?

Successful S&L fraud prosecutor and criminologist Bill Black in Fortune:

Accounting is the CEO's "weapon of choice" that transforms the perverse incentive into what economists, regulators, and criminologists agree is a "sure thing" in crises (means). That's the classic recipe for disaster: motive, means, and opportunity. ...

The motive being (of course) greed, and the opportunity deregulation (more generally, the ideological and institutional effects of the Washington Consensus starting in the mid-70s).