Even as other GOP members are already plotting how best to cave without anyone noticing. Newsmax: Republican Sen. Jim DeMint is threatening to block a vote in Congress on raising the U.S. debt ceiling unless he wins a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, according to Fox News. The filibuster threat comes a day after news that GOP leaders had offered private assurances to the White House that they ultimately would

“Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things to the atmosphere. “If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against the problem…”

Don’t mess with Texas. Unless it’s Austin. In which case, just distract them with bags of Funyons. (thanks to Dave O’C)

Tell your hypothetical statistics to shut their racist, extremist pie holes.

Success! Thanks to Tony C and Dennis Rogers.

“U.S. credit outlook lowered by S&P on deficit fears”: Standard & Poor’s slapped a negative outlook on the United States’ top-notch credit rating on Monday, jacking up the pressure on the Obama administration and Congress to slash the yawning federal budget deficit. S&P, which assigns ratings to guide investors on the risks involved in buying debt instruments, said the move signals at least a one-in-three chance that it could eventually

For years, I’ve been describing myself as a classical liberal, essentially, a Constitutional / legal conservative with many libertarian leanings — though without the reigning establishment small-l libertarians’ (read, the Reason crowd’s) open-borders / foreign policy stance, which in my opinion represents a rather strange marriage of unlimited immigration (an affront to the idea of national sovereignty) and military isolationism / “realism”. Classical liberalism is the founding ideology for this

James Pethokoukis, Reuters: The Obama White House naturally wants the media to favorably compare his outline to House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s 73-page “Path to Prosperity” which is highly detailed and has been scored accurate by the Congressional Budget Office. It brings the budget into balance and eliminates the national debt by cutting spending — not raising taxes. And how does Obama’s “Framework for Shared Prosperity and Shared Fiscal Responsibility”

The Department of Oversight for Overseeing Permissions Allowing References to Things Jesus Will/Might/Could Do, wept. In triplicate. CEI: Federal regulations cost even more than the skyrocketing federal budget deficit, and help bring the federal government’s share of the economy to over 35 percent, a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute reveals. Regulations cost $1.75 trillion in compliance costs according to the Small Business Administration. That’s greater than the record

Having all sort of computer problems today — in fact, this has been going on for some time — so I’m going to try to fix those with a few hard drive changes before I bequeath you any more of my extremist, cynical, anti-pragmatic purist observations of hating hate. You’ll just have to hate on your own in the meantime. Sorry. Don’t hate me.