Washington Post, By Lori Montgomery, Brady Dennis & Alec MacGillis, August 6

In mid-January, newly installed as the GOP House majority leader, Virginia’s Eric Cantor rose to the podium inside a spacious hotel ballroom to deliver a message to his troops, including the 87 newcomers who had given the party control of the House.

A vote to increase the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit was coming soon, he told the caucus members who had gathered at the Marriott in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for a closed-door retreat less than 10 days after taking power. Think of it as a “hidden” opportunity, he implored them, a chance to achieve their goal of reining in the federal government and its spending habits.

“I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said Cantor, one of several new House leaders who detailed the game plan for the coming months. “Either we stick together and demonstrate that we’re a team that will fight for and stand by our principles, or we will lose that leverage.”

Went and saw the Cubs play yesterday in Chicago. Also walked around and took a boat up and down the river for a bit. You can find the full set here. I'll be posting some Wisconsin photos tomorrow. I think I'm going to take The Brunette's son cow-tipping tonight.

Might even get the chance to hang out with Hong Pong a bit.

Enjoy!

Ray Rivera & Alissa J Rubin | Kabul | Aug 6

NYT - Insurgents shot down a NATO Chinook helicopter during an overnight operation in eastern Afghanistan, killing 37 people on board, a military official said on Saturday. It was one of the worst single-day losses of life for coalition troops in the nearly decade-long war and comes amid rising violence across the country.

The majority of those killed were NATO troops but Afghan soldiers were also among the dead, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the crash was still being investigated.

The helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the Tangi valley of the Wardak Province just west of Kabul. The Taliban claimed credit for the attack.

U.S. Air Force Capt. Justin Brockhoff, a NATO spokesman, confirmed the crash but could provide no further information, including what caused the crash or whether there were casualties.

Cajsa Wikstrom | Aug 6

Sixty-six years after the atomic bomb was dropped, survivor Keijiro Matsushima tells of a day of death and destruction.

Aljazeera - Sixty-six years ago, Hiroshima was turned into a burning inferno as the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city.

Keijiro Matsushima was 16 years old when he witnessed the attack which claimed roughly 100,000 lives in one day. He recalls how August 6, 1945, was a beautiful day, with a blue sky. Matsushima had returned to school only a week earlier, after he and his peers were mobilised to work for a year and a half in a factory producing military uniforms.

At 8.15 in the morning, his class had just started. He was listening to his teacher explaining a question on differential and integral calculus."I was looking out through the window and saw two American B-29 bombers. I just thought 'American planes again', assuming they were out for some routine work."

When he looked back at his books, the bomb exploded.

more at the link

Standard and Poor's finally did it. They downgraded the credit rating of the United States from AAA to AA+. There are serious questions about the reliability of S&P. The White House pointed out that there is a $2 trillion error in the calculations used for the downgrade. Ths is of interest since the two other agencies failed to change the AAA status of the US. (See Robert Oak, Economic Populist)

Jack Tapper of ABC News reported late this afternoon:

"A third official says that S&P made a "serious mistake" in its analysis, "based on flawed math and assumptions," so the Obama administration is pushing back. But even though "S&P has acknowledged its numbers are wrong, it's unclear what they're going to do.," the official said.

"S&P's numbers were off by "roughly $2 trillion," the official said.

Fitch and Moody's reaffirmed the AAA US rating earlier in the week.

In addition to the question raised about a mathematical error, there are substantial reasons to doubt S&P for any credit rating, let alone the sovereign debt of the United States This material is from an article on April 25, 2011. It is highly relevant to the situation at hand.

They Helped Trigger the Financial Collapse

Jake Tapper | Aug 5

Political Punch/ABC - A government official tells ABC News that the federal government is expecting and preparing for bond rating agency Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the rating of US debt from its current AAA value.

Officials reasons given will be the political confusion surrounding the process of raising the debt ceiling, and lack of confidence that the political system will be able to agree to more deficit reduction. A source says Republicans saying that they refuse to accept any tax increases as part of a larger deal will be part of the reason cited.

The official was unsure if the bond rating would be AA+ or AA.

UPDATE: S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government's budget deficits and rising debt burden. The move is likely to raise borrowing costs eventually for the American government, companies and consumers. Reuters

August 5, 2011

East Germany began building the Berlin Wall on Aug. 13, 1961. Originally published on Aug. 23, 1961, this article is from the DER SPIEGEL archive

Spiegel Online - "Whatever happens in East Berlin, we stand by West Berlin." -- British Ambassador to West Germany Sir Christopher Steel, after a tour of East Berlin.

Applause followed the young men as they made their way slowly through the packed crowd to the podium. The words on their large signs were visible from a distance: "Doesn't the West know what to do?" "Where are the protective powers?" and "Betrayed by the West?"

The questions remain unanswered. Even West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, a speaker at the protest rally against sealing off the eastern sector, failed to comfort the crowd of 250,000. Unable to conceal his bitterness over the West's failure to react, the mayor shouted hoarsely into the microphone: "Berlin expects more than just words!"

more at the link

More images at Troll.me

It shouldn't be surprising to those of us who physically restrain our gag reflex and endeavour to observe or participate in the American political spectacle that a trending topic on Twitter this past weekend was the combination of a four-letter word, the word "you" and "Washington".

For a long time now, what goes on in the Beltway has ceased to serve the interests of the vast majority of Americans, in that shockingly most of us don't have weekly passes to the Creation Museum, or attend performances at the David H. Koch Theatre while monocle-clad and porting brandy snifters. But the current disaster, over an artificially created "debt ceiling" (an artifact of World War I) that's been a non-event in the past, is pushing our political culture towards what was previously reserved only for Barnum & Bailey.

I've never seen anything this brutal. Just unreal.

. . . John Boehner is enjoying his 98% today.

. . . the confidence fairies are working wonders on the markets!

While I hesitate to make predictions concerning financial markets, a few respected voices have warned me that we stand at the precipice.

Check out what Ilargi has to say at the Automatic Earth.

Then take a stroll over to Zerohedge and smell the napalm.

Israeli citizens are demanding more liberal government.

TEL AVIV, Israel -- While the world has been focused on the anti-government movements that sprang up during the Arab Spring, the largest protests in Israeli history have been sweeping the country for the past two months, threatening to destabilize the government with calls for extensive change.

The protests began with a Facebook petition over the cost of cottage cheese. They now include a litany of demands, including a return to the days when the government took a more active role in subsidizing costs. Protesters also want changes in the tax system, more subsidized government housing and more spending on health and education.

PBS Pete Souza/The White House/Signing The Budget Control Act of 2011, 8/2/11

Tim Dickinson | August 3

Rolling Stone - Each of the elements of the scandal in London has been systematically employed by News Corp. in its U.S. Operations – hacking, thuggish reporting tactics, unethical entanglements with police, hush-money settlements and efforts to corrupt officials at the highest levels of government, over the past decade.

Peter Ford | Tokyo | Aug 3

CSM - Fukushima's radiation has hit deadly levels for the second day, according to Tepco, making efforts to bring the nuclear plant under control difficult. Japan’s retired skilled laborers say they are ready to relieve younger workers.

Nothing makes Nobuhiro Shiotani angrier than to be called a "kamikaze."

Certainly, the sober and precisely spoken retired scientist does not look like a World War II suicide pilot. And he is insistent that his plan to lead 300 elderly pensioners in a bid to stabilize the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is motivated not by some mad death wish but by pure rationality.

"Older people taking the risk is much less damaging to our society than asking the younger generation following us to take it," Dr. Shiotani says, adding bluntly, because we are nearer the end of our lives anyway.

Shiotani and an old friend, former plant engineer Yasuteru Yamada, founded the Skilled Veterans Corps (SVC) in April, less than a month after a tsunami overwhelmed the cooling system at Fukushima, causing the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

By writing letters and e-mails, using Twitter, and sending out a call to action at various blogs, the two men have drawn more than 300 retired engineers and scientists, ranging in age from 60 to 78, into their group. All are offering to use their skills and experience to help cool the reactors following the partial meltdown at the heavily contaminated site. "To my surprise we've received quite a large number of favorable responses," says Shiotani. "They all say they think it's their duty not to leave this negative heritage to younger generations."

What the tea-partiers did, holding the debt-ceiling hostage, was government by gimmick. Government by gimmick is where you do something that is legal but not customary. Needless to say this is something that the right is only to happy to engage in. The filibuster is one of their latest government by gimmick approaches.

During the debt-ceiling "OMG-the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh" (OMGTEOTWIN) pseudo-crisis someone came up with another end-run besides the 14th Amendment gimmick. This other gimmick could have been used if only we had a Democrat in the White House. This other gimmick struck me as the mother of all government by gimmick ideas.

It’s evident to me and many others that the lifestyles we are accustomed to living are unsustainable and therefore will cease to exist. That is the definition of unsustainable, by the way, that which cannot be sustained. While a subject that creates much fretting, wailing and gnashing of teeth, there could be a silver lining to our excessive living arrangements.

We (Americans) enjoy excesses, far more than necessary to provide essential needs, unlike some others on this planet. We can afford to do without some of this shit and still live meaningful lives.

This is a subject I often ponder as I watch people drive endlessly, as planes crisscross the sky above, people text and talk on phones or stare blankly into the glare of computer screens. How much of this is actually necessary to sustain life?

Inherent in the current sooper sekrit budjit soopercommittee Congress is setting up in response to the budget crisis, a re-write of the tax code is inevitable.

The time has come for an overhaul of the tax code, to be sure. Right now, taxes on the rich are the lowest they have ever been since Herbert Hoover was President (You'll notice the bookend of terrible unemployment and low taxes on the wealthy, too.) The effective tax rate on the wealthiest one percent (i.e. the rate the wealthy actually pay in total, after deductions, deferrals and exemptions) is the lowest it's ever been.

. . . attack Iran?

. . . our most sensitive national computer networks, so we must attack Wikileaks and Anonymous and Lulzsec.

. . . when the food they buy at the store makes them sick? Many say they'll start buying local food, farmer's market food. But this reminds me of something Don Henry Ford told me (I'm paraphrasing) when I visited him last month: how do you know that food won't make you sick either? How do you know someone at the Farmer's Market isn't taking shortcuts? Or using the right ingredients when making homemade cheese? It's a crazy paradox, because on a macro level regulations are critical, but on a micro level self-regulation is essential. The farmer that sells bad food will be known for it. Such is life.

Hey, John! John Bull! How you doing? It’s been a while – I don’t get many visitors these days you know. You’re looking great! I gotta say – I loved that wedding. Loved it! I saw all of it from the very beginning to that balcony scene at the end. I saw it live too – at 3:00 a.m. – right here in the hospital room. I was up anyway; I don’t sleep too well these days. I have to say, you guys really do that pageantry stuff better than anybody. The Pope could take some lessons from you, and those guys at the Vatican have a few millennia of practice at that sort of thing. And that Kate and William! What a lovely couple. Do you know they came to visit me right after the honeymoon? Very thoughtful, they were.

Hey, you wouldn’t mind putting on one of those white face masks, would you? These hospitals are just full of germs and you shouldn’t take any chances.

You heard about my illness, didn’t you? Something to do with my debt ceiling. My blood count was too high – reaching the limit – I couldn’t follow it all. They had all these specialists in Washington running around shouting at each other. It was all over the television channels. A real embarrassment, I tell you! Half of them were saying I needed even more blood transfusions, and the other half were saying maybe I should slow down a bit or even reduce my intake. I’m all in favor of that; I’d like to get back to where I was ten years ago, when I wasn’t stuck in a hospital bed.