Why, would you look at that. It is raining. Outside. In July. In Portland. Everyone here has an umbrella or two right? That’s a thing in Portland, isn’t it? Using umbrellas religiously?
Hopes for an easy debt-deal bridge across Washington’s partisan canyon appear even more remote. Republicans are finding new and inventive ways to say the same thing—“NO TAXES. STOP ASKING. AHHHH!”—while the middle-playing president finds new and inventive ways to chide them for their intransigence. One interesting roadblock: a bit of sibling rivalry, as it were, in the House.
Another horrific story turns up in Britain’s tabloid phone-hacking scandal. Allegedly using criminals and other ne’er-do-wells, Rupert Murdoch-owned papers accessed former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s health and medical records and then used the findings to publish something Brown kept secret and intensely private: his 5-year-old son’s battle with cystic fibrosis.
Unrest in Syria gets personal, somewhat, for the United States. Pro-government demonstrators take their rage out on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, causing significant cosmetic damage but also drawing a strong rebuke from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
A routine-seeming vaccine program in Abbottabad was revealed to be fake— part of a CIA plot to collect bin Laden family DNA. And now a doctor who helped our spies is under arrest in Pakistan and facing harsh punishment.
Further fraying our relationship with Pakistan, American drone missile strikes— a source of intense consternation even before the bin Laden raid—have left as many as three dozen people dead.
Next door, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, a self-styled big-shot who fancied himself the real ruler of Taliban stronghold Kandahar, was shot dead by a guard working for… wait for it … the Taliban.
A new way to plead the Fifth: Deciding not to turn over one’s laptop password.
Because there’s nothing like burying yourself with work after a divorce, Arnold Schwarzenegger really will make another movie.
Take a trip inside the ex-gay clinic run by GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann’s husband.
Meanwhile, another GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, was in our very own neck of the woods, quietly raising money and hobnobbing with state Republican leaders. The public was not invited.
I WILL WEAR THE BIGGEST SMILE EVER WHEN I GET ON THE BUS THIS MORNING. AND I SURE AS SHIT HOPE THAT SMILE IS CONTAGIOUS! BECAUSE I LOVE EVERYBODY!
I see no need for the existence of some unholy cross between Chico Marx, Raffi, and James Taylor.