G.O.P. Sen. Hatch Bucks Becks Anti-mosque Position:

Utah Senator Orin Hatch, a member of the LDS church, has said he believes we should follow the U.S. Constitution and that Muslims have the right to build a religious center wherever they want to in New York. Will his position come into conflict with Glenn, the self-appointed prophet, Beck's demagoguery? (See today's Washington Post.) (P.S. Beck claims to be a Mormon, but so for the LDS leadership seems to be taking a hands off approach.)

Glenn Beck Announces His Candidacy for Pope of America:

Demagogic blowhard Glenn Beck took his "white's only" message to Washington, D.C. yesterday, where he told thousands of other white folks that God had given him a divine message that they, the white folks, should "take back America," meaning of course that they should continue to give him lots of money so that he can continue to ramble inanely over the airwaves.

Beck was joined by the most vacuous political candidate to ever appear on the national scene, Sarah Palin, whose only program is to promote herself and wear expensive clothes paid for by others.

A crowd of at least 300,000 white folks showed up to hear the two celebs tell them how nice it was to be white and that God was on their side, provided they continue to give the two of them money.

Much of the funding for the event evidently came from two libertarian billionaire brothers, who have made much of their fortune by ruining the health of their workers and polluting the environment.

(For related stories, see today's Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.)

Fixing Social Security:

Gail Collins makes fun of Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chair of President Obama's deficit reduction commission, in today's New York Times. Simpson, another career politician who hasn't earned an honest dollar in decades, wants to do away with social security so that working people will die younger and stop joining AARP when they turn fifty.

Collins, on the other hand, has an excellent idea for helping to fix the Social Security budget issues. It's not a new one, but one whose time has surely come: remove the cap on income that's taxed annually. Currently, that cap means that only the first $106,800 of annual income is taxed. Surely, people earning more than this can afford to pay the tax if those of us who earn less can do it.

Write your congressman. Tell him you'll go anti-incumbent if he doesn't go along with the idea.


Today in History:

Today is the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. You can hear it on YouTube. Forget about the Fox idiot who is trying to usurp it in Washington today.

Traffic Jam from Hell:

I thought I had it bad when I was stuck in traffic moving around Indianapolis and took an hour and a half to travel a handful of miles, but China makes my little travel problem laughable. Today's Washington Post reports on a traffic jam that has already lasted ten days and may not be cleared up in the next two weeks. Some truck drivers have been sitting in their cabs for up to five days.

The last big news out of China was that the country had overtaken Japan to become the second largest economy in the world. Welcome to the future, China. Ain't progress grand!