Monday Morning Links

* These kids today, and their games.

* The Post has a profile in motion of freshman House Republican Ted Yoho (FL). The focus is how he’s part of the faction who forced John Boehner to trigger the government shutdown and now wants to move along to default on the national debt. How bad will default be? “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” Yoho told the Post.

* In Conversation: Antonin Scalia.

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

You know, Antonin, I believe in the Devil too — and I even know his secret identity!

* Open Letter to Everyone Who Secretly Controls the US Government: Are you okay? Do you need help?

* Why I’m calling on all university faculty to refuse to write letters of recommendation to TFA.

* No, this is Detroit.

* And over 100 long-lost Doctor Who episodes found by dedicated fans – in Ethiopia. Someone’s getting over 100 replica Daleks.

Tuesday Midday

* Why Are UC Administrators Such Bad Letter Writers, And Why Should We Care?

* UC Davis Students Set Up Huge Geodesic Dome On Quad.

* Turns out the optimal marginal tax rate is… 76%.

* Pennsylvania will put its plan to rig the Electoral College on pause. Hooray?

* And Jon Taplin just can’t understand why progressives think they lost the budget fight.

President Obama immediately threatened to veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. That means that Republicans would have to get a 2/3rds majority to undo the first meaningful cutback in the Military budget in 60 years. In addition, if Obama also threatens to veto any attempt to restore the Bush Tax cuts in 2012 (they expire automatically on January 1, 2013), progressives will have totally changed the inequality dynamic, without having to pass a single piece of legislation.

If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs…

The Absurdity of Devising Economic ‘Solutions’ to Please Those Institutions That Got Us into the Financial Crisis

Nick Dearden in Counterpunch says bring on the Debt Court.

Monday Morning Links

* The line on Obama’s jobs plan from establishment bloggers is that Obama’s new mode is “no compromise.” We’ll see. At the very least we could get another wonderful debt ceiling clash out of all this, allowing my beloved debt ceiling alignment chart another chance to go truly viral.

* Two David Graeber interviews at Louisville’s Radical Lending Library and Democracy Now! (at ~23 minutes).

* The questions we don’t ask: Science Lags as Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields. Thanks for the link, Fiona…

* And the questions we do: A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday against a prominent Baltimore medical institute, accusing it of knowingly exposing black children as young as a year old to lead poisoning in the 1990s as part of a study exploring the hazards of lead paint. (via)

* And Netflix utterly determined to destroy itself. Unbelievable.

Money for Nothing

The United States government can currently borrow at a -0.34% yield, meaning we’d actually have to pay back less money than we borrow after adjusting for inflation. It’s literally free money. Meanwhile we have a deep recession, high unemployment, and tons of important infrastructure work that needs to be done. This is the whole reason national debts exist in the first place.

I have no idea what the White House could possibly be thinking. Cutting government spending in this context makes absolutely no sense. We should be borrowing like crazy. Here’s Ezra:

The path forward is obvious: We should borrow now and put in place a firm plan to cut deficits later, once the economy is back on track and investors have other places to put their money. But refusing better-than-free money now in order to talk about reducing our deficit later? Well, that may be the craziest sentence I’ve ever had to include in a column.

Monday Links

* Manned space flight after the space shuttle.

* Fascinating user revolt at HuffPo in the comments of their icon design contest.

* Bachmann, Perry, and Christian Dominionism.

* Inconceivable! 23 straight polls say people want to raise taxes to pay off the debt.

* And if liberals say the world is warming, it must really be cooling: Rick Perry’s daft climate change conspiracy theory. 2012 is going to be a long year.

The Fiend!

Mr Chambers, the chairman of S&P’s sovereign ratings committee, has come under scrutiny himself since the downgrade.

Political observers have noted that he never studied economics and that he majored in literature and philosophy and has a master’s in English literature.