It is like watching a headless chicken fluttering over the fence into the pig pen.

Hilarious, dark, and disgusting all at the same time.

I wonder if Romney is going to use the Monday open-and-shut to slip his and Ryan's nomination into the proceedings somehow. Then the circus can go on without any real danger from the ronpauls screwing around.

I keep saying that Romney's real expertise is in taking the decisions away from the people. I don't know if he'd be that bold, though.

If he'd actually read it, the dude would know that the lemming analogy only applies to the Republican party. Their over-the-cliff mentality is part of a unique political makeup that makes those poor people the spear-point of fascism. Democrats don't do it.

http://njvetcaucus.blogspot.com/2009/04/gun-toting-nazi-lemmings.html

Since Mitt is logically boxed in, anyone can claim knowledge of Mitt's guilt (legal and/or ethical), and be proven correct to some degree later.

We should expect plenty of people to latch on to that and fill in the tunnel with details of their own conjecture.

But at the same time, a great many people probably know some details or are in a position to make very accurate additional guesses of their own. The list of disgruntled former associates of Mr. Romney is probably longer than the number of participants in this thread.

To a certain degree, I hope that Romney can hold on to some of the more damning facts until after the convention and ideally closer to October, when the disclosures will cause even more damage to himself and his party. But I don't think the hive mind is going to let him get anywhere near that far before the general outline of Mitt's indiscretion is fully sketched.

But I'll say this: Mitt hasn't told the truth about a single damned thing yet, and I'll bet that didn't stop with the IRS--before, during or after that amnesty, if he took it. If details begin to spill, some of them might just revoke the terms of the amnesty. So my guess--definitely a guess--is that this time two years from now Mitt is going to be planning a vacation to Club Fed.

I think Mitt Romney now has the chance to lose the mid-term elections of 2014 for the Republicans, too, which would certainly place him among the very worst candidates in US history. What a guy.

I predict that from now on, the rate of melt will continue to be larger than each subsequent prediction, and the rate of increase over the prediction will also increase.

There, that ought to keep us straight until the basement floods.

ptownbro is on to something. Ryan has name recognition and his publicly displayed lack of empathy for others is actually a selling point to right-wingers.

And that's the bottom line: he is "saleable" to the right-wing authoritarians.

Of course this pick also betrays a significant failing of the Romney campaign, which is that Mitt was able to game the primaries for a win, but he never won over the RWAs who are the most important subset of Republican voters.

So Romney had to go with a guy with high negatives among virtually everyone but the RWAs. Those high-negative voters will be further energized by the fact that they can pay themselves by voting all-Democratic instead. But a major enticement to the 'wingers is needed to make them come out to vote to raise taxes on themselves.

The pick also necessarily defines some of the future strategy they must take. The Democratic plan will obviously be to inform virtually all voters that they can pay themselves by not voting Republican, and it will be even easier to do with Ryan aboard.

The Republicans, therefore, have to shout down the Democrats with hundreds of millions in advertising, hundreds of hours of airtime, and an army of harlequins doing their best to distract and misdirect. They are going to have to try to crowd out the Democratic message with a huge, lengthy, and expensive volume of crap.

I think it will cost them billions, altogether, just to get close enough to steal it. And I don't think they can do it. The Republicans are well on their way to proving to Wall Street that politics is a terrible investment, because the losses they incur will add up to far more than what they blew on the hugely expensive wager itself.

I haven't seen a single public source acknowledge what the mathematicians (particularly fans of John von Neumann) must certainly know by now.

We are quickly approaching the steep part of a hyperbolic manufacturing curve, as self-replicating 3D printers become a reality. Faster than anyone seems to guess now, the need for exported goods is going to disappear virtually overnight as local manufacturers gain the ability to build any part within beautiful tolerances, limited only by raw materials, power, and for awhile after that, human assemblers.

The big-boxes will die out quickly, because consumer products will be built within the home or at corner manufacturing shops. There will be no storage costs, no shipping costs, and the products will be tailored to the precise needs of the local population.

But the big-box buildings will be highly valuable to local manufacturers, so I expect the parking lots to still be crowded with people. But they'll be there to make money instead of handing it over to filthy rich corporations. Don't worry about them; they'll still find a way to steal a slice of your pie at every stage, but they won't have us by the balls like they do now.

If you've got a kid, you might encourage that child to look into mechanical engineering. Someday soon, the engineers will again rule the world.

Right now they're goggling over the glorious full-color photos from THE WRONG FUCKING ROVER on Mars.

They keep showing the "Greeley Panorama," which can be seen here:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20120705a.html

An amateur like me can tell it is the wrong picture off the bat (even if I hadn't looked at this picture already this week) because Opportunity's tire tracks are visible. Curiosity has not yet moved.

Just... just awful.

You want to know why the Republicans are so screwed up now? It is because those Tea Party Republicans in Congress are so incompetent that they agreed eighteen months in advance to lose this election, by agreeing to the tax cut timetable laid out by Congressional Democrats and President Obama.

Teabaggers thought that they could simply reneg on the agreement (see, e.g., the government shutdown last summer, which was really an attempt to change the tax cut expiration timetable) and continue their disruptive ways. Since they don't actually understand the laws they're passing or the rules to which they are bound, they discovered instead that they had helped hammer out an immutable legislative schedule that just last week forced every single Republican Senator to vote against a middle class tax cut in an election year.

They will still be paying for that mistake six years from now, and the Tea Party and Americans for Tax Reform are going to carry our water for us, forcing every GOP Senator to run a primary race, and occasionally even winning their way into Congress.

Teabag Congresscritters will lower the collective IQ of the Republicans there--if possible--and make it more likely that they will stumble into other legislative entanglements like this one.