Nail Soup

• First, if you're not reading The Sideshow, GET OVER THERE AND READ IT RIGHT NOW!  I'll wait.
• Does Washington care about jobs?  Two guesses, and the first one doesn't count.
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry (aka "Governor Goodhair;" RIP Molly Ivins) promoted a prayer rally in Houston.  This is the beginning of the posting in the Politics and Government blog at the New York Times:

  HOUSTON — Thousands of men, women and children listened to Christian-themed singers and music groups at Reliant Stadium here Saturday morning, shortly before a controversial prayer rally sponsored by Gov. Rick Perry was to begin.
  
  At about 9 a.m., an hour before the program was scheduled to start, the stadium, with a seating capacity of 71,500, had tens of thousands of empty seats, particularly in the upper decks. By 10 a.m, organizers estimated that about 20,000 people were in attendance.

  Now, that still means that tens of thousands of seats were empty.  And while 20,000 warm bodies are nothing to sneeze at, I suspect that the Astros (who're in last place) get better attendance (attendance per game currently averages 26,483 which is better than my team is doing).
  
   On the other hand, Burning Man sold out.
  
• Hendrik Hertzberg at the New Yorker on the national debt, a Republican of old, and Obama.

  In 1866, Wade, a nationally prominent Ohio senator, laid down the law on the national debt. He was a principal drafter of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, until recently, was known almost exclusively for Section 1, the guarantee of legal due process and equal protection. Lately, though, Section 4 has been getting some ink, especially its first sentence: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The long-standing obscurity of this passage is due partly to the aside about insurrection and rebellion, which makes the whole sentence look like a historical relic and sound like a voice-over from a Ken Burns documentary, and partly to the rarity of the situation it anticipates, which has never before arisen in a serious way. Now that it has, a number of constitutional scholars, including Garrett Epps, of the University of Baltimore, and Jack Balkin, of Yale, have been calling attention to the sudden relevance of Section 4.

• Comrade Misfit blasts the tea party, and Fred Clark quantifies the damage.

  You don’t get anything in return for that $322, nor does my family get anything in return for that $1,288. It is simply an added cost due to our sharing this country with aggressively stupid, resentful, angry fools who would rather let the whole thing burn than bother to learn even the slightest bit about others or about the world they live in.
  
  Their willful, determined ignorance just cost you another $322.
  
  Alas, that $322 is not the entire cost to you of their destructive, crabs-in-a-bucket lashing-out. It’s simply the latest cost incurred from their childishness.
  
  [...]
  
  ... I would say they were thieves, stealing this money from you, but they’re not lucid enough to be thieves.
  
  Thieves at least enrich themselves by taking from others. These folks take from others and just set the money on fire.

• Southern Beale on another Pentagon boondoggle.
• How I'm beginning to feel, as elucidated by Arthur Silber.
• God's blog, with comments.