Shenanigans, and Without Stubby Kaye

• Via Avedon and from Mills River Progressive, Keith Olbermann's Special Comment (video) on the Four Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal.  (Quoted in full here.)
• Historical perspective (yes, America isn't like those other silly countries, except when it is, but since we seem to be recapitulating pieces of other national tragedies, we might note one obscure one which can't hurt us and has no bearing on anything going on in Washington.  Right?):  the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the liberum veto.  From Republic of T.  Excerpt:

  The Poles had a republic and couldn’t keep it the first time around. They didn’t lose due foreign invasion alone. The end of their republic began with the internal abuse of their political process, which weakened and paralyzed government to the point that it couldn’t prevent invasion, occupation and eventual obliteration by foreign invaders. Today, we’re faced with a radical Republican party on record as willing to push our republic towards collapse for political gain, and happy to abuse our political process to do it. Foreign enemies couldn’t have done better.

• Something smells a little off here:

  AH. Maybe something to see here, after all. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Romney’s former company, Bain Capital, just made a $1 million donation to its founder’s presidential campaign, and it did so very secretively. That’s like Halliburton funding Dick Cheney’s campaign, or Pilot Oil funding Bill Haslam’s. That’s the problem with these CEO politicians, if you ask me: they are invariably doing the bidding of their company. It’s the United States of IBM, Oh Beautiful For Spacious ExxonMobil, From WalMart to Shining WalMart.

  From Southern Beale.