Republican mutiny over Social Security?

It sounds like it might happen. I can only hope that W/Rove exacerbate this problem with their flim-flam about how all "serious-minded" individuals know that there is a dire crisis on hand... clearly a lot of Republicans would not agree.

National Security, always our President's top priority... mm hmm....

From Talking Points Memo via the Washington Post comes this little gem: our President, elected because he is somehow perceived as superior on security matters, or more to the point, who got elected because of obscenely cynical politicization of the worst tragedy in modern American history, is forcing Washington DC to divert millions from their homeland security efforts in order to help fund his massive inaugural (which has already been getting plenty of bad press for being so oversized when that money could easily be used elsewhere, for example, hmmm... Iraq? Thailand? Naaahhh...) The poetic awfulness of this President shaking down DC's security fund for his inaugural is just somehow perfect in its badness (like just about everything in his Bizarro world). I mean, Washington DC, they act like they have some reason to be a PRIME TARGET or something... Get a grip, you pussies, and fork up!

Britain's (Lack of) Success with Private Accounts

In the American Prospect, they examine Britain's experimentation with privatization that took place in the eighties. The conclusion: Britain really, really wishes they had our Social Security system, and are looking on it as "a model of reform". Talk about living in parallel universes.

Of course, actually examining the lack of success for social security privatization around the globe would smack of something like (gasp) the use of empirical evidence - the kind of thing those Godless liberals use... Lord knows we can't have that...