Hat tip to Smirking Chimp: 

Wouldn't you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you'd know whether his "deficits don't matter" claim is just baloney or not.

Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney's financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly.

The article is called "Cheney's betting on bad news" and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in "a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation."

With the door open to racism gerrymandering redistricting, the Democrats are choosing integrity over votes:

Democrats cried foul three years ago when Texas Republicans rammed through a highly partisan redistricting to gain an advantage in several House races. Now, a recent Supreme Court ruling that blessed the Texas plan gives Democrats a chance to show that turnabout is fair play.

But early indications are that Democrats will probably resist the temptation to do unto Republicans as Republicans did unto them.

Obviously, this news has proved upsetting to a good many netroots. After all, integrity has an abysmal track record for winning elections. But who knows, let the repugnicans betray their blackened hearts long enough and maybe we could be in for a long-term victory. I do believe on some level people are rooting for Luke Skywalker to prevail, no matter how much enticing power the Dark Lord wields.

Speaking of the dark side, welcome to ShockTheMan.com:

For the next three months I will be wearing a dog obedience shock collar around my neck. During this period you have the choice to shock me or prevent a shock from occurring. There are four levels of intensity to choose from, each progressively more painful. The price is represented by the Intensity level, $1-4. This is about dog karma. I used this on my dog and after testing it on myself, I realize this #%$^ hurts. So now it's my time, shock the man or save him.

You can shock me / prevent a shock from occurring anytime of the day. If you do not see me on webcam, I will record the action and post it in a video podcast at the end of the day.

In a word – Awesome!

I was planning to write a post today on North Korea’s giant new schlong and recent territorial pissings, but AmericaBlog has already said just about everything:

1. Good luck taking on North Korea. We have no more money left, our military is worn out, and we're still trapped in Afghanistan and Iraq. What exactly can we do about North Korea, other than start a nuclear war when North Korea nukes South Korea right after we attack them?

2. What about Iran? Remember all that talk a few months ago about how Iran was only 14 days away (or something like that) from building a nuke and using it to torch Topeka? Well, seems the Mexican invasion from the south and the pink invasion from within took precedence politically, and now it's North Korea. Iran went from an imminent nuclear threat to pretty much nothing in about 2 months. Isn't that interesting.

3. Nice that we warned N. Korea that they'd better not launch those missiles OR ELSE. Or else what? They called our bluff, and on the 4th of July, no less. So now what?

4. North Korea is NOT the issue Bush wants us debating as we enter the mid-term elections. Dems and Republicans can both agree, quite easily, that North Korea is a nasty, dangerous place. But what's more, Dems can quite easily charge the Republicans with ignoring the Korean threat all these years. So, I'm not convinced this issue is a winner for Bush, other than the fact it lets him rattle his saber, and we all know how much a boy loves to play with his saber.

Mexico’s leftist anti-poverty candidate has not only refused to concede defeat, but is actually maintaining a slim lead in the recount.  Win or lose, I think Team Chimpy might want to take a look at the word ‘backlash’ in the dictionary. 

That sound you hear is the House growing a sac. 

From MyDD: “The rush to war was premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) was superior to that of professional weapons inspectors like Hans Blix.  This turned out to be false.  Now, the foot-dragging on global warming is premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) is superior to that of the global scientific community.” 

The Italian government has issued a warrant for American soldiers.  Can’t wait to see how this plays out. 

Ahh, if only Thomas Jefferson had a blog! 

Welcome to a parallel universe where, oh yes … he’s a hasslehottie!

Nice analysis from media matters on the perpetual Bush victory: 

In reporting on three major developments regarding U.S. national security in past weeks -- Gen. George W. Casey's briefing of the White House on a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, days after Democratic withdrawal plans were defeated in the Senate; the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld; and North Korea's missile tests -- various media outlets and figures have gone to great lengths to spin these developments as "victories" for President Bush and Republicans or losses for Democrats, with little attention to how these events highlight the hypocrisy, lawlessness, or ineffectiveness of the White House and the GOP. 

Go check out the entire article.

The great state of Illinois.  Now with fewer active bigots.  Or at least fewer than the American Taliban would have us believe: 

Based on a sampling, opponents of marriage equality in Illinois don't have enough valid signatures to get an anti-marriage measure on the Nov. 7 ballot, the state Board of Elections said Thursday.

A sample check of 19 percent of the more than 330,000 signatures submitted showed that Protect Marriage Illinois is likely to fall short in its effort to put a measure on the ballot asking voters to decide whether the state should amend its constitution to ban same sex marriage.

Enron Corp. founder Ken Lay, who was convicted in May of fraud and conspiracy for his part in the Houston-based company's collapse into bankruptcy in 2001, has died of a heart attack at his vacation home in Colorado, a Houston television station reported on Wednesday.

Maybe the people running the intelligence community ain’t so dumb after all? 

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as "Osama's endorsement of John Kerry." But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term. 

This stunning CIA disclosure is tucked away in a brief passage near the end of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders. Suskind wrote that the CIA analysts based their troubling assessment on classified information, but the analysts still puzzled over exactly why bin-Laden wanted Bush to stay in office. 

According to Suskind's book, CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin-Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... 

"Their [the CIA's] assessments, at day's end, are a distillate of the kind of secret, internal conversations that the American public [was] not sanctioned to hear: strategic analysis. Today's conclusion: bin-Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection. 

"At the five o'clock meeting, [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin opened the issue with the consensus view: 'Bin-Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President.'" 

I mean, come on people.  Dogs understand why bin Laden wants Bush in power.  He is the only one stupid enough to fight exactly the kind of war bin Laden wants to fight.  He is and has been the enabler-in-chief.  Kerry had a workable four-point plan (vs. four more years of the same) for ending the war and that just didn’t jive with bin Laden’s agenda.