August is for the Insane Asylum

++Detroit's favorite son, novelist Elmore Leonard died this morning at the age of 87. He had a stroke while working on another novel. Thanks for dozens of good reads!

++Mariano Rivera overcame blowing three straight saves, something he never has done in his career, and saved one against the Bosox, while A-Rod blasted a homer. 

++Meanwhile, catch those Dodgers. 

++I was at an empty Russell Building a few days ago, reminding myself we are all safe when Congress in not in session. I remain skeptical that Congress can reach a budget agreement before September 30. Conventional wisdom has a continuing resolution and a whale of a fight over the next phase of sequestration in January. Mitch McConnell says he's saving the real battles for the debt ceiling clash.

++Teabag town halls are not going the way the GOP thought. Republican representatives have been challenged about their lies about Obamacare. Meanwhile, the immigration reform blowback has not materialized.

++Jim DeMint and his Heritage Action has targeted six states for the remained of the month to mobilize reaction to Obamacare. While on vacation, President Obama in his Saturday address said that efforts to defund Obamacare are not a game and he vowed to implement the bill as efficiently as possible. George Will claimed that Obama is as bad as Nixon in postponing the implementation of the individual mandate since that was law. Unfortunately for Will, the Supreme Court twice ruled that the executive has the power to decide when to implement a law because it is more aware of the concrete circumstances and problems involved in such a maneuver.

++Jim DeMint said today he didn't know whether President Obama would sign a bill that would defund Obamacare. Then again no one can explain how you defund Obamacare because it is mandatory spending.
This simple fact has not stopped the Teaparty from mounting primary challenges to Mitch McConnell,Lamar Alexander and Lindsey Graham.

++Maine's Teabagger Governor LePage said that Obama hates white people. LePage yesterday faced half the Maine Republicans in the legislature resigning from the party because he dared raise taxes in his budget.

++Ted "Calgary" Cruz released his short form birth certificate that showed he was born in Canada to an American mother. When it was brought to his attention that he was a Canadian citizen by law,he said he would renounce his Canadian citizenship.

++Conservatives are jubilant that there exists another fabricated study that showed the "Invinciables", younger voters with no health insurance, could save $1,000 a year by not signing up for Obamacare. Of course, they didn't figure on costs if these younger people actually got sick. Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity continue their campaign to get younger people to to enroll in health insurance exchanges because they would sabotage the cost-savings of the program.

++There is another fierce fight among the Right. Diana West wrote a new book that suggests that American politics was occupied by the Soviet Union under FDR. She points the figure at Harry Hopkins as a Soviet agent. The counter-attack was blistering. Conrad Black, a conservative who wrote a biography of FDR, called her worse than Oliver Stone, and Ron Radosh dissected her claims with the existing scholarship on the subject. Interestingly, a younger generation of college professors who do not know the primary literature thought she did a splendid job.

++The weekend brought more drama from Glenn Greenwald. Glenn's husband,a Brazilian man named Miranda, was held up at Heathrow having come from Berlin with thumb drives of more Snowden material. This act got Andrew Sullivan and Rachel Maddow up in arms when Miranda was detained under the UK's terrorist act. Naturally, equating journalism with terrorism raises legitimate concerns. But it gets murkier because Miranda isn't a journalist. Glenn says that he will expose more of the UK's secrets in revenge. Also both Miranda and the Guardian are suing the UK authorities. Somehow I get the sense there is less here than meets the eye.

++The Washington Post published an investigative piece that showed the NSA "violated privacy rights" over 3,000 times last year. Pretty bad, hey. Except the computer geeks who know this game claim that all such violations combined would equate to illegally downloading a Justin Beiber album. or about 58MgB. Pretty slim stuff.

++Meanwhile Julian Assange won the hearts and minds of the Left by backing Rand Paul and the libertarian wing of the Republican Party as the only hope for America. Assange's Wikileaks Party in Australia decided to back white supremacists in the parliamentary elections. Who's goofing whom?

++Meanwhile Snowden remains in Moscow and alerted the world that they should not listen to his father. He is surrounded by a team of the world's leading lawyers and will not be represented by Bruce Fein, the libertarian lawyer from D.C. 

++The basic problem still remains--the United States farms out its intelligence to private contractors like Booz-Hamilton who are not responsible to anyone. This costs us $50 billion a year. To prevent another Snowden, the DOD can not even estimate the cost of its preventive program. Meanwhile the FISA court said that it could not determine whether the NSA is really in compliance with the law. Down the rabbit hole we go.

++Meanwhile, Howard Dean is in Iowa. No, not for a 2016 run but Howard wants to revive his 50-state strategy to elect Democratic legislators in Red States. In case, you have missed it Republican legislators have had a field day in the states passing the most onerous anti-abortion laws, anti-voting laws, and primitive educational laws. Basically, these legislatures are passing a vision of life the Right wants to believe--with catastrophic results for anyone else.

++Democrats in Washington believe they have a secret weapon against House Republicans. Next year's sequestration will hit defense spending far greater than domestic spending because of changes this year that eased defense sequestration. They believe that the Republicans will have to suck it up and eliminate tax loopholes for corporations and the oil industry. I don't believe it.

++The Chamber of Commerce is moaning that going Big behind Republicans has not paid off the way they wanted. They were behind the Jobs bill, the Highway Bill,and Immigration Reform and now they have nothing to show from the millions they contributed to GOP campaigns. 

++The Cooch has doubled down on his attempt to revive Virginia's Sodomy Law. Now he explains that this was an instrument to prosecute pedophiles. Don't believe it.

++A special prosecutor is investigating Governor Perry's abuse of power in Texas.