Michael Douglas looks really good and said he found out last week the tumor is gone, he's cancer free. Catherine Zeta Jones looks great.

Angelina is gorgeous is a green Versace. Love it. Lots of dark green tonight.

• Eva Longoria
• Nicole Kidman
• Natalie Portman (with baby bump)
• Julianne Hough

[ More...]

45,000 fans turned out last night at Ford Field in Detroit to help Kid Rock celebrate his 40th birthday.

I liked the part of the clip (at 2:33) when a fan puts something on the stage, he bends down to pick it up, looks at it, and puts in his back pocket. Doesn't miss a beat. At 2:42, he asks the crowd how they feel, and he yells back, "I feel f**cking great" and then launches back into "All Summer Long" -- "We were trying different things, we were smoking funny things...Sweet home Alabama." (Thanks to MLive for not blocking censoring it.)

Kid Rock is a great personal ambassador for the city. But in their day, so were the MC5 (Kick out the Jams); Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Bob Seger, Commander Cody, and even Alice Cooper.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Update: Miss Nebraska, who answered a question about Wikileaks, calling it espionage and saying that government security is more important than the public's right to know, wins. Need we say more?

I really had no intention of watching Miss America. It's a cringe-inducing, fake imitation of a Norman Rockwell America.

But I turned it on by accident during the first 15 minutes (in the midst of the introductions, complete with corny one liners for each state, blinding white teeth and overblown hair. ) It's the proverbial train wreck you can't turn away from. I don't think I've ever seen so many unattractive women in the show (although I've probably never watched one from start to finish.) So many had crooked smiles, uneven eyes or noses, and overly long faces. And what was the big deal about the bald contestant, since she wore a wig the whole time?

The swimsuit competition: Three or four had stunning bodies and knew how to move them, but so many looked like a commercial for breast implants, and one had thighs so out of proportion to her body it was embarrassing to watch. She looked like a linebacker. [More...]

Open Thread.

The Obama Administration announced today that it was scrapping the high-tech border fence project known as SBI.

The project cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion and covered 53 miles along the border. It also was hugely invasive. Boeing was the builder, and as I wrote in 2007, there were plans to extend it across some 6,000 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders in segments in coming years. It was also very privacy intrusive: [More...]

Matt Yglesias seems to be saying that the significance of the political debate in America is overstated:

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yglesias is doing two things here. The first is saying that in the "grand scheme of things," there is not much to choose from between Republicans and Democrats. I think that is absurd at this point in time. As regular readers know, I have had a lot to criticize regarding the Obama Administration, but the idea that there are not fundamental differences of governing philosophy with the Bush Administration strikes me as one of the dumber things written in some time. More . . .

Open Thread.

By now you may have figured out that I think "The Deal" was a terrible mistake. Consider the counterfactual I propose in the title of this post - what if Obama had not done The Deal. Let's start with the positives of The Deal - unemployment insurance was extended for a year - an unmitigated good thing.To me, that is the end of the goods things. YMMV. More . . .

The utter failure of The Deal will continue to be evidenced as the debate about "cutting the deficit" accelerates. While the WaPo article subject of my post below is indeed quite stupid, stupid is the norm for "policy debate" in the Beltway. The Deal has empowered the stupid. Consider this from the WaPo article:

The urgent need for policymakers to reduce the deficit was underscored Thursday, when two major rating agencies expressed discomfort with the country's financial condition. [. . .] In view of the recent extension of tax cuts enacted during the George W. Bush administration, the report said, "the outlook for near-term stabilization of U.S. government debt ratios is not promising."

(Emphasis supplied. ) That would be The Deal. So what can be done? Why massive cuts in spending of course:

Hilarious WaPo story:

President Obama's refusal to raise taxes for the vast majority of Americans [. . .] is making it difficult for him to achieve his goals for reducing the budget deficit, according to administration and congressional sources. [. . .]

"It's a tremendous letdown," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "The purpose of the fiscal commission is to give politicians cover to do hard things, to pull back from the promises they can't stick to and to be a game-changer that promotes the real policies we need to fix the situation. If the White House returns to the stale debate over untenable promises about what they won't do, then they're not even letting the fiscal commission help them."

Ha! Riiiight, OBAMA's reluctance to raise taxes on the middle class is the problem. Republicans are lining up to raise taxes. If The Deal proved anything, it was that, right? Sheesh. Where were these Serious People during The Deal debate?

This is possibly the stupidest article I have ever read. Of course, it represents the highest order of Beltway thinking and will lead to the conclusion that we need massive spending cuts.

Speaking for me only

Great Krugman column:

[C]ommentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. [. . .] But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

Politics and democracy is the vehicle for a society to decide on the policies that will be employed. Essential to that process is debating these differences. Does it matter that people be "civil" when debating these differences? Not to me, but I am not opposed to it. But it is important to understand that no matter how nice folks are to each other in the political arena, the important thing is to understand what people are advocating for in terms of policy.

Speaking for me only