* Obama stormed out of debt negotiations. Apparently, in a dispute with Republicans, he pounded his fists, kicked his feet in the air, and screamed, “I want tax increases! I don’t want to cut spending! I’m the president; I get what I want!” And then he ran away crying.

It’s seems pretty unlikely that Republicans are going to get any useful deal from Obama, so I think they should just go for broke. Make a deal for $10 trillion with no tax increases — in fact have it with tax cuts that required even more spending cuts to compensate. It will have one new source of revenue, though: Obama will have to spend most of his day in a dunk tank. $20 dollars a ball. Estimated earnings: One trillion dollars.

* Moody’s is now considering downgrading the U.S.’s credit rating. That’s probably the best thing that could happen to America. Maybe if our credit gets low enough, no one will lend us money anymore. Then we’ll finally have to buckle down balance our budget. Though, more likely, we’ll just declare bankruptcy. Oh, selling off our assets is going to be painful; I always liked Hawaii.

* Sarah Palin says she’ll have a decision on whether to run for president by late summer. That’s boring and expected. I hope she has some other unexpected announcement entirely. “I am here today to announce that Alaska is splitting off to become it’s own country called Freedonia — and there’s nothing you can do about it because it’s way up there!” Obama will get all mad and be like, “I will do something about it! I’ll show you!” But then he’ll look at a map and be like, “Wow; it is out of the way. I don’t want to go all the way over there to get Alaska back. Maybe if I’m in Canada one day, I’ll wander over and yell at them. I sure like Canada.”

* The US’s favorable rating in the Arab world is now even lower than during the Bush era. This is not supposed to be. We were told that if we elected Obama, everyone would be like, “Hey, their president’s name is a lot like Osama — and we love Osama! Maybe America isn’t so bad.” And look how Obama is destroying America; people in the Middle East love the destruction of America. I guess unless you’re a slavish follower of Obama, he just become off-putting after a while. He’s “kind of a duck” as one TV commentator put it.

Still, hard to get worried over us being unpopular in the Arab world. It’s if we’re suddenly really popular there, then we should get worried. “Hmm… we have 90% popularity in the Arab world… OH NO! DID WE ACCIDENTALLY DO A HOLOCAUST?!!!”

* US women have beat France at soccer 3-1. I don’t know if our women beat their men or what — I don’t really understand soccer. But we won; so yay. Blow into your vuvuzela — though I guess you do that no matter what.

In the World Cup Final, we’ll be facing Japan. Japan could really use a pick me up after all that’s happened to them, so I hope we crush them. Other countries need to learn not to get their self-worth from soccer. Just don’t.

* The Journal of the American Medical Association has suggested taking fat kids away from their parents. If we go through with this plan, we’ll have a foster system full of fat kids, all waddling around parent-less with Michelle Obama pointing and laughing at them and forcing them to eat peas. I’m not saying that’s bad; I’m just pointing out what it entails.

* An atheist in Austria won the right to get his picture taken with a pasta strainer on his head as religious headgear to make a point about… how headgear… um… I don’t know. I thought the whole point of atheism is that their being all logical and reasonable, yet the ones we see in the news always seem to be operating under the compulsion of unexamined mental tics. “I’ll work at it for years so I can get my picture taken with a pasta strainer on my head; that’ll show these religious nutjobs who’s irrational!”

* Wisdom of the Day: “It just wouldn’t be right to have the United States collapse without Glenn Beck on the air.” –Dave Weigel

* Obama gave a speech yesterday about we need to eat band aids and rip off peas. I don’t really know as I don’t usually listen to speeches he gives since it involves a lot of him talking and it’s pretty hard imagining him having anything useful to say. I think by now we’ve all learned that he just talks and talks while saying nothing and the only thing memorable are the cliches he uses. “Let me be clear.” “This is a false choice.” “Slurpee!” The guy was elected because supposedly he done speak good, but that part has ended up just as useless as the rest of him.

So anyway, I guess he was blaming everyone else for the mess and not his own failure to lead… especially while he had huge majorities and could have gotten anything he wanted done. Of course, being responsible with America’s money is nothing he ever wanted. He even said in his speech “I’d rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes, like new programs…” So he wants to get through this debt talk… so he can spend more. So the whole point of this problem just went “whoosh” right over his little pinhead. He just sees himself as Santa, showering us all with gifts. Gifts we don’t want… bought with our own money. Money we don’t have. If Santa were really like that, people would spend every Christmas Eve carefully watching the fireplace while cradling a shotgun… instead of just the ones where they got a new shotgun as a Christmas Eve gift.

* The House is considering a bill that will stop the ban on incandescent light bulbs. It’s a good thing we have the people in Washington figuring out what light bulbs we should be allowed to use, because they’re such geniuses at everything else. It’s not like I have anything against CFLs — they’re efficient and save you on your electric bill in the long run — they just slowly whither your soul with their unnatural light. Also, I just don’t want to be told which light bulb to buy by people too stupid and useless to even know how to change one. We don’t need term limits for Congress; we just need to hand them a box of light bulbs and say, “We need you to change this one light bulb in this room.” Come back an hour later, and they’ll all be dead with a bunch of broken glass on the ground.

* Is your major complaint that politicians aren’t dumb and loud enough? Good news! Alan Grayson is going to run for office again! Liberals describe him as having guts, and if a liberal describes you as having guts, that’s pretty much a diagnosis of mental illness you can take to the bank. Know who they also thought had guts? Anthony Weiner. I just hope Alan Grayson doesn’t bite anyone.

* A woman in Michigan is facing 93 days in jail for planting a vegetable garden. Yes, this is the home of the brave and the land of the free, but there are common sense restrictions to this concept of “freedom”. It’s not like you can own a nuclear weapon. Or shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. Or grow your own vegetables. These seem like small things, but if people are so nonchalant about using government force in small things, really fear them with the big things.

* A diver photographed a fish using tools. People thought fish were too dumb to use tools because they have this sort of blank look to their faces where you just really assume their dumb (like people in Congress), but I guess some can use tools (fish, not Congress). You have this one fish using a rock to smash open a clam and later it fashioned a crude cudgel to use against Aquaman when he got too bossy.

* Wisdom of the Day: “Say what you want, but on President Obama’s watch bin Laden was killed and the Black Eyed Peas went on hiatus.” –TV’s Andy Levy

* They’re still arguing about the debt ceiling in D.C. One side wants to destroy the economy in every way possible (they want to raise taxes to suppress jobs — it’s obviously not to raise revenue, because as previous spending proved, the Democrats don’t care about revenue — and also spend, spend with no limit until we collapse under debt) and the other side would rather not destroy everything. Maybe there can be a compromise and we’ll come up with a plan that just knocks us down to a second world nation instead of completely destroying us.

It’s hard not to get a little depressed as the politicians — the dumbest, most useless people in this nation — claim more and more of all the nation’s wealth to fritter away on nothing, so here’s a picture of puppies to cheer us up:

They will starve to death in this economy.

* White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe said, “The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates, or even monthly jobs numbers.” Yeah, they really have to be hoping that voters aren’t into objective measures when determining whether someone should be reelected. Hopefully everyone is like, “I bet Obama smells nice — like freshly cut grass on a golf course. Let’s reelect him.” But if people care about stuff happening to the country, not so good for him.

* Paul Ryan paid $350 for a bottle of wine at a dinner. This is really hypocritical because he paid for expensive wine with his own money while he’s trying to keep all Americans from being forced to pay for crappy entitlements. See… hypocritical.

Some have compared this to John Edwards’s infamous $400 haircut, but there are two main differences:

1. John Edwards used campaign funds to pay for it.
2. It was a haircut — a man paying $400 dollars FOR A HAIRCUT!

* There’s now a new country in Africa: South Sudan. There hasn’t been a great record for countries in Africa so far, but maybe South Sudan will be the first country there that isn’t… you know… awful. I know one way to make sure they get off on the right foot: Ban vuvuzelas.

* Atlantis took off Friday for the final shuttle flight ever. For the first time in decades, America is now incapable of getting people into space. If there is an asteroid headed to earth and we need to blow it up in an Armageddon type scenario, hopefully Russia is on top of that. Of course, Obama has set our path for the future: high-speed trains. Yep, going from space flight to trains. Along with our economy, our society is in complete retrograde. Next we’ll be living in huts and working on high-speed horse and buggy.

* Neat find from James Taranto (last item): Basically, social scientists found that conservatives do they same processing as liberals when thinking on an issue, but then do some additional processing to get to the conservative conclusion. They proved this by showing that if you strained a conservative so he wasn’t able to think, he’d come to the same conclusion as liberals. So basically, if a conservative can’t think, he ends up like a liberal… while I guess liberals just don’t think all the time. This doesn’t give us a solution, though, because we can’t force liberals to think, but since we’ve now made this an issue of science, we can lock liberals up in cages and inject them with stuff for further study… like a study on how the debt and economy will be effected if all liberals were locked up in cages and injected with stuff. Science!

* Wisdom of the Day: “‘Zookeeper belongs right up there with Zoolander!’ -someone alphabetizing DVDs at Blockbuster in a few months, and no one else” –Sean Thomason

* Thanks again to everyone who donated a dollar for IMAO’s 9th blogiversary. I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart: You are not thieves.