It’s a slow news Friday, so might as well post this gleeful news. Paul Ryan will give the “official” response to the State of the Union address, but Michele Bachmann is going rogue and delivering her own response, translated into wingnutese.

It appears the NYT worries it may lose the fact-free deficit hysteria propaganda market to the Washington Post, so today’s Times has a front page article suggesting public employee retirements benefits are so out of control we need to push states into bankruptcy.

I still marvel at the lack of attention to this case when our Gateway Media went wall-to-wall in November over the Portland ‘bomber’ at our city’s Xmas tree lighting. I suppose we need to wait for a suspect to be in custody before the current case in Spokane — where there was a real bomb with real, or even historic, lethality — deserves that kind of attention.

The main cause of our long-term deficit is our absurdly inefficient health care system that costs nearly twice as much as anywhere else in the world. If politicians honestly looked for a simple solution to this problem, within five minutes they would find out almost every other industrialized nation on Earth has it.

The numbers on the military are quite astounding. 55% said cut the military, as opposed to 21% for Medicare and 13% for Social Security. It’s really not even close. No other area of the budget – be it education, infrastructure, science and research, unemployment benefits – comes close to the solid majority for cutting the Pentagon. The fact that the far-right Republican Study Committee’s spending reduction plan exempts the military is telling in this regard.

Immelt and GE aren’t about building the jobs American needs (for graphic representation of that, see this post). Rather, they’re about transforming the fruits of American manufacturing into yet more destabilizing casino games.

You can say that the entire goal of Julius Genachowski’s pretend plan for net neutrality was to devise something that the telecoms could live with, while allowing him to make a defense that the Obama Administration fulfilled its campaign promise of Internet freedom. If they didn’t care about being taken to court over their plans, they would have written something far more air-tight. So instead, they came up with this heavily compromised approach. And Verizon sued them anyway.

I’ll be driving down to Quantico tomorrow with Bradley’s friend David House, who will deliver the petition to the brig.

I know that it has been extremely meaningful to Bradley to know that he has the support of so many people.

Can you sign the petition and forward it to your friends?

It’s tempting to dismiss this report as far-fetched, but with today’s Republican Party, there’s no such thing as too crazy.

I haven’t quite mastered that “party” atmosphere, yet, but you gotta start somewhere. So, without further adieu, I give you the inaugural edition of The Party Line.