Let’s play a little catchup on the two most deadly flashpoints in the Middle East.

All this talk about Hosni Mubarak’s looted billions must really piss off our other client rulers, the ones who have not yet set aside such rich stashes for their retirement.

But someone in Iraq has already made the move, disappearing $40 billion from Iraq’s development fund.

It’s easy to forget that the budget repair bill is a budget bill, and not merely a vehicle to strip public employee bargaining rights. What the repair bill should do is fill a $137 million shortfall – 1% of the total budget – for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends in June. One of the bigger solutions to fill that shortfall actually restructures debt and pushes it into the next fiscal year, saving around $100 million. That may not sound like much of a “solution” at all, but coming from California it sounds pretty commonplace. Anyway, there’s kind of a deadline to accomplishing this debt restructure, and it’s fast approaching.

From the very first reports of Raymond Davis’ killing of two Pakistanis and subsequent arrest, the insistence he was just a consular employee was obviously just polite fiction. The Guardian has stopped sustaining that fiction.

The fiction that Pakistan has nothing to do with our drone campaign depends on mutual trust and sustenance of the fiction. The ISI has to be willing to play its part. And it’s not clear everyone wants to play that game anymore.

Mary Bell, the President of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, just announced that teachers across the state will return to work on Monday, instead joining protests at night in their communities. Teachers, and in many cases their students, have been at the forefront of the protests in the state capital, Madison. Local school districts have been shut for up to three days as teachers demonstrated against a measure to strip their collective bargaining rights.

• A revolution in Libya?
• The GOP’s gonna party like it’s 1995.
• Gaming out a shutdown.
• Krugman: Wisconsin power play.
• Joke Line doubles down.

At least the GOP is willing to show us where we can, er, kneel

The Beatles-Revolution

I don’t know exactly what tomorrow’s meet-and-greet format will be, so I’m not sure how many chances I’ll get to ask questions of the Senator. But if you had a chance to ask a question tomorrow, what would you ask? I’ll try to get the answers and bring them back in a MyFDL post later this week.

Thanks, the floor is yours.

Charles Lane’s brief claim to fame was a stint at a gone-to-seed once great magazine where, as editor, he discovered that one of his writers was “making shit up.” For years he has traded on this brief moment in the sun like Erik Estrada making a living appearing at car dealership openings.