Foney Fables. This Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon was released on August 1, 1942.

Atlas Shrugged! The Movie! opened yesterday. I considered seeing it, because I am a scientist, and certain phenomena ought to be studied. (Some people make a nice living investigating ringworms, you know.) And also I figured it just might be good for a laugh.

The House passed Republican Paul Ryan’s budget that would end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a privatized system of vouchers. While it is good to know not a single Democrat was actually stupid enough to vote for it, on a purely political level, I’m actually stunned that four Republicans, Walter Jones, Ron Paul, Denny Rehberg and David McKinley, voted against it.

While there is a strong belief that wealth should be more evenly distributed, the country is more divided on whether or not the government should correct this problem by heavily taxing the rich and redistributing the wealth.

Spending a quarter of a million dollars to make a big splash with their first DC fundraiser, freshman California Congressman Jeff Denham and ten other fellow newbies managed to bring in a major haul: each of the eleven newly minted GOP ‘Critters will receive exactly $59.09 in campaign funds for his first re-election campaign.

A large part of Get up, Stand Up is trying to answer the question: why?

Why is it, despite living in a “democracy” where most people now strongly oppose the wars, our government continues to wage them? More importantly, why have the American people remained so passive as the corporatocracy acts in such blatant opposition to the clear democratic will of the people? Why, despite opposition to the wars getting steadily stronger, have the protests against them been getting increasingly smaller?

Witness the strange little war in Libya, where NATO is running out of weapons but the rebels are not.

NATO apparently is running out of precision bombs for use in their air campaign, which doesn’t inspire much confidence in NATO. We’re what, a month into this operation?

Rick Santorum (R-Frothy Mixture) already has a Google problem, but now he also has a campaign slogan problem. And he isn’t even actually running for president quite yet! His campaign slogan, “Fighting To Make America America Again” not only twice cites the first name of an actress who starred in “Ugly Betty” and most recently played an undocumented nanny on “The Good Wife,” it also derives from a poem by Langston Hughes, a fan of gay sex.

This is a reminder that the victims of Wall Street’s misconduct during the housing bubble actually include millions of responsible Americans who had zero involvement in the bubble, but are simply unfortunate enough to live in a community where the banks refuse to take care of their property.

The President signed the 2011 appropriations bill yesterday, and he attached a signing statement to it. There were two bones of contention. The first was the measure banning funds to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo. The second, the bill defunded the offices of Presidential advisors, or “czars,” four all ready vacant or defunct.