Mighty Mouse — Gypsy Life. This Oscar nominated TerryToons cartoon was released on August 3, 1945.

Shorter Frank Miller.

So this is interesting. President Obama did a set of phone calls today with Patty Murray and Jeb Hensarling, the co-chairs of the Super Committee. It included the usual platitudes about reaching a deal, a balanced approach, etc. Everything Obama has said a hundred times before. This was new, however, and I assume precipitated by the chatter that the trigger will never be pulled, that Congress will find a way to back out of the cuts, particularly the defense cuts.

In a perfectly “free” labor market, everyone theoretically has the right to exchange work for commensurate compensation. But a free market is not necessarily a just one. And when the commodity is sex, how free is too free?

Sex work, and its attendant culture wars, have moved over time from traditional brothels of urban lore to online marketplaces, raising new questions about private and public freedom. In the digital world, how should trust and power be negotiated between provider and client, both encircled by systemic gender and economic inequities?

Well, here we are in Spartanburg, SC for yet another Republican debate (didn’t we just have one?). Hosted by CBS News and the National Journal, Scott Pelley and Major Garrett will run the show.

The Economist has a great elegy for my favorite soon-to-be now deposed leader, Silvio Berlusconi. If you gave me a list at the beginning of the year of Hosni Mubarak, Moammar Gadhafi and Berlusconi, I would have said that Berlusconi would have been the hardest one to dislodge from power. It took him almost destroying his country with his governance – for the second time – to finally bring the hammer down.

This book is a fast and easy read so you will absorb a ton of well-researched factual knowledge without losing your horse, crawling through the desert, or emptying your canteen. It’s a fun, easy way to learn and understand a whole lot of important information that banksters would prefer you never know and delivered in a way that exposes the hypocrisy of many of the proposed “cures” for our current economic woes. It really is a terrific learning tool and delivers information in a form that even Members of Congress should be able to understand.

The Penn State situation has allowed anti-gay bigots to take another whack at the “gays-are-child molesters” piñata (see Alvin’s post about the deranged, homo-obsessed fringe bigot Peter LaBarbera, “Scapegoating gay men for the Penn State tragedy“); however, when you hear hate-filled, fact-free garbage that has nothing to do with this scandal being heaped on LGBT parents on the public airwaves, something has to be done.

In the past several weeks Gallup polling has found a small but real increase in the American people’s economic outlook and a modest increase in people who approve of Obama’s job performance.

When I told them that we were from Firedoglake and were there to help, more than one person gave me a big hug. One woman almost didn’t let go. They could hardly believe what we were saying. They said that usually they have to beg on bended knee for supplies. It was very touching. And it felt good to be able to do something so tangible.