(h/t Scarce)

It's hard to wrap my head around how this story fits in with the swirling rhetoric of 'supporting the troops' and 'brave heroes who got the world's worst terrorist' and the steadfast refusal to consider defense cuts lest we cause the troops to be ill-prepared. But even with all the double speak, this is a true abomination:

"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job," Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, "or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home."

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon's butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the "bolt" bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

"Personally," his wife told me recently, "I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago," when her husband joined ST6.[..]

In fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.

"We're actually looking into changing my name," the wife says. "Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other."

When the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter's name come out, they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.

Just as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.

UPDATE: Stars and Stripes disputes writer Phil Bronstein's characterization of the Shooter's available benefits:

...(T)he claim about health care is wrong. And no servicemember who does less than 20 years gets a pension, unless he has to medically retire.

Like every combat veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the former SEAL, who is identified in the story only as “the Shooter”, is automatically eligible for five years of free healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But the story doesn’t mention that.

The writer, Phil Bronstein, who heads up the Center for Investigative Reporting, stands by the story. He said the assertion that the government gave the SEAL “nothing” in terms of health care is both fair and accurate, because the SEAL didn’t know the VA benefits existed.

“No one ever told him that this is available,” Bronstein said.

He said there wasn’t space in the article to explain that the former SEAL’s lack of healthcare was driven by an ignorance of the benefits to which he is entitled.

“That’s a different story,” Bronstein said in a phone interview with Stars and Stripes about what he omitted from the article.

The Nation and Feministing writer Jessica Valenti was the first to note this additional point against the notion that Fox News (either the channel or their online entity) is a professional news organization.

From the "You can't write this" files: Suzanne Venker, niece of reactionary Phyllis Schlafly, wrote a column for FoxNews.com further laying out her already lambasted argument that it is the fault of women that there is a battle of the sexes going on at all. (Is there actually anyone claiming there's a battle of the sexes so much as a war on women's rights and freedoms? Talk about starting with a strawman argument.) Worried that the feedback she got from the first column indicated that most misunderstood her argument for the traditional marriage of a man and his wife where neither strove for "equality" within the relationship, Venker doubled down and made her case more obviously:

It’s time to say what no one else will: Feminism didn’t result in equality between the sexes – it resulted in mass confusion. Today, men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what.

Prior to the 1970s, people viewed gender roles as as equally valuable. Many would argue women had the better end of the deal! It’s hard to claim women were oppressed in a nation in which men were expected to stand up when a lady enters the room or to lay down their lives to spare women life. When the Titanic went down in 1912, its sinking took 1,450 lives. Only 103 were women. One-hundred three.[..]

You see, the problem with equality is that it implies two things are interchangeable – meaning one thing can be substituted for the other with no ramifications. That is what feminists would have us believe, and anyone who contradicts this dogma is branded sexist.

But the truth must be heard. Being equal in worth, or value, is not the same as being identical, interchangeable beings. Men and women may be capable of doing many of the same things, but that doesn’t mean they want to. That we don’t have more female CEOs or stay-at-home dads proves this in spades.

There is more fallacious thinking in a few short sentences than I know what to do with. But that's neither here nor there. What's more funny than her specious argument against the reality of today's gender roles is the graphic Fox News opted to accompany the column. With Venker arguing for the traditional male-breadwinner, female-homemaker gender roles, the picture was actually of Stephanie Figarelle and Lela McArthur, who were the first same sex couple to be married at the top of the Empire State Building.

Figarelle was married in a black tuxedo while McArthur wore a strapless white gown with a train.

Figarelle said she hopes the couple's home state of Alaska will legalize same-sex marriage, which became legal in New York last year.

"Equality's a beautiful thing," she said. "Love is a beautiful thing. We don't have enough of it in this world."

But, but, but...that's not what Venker thinks should happen!

After enough tittering on Twitter and the internets over their ridiculous choice of graphics, FoxNews.com removed the graphic in favor of what appears to be generic restroom signage. Perhaps that too is a comment on Venker's scholarship.

(h/t Mediaite)

Saturday Night Live's executive producer Lorne Michaels reserves the right to change his show right up to airing, the privilege of broadcasting live. Famously, Billy Crystal was part of the original cast and had a featured skit on the very first airing in October of '75, until Michaels cut it the day of broadcast and it took years for Crystal to officially join the cast. I offer this up as a caveat that it is not necessarily anything political that caused Michaels to cut the original cold open for last night's SNL episode, replacing it instead with a skit about CBS trying desperately to fill airtime during the 35 minute blackout during the Super Bowl. It is entirely possible that Michaels felt this was the funnier or more biting satire of which he likes to think SNL is capable. Whatever his reasoning, they did allow the dress rehearsal to be available online for comparison.

It is not hard to imagine the pearl clutching and cries of outrage (Outrage, I tell you!) had this skit gone out on the airwaves, depicting the blatant pandering and ridiculousness of the dialogue in Washington surrounding the hearing on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to the position of Secretary of Defense. I'm sure that Lindsey Graham and his BFF Grampy McCain would be issuing a proclamation of censure and a threat to deport Lorne Michaels back to Canada. How dare SNL mock the "When did you stop beating your wife?" line of questioning that the Republicans proffered to prove how much more they love the state of Israel? I'm still wondering if anyone in the Beltway media will ever wonder why blind obeisance to Israel is considered a requirement for holding an American political office.

Don't get me wrong, I believe Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend its borders. I'm just not sure that it should be a requirement that we have to act as an extension of that.

Personally, I thought Fred Armisen's imitation of Bernie Sanders was perfect and the skit was worth airing for that alone.

Donald Byrd (1932 - 2013) -- Fancy Free, recorded June 1969

For the second week in a row, there were no military casualties recorded in Afghanistan. The total number of allied service members killed in Afghanistan remains 3,257.

While we may be thankful for the lull in casualties in the Middle East, we must also say good-bye to the following notable names:
Schoolteacher (and illegitimate daughter of Strom Thurmond) Essie Mae Washington-Williams, singer/songwriter Reg Presley, jazz musician Donald Byrd (video above), Alabama school bus driver murderer and child abductor Jimmy Lee Dykes, movie make up artist Stuart Freeborn, jazz musician Paul Tanner, film producer Chris Brinker, artist Richard Artschwager, and professional table tennis player Zhuang Zedong.

Remember these words from Paul Krugman last week?

The threat to the recovery is Washington.

In anticipation of President Obama's State of the Union address this coming Tuesday, Chris Hayes asked what economist Paul Krugman (who has been right about economic issues all along, mind you) what he would like to hear in the address. While acknowledging with resignation that he probably won't get his wish, Krugman responds that he'd rather not hear the legitimization of deficit pearl clutching and advocation of austerity measures.

Like the rest of us liberals clamoring to be heard through the self-protecting insulation of the Beltway Bubble, Krugman makes the point that none of what he's advocated is more sophisticated than Econ 101, a class one would assume that every college graduate (which would be most members of Congress ) has taken. Yet these very basic economic concepts are alien to the Beltway.

It’s a very insular culture in Washington. It’s one of people who hang out together, who talk to each other, who don’t listen…what’s odd about my position on this stuff is I am, for the most part, not doing any kind of odd, unorthodox economics. I’m doing Macroeconomics 101, but that is not what people in DC hear. It’s not that they just don’t accept it. For the most part, they haven’t even heard about it. The notion that oh, the budget deficit is not a problem when the economy is depressed is barely in the Washington discourse. And because I’m still in touch with Macroeconomics 101, I’m really sort of out of it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we already know the solutions to our economic woes. We've gotten out of them before and we know what works. It has never been cutting spending and lowering taxes, no matter how many Republicans get booked on the Sunday shows to flood the discourse.

But in a sad addition to the "both sides do it" meme, the fact remains that even though these basic economic concepts and solutions remain patently obvious to those of us outside the Beltway Bubble, even those who should understand and embrace Keynesian economics miss the point, continually, as Dan Pfeiffer proves with this White House blog:

With less than three weeks before devastating, across the board cuts - the so-called "sequester" - are slated to hit, affecting our national security, job creation and economic growth, we must make sure we are having a debate over how to deal with these looming deadlines that is based on facts- not myths being spread by some Congressional Republicans who would rather see these cuts hit than ask the wealthiest and big corporations to pay a little bit more.

First, the notion that President Obama hasn't put forward a solution to deal with these looming cuts is false. In the fall of 2011, the President put forward a proposal to the Supercommittee for the specific purpose of laying out his vision to resolve the sequester and reduce our deficit by over $4 trillion dollars in a balanced way- by cutting spending, finding savings in entitlement programs and asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share. That proposal would have completely turned off the sequester while further reducing our deficit and ensuring we could still invest in the things we need to grow our economy and create jobs. That same approach was presented to Congress in the President's budget last year. And the President's last offer to Speaker Boehner in December remains on the table- an offer that meets the Republicans halfway on spending and on revenues, and would permanently turn off the sequester and put us on a fiscally sustainable path.

We should have a debate over how to best reduce the deficit. But with only three weeks until these indiscriminate cuts hit, Congress should find a short term package to give themselves a little more time to find a solution to permanently turn off the sequester. That package should have balance and include spending cuts and revenues.

Why on earth do we accept the framing of these ill-informed, petulant children on how the economy works instead of demanding that we adopt the measures that brought this country back into unprecedented levels of prosperity for most of its citizens after the Great Depression? When do the adults with the real solutions get their place at the table?

In psychology and politics, perception is key. Perception is reality. But perception lies to us all the time. There's a phenomenom well known in psychology circles called the "Flashed Face Distortion." If you look at a pair of flashed faces aligned at the eyeline, suddenly the rest of their features look grotesque. Attractive people now look cartoonish and scary.

There's a little bit of that in politics now too. Sadly, it's often the liberal ideas that only get those flashes of exposure. And correspondingly, they're perceived as distorted by the traditional media, who rarely get anything outside of their comfy conservative framing in which they're surrounded. But if you got to take a good, long uninterrupted look at any one of those ideas, I bet you wouldn't find them bizarre or scary at all, but beautiful and sensible and intelligent.

The question is how we get that opportunity for a good, long look.

ABC's "This Week" -- Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.; Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.; Republican strategist and ABC News political analyst and contributor Nicolle Wallace; and Obama 2012 deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl and ABC News Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz. Author George Saunders

NBC's "Meet the Press" -- Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.; Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Panel: Democratic Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush now columnist for the Washington Post, Michael Gerson; GOP strategist Mike Murphy and the BBC's Katty Kay. NBC’s Michael Isikoff.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" -- Joe Klein, TIME; David Ignatius, The Washington Post; Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times; Gloria Borger, CNN.

CBS' "Face the Nation" -- Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich. Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars director Jane Harman, a former Democratic representative from California, Center for Strategic and International Studies expert Jim Lewis and CBS News Justice and Homeland Security Correspondent Bob Orr. The New York Times' David Leonhardt and The Washington Post's Kevin Merida.

MSNBC's "UP with Chris Hayes" -- Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner and New York Times Op-Ed Columnist; Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army”; Richard Epstein, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, professor of law at New York University Law School; Greg Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia.”; Heather McGhee, vice-president of Demos; Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project for the ACLU; Dean Baker, co-director Center for Economic & Policy Research, author of “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive;” Alexis Goldstein, a former vice president of information technology at Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, now an Occupy Wall Street activist.

MSNBC's "Melissa Harris-Perry" -- Laura Flanders, Author of Blue Grit / Host & Founder of GritTV.org; Vicki DeFrancesco Soto, NBC Latino; Tara Wall, Writer and Founder, PTP Foundation for Media Arts; Richard Kim, Executive Editor at The Nation Magazine; Richard Kim, Executive Editor at The Nation Magazine; L.Y. Marlow, Domestic Violence Survivor and Advocate.

CNN's "State of the Union" -- Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Angus King, I-Maine; former Defense Secretary Robert Gates; Rep. Jan Schakowsky, (D-Illinois); Kay Bailey Hutchison, former Republican Senator from Texas; Amy Walter, the National Editor of the Cook Political Report, and CNN National Political Correspondent Jim Acosta.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" -- New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, columnist Arianna Huffington, businessman Ed Conard, and Boston Properties co-founder Mort Zuckerman; India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani; the prime ministers of Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian Authority and Morocco's chief of government from Davos, Switzerland.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Panel: Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard/Fox News Contributor; Liz Marlantes, The Christian Science Monitor; Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR); Juan Williams, Fox News Contributor.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

Obviously, George W. Bush has a lot of time on his hands these days. Apparently, he's using this time to explore his artistic sensibilities. Good for him. I find painting and creating art to be therapeutic and gratifying myself. While he was proud enough of his work to share it with his family, I'm not sure that he wanted to share it with the rest of the world.

But in the digital age, even the former President of the United States can't be guaranteed any privacy.

Personal information stolen from several email accounts belonging to people close to the Bush family reveals the nation’s 43rd president has developed an affinity for painting himself bathing, of all things.

Photos included in an information dump turned over to The Smoking Gun include President George H.W. Bush in the hospital, the elder Bush posing with President Bill Clinton, a family photo of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and even President George W. Bush posing with a cardboard cutout of himself wearing a mustache and beret.

Three of the images also show paintings Bush created, including one of himself in the shower, another of himself in a bath, and a third of him crouched over a canvas depicting a church.

A hacker going by the name “Guccifer” claimed the stolen messages include addresses, phone numbers and email addresses that go directly to both former presidents and their families, along with a security code for a gate outside the younger Bush’s home in Dallas.

In addition to the beefcake shots imagined by Shrubby, the hacker uncovered information that George HW Bush was far more ill when he was hospitalized late last year for bronchitis than was previously released. Contingency funeral arrangements were being made, and reportedly, W felt petulant about the thought that Bill Clinton might be asked to speak at his father's funeral instead of him.

At this time, the Bush family has issued no comment, but given the warrantless wire-tapping that occured under the Bush administration, I'd be curious if they would try to claim this an outrageous violation of their privacy.

(h/t Karoli for the video)

The threat to the recovery is Washington.

There is more truth in those seven words than in the entire 11.5 hours of Sunday news programming we monitor put together.

We were at the precipice of a global economic catastrophe, thanks directly to Republican policies, at the time that Barack Obama was inaugurated. While it's difficult to gauge success from the absence of devastation, there is no argument that the preemptory measures taken in the early days of the first Obama term did slowly turn the economy around. There's far to go still, especially when it come to jobs, but we're at least moving away from the cliff.

But...

If Republicans still take their marching orders from deep thinkers like Rush that could change. And Carly Fiorina shows the same fundamental understanding of the drivers of the economy that enabled her as a CEO to drive two major American corporations into the ground. For her, we have to keep cutting federal spending because...bureaucrats!

FIORINA: I think it's important to remember when we talk about the economy that a private-sector job and a public-sector job are not the same things. They're not equivalent. I'm not saying public-sector jobs aren't important, but a private sector job pays for itself. A private-sector job creates other jobs. A public-sector job is paid for by taxpayers.

The government does not spend and invest money as efficiently as the private sector. There's all kinds of data to support that. So it isn't simply a matter of saying, well, whatever job is created out there, if it's a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., or a small-business owner hiring another employer, those are not equivalent thing.

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: ... when you say public-sector jobs, it is not a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.

FIORINA: Oh, it is, actually.

KRUGMAN: When we talk about public-sector jobs, we look at the public-sector jobs that have been lost in large numbers in this, it's basically school teachers. Don't think about bureaucrats. It's school teachers. What we've laid off is hundreds of thousands of school teachers.

And we talk about the cuts in public spending that have happened, they are not, you know, some god-awful who-knows-what. It's actually public investment. It's largely fixing potholes and repairing bridges. So, you know, you have this image of these wasteful bureaucrats doing god knows what. What we've actually seen is an incredible drought of basic infrastructure...

FIORINA: And it is a fact...

KRUGMAN: ... and -- and laying off hundreds of thousands of school teachers.

FIORINA: It is a fact that virtually every department in every organization in Washington, D.C., has seen its budget increase for the last 40 years. That money is being paid to hire people. The number of people who are -- of course there are some teachers...

KRUGMAN: Almost -- almost no...

FIORINA: Of course there are some police officers. I'm not saying that.

KRUGMAN: ... the vast bulk of -- the vast bulk of public-sector employees are at the state and local level. They are largely school teachers, plus police officers, plus firefighters.

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: And your notion that it's all these bureaucrats, that's a myth that is used to...

(CROSSTALK)

FIORINA: It's a fact. It's not a myth. It's a fact.

Words have meanings. Fiorina needs to understand that the word "fact" has a specific definition which is not "partisan talking point" or "my opinion". There is little question that there is bloat in the bureacracies of federal offices. But that isn't where the cutting is happening.

A notable aspect of the July employment report is the decline in public-sector employment. In fact, public-sector employment (i.e. federal, state, and local government jobs) declined in 10 of the past 12 months, in sharp contrast to 29 consecutive months of private-sector job growth. Indeed, falling public employment has been among the largest contributors to unemployment in the United States since the end of the Great Recession.

In this month’s employment analysis, The Hamilton Project examines public-sector employment trends over the last three decades and finds that government employment contracted, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the population, during the Great Recession and throughout the current recovery.

Additionally, we report on the results of a new analysis that finds that the cuts in public school teachers are projected to reduce the future earnings of today’s students by more than five times as much as the current budget savings.[..]

Total government (i.e., the sum of state, local, and federal) employment has decreased by over 580,000 jobs since the end of the recession, the largest decrease in any sector since the recovery began in July 2009. State and local governments, faced with tough choices imposed by the confluence of balanced-budget requirements, falling tax revenues, and greater demand for public services, have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, and other workers.

[..]In raw numbers, the largest cuts were to teachers, but of these occupations, the largest percentage decline was among emergency responders.

Transcripts below the fold:

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Amato is rooting for the Ravens, simply because he hates Niners fans, but I gotta go with my homies. Go Niners!

Open thread below...

(h/t David)

This Week with George Stephanopoulos notes the passing of former SEAL Chris Kyle at the hand of one of the returned soldiers suffering from PTSD whom he mentored.

There were no casualties reported from service members stationed in Afghanistan.

In addition, the following notable names lost their lives this week:

MD state politician Hattie N Harrison, LGBT activist Dan Massey, actor Bernard Horsfall, singer Patty Andrews, Canadian MP Diane Marleau, conservative radio talk show host Lee Rodgers, musician Cecil Womack, former NYC mayor Ed Koch, HI state politician Helene Hale, former "first dog" Barney, football player Tyrice Thompson and educator Arlene Ackerman.