Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi stunned the country today by firing the military leaders who were his chief rivals for power, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and chief of staff Sami Anan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19234763

I think Morsi has pulled it off.

For one thing, he's named a bunch of other SCAFers to succeed Tantawi and Anan, and those guys aren't whining about his right to do so.

Pull up a chair, kiddos, Uncle Paracles has a Fable.

Once upon a time there was a bad bad man with lots of money....

People seem confused about the Romney selection.

Why does he need to please the base so much?

He has plenty of money....

The base are still likely to vote for him - he needs the independents...

Okay, here's the deal - the choice of Ryan means Romney's been captured by tea party/nuttism.

And that nuttism, as seen from Kansas the last few weeks, has been brutally effective.

This is the lull before the storm, the final moments within which to settle the character of the presidential campaign of 2012. Even in the lull, however, the likely lines-of-march are already clear – lines that, if unaltered, should give far more comfort to conservatives than they do right now to progressives.

Warning, "In the News" piece repeated below. As part of a rather long comment re: NBC's skipping the Olympics 7/7 memorial & demands for a Munich moment of silence, I'd made a snide aside re: memorializing the King David Hotel bombing (location of once-PM and famed Irgun warrior Menachem Begin's greatest atrocity against the British soldiers enforcing the Palestinian Mandate).

Email I received today, from a group, Bold Progressives:

Billionaire New York mayor Mike Bloomberg calls himself "independent." But he shows no independence from Wall Street bankers.

Last year, he cracked down on Occupy Wall Street. Yesterday, he endorsed Republican Senator Scott Brown against Wall Street's biggest foe -- consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren. He's even pulling together other rich donors to raise money for Brown.

Where's the outrage from Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the rest of the right wing media cabal? Not only is Romney being trashed by the British press, but the Prime Minister himself ridiculed the great American state of Utah, calling it the middle of nowhere!  What arrogance. I've had enough of these insults. Romney took the trouble to grace the shores of England only to meet a disrespectful host. He should finish his fund raising, dump that small meaningless country, which, if it hadn't been isolated from Europe by a choppy channel, would have been overrun by Hitler in WWII. The fact is that Romney should just come back home.......oh.

Romney's faux pas in London illustrate the essential truth of the man and the campaign. Seldom has a Presidential candidate been as internally compromised as this Republican nominee is. The reason he says nothing of any substance about himself is because most of what a normal candidate would say about his experience leads down a booby trapped path. Romney is like the guy whose wife has just discovered his affair. There is nothing he can say which isn't worse than simply keeping his mouth shut and looking dumb. All Romney had to do was romance our ally for a couple of days and not bust the Queen's furniture. It should have been an easy assignment. But he blew it.