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Tea Party Radicals, Dancing on the (Debt) Ceiling; Jason Leopold’s Exclusive Causes Air Force to Suspend Ethics Training with Christian Themes

Just back from vacation, PBC opens with a bad Lionel Richie tune and a rant on the sordid deficit deal–Obama is a bad negotiator who was forced to accept a lose-lose-lose deal.  Jason Leopold of Truthout on his latest exclusive investigative report: the Air Force uses Bible quotes and other religious messages to train missile officers to launch nuclear missiles on command.  Your humble host was clever enough to be on vacation in France during the last 2 weeks of the contrived struggle over increasing the debt ceiling, and managed to miss much of the blow-by-blowhard coverage.  So he caught up during long plane rides, and opines that Obama is a lousy negotiator who allowed a predictable deadline to force a range of capitulations, again.  Like the tax-cut extension last year, the weak health insurance reform and his giveaways on nuclear power and offshore drilling, Obama has been outmaneuvered by a minority of Republicans.

At 18 minutes into the podcast, Leopold returns to talk about the exclusive investigative report he published on July 27.  He describes a mandatory ethics training seminar for Air Force missile officers that is infused with Christian themes and references, used to rationalize a required written declaration that the officer will launch a nuclear strike if ordered to do so.  The class also cites the Nazi rocket scientist and sometime moral authority Werner von Braun, delivering Hitler’s secrets to “people who are guided by the Bible”.  Just 2 days after the story was published, the Air Force suspended the program for review.