David Brooks: “Last fall, the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission released a bold report on how to avoid an economic catastrophe.” No, it didn’t. [NYT, Bloomberg]

Local news: the Psychometer feature is no more.  It has ceased to be.  (Frankly, it has ceased to be for months now.  Now it is official.)

The fault, dear cynics, lay not in the concept, but myself.  We were all gung-ho to track the stupid.  Then real life happened to your humble servant.  Now we look at it and the House segment of the Congressional Record runs to almost 1600 pages.  Sifting through that to find every stupid thing that the GOP said for the record?  Though offers for help came (and thank you, btw), you could put the entire staff of a major metropolitan newspaper to that task, and it would never get done.  Through my overreaching and reality-based sloth, the idea has wasted away, and has now died through my own fault, through my own grievous fault.

So hail and farewell to Psychometer — an ingenious plan that turned into a brilliant mistake.  Sleep well.

“Shirley Sherrod, who was fired from her USDA job last year after Andrew Breitbart posted online an edited video of her, has filed a lawsuit for libel and slander against Breitbart in D.C. Superior Court… Breitbart was served with it this weekend, while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference.” [TPM]

For any Catholic who can’t dilly-dally at confession, there’s now a church-approved iPhone and iPad app that allows a person to categorize and organize his/her sins in anticipation of the Rite of Penance.  The app provides a checklist of the Ten Commandments, as well as questions a priest might ask at confession.

Penance isn’t free. The price? Only $1.99.

[Christian Science Monitor: Confession app for iPhone approved by Catholic Church]

Information on becoming a Knight [Christian Concepts, via Gen JC Christian]

MasterCard, Visa shut down electronic donations to WikiLeaks [Raw Story]

And so Joe Lieberman has, apparently, forced the hand of Amazon, who has advised Wikileaks to get off of its cloud.

This does pose an interesting question for us here, concerning the Stinque Kickback box, on the right-hand side of your screen.

Admittedly: this is not a decision for me, but for Fearless Leader.  But the question has no good result.  Either we keep the Amazon link and reward Amazon for giving bandwith to a self-absorbed, nefarious gasbag, or we punish Amazon for caving in to pressure from… a self-absorbed, nefarious gasbag.

Your move, nojo.