You expect Michele Bachmann to sign a Bigotry Pledge, because Michele Bachmann is a bigot, and signing a Bigotry Pledge is just self-affirmation.

You expect Mitt Romney to pander, because Mitt Romney is a Pandroid (“Pander Bear” is too cuddly and warm-blooded), and pandering is just his programming.

And by now, you should probably expect Tim Pawlenty to be Michele & Mitt’s lovechild: A Bigoted Pandroid.

Or, because he’s so bad at it: A Special Needs Bigoted Pandroid Lovechild…

GREGORY: Is being gay a choice?

PAWLENTY: Well, the science in that regard is in dispute. I mean, scientists work on that and try to figure out if it’s behavioral or if it’s partly genetic—

GREGORY: What do you think?

PAWLENTY: Well, I defer to the scientists in that regard.

GREGORY: So you think it’s not a choice? That you are, as Lady Gaga says, you’re born that way.

PAWLENTY: There’s no scientific conclusion that it’s genetic. We don’t know that.

Well, of course we do, and Tim Pawlenty knows that, just as he knows that climate change isn’t happening all by itself, only he can’t say that either, not if he wants to be the Republican nominee for Preznit.

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We’ve been ignoring the debt-ceiling talks as long as possible, in part because it’s a ginned-up crisis that nobody cares about, in part because the daily play-by-play is fucking boring — but really because we just want to know how much we’re getting screwed and be done with it.

We’ve been so heroic in our disregard, we managed to ignore an entire day of flailing, following the deliberately provocative suggestion the Social Security and Medicare are now among the lambs to be sacrificed to the Gods of Bipartisanship.

At least, that is, until Glenn Greenwald socked us in the kisser:

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In the course of an otherwise interesting article on the overseas growth of American service organizations — think Rotary — Washington Monthly editor John Gravois lets slip the following:

And while the decline of these groups domestically is certainly not a good thing for America, their growth abroad is hardly unwelcome.

Certainly not. That’s a staggering presumption. A more reasonable assertion might be that service groups, like Playboy Clubs, had their day, and that day ended more than a generation ago. Times change.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYzvCpMGSrY

WaPo wunderwonk Ezra Klein, whose youthful taste for the chillingly nerdish DC social life we’ve noted previously in this esteemed journal of American sociopathy, is back with another installment of You’ve Got to Be Fucking Kidding Me:

I have a friend who hosts a Fourth of July brunch most years in which the food is preceded by a roundtable reading of the Declaration of Independence. I like that tradition.

Sometime in the distant future, should you find it your turn to recite some crap about the King’s repeated injuries and usurpations, and wondering what sin you committed to anger your vengeful god into such inhuman punishment, we suggest you keep the above video handy on your personal computing device to remind yourself that the sole purpose of the Fourth of July is to get shitfaced drunk, make an ass of yourself, and blow the crap out of purpose-built objects.

[Video via Sully]

Sandy Eggo offers a spectacular fireworks display each year, at five coordinated locations along the waterfront — three of which are visible from the hillock above Stinque World Domination Headquarters, a view only exceeded by the port side of passenger jets landing at Lindbergh Field.

But as good as it is, our favorite fireworks display remains the one we saw in 1979, in black-and-white, in a Eugene movie theater.

Well, the embedded video was working, and then it wasn’t, and we’re too busy victimizing patriot light-bulb companies to find a replacement, so just click through to Popular Science, or, better yet, throw an M80 down their toilet for putting us through this.

Fireworks + Explodables + Ultra-High Speed Phantom HD Camera = The Best Fourth of July Video [Popular Science, via Nerdist]