• German researchers have discovered that Victoria Beckham is the descendant of Communist Carl Heinrich Pfänder, who fled to London in 1848 after participating in the failed revolution with Karl Marx. In other news, up is down, lions have lain down with lambs and black is now officially white. [Reuters]
• Bob Novak, by the way, is retiring today to focus on his brain tumor. That's a kind of karmic bullshit. [Editor & Publisher, Media Matters]
• Gasoline prices are dropping, though, just as Obama announces that he thinks we should open up the strategic reserves to lower prices. [LA Times, NY Times]
• In response, the McCain campaign is distributing tire pressure gauges to mock Obama's energy plan. Do they have a dedicated group of fratty morons making up strategy there or something? [Politico]

• Speaking of morons, John McCain told a Democratic party delegate stripped of her seat at the Democratic convention for endorsing McCain that God will reward her in heaven for doing the right thing. Who knew he got the coveted God endorsement? [HuffPo]
• While McCain was busy handing out tchotchkes and blessings from heaven, Obama was planning his own birthday party fundraiser that will rake in $5 million for his campaign and the DNC. That's a lot of tire gauges. [Boston Globe]
• And while they're doing that, mortgage defaults among borrowers with good credit have started to rise, so don't expect the housing crisis to end any time soon. [NY Times]

• The Arizona co-chair of the McCain campaign gets charged with all manner of bribery and corruption and yet again McCain escapes unscathed because the whole thing makes the Bush Justice Department look way worse. [DailyKos]
  
• Which is why McCain gets to spread all sorts of untruths about how Barack Obama wants to bomb Pakistan and cheat on his taxes without anyone but America's voters really paying attention. [Media Matters]
  
• Remember when Moby and Natalie Portman used to do it? No? Then this is the post for you. [NY Mag]
  
• Everyone was on us to write about that inane "wow girls use the internet too OMG!" story in yesterday's Times. God was that dumb. I feel less empowered being a girl who used the internet to read that fucking story. [Doree]
  
• McCain hopes Fidel Castro "meets Marx soon." I think the only medium nuanced and sophisticated enough to adequately respond to this sentiment is South Park, but it does make the whole afterlife concept sound kinda fun, no? [Reuters]
  
• Enron: where are they now? Well, Jeff Skilling is in jail for the next twentysomething years, Andy Fastow gets out in five, and some bankers who skimmed a few million from some phony partnership — "victims," really, of Skilling's "culture of greed" — are about to go to prison for three years apiece. I wonder if Ken Lay has met Marx? [Time]
  
• The Hillary campaign is not looking so good. [Economist]
  
• I guess I should really see No Country For Old Men before Sunday but Step Up 2 The Streets looks like it could be pretty good too. [NYT]

We started off by watching a video wherein Jason and his buddies screen an episode of The Hills, and masturbate. Then we visited Wahler's MySpace page, where we learned Wahler does not attend school, has trouble discerning between the words "to" and "too," and lives in a "penthouse." Later, we read a story in the Wall Street Journal about how difficult it is for students in Palm Beach — which is wealthy like Laguna but with more humidity — to relate to the troubles of the lower classes as depicted in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. And that was when we remembered a little something we caught in the New York Times Book Review last weekend about a new social trend threatening the values and mores of American society: Capitalism. Suddenly, the terrible truth behind Wahler's seemingly-inexplicable rage all made sense!

Capitalism, Barber writes, "seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain." Children's lives are reduced to shopping excursions in which their identities are subsumed by brands — they're the Nike generation, Abercrombie kids, iPod addicts. Our political culture compounds this by elevating the private sector over the public, encouraging Americans to believe that anything the government can do, private enterprise can do better (for example, prisons-for-profit are preferable to those run by the state, mercenaries trump the Marines, and so on). Left unchecked, Barber warns, "infantilization will undo not only democracy but capitalism itself."

So there you have it, dismayed Hills fans: Don't say Karl Marx didn't warn you!

Cop: Wahler Called Me "N—-r" "Faggot" [TMZ]
Palm Beach Meets The Jungle [WSJ]
Proceed To Checkout [NYTBR]
Jason Wahler's Myspace Page