It wasn't a matter of if this would happen, but when. In a promo for the upcoming season of South Park, Eric Cartman strolls into an armory: "Yes, I would like 500-AK-47s please," he says to an official sitting behind a desk.

"500 AK-47s?" the official responds. "OK, but you're going to have to sign for those."

"Not a problem," Cartman says.

Apparently, this was more or less the scene that took place in a weapons depot outside of Kabul in September 2008 when some Blackwater wisenheimer signed for 211 AKs he was unauthorized to have using the alias Eric Cartman.

"It makes perfect sense. It's the name I would use," South Park co-creator Trey Parker told the Huffington Post a couple weeks ago. "Our first reaction to any story is 'How do we put this into the show?' and the second reaction is 'Did Cartman do that?'"

Tune in March 17 for the season 14 premier to see if Cartman makes Blackwater respect his authoritah.

(H/T Danger Room, Attackerman)

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For more than a year, there have been signs that all our economic woes--the costs of the financial meltdown, and the bank bailout and stimulus spending that followed--would eventually be placed square on the backs of our so-called old-age entitlements: Social Security and Medicare. And lo, it is coming to pass, via President Obama’s euphemistically named National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, commonly called the Deficit Commission or the Debt Panel.

Despite the names, no one is even trying very hard to pretend that the commission has any purpose other than cutting Social Security, Medicare, and probably Medicaid as well. That was clear from the get-go, based on Obama’s choice of Alan Simpson to co-chair the commission. The former Republican senator from Wyoming has already described his mission as “saving” the United States from “insolvency” by hacking away at entitlements. And if we want any more proof, we need only look at Simpson’s background, as detailed by Saul Friedman in his latest “Gray Matters” column:

This time President Obama, in his obsessive reaching across the political aisle, may have gone a stretch too far. For the Republican he picked to co-chair the so-called deficit reduction commission, former Sen. Alan Simpson, has been a harsh critic of Social Security and Medicare. And he sought to destroy their most powerful defenders, especially AARP.

That was 15 years ago, but as recently as 2005, Simpson, a conservative from Wyoming who left the Senate in 1997, supported attempts by President George Bush to privatize Social Security by turning part of the pension and insurance program into millions of individual investment accounts, which by now would have lost 20 percent of their value. Bush’s plan failed, largely because of the opposition of AARP and other advocates that Simpson sought to discredit.

Even now, Simpson, who should know better, conflates or deliberately confuses Social Security’s long term fiscal problems, which are minor, with its supposed contribution to the federal deficit, which is almost nil.

In an interview with the NewsHour after his appointment, Simpson said of Social Security, “You have two choices…you either raise the payroll tax or decrease the benefits or start affluence testing. The rest of it is B.S. And if the people are really ingesting B.S. all day long, their grandchildren will be picking grit with the chickens. This country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements, Social Security and Medicare.”

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For a guy who doesn't want the job, Gen. David Petraeus sure talks about the presidency a lot. So says the Associated Press in its dispatch today.  The AP followed the head of US Central Command—who's credited with writing the book on counterinsurgency, turning Iraq around, keeping Afghanistan close, and generally making patriotism sexy again—as he participated in Q&A's around the country. And every time he was asked a question that bordered remotely on politics, he steered it into a denial that he's trained his sights on the White House:

Part of his stock reply to the politics question—even when it's not asked—is to cite lyrics from a Lorrie Morgan country-western song about rejecting an unwanted suitor: "What part of 'no' don't you understand?"

Then he chuckles as if to suggest he's a bit embarrassed by the fuss—fuss sometimes of his own making.

Is he keeping his options open?

By a long stretch, this isn't the first time "Petraeus" and "presidency" have been joined in the same sentence; two and a half years ago, MoJo's own DC-based Dan Schulman reported in great detail on the general's electoral potential. Even Bob Dole weighed in last year to give the noncandidate his endorsement for commander in chief. And no grassroots candidacy is truly complete without the occasional Astroturf blog of support.

But on further review (and ignoring the obvious concerns about militarism in electoral politics), a Petraeus candidacy might be healthy for the GOP—and for the country. He publicly supported the Obama administration's now-stalled plan to shutter Guantanamo Bay's detention facility and end torture. He holds a doctorate from Princeton and has surrounded himself with intellectuals, left and right, in and out of uniform, who embrace out-of-the-box thinking—no small feat in the military's often stultifying bureaucracy.

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That's the message coming from the GOP's lead negotiator in the Senate on a new Wall Street crackdown. Today Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), on CNBC to talk about the state of play in the Senate banking committee's financial-reform negotiations, said no one should get their hopes up for a bill that tackles all parts of the financial-reform equation. "I don't think we oughta try to pass legislation that solves every problem in the world," Corker said. "I think when we do that we end up with things like [what] is happening right now with health care reform." The junior senator from Tennessee added that a "middle of the road"—not too far to the left or the right—and "very solid" bill was the best outcome for the Senate banking committee, which has been embroiled in financial-reform talks for months now. (Below is the CNBC video, with more after it.)

On the one hand, Corker makes a fair point. Politics is compromise, and if the Democrats and Republicans on the banking committee try to inject their own ideologies into financial reform, we'll still be waiting for the banking committee to release a bill in November. That said, a crisis, to borrow the well-worn adage, is a terrible thing to waste, and the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity for lawmakers to put aside partisan differences and pass a comprehensive, historic bill. That bill would do away with the government's implicit bailout guarantee, protect consumers, shed some light on the derivatives industry, and try to end what Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, has called the "doom cycle."

That window of opportunity, however, looks to have passed. Odds are, if and when the dust settles and a financial-reform bill lands on President Obama's desk, that legislation will do far less than originally anticipated and possibly represent a victory for the financial services community. Sen. Corker's comments today are further confirmation (if you needed more) that any chances of a major overhaul have disappeared.

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