Don Rumsfeld says he’s ready for another war despite existing commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Update: the Porkbuster Countdown is going strong into day two. So far, 59 senators have denied placing a “secret hold” on legislation to create a public, user-friendly database of all government spending. Thanks to the many TPM readers who have called senators and gathered responses. Check out our rolling tally — and help unmask the secret senator.

Bush’s new plan to control federal spending — delay federal payments ’till October when they’ll count as part of a different fiscal year. Amateurish and insulting.

The United States of America is a substantially wealthier society, on average, than is Sweden. Nevertheless, the poorest Americans and the poorest Swedes have essentially the same amount of money income — both get about 39 percent of America’s median income. Tim Worstall at TechCentralStation takes a gander at these numbers and concludes that even leftwingers should find nothing to admire about the Swedish model as opposed to the American — after all, the poor do the same in both places!

The trouble, as Max Sawicky points out, was right there in the text accompanying the chart (it’s in the new edition of The State of Working America) where Worstall found his data, “To the extent that these countries provide more social and economic support to their citizens than the United States, these numbers provide a somewhat incomplete comparison regarding the living standards of low-income people.” Obviously, however, the whole point of something like the Swedish welfare state is precisely that it provides more social services to its citizens. A more subtle and technical point would be that the chart compares incomes in terms of purchasing power parities (PPP) rather than market exchange rates. PPPs work by comparing what actual baskets of goods cost from place to place and thereby avoids distorting the picture with transient exchange rate fluctuations and captures the fact that consumer goods are generally cheaper in the USA than in Scandinavia. One downside of this method, however, is that “PPPs do not account for the cost of non-market social goods, such as education, health care, or child care, which are much cheaper for completely covered by public spending in many European countries relative to the United States.”

Now, as it happens, the United States is so different from Sweden in so many ways that I’m not sure this is an especially useful comparison. The United States isn’t going to become a small, highly urbanized country with an ethnically homogenous population and the Swedish economy has various non-replicable features, etc. Canada, by contrast, actually does resemble the United States in a lot of ways and its poor are substantially better off than are Americas poor, even while the American rich do better than the Canadian rich.

New Current Population Survey income, poverty, and health care data out. Average household income finally rises! It’s not clear whether that’s a rise in wages or a rise in hours worked.

More CPS analysis here from ThinkProgress. Median earnings are down, the number of uninsured is up, the poverty rate is approximately unchanged.

A Sweden update. Reader K.M. informs me that the country is less homogenous than I thought — 13 percent are foreign born. About a third of those are from elsewhere in Scandinavia and Western Europe, another third from Eastern Europe and the former USSR, and a final third from outside of Europe.

Shows what I know. I’ll also add that I think The Cardigans are underrated.

Porkbuster countdown: 79. Just 20 more denials to go to find out who’s holding up the Obama/Coburn bill.

While you wait, why not catch up on the curious history of the Senate’s secret hold? (No, that’s not a wrestling move. But it should be.)

For his latest trick, in a speech to the American Legion, Don Rumsfeld gives the full wingnut monte. America faces an undifferentiated fascist menace. Bush’s critics are appeasers who don’t understand the lessons of history who blame America first and hate freedom. The media is treasonous and a free press is a luxury we can ill-afford in this time of crisis. Etc.

This, I think we can assume, is the fall campaign. The idea is to psyche the Democrats out. To make them think they can’t win an argument about foreign policy. To make them act like they can’t win an argument about foreign policy. And to thereby demonstrate to the American people that even the Democrats themselves lack confidence in their own ability to handle these issues.

It’s essential that the debate be joined, and joined with confidence. Rumsfeld is a buffoon. A punchline. A well-known liar. He and his bosses — Bush and Cheney — are running around the country trying to cite the failures of their own policies as a reason to entrust them with additional authority in order to continue and intensify those same failings. We’re witnessing the bitter, bitter fruits of the Iraq War. Other nations learned that they must seek nuclear weapons as soon as possible to safeguard themselves from a newly trigger happy United States of America. Muslim opinion was sharply polarized against us. Iran and Syria were told that their cooperation against al-Qaeda was no longer needed because their governments would topple soon enough. A power vacuum was left on the streets of Baghdad that parties aligned with Iran have rushed to fill. The Arab-Israeli conflict was sidelined as something that would magically resolve itself once Saddam Hussein was out of the way. And America’s allies were taught that our government was not to be relied upon — that we operated with bad intelligence and initiated wars of choice without any real plans or ideas about how to cope with the aftermath.

That’s how we got here. By listening to Bush. By listening to Cheney. By listening to Rumsfeld. The idea that we should keep on listening to them is absurd.

Minimum amount spent by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on direct mail against Steve Laffey in Rhode Island: $181,587.66.

Amount spent by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Connecticut: $0.

Update: I should have been clearer about this – the figures above refer to the Republican primary in Rhode Island versus the Democratic primary in Connectict (not the general election).