The New START Treaty finally will be ratified by the Senate today, only eight months after President Obama sat down with Russia to sign the thing in front of news cameras. This seemed like a done deal; who in their governments would really oppose drawing down the ridiculous stockpiles of aging nuclear weapons to help avoid accidental extinction of the species? In our case, Republicans who refuse to vote for anything Democrats want, that's who. This is a huge defeat for dumb ol' hack Jon Kyl, who was supposed to keep his party opposing this for no reason at all and thoroughly embarrass this country in front of those Russians.

“The administration did not negotiate a good treaty,” said Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican and the leader of the opposition. “They went into negotiations, it seems to me, with the attitude with the Russians just like the guy that goes into the car dealership and says, ‘I’m not leaving here until I buy a car.’ ”

Oh, now it's a bad treaty. It's funny it took him eight months to decide that. Previously, the problem was that the Democrats didn't give him enough hundreds of billions of dollars of defense spending to make the deal. But then they did, so he just blocked it to block it. But kudos for finally coming up with an actual reason to block the treaty, which is that this is actually a bad treaty. That sort of rationale is so old school.

Meanwhile, Russia is busy trying to figure out the right ratio for diluting blood transfusions with as much vodka as possible. And also they're busy laughing heartedly at us. So it's the perfect time to strike.

Another war! That's something we can all get behind! [NYT]