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WASHINGTON — The leaders of the nation’s two dominant political parties announced this morning that they’ve reached a definitive agreement to merge into one super-party in time for the 2012 elections.

Although terms of the deal were not announced, insiders who declined to be identified say that a new corporation will be established to acquire the assets of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. It’s expected that the newly combined party will have a market value of roughly $7.8 trillion, according to an economist at the Federal Reserve.

“The more we talked about it during the debt negotiations, the more obvious it was to all of us that we needed to consolidate our operations,” said a clearly jubilant Barack Obama, who will serve as president of the newly merged party. “We realized that we’re both working for the same things, so there was no sense in us opposing one another and duplicating our efforts.”

The name of the new party will be unveiled next week, but insiders say the two finalists are the Demopublican Party and the Republicrat Party. Demopublican was considered the frontrunner because of its association with democracy. A new logo combining the two parties’ long-time symbols has already been released.

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The citizens of Coralville, Iowa, are safe tonight from the scourge of unlicensed lemonade. The nationwide “War on Lemonade” never ends.

On the right is 4-year-old Abigail Krutsinger, who had the audacity to set up a table selling her own lemonade for 25 cents a cup.  She was caught red-handed with the merchandise and various lemonade paraphenalia. The police officer who came to shut Abigail down told her that a permit would cost $400 — far more than the $4 she had made.

I’ve covered this very recently, so I’m not going to belabor the point. Government agencies extort money from people who want to engage in voluntary transactions with other. It’s no different from the Mob demanding protection money.

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Every time there’s a wild binge of some sort, there comes a day of reckoning. For Americans, we might be seeing the first early warnings that it’s not far away.

In front of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham this morning, a couple dozen protesters picketed against proposed sewer rate increases in the county where I live. Rates have skyrocketed over the past decade because of billions of dollars that the county borrowed for the sewer system. Much of the money was lost to waste and fraud. Several politicians and contractors went to prison for their part in the massive fraud.

Explaining the full story would bore you silly, but it involves greedy local politicians, greedy contractors and slick NYC bankers who sold the county on making complicated and dangerous financial transactions that county officials didn’t really understand. (This PDF is the best summary I can find of how the debt accumulated.)

The county owes billions to the banks and is threatening to file a bankruptcy which would make the one Orange County, Calif., filed in 1994 pale in comparison. County sewer customers are angry about any proposal which would keep increasing their bills in order to give more and more money to the banks, so politicians are willing to pull the bankruptcy switch.

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