Grove Nordquist Signs off on Debt Ceiling Deal

Do you remember Grover Nordquist?  He's the anti-tax, anti-government champion that hangs around with the likes of the infamous Jack Abramoff*  Here's Grover's TWEET on the debt ceiling 'deal':

"Real spending cuts. No tax hike. Gang of Six said it could not be done. 1982, 1990 are now bad memories we learned from. Onward."

Barack Obama is the weakest negotiating president of my lifetime and I've got almost 7 decades on me. Right from the git-go he gave away the ship by declaring that section 4 of the 14th amendment** was not an option under consideration. I hoped that denial was an ace in the hole and that he would let the Republicans go to the very edge of default before invoking the amendment. That way America would know who was responsible for the impending debacle and set himself and other Democrats up for re-election in 2012. But he again surrendered to the enemy with the same tired explanation that he did over the cave in at the end of last year when he didn't hold firm on letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire ('next time will be different, next time'.) So the debt ceiling deal has no revenue side, it's all spending cuts, and there's no guarantee that there will be any revenues in the foreseeable future.

David Frum, a conservative of the ilk that one can tolerate (he's not rabid, he's smart, and he's not an economic Libertarian) had this to say about the Republicans:

(they)

--forced the United States to the verge of default;
--shrugged off the needs and concerns of millions of unemployed;
--protected every single loophole, giveaway and boondoggle in the tax code as a matter of fundamental conservative principle; and fundamental conservative principle; and
--forced massive government budget cuts in the midst of the worst recession since World War II.

Only about one-third of Republicans agree that cutting government spending should be the  country's top priority. Only about one-quarter of Republicans insist the budget be  balanced without any tax increases.

Yet that one-third and that one-quarter have come to dominate my party. That one-third  and that one-quarter forced a debt standoff that could have ended in default and a second Great Recession. That one-third and that one-quarter have effectively written the "no new  taxes pledge" into national law. -- David Frum

As for me, living here in the heartland and heatland of America,  I think Barack Obama is a closet Republican who actually believes he does a good job when he tosses the baby out with the bath water. I can hardly stomach it.

*Convicted in 2006 of mail fraud and conspiracy, he was at the heart of an extensive corruption investigation that led to the conviction of White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian, U.S. Representative Bob Ney, and nine other lobbyists and Congressional aides. He served three years, six months of a six-year sentence in federal prison before being released early to a Baltimore halfway house on June 8, 2010. He also scammed millions from Indian tribes while "promoting" their casino interests in Congress and then went on to making pizzas when he got out of jail.

**Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

 

Japanese Beetles, Congress & the President

Which have the smaller brains, members of Congress or Japanese Beetles? If you answered Congress you earned yourself an A and congratulations to you. The rest of you need to move on with your life.

It appears that our ineffectual, ever compromising away anything that might help the poor, the middle class, the elderly, the sick and infirm to the benefit of millionaires, billionaires, wall street, banks, corporations, etc., President is going that route again. The latest proposal to increase the debt ceiling has spending cuts of $3 trillion, no revenues, and another cut of spending 6 months from now to be determined by a "super-Congress". And guess what? Not a single penny in new revenues! Obama has turned out to be a Democrat's nightmare and a progressive's horror show. As Paul Krugman opined in a recent column, "Obama is not the one we've been waiting for."

Let's hope there are enough Democrats in the House and Senate to oppose this final minute compromise and see if Obama has the balls to invoke the 14th amendment and raise the debt ceiling on his own. Fuck the Tea Party, fuck Boner, fuck McConnell. Lieberman, too. And there's another couple of hundred in the hallowed halls that should have it stuck to them, too. We have a sick, corrupt to the core political system and nothing's changed since Obama's 'transformational' election in 2008.

Japanese beetles emerge from the ground then fly to the top of my pole beans. I seldom find them on lower levels, where they would be better hidden and more able to escape my can of gooey soapy water. Once they hit that their brief existence quickly passes on into the darkness of the beetle afterlife. If these things were smart they would never leave the ground in the first place, where a horde of humans armed with poisons, fly swatters, and cans of soapy water await to beat them back. A few brave souls squash them with their fingers, but the stink that ensues does not make that a viable option for this gardener.

But wait. If a Japanese beetle is smarter than a member of Congress, maybe they're smarter than the President of the United States as well. We've never tried a beetle in office before, maybe the time is now.

Entitlement?

Pasted on Facebook today by my friend Caroline:

"Entitlement? I PAID cash for my Social Security Insurance! Our benefits are not some kind of charity of handout! (Now) congressional benefits--premium federal health care, outrageous retirement packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited sick days--THAT'S welfare! And they have the nerve to call my retirement an entitlement. Repost if you are sick of their crap."

(Yes. that means you can copy and paste and repost from this blog.)

These Tea Partiers are truly amazing. Being led around by the nose by Karl Rove, Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and other evil-doers, they have control of our country right now and their hypocrisy smells worse than their shit does, and their shit is the stinkiest of all shit because the vile they spew from between their lips stinks like a rotten sewer.


Since when has the debt ceiling been held hostage to the federal budget? If you think this is a disgusting display of uber conservative libertarianism at work, wait until we get around to the next discussion about how to avoid a government shut down. Surely you remember the last time? That was when our failed leader Barack Obama sold us out by maintaining the Bush tax cuts, costing us trillions of dollars in revenues. Now these same yo-yos that pushed him to accept that are responsible for not funding the FAA because they don't like the fact that it is now easier to unionize than it was before. These people hate unions! They want to pay the lowest possible wage possible, extract as much work as they can, treat their employees any way they want, and let the profits flow to those in Congress who will continue these despicable practices. And they want people to work longer and receive less in benefits for the few years they have left after they do retire.


Why are we now in an "age of austerity", when what we need is something to kick ass our economy into gear. Companies are sitting on record profits (partly by shedding every job they could and consolidated what was left so that yet more people were unemployed), oil companies get billions in tax breaks, rich people pay peanuts in taxes while they use most of the resources (and want to use more) that are destroying the little bit of the environment that's left.


Record tornadoes, record rainfalls, record heat, record heat and humidity, pine beetles on the march, grizzles in decline, polar bears drowning because there's not enough ice left for them, the oceans turning into fetid dumps, etc. and these idiots don't even want to consider that human action MIGHT be responsible. Obama has completely dropped the ball on this issue, too. Does anyone have a spine to donate to him? I'll pay for the surgery to implant it. The future for our children and grandchildren is bleak!

This post is a bit of a ramble. I'm pissed today! If the government defaults then Congressional pay and associated benefits should be the first to go.

Pat Buchanan v Cenk Uygur

MSNBC sheds Cenk Uygur* and Keith Olberman, while the untouchable Pat Buchanan, right-wing commentator, survives by spewing this rhetoric:

Mexico is the greatest foreign policy crisis I think America faces in the next 20, 30 years. Who is going to care, Andrea*  30 years from now whether a Sunni or a Shia is in Baghdad or who's ruling in Kabul? We're going to have 135 million Hispanics in the United States by 2050, heavily concentrated in the southwest. The question is whether we're going to survive as a country.

or this, when he eulogizes Hitler:

When Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece? Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

Buchanan has claimed that Hitler wasn't just a man of peace, but "an individual of great courage."

or this, when he embraces the ideology of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing terrorist:

...this is (not) to deny the the presence of violent actors or neo-Nazis on the European right who bear watching. But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent. That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never know mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists. Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis . . . As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

Patrick Buchanan is an old white man, hard-core Catholic (along the lines of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito) who is afraid of everything. You can let MSNBC know that you want Cenk back and Pat gone at http://msnbc.com/.

*The Young Turks is the largest online news show in the world. It is a recent winner of the 15th annual Webby award for News and Politics.

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**referencing Andrea Mitchell, another MSNBC 'analyst' and who is married to Alan Greenspan, who many believe helped to royally screw the economy while chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006.