This is just another sign of the incivility and really the vulgarity of modern American campaigns. These campaigns have gotten so ugly and so nasty, that they’re now tarnishing the whole system.
I think it also underlines the coarseness of our culture in this age of social media when it is so easy to say anything about anybody and get no penalty for saying it.
…
I’ve watched a lot of presidents over the years but I can never recall a president stepping off Air Force One, which is itself a symbol of the presidency and American democracy, and being subject to such rudeness.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, Schieffer was discussing the incident between Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and President Obama on the tarmac involved in what seemed an intense conversation, with Brewer at one point pointing her finger in Obama’s face.
No audio, but the video/picture painted a scene not very cordial.
Brewer said later: “I respect the office of the president,” she said. “I was there to welcome him.”
Also later, Brewer reversed the action, putting a lie on top of a lie, claiming Obama treated her like an asshole: “It is what it is. I proceeded to say that to him, and he chose to walk away from me,” she said Thursday. Asked whether she regarded that as disrespectful, she replied: “Well, I would never have walked away from anybody having a conversation. And, of course, that is what it is. It is disrespectful for me.”
Such total bullshit.

A lie within a falsehood, from real-time to book time:

The argument stemmed from Obama’s feelings about Brewer’s 2011 book, “Scorpions for Breakfast.”
In it, she refers to the president as “patronizing” and claims he lectured to her as if she were a child during a 2010 meeting in the White House.
At the time of the meeting, the White House described their encounter as a “good meeting,” and even Brewer said it was “very cordial.”
But, later, in her book, she accused Obama of being extremely “condescending.”
“I said to him, you know, I have always respected the office of the president and that the book is what the book is,” Brewer said.

Back to Schieffer’s view on political rudeness — he still played the MSM line and didn’t tell the entire truth about the ugly rudeness now apparent in US politics : This vulgar, shithead activity stems from one, and only one,  nasty corner of the room — Republicans.
The GOP is the party of the rude, of the sneering asshole remark, of the racist, of the zilch compassion for the ordinary US person, and the absolute rude behavior in all workings in things political.
Since becoming aware of politics via the 1960 election between Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon, I’ve never seen such total bullshit spewing from the lips of one group of assholes — and the big, massive problem is that the MSM will not point it out.
Just like John King of CNN and Newt Gingrich’s rebuttal of an opening question about Newt’s tangled martial operations — instead of slapping back at Newt’s lying hypocrisy, King MSMed himself, back stepping.
The GOP has been on this nasty forum awhile.

From Time magazine in September 2009 and the “You lie” incident:

So when Representative Joe Wilson, a little-known Republican and Army Reserve veteran from South Carolina shouted them at the nation’s Commander in Chief on the night of Sept. 9, heads snapped.
The House chamber took a collective gasp.
Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind Obama, tensed and scowled as if she had just witnessed a crime, her disgust unhidden.
Even President Obama, who had just dismissed conservative claims that illegal immigrants would be able to take advantage of health-care reform, was taken aback.
He looked to his left, adjusted his arm, part nervous twitch, part macho posturing, and shot back at Wilson, “That’s not true.”
And there, for a moment, the nation watched two men, elected to lead, call each other the worst thing in politics — dishonorable deceivers.
At the moment Wilson exploded, the outburst seemed like an assault on the President.
Soon afterward, it was clear that it had been a gift.
Wilson had, in an emotional expression, proven Obama’s point: the summer of town halls had been less a discussion than a circus, a forum where misinformation was vindicated by passion, where disrespect was elevated to a virtue.
Now the circus had come inside Congress.

Where it has mutated into a living, breathing creature eating at the US.
The problem is the MSM doesn’t call it out — the GOP gets away with it — even taking the circus out onto an Arizona tarmac.

(Illustration found here).

Obama even had the flag carried by the US Navy SEAL team that assassinated Osama last year: “Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation room…All that mattered that day was the mission. No-one thought about politics…”

And he pounded it home:

“Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes.
No-one built this country on their own,” Obama said.
“This nation is great because we built it together.
This nation is great because we worked as a team.
This nation is great because we get each others’ backs.
And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great, no mission too hard.”

In this he laid the groundwork for the next eleven months — the real man-up ruler of the US can only be the guy that got Osama bin Laden, and it will surely not work if anyone else takes the reins of power, so vote for me!
And boxed in between the warmongering, Obama slapped at income inequality and the Republicans who have produced the situation — the president proposed big shifts with the US tax system, like for instance, a minimum 30 per cent effective rate on millionaires.
Which prompted Mitch Daniels in response to whine: “No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favour with some Americans by castigating others,” Daniels said, according to excerpts of his speech.
In other words — leave the rich alone.

And this tweet via Aljazeera English: “RT @theonlyadult: Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. #obama2012 #sotu”

And as if on cue, early this morning U.S. Navy SEALs popped into Somalia to grab two kidnapped aid workers — an American and a Dane — in a daring helicopter raid reminiscent of the Osama attack.

Before news broke of the rescue, Obama told Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, “Leon, good job tonight. Good job tonight,” at the State of the Union address.

Election 2012 is gonna be a dandy, action-packed pile of hollerin’ bullshit.

Nowadays, don’t US politics — and politics in general — make you sick to your bowels?
In the midst of most-likely the biggest, nastiest, piece-of-shit economic condition since I-don’t-know-when (common term, ‘not since the Great Depression‘), the political systems on this entire, whacked-out planet has gone way-bonkers.

This morning, for instance, there’s a general strike beginning in Greece, a suck-hole of all things financial, in protest to the latest round of government austerity measures that’s already known to be creating higher taxes, pay cuts and job losses.
The sight to behold:

One striker, university lecturer Yannis Zabetakis, told the BBC: “We are now living in a taxation Armageddon and the economy is dying.
Along with the economy, we are dying.
The austerity measures are not working and our best people are being forced to go abroad.”

The words, ‘austerity measures,’ has become the catch-phrase, linchpin for how Europe is handling the spreading financial crisis, an approach scorned by almost all economists worth their salt — from a couple of Nobel-prize winners.
Paul Krugman echoes the sensibility: Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
Joseph Stiglitz agrees: “Austerity is an experiment that has been tried before with the same results,” Stiglitz said today in a speech in Copenhagen. Cutting budgets in low-growth cycles leads to higher unemployment and hampers recovery, he said.
Thus, Europe is f*cked.

So far, in the US the cuts haven’t reached European size, but it’s not that the GOP ain’t trying.
Last night, another Republican blow-hard debate, and once again, these clowns showcased the cruel reality they really don’t have a portent of a clue about how to handle the American economy.
Hot Herman Cain’s infamous ’999′ tax program would make it that 84% of U.S. households would pay more than they do under current tax policies, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonpartisan research group. And the impact would be felt most heavily by the lowest income groups.
And Mitt Romney’s proposal to increase US Navy ships would would add $35 to $40 million to an already dangerous national bottom line, plus Romney doesn’t explain where he’d get the money.
Out of the ass of we-the-people, that’s where.
And if I hear these frackin’ assholes call the rich/wealthy/the 1 percent “job creators” I might just holler, slobber, pound the floor and rend my garments — makes one go crazy.

The horrible part is that President Obama ain’t much better.
From the Washington Post:

By mid-2011, it was clear that Obama had done little to address the nation’s fundamental economic problems.
As had not been the case during previous recoveries, America’s major corporations and banks were investing abroad rather than at home.
Unemployment still exceeded 9 percent.
Almost all the growth the nation had experienced since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009 had gone to profits; wages during that time actually declined.
Their incomes diminished and mired in debt, Americans were unable to purchase enough to get the economy going.
Even if their purchases had increased, a lot of their funds would simply have flowed to the nations that made the things they purchased.

No wonder the US economy is floating down the financial river.
And no wonder the Occupy Wall Street movement has gained so much traction in the last few weeks — US peoples really know what is happening, despite what’s coming out of Obama’s White House.
He’s off campaigning, but it won’t do much good, for him, or this country.

Once again, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture pretty much summed it:

Today’s NYT notes the gloom that has descended over consumers, and they suggest it may be home prices.
I think they are wrong — in my experience, the sort of generalized rage and frustration comes about when people realize the institutions they have trusted have betrayed them.
Humans deal with financial losses in a very specific way — and its not fury.
This is about a fundamental breakdown of the role of government, courts, and leadership in the nation.
And it all traces back to the bailouts of reckless bankers, and the refusal to hold then in any way accountable.
There will not be a fundamental economic recovery until that is recognized.

Hence, it might get even more ugly.

(Illustration found here).

I hope the graph is readable — if not, it originates from Spiegel Online at the link just above.
One can readily see George Jr. did more than his fair share, but to all those big-yapped GOPers, the real shit didn’t start until Saint Ronnie opened the floodgates — compared to the nowadays, the debt before Ronnie was pocket change.
Barry Ritholtz rightfully adds: Whatever your political or economic views are, it is not up to me to tell you what to believe. However, you need to be intellectually consistent and not merely grab whatever ideological bullet point that suits your purposes at the moment. If you do so, you best be prepared to be charged with being intellectually dishonest, and to be categorized as called a political hack. Or worse.
Maybe…you’d be a lying asshole.

And the mass-popular appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement is reflected in all that debt that no one but the guys/gals marching in the streets will end up paying — US peoples live in a financial climate that’s worse than Ghana.
To make it worse, income in the last few years has become even more way-one-sided.
The bottom 99 percent income level registered a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, but then those incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007.
However, in those same boom years, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.
Pissed off a lot of peoples, huh?

Not only that, the housing bubble bust struck the average American way-more than it did the wealthy: In 2007, the bottom 60 percent of Americans had 65 percent of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1 percent, in contrast, had just 10 percent.
And home ownership, the bedrock of the Great American Dream (Fantasy) is busted bad — home ownership rate fell to 65.1 percent last year, and measured by race, the homeownership gap between whites and blacks is now at its widest since 1960, wiping out more than 40 years of gains.

And this from War in Context and the last near-60 years:

Wall Street has cannibalized itself.
Still hungry, feeling the pangs of their greed, they’ve now come to the government for their daily meal.
And still, without a hint of irony, a spokesman for this ravenous tribe, mounts a soapbox and has the temerity to rail against the evils of socialism.
Turns out, the socialism is for them, the capitalism is for us.
Abbie Hoffman once baited these banksters by throwing cash onto the floor of the NYSE.
To no one’s astonishment, they demonstrated their insatiable greed.
The gluttons couldn’t help themselves, they stopped trading and got on their knees and swept up the free loot.

Title of the post?
“The Dirty Fucking Hippies…Were Right!”

Oh yeah!

A tale so convoluted it turns out that David Mamet would have a hard time trying to decipher the plot.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton spoke some double-speak: “The idea that they would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador? Nobody could make that up, right?” Clinton said shortly after U.S. prosecutors accused two suspected Iranian agents of trying to murder Saudi envoy Adel Al-Jubeir.
Hey, a shitload of people could easily make that up, or at least, orchestrate the proceedings.

(Illustration found here).

One of the best reporters in the field, Patrick Cockburn, says the whole scheme stinks of political bullshit.
In the UK’s Independent:

The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran’s highly sophisticated intelligence service.
The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
…
Could the accusations be true?
The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed.
A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks.
A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
None of this makes sense.
The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran.
It usually operates through proxies.
Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico.
The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident.
There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world.
Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington.
There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations.

Holder, of course, is himself under fire for the mega-dumb-ass “Fast and Furious” operation — a supposedly ‘sting’ stunt on Mexican drug cartels with all kinds of weapons, but it went south and the guns ended up at all kinds of bad killings and other deadly, nefarious events.

Darrell Issa, one of the great GOP pricks in Congress and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is after Holder and his justice department for the “Fast and Furious” bullshit and has issued subpoenas for all kinds of documents relating to the operation, and even the AG himself.
Holder responded at the press conference for the Iranian/Mexican drug cartel plot — of course, using Iran to deflect Issa: “[W]hat I want the American people to understand is that in complying with those subpoenas and dealing with that inquiry, that will not detract us from the important business that we here to do at the Justice Department, including matters like the one that we have announced today.”
Yeah, right.

Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com pretty much sums up this crocked Iranian/drug killers story:

This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with.
This has been the general pattern of our “anti-terrorist” operations in the US since the beginning – because finding and catching real terrorists is much too hard, at least for our Keystone Kops.
Instead of going out and actually, you know, looking for the Bad Guys, and then apprehending them, they lure some unsuspecting Muslim immigrant into a trap, and spring it when the time is right.

Bullshit is the easy route.
And another pile from Afghanistan — officials there have been manipulating stats and any kind of “success” in the Afghan mess has been stretched pretty thin
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:

A new report from the Kandahar-based Afghanistan Analysts Network examines NATO claims of “success” in Afghanistan and massive numbers of slain Taliban “leaders” and finds, as usual, the claims are greatly exaggerated.
The report determined that NATO’s broad definition of “leader” was “so broad as to be meaningless,” noting that they used to word to describe people whose houses were suspected to have been used by insurgents, and that many of the captured “leaders” were ultimately released from detention.
The so-called night raids were the focus of the study, which found that for every “leader” NATO killed, they also killed eight others, including a large number of innocent bystanders.

No wonder US peoples are sick of the US government.
Last month, a CNN/ORC international poll revealed: Only 15 percent of Americans surveyed trust the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time. A year ago — that number was at 25 percent.
So 85 percent think government can’t be trusted, and the odds are growing it might end up at 100 percent.
Not good.

Ex-CIA don’t trust ‘em either.
Robert Baer spent 21 years working as a CIA case officer in the Middle East, and in an interview at The World Today, acknowledge the whole Iranian thing could be bullshit:

Oh absolutely. I mean right now is not the time for Iran to provoke the United States.
We’re on edge already vis-à-vis Iran and it came as a total surprise to me.
I don’t think it’s credible, not the central government, there may be a rogue element behind it.
This doesn’t fit their modus operandi at all.
It’s completely out of character, they’re much better than this.
They wouldn’t be sending money through an American bank, they wouldn’t be going to the cartels in Mexico to do this.
It’s just not the way they work.
I’ve followed them for 30 years and they’re much more careful.
And they always use a proxy between them and the operation, and in this case they didn’t.
I mean it’s the, either they’re shooting themselves in the foot or there’s pieces of the story, I don’t know what they are.

When the whole twisted tale comes out, it’s going to be a zinger.

The air is clear (even with thick coastal fog) because the mind is still clear; all the problems facing this wretched planet seem far away and not as dangerous, ugly and dominating as it seems as the clock swings southward.
In the coming day, there’s promise of something neat, of maybe a good thing happening somewhere down the line.

Of course, this is just bullshit — morning gives way to afternoon and the same old crud.

(Illustration found here).

Happiness is both a warm gun and the morning staying put.
And according a most-modern study, most people agree:

People around the world are happiest in the morning, according to a US study on Thursday that analyzed hundreds of millions of messages on the microblogging site Twitter.
…
Mood peaks were detected early in the day but began to dip mid-morning, about the time most people are starting their workdays.
Another positive peak was witnessed around midnight, followed by a “sharp drop in NA (negative affect, including distress, fear, anger, guilt, and disgust) during the overnight hours,” said the study in the journal Science.
The highest numbers of good mood words indicating enthusiasm, delight, activeness, and alertness were found on Saturdays and Sundays, “which points to possible effects of work-related stress, less sleep, and earlier wake time.”

That’s why we’re working for the weekend.

And what brought on all this happy/unhappy introspection is President Obama’s three years at the helm of this disastrous ship of state — he is without a doubt the most disappointing US leader in all of this republic’s history.
Never was so much become so little, or worse.
In the silent corner as opposed to the loud, drum-banging war room, are those quiet civil liberties all of us has taken for granted, though, now could be just a little tick away from a bad shift in the 200-plus years of a country which was for a time the ultimate place on earth.
Jonathan Turley, in an op/ed in the LA Times yesterday, summed up the disappointment in Obama’s disaster for freedom.
Key notes:

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them.
The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly.
Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture.
In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture.
Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the “just following orders” defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised.
He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists.
His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.
But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself.
It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama’s personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush.
Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected.
Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

Nobody, however, had been raptured yet — all are still prowling around, banging on that pessimism pipe dream.
If it’d only stay morning forever.

Happy Birthday!

One of the all-time, good-looking and talented actresses turns 80 today.
Angie Dickinson is one of those performers who was nearly taken for granted during her heyday.
She made a shitload of movies, but always seemed to stand out as a female member of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Rat Pack’ and was seen in the best of places, both on and off the screen.

Not only was Dickinson gorgeous — her legs was the toast of Hollywood — she also had some acting chops, and appeared in one of the best films from the 1960s, John Boorman’s ‘Point Blank,’ playing Lee Marvin’s girlfriend.

Always a favorite, but like everybody else, age slows — she looks happy in that photo at left, mainly because it was shot in 1970 when it was still morning all over the world.

Happy eighty!

(Illustration found here).

Obama helped create a monster even in the eyes of his own: “This deal does not even attempt to strike a balance between more cuts for the working people of America and a fairer contribution from millionaires and corporations,” Representative Raul Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who leads the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement. “I will not be a part of it.”

In reality, the US peoples shouldn’t be a part of it, either.
(Illustration found here).

Obama seemed to reflect the bigwigs of the Democratic Party — spineless.
According to the LA Times, the proposed $900 billion debt-ceiling increase deal would raise the debt roof through the end of 2012 with spending cuts coming in two stages; first, more than $900 billion in domestic cuts will be made across the federal government over the next 10 years, the big chunk coming later, and relatively small cuts this year and next.
In the second stage, a bipartisan congressional committee would be established to recommend by late November $1.5 trillion in further cuts.
And one must remember — no tax hikes, no new revenue sources, just all cuts.

Biggest debt doubt came from Obama’s own party.
From the New York Times:

“Americans will not stand for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts–not now, and not six months from now,” said Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn.org.
“We can not and should not ask seniors and the middle class to bear the burden of the debt deal.”
Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement that “seeing a Democratic president take taxing the rich off the table and instead set the stage for cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits is like entering a bizarre parallel universe — one with horrific consequences for middle-class families.”

Hard to imagine this is the same Obama guy from 2008.

Democrats originally wanted no strings attached to a debt limit increase that would enable the country pay its bills and insisted if deficit reduction was going to be linked to the debt limit, then closing loopholes and raising taxes on the rich had to be part of the deal — they lost both.
And House Republicans  managed to pull the entire deal further and further to the right, even inserting a requirement into the agreement for a vote on a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Losers.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the debt deal a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich,” and added this at the end of the day: “If I were a Republican, I would be dancing in the streets,” he said. “I don’t have any idea what the Republicans wanted that they didn’t get. And I can’t tell you anything that Democrats got out of this deal, except that we’re probably going to prevent the nation from crashing.”
The problem in the long run is no one is going to care about that last item.
A disaster halting a disaster, via piss-poor politics: Obama “let the momentum die,” said David Gergen, director of Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. “There’s shared blame. Everybody’s fingerprints are on this mess. This will be a case study one day for college students on failed politics.”

In the long term, however, it’s the ordinary guy on the street that will really, really suffer.
The burden has been firmly placed on the shoulders of the middle class and the poor and anybody who’s not a Republican.

Paul Krugman, who’s been more right than wrong on this ‘Great Recession‘ bullshit, chimed in this morning that Obama blew it big time:

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party.
It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
…
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats.
He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
…
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away.
And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers.
What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question.
After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy?
And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

Ross Douthat, also at the NYT, wrote yesterday the bottom line to the whole horrible mess: First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either.

And US peoples will start to dance on the ceiling.

“It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.”
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt

(Illustration found here).

Early Sunday and deep, wet fog here on California’s north coast, but unlike a lot of other shit going on right now, my natural environment will get better, much better: The fog will burn off in a couple of hours revealing a sunshine-bright environment — even our Alaska-bred wind, usually twirling up cold and sharp in the afternoon, has been the last few days most agreeable, friendly and warm.
A nice, possibly-good day coming.

Not so for a whole-lot of other stuff.
Especially for this most-ridiculous, but yet apparently most-Titanic-the-ship situation in US financial history, the debt ceiling.
Despite what’s been considered a near-mundane point of economic government — this same item done some 78 times since 1960 (49 times under Republican presidents), President Obama himself has already raised the debt ceiling three times, the last in February 2010, and absolutely no nasty shit-storm about none of it.
This time, however, there’s the insanely-strong influence off people-full-of shit — the so-called Tea Party.
From The Australian posted online down yonder, where right now it’s already tomorrow:

With Barack Obama facing the greatest crisis of his presidency, the Republican Party torn asunder and the US on the verge of its first default, a small group of novice congressmen was celebrating a stunning political coup at the weekend.
…
What most of the world sees as a deadlock and a crisis, the Tea Party sees as victory, its members having done exactly what they had said they would do when they were voted in at the mid-term elections.
“Last November I told my constituents (in Minnesota) that I’m a numbers guy,” explained Republican congressman Chip Cravaack, after voting against his own party’s bill on Friday night.
“I gave them my promise that if the numbers don’t add up, I’m not voting for it.”
…
Since then, they have become increasingly unco-operative, leading some to refer to them as the “Tea Party Taliban”. Over the past few days they have left the leadership of both parties reeling at their readiness to play brinkmanship with the country’s credit rating.
“There’s an old JFK line: those who ride the back of the tiger often end up inside it,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum.
“What we’re seeing is one-fifth of the House of Representatives trying to run the country.
It’s a constitutional coup d’etat.”
Mark Meckler, national co-ordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, hailed their action as a success. “The Tea Party is already victorious,” Meckler said.
“What we were looking to do was change the terms of national debate and we’ve completely changed it.”

Yeah right.

Along with all that bullshit, stir in the long-time creep, conservative strategist Grover Norquist and his half-crazed tax pledges, and you’ve got a recipe of pure disaster not yet seen by US peoples, who are in for a bad-ass, shit-kicking, slap-in-the-face.

One thing for sure: We as a peoples are wading around in a living, breathing train wreck.
A poll from CNN last week found that not only do 84 percent of Americans feel the economy is bad, a majority 59 percent are gloomy about the country’s economic future: “That’s a very significant, and very discouraging change in public attitudes toward the economy,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “It’s unclear what caused this newfound pessimism. The length of the current economic downturn and concerns over the chances that the debt ceiling will go unresolved are probably contributing factors.”

And since then, the whole DC/economic scenario has gotten worse.
Just on Friday, a report the US is not only not gaining any recovery traction, the whole ‘Great Recession‘ shebang was/is more severe that first thought: To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33 percent deeper than we thought. And we’re driving 33 percent slower than we hoped.
Sweet.

Paul Krugman waxing on the terrible ‘no light at the end of this tunnel‘ routine this morning on ABC News (via Raw Story):

“From the perspective of a rational person, we shouldn’t even be talking about spending cuts at all now,” Krugman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour.
“We have nine percent unemployment.
These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment… If you have a situation in which you are permanently going to raise the unemployment rate — which is what this is going to do — that’s actually going to reduce future revenues.”
“These spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. Then on top of that, we’ve got these budget cuts, which are entirely — basically the Republicans [saying], ‘We’ll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what you want’ and the president said, ‘Okay.’ That’s what happened.”
“We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade.
We’re going to look to them as a role model.
They did better than we’re doing,” he added.
“There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
We’re having a debate in Washington which is all about, ‘Gee, we’re going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent the Republicans’ terms or 100 percent the Republicans’ terms?’ The answer is 100 percent.”

And real reality of this debt ceiling drama is it created an open showcase for US peoples to witness the screwed-up mess of government as it strangles itself and dies.

Upchucking the ‘toon above: The good news is not gay — it’s pretty-much a hard-packed ass, not happy at all.
In reality, there’s no good news.

As Sunday morning dawns, the news cycle is still Casey Anthony — she was released back into the wild with all kinds of implications amid death threats, book deals via total consumption by the media.
US peoples are a much-fickle peoples.
What’s the next public obsession?

It should be the state of the US government.
In the ugly business of the looming debt ceiling bullshit, the actual, real work of the US government has been thrown into the light, the dumb-asses behind the curtain have been exposed and without much exertion, one can see America is a total and complete train wreck.
The biggest problem facing the US, of course, if one has any sense in his eyes and ears, is not Wall Street, or Main Street, or oil prices or even climate change — it’s the current crop of GOP ass-hats.
Even UK’s The Guardian can see those elephant prints on the backside:

Yet even though their sums do not add up, they will not budge.
They are immovable.
Steve King, an ultra-conservative from Iowa, says that warnings from Wall Street’s finest are “empty threats.”
Others, elected as Tea Party candidates last November, consider they have been told by God to pursue the holy mission of rolling back the insidious and demoralising advance of the federal government.
Taxation is the illegitimate confiscation of honest citizens’ hard-earned dollars; in a perfect world, there would be a tiny state, close to no taxation and no regulation.
Americans must confront the reality that their country is allegedly bankrupt, a situation they say is created by irresponsible Democrat politicians and their allies, false Republicans.
“Real Republicans” don’t blink.
…
Navigating an economy through the aftermath of a credit crunch with a mountainous legacy of private debt and crippled banking systems is enormously difficult.
On top, there is the spectre of the implosion of the euro.
Yet in the US — and to a degree in Britain — the political right is implacably opposed to the creative public action that in the past has been crucial to success in such circumstances.
It is already clear that even if the US avoids default in the weeks ahead, the price will be to so cramp the US government that it can do little or nothing.

By the way, when was the last time we witnessed a ‘real Republican?’
Paul Krugman says it’s been years and years:

A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has.
But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.
Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
…
And even the administration of former President George W. Bush refrained from making extravagant claims about tax-cut magic, at least in part for fear that making such claims would raise questions about the administration’s seriousness.
Recently, however, all restraint has vanished — indeed, it has been driven out of the party.
Last year Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, asserted that the Bush tax cuts actually increased revenue — a claim completely at odds with the evidence — and also declared that this was “the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”
And it’s true: even Mr. Romney, widely regarded as the most sensible of the contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination, has endorsed the view that tax cuts can actually reduce the deficit.
…
So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end.
If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.

One can see this crazy in Eric Cantor, most-likely one of the biggest assholes in public life this side of Dick Cheney, a self-satisfied smiling little prick, who blubbered on and on so incoherently last week (actually it was way-too coherent, but a pure nonsense stance — a short-term hike in the debt ceiling, unacceptable to any fiscally-sane person) during last Wednesday’s session of the nasty, on-going debt-ceiling negotiations at the White House, that President Obama whipped-out some way-way-belated anger on him.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post described Eric to a T: “…the smirking, eye-rolling Cantor…”
GOPers apparently don’t give a fat-rat’s-ass, but that’s obvious to anyone paying truthful attention.
Less perceived is the spineless, baby-acting Democrats in this whole ugly episode.
One Democrat, former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, told HuffPost: Democrats, he argued, have “allowed the center of the political debate to be shifted so far to the right that we find ourselves debating on their territory and using Republican language. It’s very troubling.”
And the concessions made by Obama off the backs of the poor, forever the real base for Democrats, has some old folks worried.
A failure to raise the ceiling, even for Digby, would still keep the problem with entitlements (Medicare, Social Security, etc.) getting whacked down, as they have all along.
From Politico:

With entitlement programs potentially on the chopping block during the current debt ceiling negotiations, a prominent liberal group is threatening to pull its support for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign if Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security benefits are cut.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee said Friday that 200,000 of its supporters had signed a pledge to withhold donations and volunteer hours for the reelection effort if the president agrees to cuts in the programs’ budgets.
…
“When Barack Obama was elected president, he said he was going to be our voice in Washington, and this is a chance to tell him that he’s not playing that role right now.
It’s sending a clear message to someone who we want to support and sending a clear message that if you don’t cut this out, we won’t be able to give you our time and money,” Sroka said (Neil Sroka, a PCCC spokesman).

Nobody it seems will come out winners in this, especially the big wad of hurting US peoples, and especially the low-income peoples who depend upon the state/federal health program, Medicaid, a project lost in the “muddled message” from Democrats.
Dems just ain’t got the balls — yet with a big chunk of Americans needing/wanting to keep those basic bottom-rung programs, why the shit don’t they grow a pair.
Witness the much-needed hilarity this past spring in those nasty town-hall meetings between GOPers, a vocal people’s backlash against Paul Ryan’s clusterf**k of a budget proposal — the sentiment is there, as many have warned, Republicans are so narrow-sighted, so-aligned with money-matters-only, and pure-nasty political, all their bullshit might suddenly clog their own system, causing horrendous bowel failure.
And not only at the ballot box, but also in those money matters: President Obama’s second quarter haul was bigger than the entire GOP field’s fundraising efforts combined. And with an average donation hovering at just $69, his reelection team will be able to go back to the well many times.
The GOP from all apparent notions has no idea a street-level life, even in rhetorical terms.

(Illustration found here).

And so it goes…

Even beyond the way-hot weather in the central and eastern US, the disastrous wars all over the globe, and finally even beyond Casey Anthony, the news tearing at the very tattered fabric of everyday life is the infamous, so-called debt ceiling bullshit in which the whacks in DC are deeply bickering.
Although, there’s been blubberings about Aug. 2 as the deadline, the US actually struck the debt ceiling last May 16 at the $14.294 trillion mark — the August date is the final line.

President Obama told CBS News:

“I’ve been hearing from my Republican friends for some time it is a moral imperative to tackle our debt and deficits in a serious way,” Mr. Obama said.
“What I’ve said to them is, let’s go.”
The president said today he would not accept a smaller, short-term deal.
“We might as well do it now,” he said. “Pull off the band aid. Eat our peas.”

I have no idea what Obama was taking about, unless he was trying to discuss the deep, black hole between the White House and the self-centered, asshole GOP — Mitch McConnell cried that as long as Obama’s in the White House, “a real solution is unattainable.”
Pretty much sums up the shit.

The debt ceiling scenario has been around since 1917 with the passage of the Second Liberty Bond Act, which helped finance the United States’ entry into World War I — the first notch was at just $11.5 billion.
The tally eased its way slowly up over the years, but really hit the skids the past decade.
In June 2002, it was a paltry $6.4 trillion — after George Jr.’s eight years of horror, its at the current mark achieved in May.
Since 1960, the debt limit was monkeyed with 78 times — 49 during Republican administrations and 29 during Democratic ones.

This whole theater of the financial world might just be political bullshit.
From Calculated Risk and the debt ceiling charade:

I’m frequently asked why I’m not worried about the debt ceiling, and why the bond market doesn’t seem to care.
The answer is the debt ceiling is a joke.
It serves no purpose except political posturing.
The budget is about the deficit; the debt ceiling is about paying the bills – and the U.S. will pay its bills.
Here is what I wrote two months ago:

(Congress will probably push this to the brink, but they will raise the debt ceiling before the country defaults. The first rule for most politicians is to get re-elected, and the easiest way to guarantee losing in 2012 is to throw the country back into recession. If that happened, I believe the voters would correctly blame the leaders of Congress, and I think Congress knows that too. Therefore it won’t happen. I’m not worried and neither are investors.)

We are almost to the “brink”.
Let me add: In this case, voters would blame the Republican party, and if the debt ceiling is not raised, the “Republican” brand would become toxic and synonymous with fiscal irresponsibility.
The leaders of Congress know that and they will scramble to find a solution. I doubt this is the end of the GOP

However, do we have to eat our peas with a butter knife?