Rachel Maddow shows exactly why the Teapublicans were never, ever, ever going to back down from shutting down the government.
There's no reason whatsoever to think they'll change their minds (such as they have).
There's also no reason for confidence that they will shrink back from default when we soon bump up against the debt ceiling.
Because the Congressional Republicans never acquiesce, I'm suspicious of the debt ceiling deal they've floated and voted. The press, true to its fetish for agreements, no matter how awful, is happy.
Of foremost concern to me, it's not clear what's in the deal. The New York Times has reported it badly, as if it's a standard cooling off move that leaves everything unchanged for three months. To careless readers, the story looks like a debt ceiling increase:
House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months.and, sure enough, past debt ceiling increases are recalled with identical phrasing:
The change in tack represented a retreat for House Republicans, who were increasingly isolated in their refusal to lift the debt ceiling.But there's no dollar amount anywhere, which ought to make everyone as suspicious as I am.
[E]ven as House Republicans voted to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling through May 18, their budget chairman [Paul Ryan] vowed to use the coming deadlines to force President Obama and Senate Democrats to deliver “a big down payment on the debt crisis.”Not only did Jonathan Weisman of the Times get the mechanism wrong, he got something as simple as the time frame wrong - four months, not three.
Now that the world can no longer deny America's willingness to blow off our debts, who'll put money in our purse?
Of course, [China's moves into the euro, South Korea's into the renminbi and gold, and other nations' into gold] are all minor moves in a currency market still dominated by U.S. dollars. That's good news for the U.S. economy in the short-term, because it lessens the threat of a massive sell-off and keeps borrowing rates relatively cheap. But the recent pileup of central banks and sovereign wealth funds into gold (according to the FT, central banks are on their biggest bullion buying spree in 40 years) is a warning signal that global esteem the almighty dollar (and the U.S. economy's strength) is already eroding.There's a huge and growing overhang of dollar positions that other countries want to unwind. Whenever the race for the exit starts, it's going to get ugly for us. Uglier.
There's no longer a consensus in American politics, particularly on the ascendant insane right wing, that the U.S. should pay its debts.
You'd sell your stock - and your dollars - too.
Of course, the fact that we're beginning a double-dip recession and the debt deal is contractionary should drive the stock market down.
He would have made this case forcefully and pointedly for his entire presidency.
Some people ... are wishing our economy harm for political reasons, and those are people whose attitudes will have terrible consequences for virtually every working family in this country in terms of higher interest rates, in terms of significant job loss, in terms of making a very unstable global economy even more unstable. ...
Those are the choices that our right-wing Republican friends are giving us. Default with horrendous economic consequences for working families in this country and for the entire global economy or massive cuts to programs that working families desperately need. ...
In my view a group of people in the House whose views represent a small minority of the American people are holding this Congress hostage. It is time for the American people to stand up and say, enough is enough; the function of the United States Congress is to represent all of our people and not just the wealthy and powerful.
... shame if anything happened to it.
Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.Look, the damage is already done, with or without a default. The Republicans from teabaggers to alleged mainstream conservatives have clearly demonstrated that the consensus that has held since 1776 - that we're good for our debts - is over. It's not safe anymore for other countries to treat the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
On general principles - that knowledge and insight are dispersed widely, that any organization large enough to be a coalition of interests is bound to make compromises against what's right for the benefit of what's possible, to name two - blind orthodoxy is almost always wrong. When you see Republicans who routinely passed debt limit increases under Duhbya hold the nation's credit-worthiness hostage under President Obama, you know they're rank hypocrites whose principle is not knowledge much less wisdom, but instead only what power they can derive from a political position.
How then can I claim that the Democratic Party and its interest groups are consistently right on every issue?
I can answer this question in three ways:
“It is commonplace, if you are a resident of the city of Chicago, to see work crews on which only a couple of people are working and others appear to be standing or sitting idle,” Mr. Ferguson said last week. “The remarkable thing about this is they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do. We have basically codified wasteful overstaffing.”The purpose of labor unions is to gain a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, not to featherbed. Detailing five guys to walk along behind an asphalt paving machine with hand tools is a day's pay for a smelly stroll. I've heard conservatives use the phrase "unsustainable model" about all labor work rules, but that phrase surely applies to this.
Better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
I don't think Palin could pass Economics 101. She's never heard of Keynesian stimulus. She doesn't know the difference between private debt and public debt. She has no idea of the vicious cycle of contraction that's still a very real danger."Since when can you get out of huge national debt by creating trillions of dollars of new debt?" [Sarah] Palin asked. "It all really is so backwards and skewed as to sound like absolute nonsense when some of this economic policy is explained."
"We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and control it," she said. "And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and control the people."
"Some in Washington would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord," she said. "Those principles it makes you wonder what the heck some in Washington are trying to accomplish here."
Why can Fred Thompson still get on TV? He's a snoozer. He's less popular than Dennis Kucinich, and you don't see him turning up on your screen. Is Kucinich's jaw wired shut or something?
I've got it. Fred is soooo gorgeous. That must be it.
What he says makes no sense either:
"If he takes us down the road of tripling our national debt in ten years and making us vulnerable to higher interest rates and higher inflation, and things of that nature, I want all those policies not to succeed," he said.Somehow CNN's John Roberts is not prepared to ask Reaganite Fred to compare Obama's plan to what Reagan and Bush did in their 12 years - multiply the national debt by a factor of four and a half! Saint Ronnie tripled it on his own.
The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.
Here's the clearest of many illustrations:
In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail.Frank Luntz's take on the Republican attitude toward bullshit is also instructive:
“When he talks about New York, people see it,” Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, “and they feel it, and if a number isn’t quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them.”Whether something's true or not doesn't matter. Only fooling the people with their feelings matters.
