I think it’s in part a tactic to create a perpetual “debt crisis”, which works in conservatives’ favor politically.

Creating the artificial crisis was the only way Obama and his henchpeople and congressional partners could loosen support for SS and the two Meds. Now, the congressional committee on deficits may fail to come to an agreement, but don’t bet on it.

The fix, as a movie gangster would put it, is in.

BTW: when, since December 2000, has the Constitution really mattered?

I’ll tell what else is stupid—dragging a brain-injured woman back to congress to vote yes on a supremely damaging bill I know she cannot fully comprehend. Who pushed her to do that, I wonder?

succinct

But the Kochs’ greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham’s film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they’ve started with AFP help. “Five years ago,” he tells them, “my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It’s beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation.”

AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.

Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favour of his

Sadly, Giffords would have been front and center to vote for that bill if nothing had happened. She’s a true Blue Dog.

Even the “We must not say a word against Obama” crowd on MSNBC last night had a few choices ones for him.
Like, “he doesn’t know how to legislate”, “He had a cup of coffee in the Senate” and He didn’t do much legislating in the Illinois Congress”
While it may not have been clear to them why they were frustrated by this traitor, is was to me, knowing that Obama was groomed by Henry Kissinger and has MOTUs “handling him.
They even said “Obama’s heart is in the right place” well, now THAT I disagree with.
Most people will never know what hit them when this horrid deal comes to fruition….too busy, ya know?
But already, the little media circus of Giffords coming back to Congress on the fateful night is getting more attention on the tubes than the deal itself.
Like we knew it would
SURPRISE

I think it was rather mean. She looked overwhelmed and a little scared to me. Her little hand wave looked more like “back off” than a greeting
But then, they don’t care who they use or damage if they get their way, do they?

The “left” really has to develop new tactics and strategy other than making telephone calls, blogging and signing petitions. This has been totally impotent and has barely changed the framing and dialogue. It’s time to develop a broad based coalition of students, civil and immigration rights, organized labor, peace groups, gay activists etc.. These groups have been either coopted or marginalized by Obama and the Democrats and it’s time they come together and join forces.

this got dissapeared

Billionatres Coup

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/01/us-debt-deal-tea-party

That was the most opportunistic and cynical political theater since Jessica Lynch.

yup, or Trig Palin

Obama was groomed by Henry Kissinger and has MOTUs

oy
i did not know that…..sigh

They’re all damaged goods. I plan to vote republican next time. It’s too inefficient to have two parties for the same outcome.

Go back to the old rules. If Congress wants to borrow, it’ll have to approve the sale of a bunch of Treasury bonds and consider each new bond individually.

Approve the form of the security, the purpose of the security, what the duration should be, what the interest rate should to be.

That’ll slow down the spending.

Does anyone know how Gabby got to Washington? Did the president send one of the special purpose aircraft to fly her in for the photo op?

Yes, she is a bluedog. Her campaign, her voting history, etc, all say that. As a progressive Arizonan, I feel embarrassed by the dog and pony show yesterday. I sent middle of the night (sunday) e-mails to everyone I thought would listen, but to no avail. But I have no doubt that next week I’ll be getting requests for donations from all of them.

What a great con. In order to maintain the permanent state of exception required to circumvent the rule of law, the public good and democratic representation in the interests of moving wealth upward, one must create recurring crises. In this case yet another lesser-of-two-evils threat is promulgated so that courtiers living off the scraps from the master’s table can assure their fake constituents that they saved them from Impending Doom. What are the odds that this non-choice, this bluff will be called and the courtiers will be faced with pulling the trigger?

And those donation requests will be couched in blatant lies.

Return the request for funds by sending them a shit sandwich.

Asshole feeling a little sore today. I woke up like this but went to bed alone? How did this happen? Feeling a little groggy too. I’m not even LBGT?

Congress could easily eliminate the debt ceiling all together, removing any potential for problems in the future.

Partisan Democrats really want everyone to forget that the Democrats could have done this after 2008 – they want to “Look forward, not backward” so to speak. The Inner Party [Rs and Ds] wants there to be a perpetual crisis while they try and lie about or bury the past. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

This country has been run on fear since 9-11.

Nothing to see, move along…

from the above article

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama’s words, “is at its lowest level in half a century”. The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

Every news story I’ve come across about Gifford gives the con away with the disclaimer that her visit was “a surprise.” To whom? For whom?

Example:
“Vice President Joe Biden came to the Capitol to see Giffords, after being tipped off by Pelosi that she would be in attendance.”
[snip]
“Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) found out about her return about an hour before the vote and helped to escort her into the chamber.”

Indeed. All the surprise of every reality show you’ve ever seen. “Why, I had no idea the good guy would win, or that the star-crossed lovers would live happily ever after.”

You never want to get onto a political party donation list. I made the mistake of getting mine on the DNCCCs. A few weeks ago I finally got tired of all the calls, called them up and said “take me off your call list”. After which they did that, but only that. Still am getting their mailings. And they then evidently sold my name and phone number from their call list to someone else who called up for donations for “a good cause”. Early on I discovered they “shared” their address list with other “worthy causes”.

Even if I had money to give, which is in exceptionally short supply, I would never, ever again give to a blanket organization. An individual candidate, maybe.

Heaven forbid the reply I might write if I got a letter from CREEP. (Isn’t that still the acronym for Committee to Re-elect the President).

If the U.S. public ever wakes up to the fact that they been played for the biggest chumps of any advanced industrialized country for the last 40 years there won’t be any place for traitors to hide and they will all have earned a traitors fate.

Try 1946.
“The Red Menace”
“those anti-war people”
“those civil rights people”
etc.

Fear is what the subconscious of America reacts best to. Certainly not the rational thought process.

That’s because they have enlarged amygdalas. Maybe they’re putting something in the water.

http://goodmenproject.com/newsroom/study-of-the-day-conservative-brains-have-bigger-fear-centers/

wonder where the Lords and Ladies of Congress (in their designer suits) went to celebrate (with 350.$ wine) the total screwing of America?

people will do crazy things,like NOT THINK when they are scared
media learned this

The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds.

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated “news bulletins”, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a ‘sustaining show’ (it ran without commercial breaks), thus adding to the program’s quality of realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated.

In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners who believed the events described in the program were real

“The intent is to make them so stupid that everyone in Congress wants to avoid pulling them.”

No, the intent is to create such a bad crisis (like the debt limit crisis) so they will push cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the lesser of two evils. They will also let some of Bush taxes expire (as they were supposed to) as the carrot for the democrats.

The debt ceiling itself is a creation of Congress. There is no need to have periodic debt ceiling limit votes that create dangerous uncertainty. Congress could easily eliminate the debt ceiling all together, removing any potential for problems in the future.

Congress has already provided a way around the debt ceiling: Section 5112(k). It makes the debt ceiling irrelevant by eliminating the need for further borrowing.

I see an 8-4 vote on the Dog Food Commission, as projected “Democratic” appointees Mark Warner and Kent Conrad vote with the Republicans on a plan to cut SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and all other programs that are not needed by the rich. They will also compromise to “raise revenues” by eliminating some tax deductions used by the middle class, further impoverishing that “ungrateful and lazy” element of society.

Some alternate traitor “Democrats” could include Allyson Schwartz or Claire McCaskill, but there are plenty of Third Way lemmings to provide a 12-0 BIPARTISAN COMPROMISE (I hear those two words in my sleep, as I fall off a cliff, screaming).

We are so screwed.

Someone somewhere mentioned a favored watering hole, but I can’t remember what it was. Or so they split by party their drinking business?

That is indeed the default procedure, but the bill ending the debt limit could set up a new procedure that was as efficient as the current one.

Stupid, silly, madness…that seems to fit only if you play along with the whole “dysfunctional system” meme.
Yeah, because what we need are some elite technocrats to fix the the system…fuck that.

What’s going on is far from stupid, wake up.

We’ve been BEING screwed for a long time.
Check this out:
Reaping Millions in Nonprofit Care for Disabled

Medicaid money created quite a nice life for the Levy brothers from Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The brothers, Philip and Joel, earned close to $1 million a year each as the two top executives running a Medicaid-financed nonprofit organization serving the developmentally disabled.

They each had luxury cars paid for with public money. And when their children went to college, they could pass on the tuition bills to their nonprofit group.

Philip H. Levy went as far as charging the organization $50,400 for his daughter’s living expenses one year when she attended graduate school at New York University. That money paid not for a dorm room, but rather it helped her buy a co-op apartment in Greenwich Village.

The rise of the Levy brothers, from scruffy bearded social workers in the 1970s to millionaires with homes in the Hamptons, Sutton Place and Palm Beach Gardens, reveals much about New York’s system for caring for the developmentally disabled — those with conditions like cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and autism.

Nope, no cuts to the programs, just rerouting the money.
And all these people, like the mentally disabled during St Ronnie are being kicked into the streets as we speak.
That’s how they “FIX” a problem

“The triggered cuts are not well thought out. In fact they are purposely designed to be really bad and horribly structured. The intent is to make them so stupid that everyone in Congress wants to avoid pulling them.”

Well “so stupid” is in the eye of the beholder.

Compared to Tea Party likely victory with Obama, those triggers look just fine – let them happen – and see if the Tea Party can pass a bill to undo what they don’t like. The Trigger assumes the Clinton tax rates come back in total for a $3.5 b deficit reduction – after which the Tea Party can take credit for any tax cuts it can get passed. I suspect the Tea Party can accomplish nothing, even with a GOP controlled Senate, without Dem agreement – and that would be a much better environment than the debt/budget crisis/Obama fold scenarios that are ahead.

what are you talking about. I’ve always advocated that the solution is a more accountable system that is more democratic.

You are correct, Jane, about Gabby Gifford’s political stance. But this was really a gruesome use of an extremely debilitated yet still living puppet for the regime. It was a Terry Schaivo moment. I cannot believe anyone who saw the hyped up press about the occurrence would not have shuddered deep in their bones. Images like this have resonance far and wide. People know that the recovery has been amazing but very, very slow, to the point where she couldn’t even be interviewed, just very careful things being said by intimate friends.

If indeed they want her to be a poster child for this deformity they have birthed, indeed she is – just as the Terry Schiavo charade was for the Republicans. There could not be a clearer indication that both sides have reached down into the very depths. They will both start hauling up corpses to vote very soon.

We have a month in which the cats will be away. Us mice had better start creatively playing. This is our moment.

True – but count me as a vote for letting the triggers happen because the resulting events work in our favor. What we lose we will get back in 6 months as the Tea Party goes from demanding to begging.

Unfortunately, we continue to assume there is some sanity in Washington and that the far right will have a modicum of it. Further unfortunately, the tendency of those who are self-destructive and have a lack of sane facilities is to run INTO the fire instead of away from it. All the while yelling “I’m free”.

My best friend is a blue dog, and I’m perpetually amazed at how naive someone who’s a member of MENSA can be. It’s all going to be just fine he thinks. But then again, he thought the Iraq war was going to be fine because the generals told him so. And he was a Viet Nam vet. Go figure.

We used to raise the limit a few billion per year, now it’s 2 trillion. Why not just raise it a quintrillion, then we can really do some borrowing.

And you think that she could ever be elected in her district if she wasn’t a conservative Democrat?

Sadly? She’s still alive, for heaven’s sake.

This is thin gruel for what you present, but would any Republican have ever nominated Sotomayor or Kagan to the Supreme Court? I suppose that you are looking forward to that 6-3 or 7-2 SCOTUS that you’ll get from any Republican President elected in the next two terms.

Hope you are getting old, and have no children or grandchildren.

Gaby Giffords is also a Third Way co-chair
http://www.thirdway.org/co_chairs/11