Reasoned Answers, Please: What Happens If US Defaults?

[bulldog10jw]

Wow.

Easily impressed, aren't you.

[∞∞∞]

ps. I didn't really think the whole cancer analogy through thoroughly so I apologize in advance to anyone here who may have thought it was crass (because it was). My mistake.

[Ibanez]

Wow.

Easily impressed, aren't you.

Not really. I had about three or four comments typed out but "wow" seemed to summed it all up. The analogy of the Tea Party to malignant melanoma was genius...GENIUS!

[BDKJMU]

F everyone in our government. At this point, I don't care if they come up with an agreement or not. All of them have showed how incompetent they are in their abilities to run the US. The only thing I'm gonna look forward to is doing my tiny part in trying to vote all the idiots out of office. What a ridiculous position we're in right now.

ps. also an especially big F you to the Tea Party. Cancer on this nation.

The tea partiers, at least the majority of them, for the 2010 midterms campaigned on cutting spending, no more debt ceiling increases, pushing for a balanced budget amendment, etc. They're simply sticking to what they said they would when they campaigned, while at the same time being villified by many for "failing to compromise".

Well it seems to me there are 2 choices, either:
-Stick to what you pledge to do during your campaign and being accused of failing to compromise.
-Not stick to what you pledged to do during your campaign for the sake of "compromise", thereby coming across as a hypocrite.

Would you rather have pols in general who stick to what they pledged to do during their campaign, or pols who campaign on doing one thing, and then when they get into office, doing another (which is typical of Washington)? Me, I'll take the pols (be they tea partiers or not) who stick to what they pledged to do during their campaign, period.

[∞∞∞]

I think most centrists understand that politicians can't keep every promise. I won't get upset if a politician doesn't fulfill everything they campaigned for because I understand that negotiating and compromise is a sign of a healthy democracy that cherishes the views of all, both majority and minority. The way the Tea Party approaches things isn't healthy for our republic. They think their view should represent everyone when the reality is that they don't represent the whole country. In my opinion, what the Tea Party has become is an oligarchic group taking advantage of our democratic way of life, and in turn threatening the future of America.

[kalm]

Trip and wedge:

And I'd like add that the head of the Tea Party Caucus is Michelle Bachmann...


Limit government spending unless it pertains to my farm and doctoring the gay out of people. Tea Party is no different from the rest.

[JoltinJoe]

F everyone in our government. At this point, I don't care if they come up with an agreement or not. All of them have showed how incompetent they are in their abilities to run the US. The only thing I'm gonna look forward to is doing my tiny part in trying to vote all the idiots out of office. What a ridiculous position we're in right now.

ps. also an especially big F you to the Tea Party. Cancer on this nation.

The tea partiers, at least the majority of them, for the 2010 midterms campaigned on cutting spending, no more debt ceiling increases, pushing for a balanced budget amendment, etc. They're simply sticking to what they said they would when they campaigned, while at the same time being villified by many for "failing to compromise".

Well it seems to me there are 2 choices, either:
-Stick to what you pledge to do during your campaign and being accused of failing to compromise.
-Not stick to what you pledged to do during your campaign for the sake of "compromise", thereby coming across as a hypocrite.

Would you rather have pols in general who stick to what they pledged to do during their campaign, or pols who campaign on doing one thing, and then when they get into office, doing another (which is typical of Washington)? Me, I'll take the pols (be they tea partiers or not) who stick to what they pledged to do during their campaign, period.

What is happening in Washington right now is 100% the fault of the President.

If he had not opportunistically parlayed his numbers in congress to pass through a national entitlement program which catered only to his liberal base and did not have broad-based support, when his mandate was to fix the economy and bring down unemployment, the Tea Party movement would have never gotten off the ground.

When he looks across the mall at the House of Representatives, and sees all those Tea Part activists railing against government spending and holding his feet to the fire, he can thank his own arrogance and lack of political acumen.

In politics, like physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The cost to the Democrats of "winning" the health care debate is that they have now lost the national debt ceiling debate. The problem is that they don't realize this. They think that because they still have the Senate, they can pull this out. Wrong. The Tea Party members are going to get their way or else. At this point, the Democrats have to essentially cave and cut the best deal they can with the Republicans.

[D1B]

The tea partiers, at least the majority of them, for the 2010 midterms campaigned on cutting spending, no more debt ceiling increases, pushing for a balanced budget amendment, etc. They're simply sticking to what they said they would when they campaigned, while at the same time being villified by many for "failing to compromise".

Well it seems to me there are 2 choices, either:
-Stick to what you pledge to do during your campaign and being accused of failing to compromise.
-Not stick to what you pledged to do during your campaign for the sake of "compromise", thereby coming across as a hypocrite.

Would you rather have pols in general who stick to what they pledged to do during their campaign, or pols who campaign on doing one thing, and then when they get into office, doing another (which is typical of Washington)? Me, I'll take the pols (be they tea partiers or not) who stick to what they pledged to do during their campaign, period.

What is happening in Washington right now is 100% the fault of the President.

If he had not opportunistically parlayed his numbers in congress to pass through a national entitlement program which catered only to his liberal base and did not have broad-based support, when his mandate was to fix the economy and bring down unemployment, the Tea Party movement would have never gotten off the ground.

When he looks across the mall at the House of Representatives, and sees all those Tea Part activists railing against government spending and holding his feet to the fire, he can thank his own arrogance and lack of political acumen.

In politics, like physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The cost to the Democrats of "winning" the health care debate is that they have now lost the national debt ceiling debate. The problem is that they don't realize this. They think that because they still have the Senate, they can pull this out. Wrong. The Tea Party members are going to get their way or else. At this point, the Democrats have to essentially cave and cut the best deal they can with the Republicans.

Good post as usual Joe, but you give the Tea Party too much credit. They initially opposed some of Obama's (with the support of republicans and key Tea Party figures) tough but necessary measures to help regular people buy and keep their homes. I don't think it was the healthcare issue that primarily got them off the ground and I wouldn't underestimate the role of racism and class war in their motivations. The Tea Party is another brilliant Rovian ruse to use uneducated whites to gain power and cash for corporations and the wealthy.

Here's the Tea Party:

The original Tea Party was launched by a real opponent of the political establishment — Rand Paul's father, Ron, whose grass-roots rallies for his 2008 presidential run were called by that name. The elder Paul will object to this characterization, but what he represents is something of a sacred role in American culture: the principled crackpot. He's a libertarian, but he means it. Sure, he takes typical, if exaggerated, Republican stances against taxes and regulation, but he also opposes federal drug laws ("The War on Drugs is totally out of control" and "All drugs should be decriminalized"), Bush's interventionist wars in the Middle East ("We cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a gun") and the Patriot Act; he even called for legalized prostitution and online gambling.

Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.

The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford — and now the government was going to bail them out.

"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"

Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.

Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks — which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife — had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.

Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch, whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum, Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services. He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me — I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.") Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are...

Full piece: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... 928?page=3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Ivytalk]

Matt Taibbi, right? It was just a matter of time...

[kalm]

Matt Taibbi, right? It was just a matter of time...

I didn't think you be able to recognize a real investigative journalist. Good on ya!

[D1B]

Matt Taibbi, right? It was just a matter of time...

The guy did his research. It's an ugly world out there Ivy.

Taibbi one of the few honest people and Rolling Stone one of the few honest rags.

[bulldog10jw]

Matt Taibbi, right? It was just a matter of time...

The guy did his research. It's an ugly world out there Ivy.

Taibbi one of the few honest people and Rolling Stone one of the few honest rags.

Sure. Can't find an agenda in Rolling Stone.

[bulldog10jw]

The Tea Party is another brilliant Rovian ruse to use uneducated whites to gain power and cash for corporations and the wealthy.

Even if true, how does this differ from the Democratic ruse to use uneducated Blacks and Latinos to gain power and cash for unions and the redistribution of wealth?

[D1B]

The Tea Party is another brilliant Rovian ruse to use uneducated whites to gain power and cash for corporations and the wealthy.

Even if true, how does this differ from the Democratic ruse to use uneducated Blacks and Latinos to gain power and cash for unions and the redistribution of wealth?

One uses racism to motivate, the other uses social justice and fair wages.

[D1B]

The guy did his research. It's an ugly world out there Ivy.

Taibbi one of the few honest people and Rolling Stone one of the few honest rags.

Sure. Can't find an agenda in Rolling Stone.

Everyone has an agenda.

[bulldog10jw]

Even if true, how does this differ from the Democratic ruse to use uneducated Blacks and Latinos to gain power and cash for unions and the redistribution of wealth?

One uses racism to motivate, the other uses social justice and fair wages.

I agree. Those damn Democratic racists exploiting minorities.

[D1B]

One uses racism to motivate, the other uses social justice and fair wages.

I agree. Those damn Democratic racists exploiting minorities.

What do we do with them BD? - the tens of millions of minorities and people living in poverty.

What do we do?

[bulldog10jw]

I agree. Those damn Democratic racists exploiting minorities.

What do we do with them BD? - the tens of millions of minorities and people living in poverty.

What do we do?

What CAN we do? "The Great Society" didn't work. The "rising tide lifting all boats" didn't work.

Does anyone on either side have any "new" ideas?

Truth. Neither side really cares.

[JoltinJoe]

What is happening in Washington right now is 100% the fault of the President.

If he had not opportunistically parlayed his numbers in congress to pass through a national entitlement program which catered only to his liberal base and did not have broad-based support, when his mandate was to fix the economy and bring down unemployment, the Tea Party movement would have never gotten off the ground.

When he looks across the mall at the House of Representatives, and sees all those Tea Part activists railing against government spending and holding his feet to the fire, he can thank his own arrogance and lack of political acumen.

In politics, like physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The cost to the Democrats of "winning" the health care debate is that they have now lost the national debt ceiling debate. The problem is that they don't realize this. They think that because they still have the Senate, they can pull this out. Wrong. The Tea Party members are going to get their way or else. At this point, the Democrats have to essentially cave and cut the best deal they can with the Republicans.

Good post as usual Joe, but you give the Tea Party too much credit. They initially opposed some of Obama's (with the support of republicans and key Tea Party figures) tough but necessary measures to help regular people buy and keep their homes. I don't think it was the healthcare issue that primarily got them off the ground and I wouldn't underestimate the role of racism and class war in their motivations. The Tea Party is another brilliant Rovian ruse to use uneducated whites to gain power and cash for corporations and the wealthy.

Here's the Tea Party:

The original Tea Party was launched by a real opponent of the political establishment — Rand Paul's father, Ron, whose grass-roots rallies for his 2008 presidential run were called by that name. The elder Paul will object to this characterization, but what he represents is something of a sacred role in American culture: the principled crackpot. He's a libertarian, but he means it. Sure, he takes typical, if exaggerated, Republican stances against taxes and regulation, but he also opposes federal drug laws ("The War on Drugs is totally out of control" and "All drugs should be decriminalized"), Bush's interventionist wars in the Middle East ("We cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a gun") and the Patriot Act; he even called for legalized prostitution and online gambling.

Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.

The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford — and now the government was going to bail them out.

"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"

Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.

Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks — which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife — had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.

Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch, whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum, Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services. He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me — I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.") Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? **** you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are...

Full piece: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... 928?page=3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I don't think I'm giving the Tea Party too much credit. I think many of them are zealots. My point is simply that so many of them are in Washington now because the President played politics with the national health care plan at a time when so many people were hurting economically.

A guy I know went to a Tea Party rally just to see what was going down. Many people there, he thought, were no more than curious. A speaker gets up and says, "Raise your hands. How many of you have benefited from our new Obamacare program?" Not a hand went up. He then said, "How many of you are hurting in some way economically because of this anemic recovery?" And every hand went up.

A lot of attention gets paid to those people at the Tea Party rallies holding signs with misspellings; or the dopes spewing hate speech. But very cogent moments like the one above described to me are really the impact moments that get people to the polls.

[D1B]

Good post as usual Joe, but you give the Tea Party too much credit. They initially opposed some of Obama's (with the support of republicans and key Tea Party figures) tough but necessary measures to help regular people buy and keep their homes. I don't think it was the healthcare issue that primarily got them off the ground and I wouldn't underestimate the role of racism and class war in their motivations. The Tea Party is another brilliant Rovian ruse to use uneducated whites to gain power and cash for corporations and the wealthy.

Here's the Tea Party:



Full piece: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... 928?page=3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I don't think I'm giving the Tea Party too much credit. I think many of them are zealots. My point is simply that so many of them are in Washington now because the President played politics with the national health care plan at a time when so many people were hurting economically.

A guy I know went to a Tea Party rally just to see what was going down. Many people there, he thought, were no more than curious. A speaker gets up and says, "Raise your hands. How many of you have benefited from our new Obamacare program?" Not a hand went up. He then said, "How many of you are hurting in some way economically because of this anemic recovery?" And every hand went up.

A lot of attention gets paid to those people at the Tea Party rallies holding signs with misspellings; or the dopes spewing hate speech. But very cogent moments like the one above described to me are really the impact moments that get people to the polls.

Fair enough Joe. Agree his timing and priorities may have been fucked.

Obama has been unfairly villified by the Tea Party. He was handed a fucking mess of a nation.

He's black and he tried to do something admirable for the poor - hence their hatred.

[BDKJMU]

I think most centrists understand that politicians can't keep every promise. I won't get upset if a politician doesn't fulfill everything they campaigned for because I understand that negotiating and compromise is a sign of a healthy democracy that cherishes the views of all, both majority and minority. The way the Tea Party approaches things isn't healthy for our republic. They think their view should represent everyone when the reality is that they don't represent the whole country. In my opinion, what the Tea Party has become is an oligarchic group taking advantage of our democratic way of life, and in turn threatening the future of America.

All that is a sign of is continuing to kick the can down the road. "Negotiating and compromise" will continue to get us a massive deficit with exploding national debt and interest on it.

"Negotiating and compromise" leaves us a choice of compromising between 2 turds- Boehner's plan, which doesn't cut a dime in ACTUAL spending, and Reids plan, which also doesn't cut a dime in ACTUAL spending. Slowing the rate of growth isn't a cut. They can "negotiate and compromise" between the 2 turds, but you still end up with a turd. Both plans leave us with massive budget deficits for years. Neither plan will likely ever lead to a balanced budget, much less begin to pay down the massive national debt.
-Neither plan does anything to substantially reduce the military's overstretched overseas footprint (and thereby allow the military's budget to be shrunk).
-Neither plan does anything to significantly cut foreign aid.
-Neither plan does anything to reduce the asinine over lap in govt programs. Remember the GAO audit released earlier this year that got a ton of media play that talked about all the overlap in govt programs?
Examples- 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless 80 programs for economic development, etc, etc, etc. There should be no more than one fed govt program for each of those things!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 65436.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-Neither plan does anything to cut (not slow the rate of growth, but actually cut) the budget of most fed departments. Heck, neither plan even freezes the budgets of most fed departments.
-Neither plan does anything to reform medicare (SS will take care of itself, as once the surplus in the SS Trust Fund runs out in a couple of decades, SS by law can't run a deficit, so everyone's bennies will be cut 25-30%).
I could go on and on......

"Negotiating and compromise" was what Reagan tried in the 80s' with the donk Congress. Was suppose to be $3 of spending cuts for every one of tax increases. Ended up with the tax increases, but no spending cuts. Thats the same thing that will happen with this Congress, or the next, unless they are FORCED to control their spending. What's the definition of insanity- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

"Negotiating and compromise" just continues the politics as usual of kicking the can down the road, leading us at a full sprint towards an economic cliff that at the current pace, about $1.00 in spending for every $.60 in revenue from the last few years continues to leave us with massive deficits, and explode the national debt so much that within a couple of decades the interest on the debt would chew up so much of the budget it wouldn't be able to be paid, no matter how much other spending was then cut and taxes were raised. We would be past the point of no return. As big as the US economy is would make Greece look like tiddly winks. Our credit rating wouldn't simply be downgraded, it would be complete junk. It would't be a simple recession, but a massive depression that could take decades to dig out from. Think of every negative economic consequence you can think of- sky high inflation, sky high interest rates, massive unemployment, massive tax increases, massive cuts in govt, a substantial decrease in the standard of living, etc, etc, etc. You could have class warfare, generational warfare, etc. The US wouldn't be a pretty place.

"Negotiating and compromise" ie politics as usual is threatening the future of America. Its fucking the future of our kids and grandkids.Its time for a line to be drawn in the sand. At least the tea party is trying to draw that line. Every time these spending addicts in congress raises the debt limit its like a crack addict taking another hit off a crack pipe. These spending addicts in Congress, more donk than conk, but on both sides of the aisle, need rehab. And that rehab is a balanced budget amendment. The only way these addicts will be constrained is with a balanced budget amendment of some sort (there are several versions out there) (unless someone knows of something else beside a BBA that will have the same effect- I'd love to hear it). Fuck "negotiate and compromise" Balance the god damn budget- I don't give a fuck how you do it- massively cut spending, shrink govt, raise taxes, whatever. But force those spending whores, the ones there now and any future ones elected, to balance the budget!

Ok, end of rant. I feel better now.

[BDKJMU]

And I swear I hadn't read Buchanon's article that Cid1990 started the other thread with, but I'm thinking along the same lines he is in regards to the Tea Partiers & the debt ceiling:

"Thanks to Tea Party fanatics, we are told, America just lost an historic opportunity to deal with her national debt.

Because of Tea Party intransigence and threats against their own leader John Boehner, the speaker had to reject Obama's "grand bargain," the "big deal" of $3 trillion in budget cuts for $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."

These crazed ideologues, the Tea Partiers, we are told by the talking heads, just do not understand that governing is about compromise.

And that is the mindset of a city that relishes nothing more than those "Kumbaya" moments when Democrats and Republicans break ranks and appear grinning together at a joint press conference to announce a "big deal" to do what is best for America.

Decade after decade, the play is re-enacted.

But the Tea Party folks were elected to close the play. As Ronald Reagan said, "We were sent here to drain the swamp, not to get along with the alligators."

And what have the big deals done for America?

Reagan was persuaded to sign on to a bipartisan big deal to cut spending three dollars for every dollar he accepted in new taxes. And the Gipper forever believed he had been lied to, as he got three dollars in tax hikes for every dollar in spending cuts.

Obama's offer to Boehner is the same one Reagan signed on to.

George H.W. Bush agreed to break his pledge of "no new taxes," and raised the top rate from Reagan's 28 percent to 35 percent.

How did that work out?

A recession ensued that probably cost Bush his presidency................................................................"

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45175" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[∞∞∞]

You can rant all you want, but a democracy without negotiations and compromise is just a dictatorship. Our government will work if we send to Washington people with brains...and not ideologies.

And look, the Tea Party is losing support. The rest of the country is finally waking up to their childish antics and I hope some of you guys will too. Most of us want a country that's about the "we," as in "We the People." The Tea Party is a political movement about the "me," as in "me vs. you." Independents realize it, Democrats realize it, and Republicans are finally waking up and realizing it. Argue all you want how they're sticking to their guns, but Americans are smart enough to know that allowing a small group of people to take this country hostage based on their narrow-minded ideologies will be the death of America. The beauty of a democracy is that past faults can be fixed. It takes time and new people in the Executive and Legislative branches, but it will get fixed. However, if the Tea Party is unwilling to listen to the views of others, then they are no better than the hundreds of statesmen who have "graced" the Capitol in the decades before. If there's an issue, "be a part* of the solution, not the problem."

*part (noun)

1. A portion, division, piece, or segment of a whole.
2. Any of several equal portions or fractions that can constitute a whole or into which a whole can be divided.

Ex. If a part isn't working in tandem with the others, the machine will face complete operational failure.

[BDKJMU]

You can rant all you want, but a democracy without negotiations and compromise is just a dictatorship. Our government will work if we send to Washington people with brains...and not ideologies.

And look, the Tea Party is losing support. The rest of the country is finally waking up to their childish antics and I hope some of you guys will too. Most of us want a country that's about the "we," as in "We the People." The Tea Party is a political movement about the "me," as in "me vs. you." Independents realize it, Democrats realize it, and Republicans are finally waking up and realizing it. Argue all you want how they're sticking to their guns, but Americans are smart enough to know that allowing a small group of people to take this country hostage based on their narrow-minded ideologies will be the death of America. The beauty of a democracy is that past faults can be fixed. It takes time and new people in the Executive and Legislative branches, but it will get fixed. However, if the Tea Party is unwilling to listen to the views of others, then they are no better than the hundreds of statesmen who have "graced" the Capitol in the decades before. If there's an issue, "be a part* of the solution, not the problem."

*part (noun)

1. A portion, division, piece, or segment of a whole.
2. Any of several equal portions or fractions that can constitute a whole or into which a whole can be divided.

Ex. If a part isn't working in tandem with the others, the machine will face complete operational failure.

There isn't any "Me" in Tea Party. I'm not a member, but for them its about WE are sick and tired of the kicking the can down the road, something I and a lot of others agree with.

"Small group of people" my ass Tea Party #s in the millions. Check out the results of the 2010 midterms. They're shaking up the establishment because they are such a LARGE group of people. If you think the Tea Party is a "small group of people" you're delusional.

"Narrow minded ideologies" my ass. 74% in that CNN poll want a Balanced Budget Amendment, and the majority of them aren't Tea Party members. Nothing narrow minded about not wanting the govt to spend more than it takes in and continuing to sink us deeper, and deeper into debt. It ain't rocket science. Its not re-inventing the wheel.

But what you advocate is continue business as usual in Washington, kicking the can down the road till it can't be kicked anymore. And then it will be too late..... That will be the death of America as we know it. Enjoy the good times while they last.

[CID1990]

You can rant all you want, but a democracy without negotiations and compromise is just a dictatorship. Our government will work if we send to Washington people with brains...and not ideologies.

And look, the Tea Party is losing support. The rest of the country is finally waking up to their childish antics and I hope some of you guys will too. Most of us want a country that's about the "we," as in "We the People." The Tea Party is a political movement about the "me," as in "me vs. you." Independents realize it, Democrats realize it, and Republicans are finally waking up and realizing it. Argue all you want how they're sticking to their guns, but Americans are smart enough to know that allowing a small group of people to take this country hostage based on their narrow-minded ideologies will be the death of America. The beauty of a democracy is that past faults can be fixed. It takes time and new people in the Executive and Legislative branches, but it will get fixed. However, if the Tea Party is unwilling to listen to the views of others, then they are no better than the hundreds of statesmen who have "graced" the Capitol in the decades before. If there's an issue, "be a part* of the solution, not the problem."

*part (noun)

1. A portion, division, piece, or segment of a whole.
2. Any of several equal portions or fractions that can constitute a whole or into which a whole can be divided.

Ex. If a part isn't working in tandem with the others, the machine will face complete operational failure.

Politicians NOT sticking to their guns and NOT staying true the people who elected them is precisely how we have come to this debate to begin with.

BTW- this is an empty argument anyway, because the logical endpoint is to suggest that we either 1) allow only certain people to vote, or 2) fundamentally change the Constitution.

The Tea Partiers were elected to to exactly what they are doing, so stop crying. This is the democratic process at work. If you would prefer to deny the voters their voice (which is what somehow stifling the Tea Party would be), then feel free to bring yourself over here to Vietnam and enjoy things as they would be if you and the rest of the knuckleheads got their way.

The fix to all this is going to involve pain. There is no way around it. Vilify who you want to, but the "compromise" everybody whines about is how you get big, expensive budget bills with no teeth.