StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-tea-party-is-unyielding-on-the-debt-ceiling/2011/07/27/gIQAGvEVdI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

Here is the ‘Leader’ of the Tea Party movement explaining the moral and political necessity of Austerity, of fiscal responsibility, in the age of the failure of American Capitalism, post financial reform. Mr. Judson Phillips core belief is that suffrage be limited to property owners exclusively, should we be surprised?  Another instance of a political romanticism carefully framed via a usable political nostalgia. Mr. Phillips is being bankrolled by the Koch brothers among others, so beware of this ‘false prophet’ and his particular brand of political nihilism, of a permanent insurgency rather than the political challenge of compromise, as the imperative of the exercise of republican civic responsibility.  Below is a link to a Frank Rich column of August 28, 2010 that has some revelatory information and below that Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article of August 30, 2010 on the Koch brothers

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

Political Observer

      

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/invoke-the-14th–and-end-the-debt-standoff/2011/07/01/gHQAUif8yH_story.html

'There are reasons why such a solution is less than ideal. There ought to be some concern about executive overreach; the very idea of the president deciding which laws are and are not constitutional has disturbing ramifications. And to the extent that the goal of the move is to prevent market panic, it remains an open question as to whether it would succeed. But market panic will surely come with the failure to reach a deal altogether. The consequences of default are simply too severe — and too long-lasting — to take this option off the table. It may not be ideal as an elective choice, but as an option of last resort, it is a necessity.'

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/debt_madness_was_always_about_killing_social_security_20110727/

'What is at stake is a radical Republican agenda to totally reverse the progress in economic justice that began with the great reforms of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Consider the direct consequence of the economic crisis that unfettered Wall Street greed has wrought, particularly in reversing the gains made by the most underprivileged sectors of the population. As The Wall Street Journal reported, based on a Pew Research Center study from 2005 to 2009, “The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation’s two largest minorities—Hispanics and blacks—has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession. … The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago. …”'

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/26/debt-ceiling-crisis-boehner-s-hypocritical-response.html

'As you watch this drama play out over the next seven days, don’t forget that this is an entirely forced fire-drill.  The debt ceiling has been raised more or less automatically in the past—77 times since JFK, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan and 7 times under George W. Bush.  Republicans were not rushing to the ramparts then — consistent with their heightened concern over deficits that comes only when Democrats are in the White House.'

Just one more plutocratic political romantic to add to an already overcrowded field of Sclerotic Old White Guys and their surrogates. That Mr. Huntsman is a proponent of Civil Unions is a sop to the Log Cabins and their delusion of belonging. He makes the timid New Democrat with no fight, President Obama seem like my best progressive Christian friend. I'm not in the mood to entertain any delusion about where I stand in Hetro-America: second class citizen!
Queer Atheist 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26brooks.html?ref=opinion

 

‘Some of us like to think big. We thought at the beginning of this debt crisis that it might be possible to reach a Grand Bargain. This deal would make a serious dent in the country’s awful debt problem. It would begin to reform entitlements. It would involve enough revenue to forestall ruinous cuts in domestic programs.’

Here is the laughable opening paragraph of David Brooks’ latest column titled Congress In the Lead.  It’s all there, the self-congratulatory style, Big Thinking as an imitation of real thought, almost bursting the seams of its’ rhetorical frame. He can’t let go of The Grand Bargain, it won’t happen, as he reports, but the capacious intellectual vacuity of this idea has irresistible appeal to our writer; Mr. Brooks has never been modest, although he is sometimes coy.  But in just under 800 words, in his inimitably breathless foreshortened style, he narrates the denouement of the Fake Debt Crisis, in which the lead switches from President Obama to the Congress, meaning the Republican controlled House and the Democratically controlled Senate. As the deadline of August 2, 2011 approaches, the melodramatic tension increases to a fever pitch. It is great television, perfect for the small screen.  And Mr. Brooks is having a grand time, reassuring his avid readers, that reasonable establishmentarians will prevail, and a Default will just be avoided, by the actions of big thinkers like himself, among others.  As the American Empire’s slow but steady decline continues apace, with all the garnishes that were once the envy of the huddled masses, we must feel a certain good fortune in having Public Men of the caliber of Mr. Brooks: to lead an enlightened public discourse and to have such men who continually remind us of their public virtue.

Political Cynic     

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/congress-stands-its-ground/2011/07/25/gIQAmvNsYI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

George F. Will has been a Republican Party operative since the days of his duel employment by President Reagan and ABC News. While that is old news, indeed, it was a flagrant breach of the public trust, the flouting of any real notion of conflict of interest: public integrity and its concomitant notion of a public morality exercised in historical time is passé in Mr. Will’s world view, it failed to fit the Free Market paradigm. Mr. Will has over time proclaimed his ethical superiority as a fact, while never demonstrating that bit of moral legerdemain. This is mere introduction to this hectoring, even overtly insulting, opinion piece in which President Obama is cast in the role of Devil opposed to the ‘ Virtuous 87’ elected  Tea party Jacobins, this all taking place within the narrative bounds of American Political Theology. Mr. Will has cast his lot with the most radical wing, the No-Nothing fringe, of a Republican Party that has utterly discarded any notion of political rationality or the notion or practice of political compromise, while maintaining an unending narrative steeped in fomented hysteria. Here is a quotation:

‘It has, however, rescued the nation from Obama’s preference for a “clean” debt-ceiling increase that would ignore the onrushing debt tsunami. There are 87 reasons for Obama’s temporary conversion of convenience to the cause of spending restraint — the 87 House Republican freshmen. Their inflexibility astonishes and scandalizes Washington because it reflects the rarity of serene fidelity to campaign promises.’

 Mr. Will’s ultimate rhetorical destination is the constitutional practice of separate but equal branches of government, which is the lynchpin of his whole column. But Mr. Will has been inconsistent in his advocacy of that idea, it has been a matter of political pragmatism, even political opportunism, that brought him to this position, after the defeat of the Republicans in 2008 and the political victory of The Socialist Obama.

But let me now present my argument as to the thrust of this latest propaganda piece: the Debt Ceiling Crisis is another one in a long line of fake crises, manufactured by an utterly desperate Republican Party to rescue it from its marginal political status, aided and abetted by President Obama, who is not a New Deal Democrat but a New Democrat, who unreflectively enunciated the new party line of the evils of deficits .This whole line of argument can serve the Republicans well by establishing in the public mind the lack of viability of any form of  Neo-Keynesianism, as a way of addressing any economic problem, after a through demonization in the public debate. As Paul Krugman has pointed out on his blog, this is 1937 and the idea and practice of austerity will not work, except as a strategy to get a Republican elected in 2012, by putting an already struggling economy in further jeopardy.

Political Observer