Just got home from a grueling day of window shopping at the Palisades Mall near Nyack. I hate to shop but the kid took my best pair of gladiators with her on vacation and I needed a replacement pair.
What I really wanted was to get away from this interminable debt ceiling screwup for awhile. But when I got home, I found that there are a bunch of idiots still talking about it on the House floor. And I’m reading that we can’tt pivot to addressing unemployment until we bring down the deficit in a harsh, draconian way. Like, I’m supposed to believe that. What do they take us for? Idiots? We know there’s no way in hell the passage of this bill is going to help the economy or the unemployed. It’s going to make matters worse. There will be more federal and state workers laid off and probably higher state and property taxes to offset what is lost.
More people window shopping and fewer people spending means another slam at the economy and more lost jobs. And I am firmly of the opinion that the Republicans actually *want* this outcome. They want the economy to be so bad next year that Obama is a one-termer. Hey, fine with me. I have no problem with Obama leaving the White House to spend more time with his family, write a book and go on a lucrative speaking tour. He is over his head. We knew this would happen with Obama in the White House. No, seriously, go back to the beginning of this blog and read all about why we objected to obama’s nomination.
So, the likely scenario is that this stupid bill gets passed by Republicans and signed into law by Obama and the Democrats wash their hands of it. Yep, get as far away from this radioactive fart as you possibly can get, Dems. Let Obama take the fall for this and when you see once and for all that he’s killing your party, think long and hard about whether you want him as your fearful leader for four more years.
Blog the vote in the comment thread and make your predictions.
Update: Radioactive fart bill has passed the House.
Found on twitter: “Left calls for original birth certificate; believes Obama was really born a Republican”
Also, Jeff Jarvis has started a new hashtag- #Hillaryforpresident. It’s time.
Filed under: General | Tagged: budget, debt ceiling, Economy, unemployment |
The Confluence 
The only smart thing I heard on the news is that a bunch of Dems and a bunch of Repugs want to hold off to vote last. They don’t want to vote FOR it unless their vote is really, really needed.
What a surprise! No one really wants their vote to count.
Where are the Dems marching to their button to cast the First Vote NO?
(crickets)
It’s great to see Gabrielle Giffords back on the House floor. She looks like she is recuperating very well in spite of her devastating injuries.
Too bad she voted for the bill.
Unbelievable. In every way.
The one bright spot (really bright spot) of the day.
Is there a countdown clock for the end of the Democratic Party? What a
fuckingwaste of money they are.We’re cannon fodder in their battle for riches and we won’t even get the crumbs.
I love mixed metaphors!
I don’t think Obama is in over his head-he has been a very successful right-wing President. If there is a coup here, it is against the principles of the Democratic Party, and Obama has been leading it.
We so don’t matter to these people…the very fact we are not millionaires( the new middle class) is more than enough to make us not worth worrying about in the least.
I’m wait for a bill to pass to change the words on The Statue of Liberty from ” … Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. …
To our new guiding light :
comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted
What is there to say? Bernie Sanders for President. Not sure if I know enough about Bernie but I sure like what he’s been saying recently. I wonder how he’s going to vote.
Bernie says “Immoral, grotesque and unfair”. I think I can live with him as President.
Bernie can say whatever he likes. No filibuster, right? So who cares.
Yeah, even that great 7 hour speech last December was on a dull Friday, not Monday – the day of the vote.
Exactly
When Obama expressed admiration for Reagan’s way of doing things, he was serious. Of course his supporters never wanted to hear that.
This extracongressional committee is a backdoor to achieve both the goals of the tea party and Barack Obama, that is to dismantle Social Security and Medicare.
Riverdaughter,
Primary him with Hillary?
By all means.
I want him punished and the Democratic Party seriously rattled.
But he could not and did not make this mess all by himself.
The Democrats have been taken over by soft neoliberals who see their role as dismantling the progressive achievements of the last century more slowly than the GOP wants to do, and see that role as enabling them to campaign as sincere and heroic defenders of progressivism who have fought loyally but powerlessly before an irresistible GOP tide.
But if you intend to actually support Hillary and the Democrats if she primaries Obama and wins I have to think you are still at heart a loyal Democrat and all the talk on this blog of a need for a new party seriously committed to progressive achievements and values, however sincere for those who posted it, was for you only venting enduring anger that Hillary didn’t win the nomination back in 2008.
Is that right?
My own idea of a fair package would contain only tax hikes on the rich, but I am certainly open to some spending cuts for the Pentagon and some other parts of the national security apparatus.
Bernie S has said his idea of an acceptable package – not necessarily the same thing as a fair package – could contain mostly spending cuts but would contain some tax increases and no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.
And today I saw a clip in which he insisted he would not vote for the deal currently being hammered out.
Jane Hamsher dismissed him and the entire progressive caucus, but I don’t think she’s being entirely fair.
My thought is that though they would make solid and reliable liberals in a liberal party they are not in a liberal party and keep getting pressured, dragged, and bullied into positions further right than they are actually comfortable with.
Bernie is pretty good, but though he is not a Democrat he is too close to and too much like the others who are.
He just doesn’t seem committed enough or bloody-minded enough to play the role of adamantine liberal.
Still, he has long since got used to running as a progressive outside the Democrats.
That might make him less willing than the others to join another party committed to replacing the Democrats and really and truly not just saving the progressive achievements of the past but making new ones.
On the other hand, though Bill Cllinton has insisted Obama ought simply to invoke the 14th he represents the kind of Democrat who has made the party something we need to just give up on.
You can give up on Bill Clinton if you want to. It’s not like he’s going to run again.
His wife, however, is her own person, not that she couldn’t learn a thing or two from him.
I like Bernie. I could definitely see myself voting for him.
BUT given Obama’s pathetic performance thus far, there is absolutely no reason to vote for him. There are other politicians that can do the job, including Hillary and Bernie, and as long as they’re out there, we should stop trying to redirect the conversation to considering Obama as the only possible nominee.
The party can continue to try to play this game of discouraging voters from thinking that anyone else can run and win and we will continue to resist. If I were the party right now, I would not be counting on learned helplessness. Remember Martha Coakley in Massachusetts and John Corzine in NJ? They lost not because Republicans turned out but because Democrats stayed home.
Think about that.
We’re not stupid enough to believe there are no other choices. There are always choices. Even the ones that the party doesn’t like very much. It needs to get over Obama and fast because the rest of the country already has.
Sorry, meant “less unwilling,” of course, in that next to last sentence.
watching the Senate getting ready to vote. 😦
Bill and Obama. They are not of the same cloth…we did not get to Obama via Bill Clinton…but via Bush 2 . That is Obama’s political blood lines. GOP in a Dem sheep skin
Bill would fight and freaking GET something for any accommodation. He constantly peppered the GOP with bills helpful to the average person and had lines in the sand that remained there…
NAFTA.
Welfare “reform.”
“The era of big government is over.”
DLC Democrats are just slow neoliberals.