Let's Do The Numbers

Budget Deficit (Surplus in parentheses)

Jimmy Carter

1977: $54B

1981: $79B

Change: +46.2963%

Ronald Reagan

1981: $79B

1989: $153B

Change: +93.6709%


George HW Bush

1989: $153B

1993: $255B

Change: +66.6667%


Bill Clinton

1993: $255B

2001: ($128B)

Change: -150.196%


George W Bush

2001: ($128B)

2009: $1.413T

Change: +1,203.91%


Barack Obama

2009: $1.413T

2017: $665B

Change: -52.937%


Donald Trump

2017: $665B

2021: $3.132T

Change: +370.977%


Joe Biden (to date)

2021: $3.132T

2023: $1.70T

Change: -45.7216%

Average Change

4 Democratic Presidents: - 50.639575%

4 Republican Presidents: +433.80615%

Making America Grumpy Again

While Republicans continue to bitch about how we need to unbundle the budget, and vote on individual spending bills, they insist on tying Ukraine aid to their demands to fund shittier treatment of immigrants.

There is no bottom that these clowns can't dig under.

Opinion

How Trump is wrecking hopes for a ‘reasonable’ Ukraine deal

Sen. Thom Tillis wants you to know that he’s very “reasonable.” That’s the word the North Carolina Republican used with reporters this week while describing immigration reforms that the GOP is demanding from Senate Democrats in exchange for supporting the billions in Ukraine aid that President Biden wants.

But the demands from Tillis and his fellow Republican leading the talks, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, are not reasonable at all — they’re following Donald Trump’s playbook. Under the guise of seeking more “border security,” they’re insisting on provisions that would reduce legal immigration in numerous ways that could even undermine the goal of securing the border.

According to Democratic sources familiar with the negotiations, Republican demands began to shift soon after the New York Times reported that in a second Trump term, he would launch mass removals of millions of undocumented immigrants, gut asylum seeking almost entirely, and dramatically expand migrant detention in “giant camps.”

As one Senate Democratic source told me, Republicans started acting as though Trump and his immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller were “looking over their shoulders.”

Biden has asked Congress to provide tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine and Israel, and an additional $14 billion to buttress the southern border with new law enforcement agents, expanded detention and other increased security measures. But Republicans won’t agree to that latter request — or the Ukraine aid — without substantial changes to immigration policy as well.

This week, Tillis told reporters that without “language on parole,” any compromise would not constitute “border security,” and without it, Republicans will oppose aid to Ukraine. That’s a reference to Biden’s use of parole authority for humanitarian purposes to allow 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to gain entry to the U.S. each month.

According to the Democratic sources, Republicans are demanding that presidential parole authority be scaled back so it can only be applied on an individual case-by-case basis, not to large groups from a single nationality.

That would functionally gut those programs entirely — an absurd demand. Under those parole grants, if migrants gain U.S. sponsors and pass background checks, they can live and work here for two years. This provides an orderly alternative to the mode of entry that enrages Republicans, in which migrants breach the border, seek asylum and disappear into the country while awaiting a hearing. Gutting parole could mean more of the latter.

“Canceling parole would significantly heighten the pressures on the border and the numbers of migrant crossings,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “It’s the opposite of what’s needed to strengthen border security.”

In another absurdity, Republicans have said publicly that Democrats must agree to reduce illegal border crossings by more than 50 percent. But that’s a fuzzy demand: It’s unclear how policy changes could dramatically slash the number who attempt to enter and simply get intercepted by law enforcement. When Democratic staffers sought clarification on this point, the sources say, they got nothing back.

Republicans would also raise the legal standard to qualify for asylum, and here the situation gets particularly frustrating. One can envision a compromise that provides changes to the asylum standard in exchange for, say, legalizing “dreamers” brought here illegally as children. But Republicans have ruled out making any such concessions. (Spokespeople for Tillis and Lankford didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

What’s really bizarre about the impasse is that Republicans should support much of what’s in Biden’s initial request for border security funding. After all, it would also fund expedited asylum processing, which could reduce the window for migrants to exploit the system and prompt faster removals for those who don’t qualify. Aren’t those things Republicans want?

To his credit, Tillis did compromise on this issue last year, when he and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) negotiated reforms that ultimately died in Congress. And Democrats say Lankford, who has acknowledged the need for both sides to compromise, is acting mostly in good faith. But Trump’s seemingly unshakable influence over the GOP stands to reshape these ongoing negotiations.

Trump’s loud broadcasting of plans for an extraordinarily cruel immigration crackdown if he is elected president again appears to be rendering Republicans even less open to compromise without him being in the room. Hence, their slapdash demand for cuts to legal immigration and other radical measures, which seems to cast about for some way to satiate the former president’s taste for draconian nativist savagery.

The bottom line: Senate Republicans are demanding that Democrats add numerous extreme concessions to a package that already gives Republicans many border security measures they ordinarily support, in exchange for Ukraine aid that many already back anyway.

Tillis and Lankford can either be “reasonable” in these negotiations, or they can satisfy Trump and Miller. But they can’t do both. Unfortunately, they appear to be privileging the latter.

Un-Fun Fact

At $800B ($800,000,000,000.00) per year,

the amount we spend on the US military

is greater than the GDP

of all but about 15 countries in the world.

What makes it really hard to push down on the spending is the fact that right now, the Ukrainians are using our weapons (and without a whole lot of training) to make the Russian army look a lot worse than they really are.

There are of course, other factors - all the NATO allies have pitched in quite a bit - but the tide really started to turn when the M777s showed up, and then the HIMARS, and soon (possibly) some F-16s too.

There has to be a way to find a better balance.

I don't now what that is, but we could expand nationwide programs and really dig into solving problems of mental health, hunger, crime, and homelessness with less than 10% of what we spend on ways to blow shit up.

Today's Press Poodle Award

It's like they just can't help themselves. When it starts to look like the reality of the situation is that yes, the shit going on in USAmerica Inc is in fact mostly because of the dog-ass GOP, the Press Poodles have to fuck with us - they feel the need to push some bullshit on us that "balances" it out again. 

I hate these fuckin' people sometimes.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Senate GOP prepares to block bill to fund government, stave off default

The expected opposition would deal a death blow to the measure, which had passed the House, and adds to pressure on Democrats to devise their own path ahead of a series of fiscal deadlines starting this week.

Senate Republicans on Monday prepared to block a bill that would fund the government, provide billions of dollars in hurricane relief and stave off a default in U.S. debts, part of the party’s renewed campaign to undermine President Biden’s broader economic agenda.

The GOP’s expected opposition is sure to deal a death blow to the measure, which had passed the House last week, and threatens to add to the pressure on Democrats to devise their own path forward ahead of a series of urgent fiscal deadlines. A failure to address the issues could cause severe financial calamity, the White House has warned, potentially plunging the United States into another recession.

Ahead of the planned Monday vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) staked his party’s position — that Republicans are not willing to vote for any measure that raises or suspends the debt ceiling, even if they have no intentions of shutting down the government in the process. GOP lawmakers feel that raising the borrowing limit, which allows the country to pay its bills, would enable Biden and his Democratic allies to pursue trillions in additional spending and other policy changes they do not support.

“If they want to tax, borrow, and spend historic sums of money without our input, they’ll have to raise the debt limit without our help. This is the reality. I’ve been saying this very clearly since July,” McConnell said last week.

Democrats have sharply rebuked that reasoning: They have pointed to the fact that the country’s debts predate the current debate, arguing that some of its bills, including a roughly $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package adopted in December, had been racked up on a bipartisan basis. Democrats also have stressed they had worked with Republicans under President Donald Trump to raise the debt ceiling even when he pursued policies they did not support, including the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Democrats’ arguments have failed to sway Republicans, resulting in a widely predicted outcome that now forces Democrats to recalibrate their strategy on a tight timeline. They have until Thursday at midnight to craft a plan to fund the government, or else key federal operations will suspend or scale back many operations Friday morning. And they must act before mid-October to raise the debt ceiling, or they could risk a financial calamity that could destabilize global markets.

It is not clear how the Biden administration might respond in the event Congress failed to act in time to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, which would be an unprecedented event. Officials in the past have studied whether they could prioritize certain debt payments while delaying obligations, but some at the Treasury Department previously have described such a process as largely unworkable, since many investors could still consider the U.S. government to be in default if it started missing any scheduled payments.

The high stakes prompted Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard on Monday to stress that Congress has no alternative but to take action before the looming deadline.

“Congress knows what it needs to do. It needs to step up,” Brainard said at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics. She added that the “American people have had enough drama” over the past year.

The standoff only serves to highlight the intensifying acrimony on Capitol Hill, where Democrats on Monday are also set to forge ahead on their plans to adopt as much as $4 trillion in new spending initiatives backed by Biden. That includes a plan to improve the nation’s infrastructure, which Republicans support, and another that raises taxes to fund new health-care, education and climate initiatives, which the GOP opposes. Those measures also hang in the balance, as the House had hoped to begin debating them — and potentially hold votes — as soon as this week.

Republicans say they are still willing to support a funding stopgap, so long as it is entirely divorced from the debt ceiling. Absent an agreement, Washington would grind to a halt, disrupting federal agencies that are responding to the coronavirus while leaving thousands of federal employees out of work and without a paycheck.

“There would be a lot of Republican votes for that,” Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) predicted Sunday during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Democrats have also pledged to prevent a government shutdown, raising the odds that lawmakers can still stave off a worst-case scenario by the end of week — so long as the two parties cooperate. Their eventual measure is also expected to include billions of dollars to respond to two recent, deadly hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard, as well as money to help resettle Afghan refugees.

But the fight over the debt ceiling is another matter entirely.

Even as they readied a vote against the suspension Monday, Republicans maintained they do not want the U.S. government to default. Instead, they have said Democrats should shoulder the burden on their own given their proposed increases in federal spending, including a roughly $3.5 trillion tax-and-spending package they hope to move through the House as soon as this week.

Democrats plan to advance that measure through a legislative maneuver known as reconciliation. The move allows them to sidestep Republican opposition, particularly once it reaches the Senate, where the party has only 51 votes — and otherwise would need 60 to proceed. But GOP lawmakers have seized on the process, demanding that Democrats also use it to increase the debt ceiling.

The move is easier said than done: It could be time consuming, and it could expose Democrats to a series of uncomfortable political votes. And it is guaranteed to force the party to choose a specific number by which to raise the country’s borrowing limit, rather than merely suspending it, perhaps turning the entire process into fodder for GOP attacks entering the 2022 congressional midterms.

The entire endeavor has frustrated Democrats, recalling for some the brinkmanship over the debt ceiling from a decade ago that hammered U.S. markets and spooked investors globally, as the country for the first time risked the potential for default. The standoff ended only after Democrats agreed to across-the-board budget cuts and caps that they say decimated the ability of federal agencies to provide much-needed health and education programs.

“It is bad for the economy. It is bad during this time we are struggling with a pandemic,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said during an interview on CNN over the weekend, noting that Republicans added more than $7 trillion to the deficit under Trump. “These are the kinds of things that should be pro forma.”

And the kicker:

If this isn't more of the usual cynical bullshit, it seems like Wall Street would be freaking out just a tiny bit.

So the real question is:

Why the fuck do we have to be forced to live on the knife's edge all the fuckin' time?

New Thinking

Like most everybody else, I've been wondering how billionaires got so much more billionare-y and the stock market kept rollin' in the midst of a pandemic that basically shot large holes in the economy and pushed the deficit to places that make us all more than a little cranky.

If I take this lady at her word, I can wonder no more and start to understand that Bernie and AOC and the other "crazy lefties" may actually have it just about right.

And that in itself is pretty fuckin' scary for a hard-core(ish) capitalist like your favorite blogger.

Anyway, here's Stephanie Kelton, PhD, trying to lay it out for me in a way that doesn't make my head hurt as badly as would normally be the case for me.

The big easy take-away for me is her concept of balance - ie: a deficit on the government side always equals a surplus on the private side, and vice versa. That's the Zero-Sum Game that matters.

And it works the same on the macro scale as well. A trade deficit in USAmerica Inc is always in balance with a surplus somewhere else.

The 2nd point is that, yes, it seems wildly counter-intuitive and unwise and crazy and stoopid just to create whatever money we need by pushing a few buttons on a computer keyboard in Steve Mnuchin's office, but it really doesn't matter how much "funny money" we conjure up out of thin air as long as most of us maintain a sufficient level of confidence in the system, and - muy importante - as long inflation is under the magic 5% mark, which according to Dr Kelton is about the only real constraint we have to worry about.

What remains for me to figure out: 

The people "in charge" have to know about all this, but they keep acting like they don't know what's going on, so what are those fuckers up to behind our backs as they're doing the shit that's going on?

On Joe's Plan

First: The national debt and the federal deficit are not IOUs that come due when our grandkids have kids and everybody goes bust trying to pay it all back.

Second: as Biden rolls out his plan to get us back in the game, we can expect the Republicans to rediscover their rabid convictions over fiscal conservancy - and who the fuck is anybody trying to kid on that one? Everybody knows that's what's coming and everybody knows they're still full of shit and everybody's still going to point at GOP hypocrisy like they've discovered something brand new about Republicans being assholes. 

Mother Jones:

On Thursday night, President-elect Joe Biden outlined the first portion of his administration’s two-step plan to contain the coronavirus and revive the struggling American economy. A key emphasis of his proposal is to give immediate, individual relief to Americans suffering in the pandemic-induced recession.

The so-called American Rescue Plan that Biden unveiled includes $1.9 trillion of relief spending. The proposal includes about a trillion dollars for extending unemployment benefits, rental aid, expanded child care assistance, direct payments of $1,400 to qualifying households, and more. It also includes $350 billion in aid to state and local governments whose budgets have been pummeled by the economic slowdown, and $20 billion to help distribute vaccines more quickly to Americans.

- snip -

Unemployment

Jobs numbers this month have shown, in more ways than one, that the labor market’s recovery is sputtering. The Labor Department announced last week that employers had cut 140,000 jobs in December, as COVID-19 surged around the country, leading to stricter shutdowns. On Thursday, Labor published data showing that 1.2 million people had applied for unemployment benefits last week, an increase of more than 300,000 over the week before.

Biden’s rescue plan seeks to ease the unemployment crisis with a number of immediate measures, including:

• Increasing the $300-per-week unemployment boost, passed by Congress last month, to $400
• Extending both regular unemployment and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which offered help to independent contractors and others who don’t normally qualify. Last month, Congress extended both of these programs through mid-March. Biden’s proposal would further extend them through September.

$1,400 checks

Biden’s plan will give stimulus checks of up to $1,400 per individual or $2,800 per household. This amount, plus the $600 checks Americans received from the $900 billion stimulus package that President Trump signed last month, adds up to the $2,000-per-person promise Biden made while stumping for the Senate candidates in Georgia. But some progressive lawmakers, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are calling on Biden to include a full $2,000 in his plan. Ocasio-Cortez accuses him of stopping short of his pledge: “$2,000 means $2,000;” she told the Washington Post, “$2,000 does not mean $1,400.”

Child Care

The pandemic has perpetuated a child care crisis in America. Protective equipment and safety measures have increased operating costs for child care providers at the same time that their enrollment is declining because of contagion fears and the vast numbers of working parents who have lost jobs. Many providers face the prospect of closing permanently, which also could jeopardize parents’ ability to return to work as the economy improves.

Biden’s plan expands child care tax credits for one year, providing families up to $4,000 for one child and $8,000 for two or more, and adds another $15 billion to a child care block grant program to help families pay for care, prioritizing those who lost their jobs during the pandemic and are struggling to afford care. The plan also earmarks $25 billion in emergency funding to keep struggling child care centers afloat.

Evictions and rental assistance

Even as the pandemic has produced staggering job losses, it has also wrought a housing crisis, causing millions of tenants to fall behind on rent. Many such households have been able to stay put thanks to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s moratorium on evictions. In December, Congress extended that moratorium through the end of January. It also allotted $25 billion in rental assistance for tenants, since the moratorium doesn’t wipe out any back rent owed to landlords. A relief proposal outline provided by senior Biden administration officials notes, “While the $25 billion allocated by Congress was an important down payment on the back rent accrued during this crisis, it is insufficient to meet the scale of the need”—and it calls on Congress to allocate another $25 billion in assistance.

Were Congress to pass Biden’s proposal, it’s possible this doubling of rental relief would still be insufficient: In December, Moody’s Analytics predicted that rental debt in the US will have climbed to $70 billion by year’s end.

Tax credits

Biden’s proposal includes additional relief in the form of a one-year expansion of two tax credits that target low-income households. The first, the Earned Income Tax Credit, lets families below a certain income threshold reduce their tax liability, and grows larger for households with children. Biden proposes more than doubling the credit for childless adults - to $1,500 - and raising the income threshold for eligibility.

He’s also proposing to raise the Child Tax Credit to $3,000 per kid—and more for children under six. Biden wants to make the full credit refundable—meaning that if it brings a household’s tax liability below zero, the family will get a tax refund.

One element notably absent from Biden’s rescue plan is student loan forgiveness or forbearance. This summer, the education department suspended student loan payments and the accrual of interest on federal student loans. That forbearance is slated to expire January 31.

Biden has previously promised to extend the forbearance in the first days after his swearing-in. In a call with reporters on Thursday, administration officials said forbearance was still a priority for the president-elect, and that Biden would address the issue directly in the next phase of his recovery plan. They also reiterated Biden’s desire to make good on his promise to forgive up to $10,000 in student debt. Transition officials have expressed hope that the package will garner bipartisan support, so it can pass the Senate with 60 votes.

The inevitable bullshit about "how ya gonna pay for all that, libtard?" is going to pop up, and we have to countervail it with something like "we'll pay for it with the yacht money we gave away to all those rich legacy pukes - they'll just have to postpone their gratification for a little while."

Needs work, but you get the idea. 

"Paying for it" is a red herring to begin with, so maybe a better way of rebutting would be just to point out that paying for their 2nd or 3rd yacht shouldn't be up to pensioners and school kids.

Heavens To Betsy

Your budget is a statement of your values. What do you prioritize? What things do you promote over other things? What is it you value most?

Dots

The federal budget is a statement of our values. And our values are now nothing but the kind of Friedmanesque "Rational Self-Interest" that says as long as I get what I want everybody else can take a flyin' fuck at a rollin' donut.

John Oliver:

This is not a philosophy of governance. This is a fucking robbery.

Keep This In Mind

(Paraphrasing)

"You don't have to tell me about your values. Just show me your budget and I'll know exactly what your values are."

--Joe Biden's dad

Today's Tweet

Under @POTUS budget, virtually all fed funding to #NYPD eradicated. Entire counterterrorism apparatus in nation's top terror target hobbled. pic.twitter.com/Vetyv1aZrH

— Commissioner O'Neill (@NYPDONeill) March 16, 2017

Like the man said: It's not about budgets - it's about retribution for somebody having insulted 45*'s delicate sensibilities.

On The Budget

WaPo:

On Thursday, the Trump administration released a preliminary 2018 budget proposal, which details many of the changes the president wants to make to the federal government’s spending. The proposal covers only discretionary, not mandatory, spending.

To pay for an increase in defense spending, a down payment on the border wall and school voucher programs, among other things, funding was cut from the discretionary budgets of other executive departments and agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and the Agriculture Department took the hardest hits. The proposal also eliminates funding for these 19 agencies.

 

The piece lets you focus in on recaps for individual departments, like Agriculture (eg):

Here It Comes

Grease up and bend over, America - the GOP's back in town.

The Hill:

The two committees will be working on the bills even though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not completed its analysis; as a result, estimates of the plan’s cost and how many people could lose coverage will not be immediately available.

Sources said previous versions of the plan faced unfavorable coverage numbers from the CBO.

The tax credit under the GOP plan ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a year per individual, increasing with someone’s age. That system would provide less financial assistance for low-income and older people than ­ObamaCare, but could give more assistance to younger people and those with somewhat higher incomes.

Democrats warn that between the phasing out of ­ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion and the smaller tax credit for poorer people, the 20 million people who gained coverage in recent years will be put at risk.

So let's see - the GOP has long contended that 47% of us don't pay federal taxes, so obviously, the best way to help us with this healthcare insurance thing is to give everybody a federal tax break.

Why do I always get the feeling that there's no vision or imagination in the GOP that isn't aimed at fucking us over in another attempt to advance a bogus economic theory, even when every one of those attempts turns out to be further proof that it doesn't fucking work?

And let's not lose sight of the high probability that guys like Ryan would engineer the "collapse" of Obamacare as a political maneuver just so they could use it to bully their way thru with this new bullshit plan (which is nothing new at all).

1. Fuck it up
2. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up"
3. Sell your ideology-driven bullshit as the only solution that can possibly help
4. Collect campaign contributions from the cronies who get richer from that solution
5. Enjoy our re-election
6. Find something else you can "fix" and start again at step 1

What We Really Need

"... are fewer people who think there's one single thing that will solve all of our problems ..."

Lily Eskelsen, NEA President:

Gimme what we'll spend the next several years on a coupla fully-loaded Ford class aircraft carriers, and I'll turn every public school in this joint into a fucking palace.  Not by painting the walls and landscaping the parking lots, but by helping the people who struggle sometimes just to survive in the neighborhoods where those schools are. 

You can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods.  And you can't fix the neighborhoods without giving people solid reasons to believe we're not gonna turn our backs on them and allow their kids to be mangled and pulverized by the cycle of poverty ignorance and crime. 

Today's Winner

This one (Democratic Underground) wins the intertoobz for today:

Been Wondering

We've seen certain things pop up regarding the much slower growth in federal hiring under Obama; and the dramatic decreases in deficits and debt; and the low inflation numbers; and the uptick in hiring along with the steady drop in unemployment; etc etc etc.

And when I say "pop up" I mean "hardly a fucking word about any of it from the Press Poodles".

But hey - maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I've been wondering why the Repubs aren't jumping up and down screaming about how they've been right about everything, and how all these unicorns and rainbows came about because they forced the Prez to rein in all that reckless outa-control spending ... that wasn't and still isn't ... uhm ... you know - happening.

Well guess what, kids.

"Congress has severely damaged the economy with deep spending cuts in a misguided attempt to solve a short-term debt crisis that simply does not exist," wrote CAP economists Harry Stein and Adam Hersh.

The progressive think tank's analysis is based on the latest budget outlook from the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan congressional research group, which was released on Tuesday.

So where are you, Democrats?  Why is there no talk from you guys about "the failed conservative policies of the past"?  Are you guys so inept that you can't see this opportunity?  Are you so truly bereft of testicular fortitude that Elizabeth Warren is the only one unwilling to remain comfortable in the role of battered spouse?

Get up on your hind legs and make some fuckin' noise, dammit.

Death And Taxes

Wanna get a good close look at where all the money goes?

Here it is.

A few screen shots:

Seriously, They Just Lie

Via Rude Pundit (cain't hep muhsef - the guy's on fire):

And notice the kicker (from the GOP.gov website) - they "repealed" ObamaCare on 01-19-2011, and then, a day later, they passed a resolution instructing their committees to come up with a replacement.

They've got nothing.  They know their little scheme is going nowhere in the senate, and they know Obama wouldn't sign it into law, and they know they can't override a veto.  So they pretend - they literally just make shit up.

But to hear them tell it, Obama's the one who's lying about everything?

One last thing - their website also has this:

On the rare occasion when the Press Poodles aren't busy wearing their asses for hats, we've heard a tiny bit that the Deficit's been coming down in almost remarkable fashion (which means the Debt will be reduced as well).  And I've wondered why the Repubs aren't playing it up a little more, trying to claim it's because of their steely-eyed grit and determination to hold Obama's spend-thrift instincts in check blahblahblah.  They've tagged Sequestration as Obama's idea (in an obvious attempt to cause pain and then blame The Prez) but gosh - it seems to be backfiring on them.

Sequestration's still a pretty stupid thing, but they can't afford to own it and they can't afford to let it make Obama look good.  So by trying to have it both ways (as usual), they get dick (as it should be).

The Party Of No Fucking Way Am I Votin' Fer These Pricks

If past is prologue, then there will come a time when a buncha Repubs will start revising the history of these last coupla weeks. I figure it oughta start just about June or July next year once they've safely lied their way around or thru their primaries, and have to start the 2014 campaigns proper.

They will spin all manner of yarn about how they didn't really vote to fuck over hungry children and homeless veterans and anybody trying to eke by on a few bucks invested in T-Bills - and they're going to go to the ends of the Earth trying to tell us we didn't actually watch as they all took a giant shit in each other's hats.

These people voted to go on wasting 12 Billion Dollars of the US economy (per week).

And they voted to make the world's Big Market Players so antsy that a fuckload of investors are looking to put their money in just about anything, just about anywhere but here in USAmerica Incorporated.  So I hafta wonder: if the GOP is really "the party of business", and if they really want the US to be run like a company, then why the fuck are they working so hard to make America unattractive to our investors?

Senate

Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)
John Cornyn (R-Texas)
Mike Crapo (R-Idaho)
Ted Cruz (R-Texas)
Mike Enzi (R-Wy.)
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
Dean Heller (R-Nev.)
Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
Mike Lee (R-Utah)
Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
James Risch (R-Idaho)
Pat Roberts (R-Kan.)
Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
Tim Scott (R-S.C.)
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
Pat Toomey (R-Pa.)
David Vitter (R-La.)

House

Find your Critter here: Daily Kos (How every Congresscritter voted on shutdown & default (w/spotlight: Georgia)

What It's Costing Us

We're allergic to paying for the things that actually make us exceptional - and I'm not talking about the empty rhetorical bullshit being peddled by "conservatives".

Up Next

Let's hope the fuck ups in congress can get done fucking up the Federal Budget and the US Credit Rating and the global economy real soon so they get on to the confirmation fight over Janet Yellen and fuck that one up too.

Can't wait - should be lotsa fun.