This Is How Low We've Sunk

The pursuit of higher education and attending college, once a long-standing pillar of the American Dream, is now controversial. Because, you know, Obama supports it.

The tea bagger interviewed in the article scoffs at the Socialist Kenyan Usurper's librul elitist hogwash because, "we need garbageman, we need welders, carpenters." And that is certainly true. But the distinction here is that the President would seek to increase access to higher education so that people have the choice to either go to college or become a garbageman, welder, or carpenter. You shouldn't have to be relegated to a career as a garbageman simply because higher education is out of the question due to your economic means. 

And I would add that societies also need court jesters, clowns, and fools. And for that, we have the tea baggers. 

Sexism Cuts Across All Parties

It goes without saying that I am no fan of Michelle Bachmann, but in her defense, this is total bull shit (via Digby):

After Bachmann left the race, several of her advisers pointed to sexism as a contributing factor. “We did believe that sexism — I use the stronger word misogyny — was at play,” said Peter Waldron, her faith outreach coordinator. 

Waldron said that several influential pastors called for her to drop out of the race, reasoning “that a female could not be a civil magistrate.” Johnson himself is a pastor at a central Iowa church.

Hooray! Look at all the progress that has been made since the 1960s! We have women running for president....and organizations full of old, misogynistic, white, male Christians telling them that there is no place for vaginas in the White House. Because you know, that is not what Jebus would have wanted.

This is not a left/right issue. No female should ever be subjected to this kind of regressive, ignorant treatment, and it is a sad reflection on the state of our lack of progress on gender equality. 

It's a Wingnut World After All

Obama can't do anything right ever - Disney World edition:

Maybe I am crazy, but I come from a world where it is a privilege, dare I say an honor, to hear a sitting president speak in person. I guess I am a little biased, because if it were George W. Bush speaking at Disney World, I would probably rather ride the Tea Cups until I puked up my intestines. But regardless of the speaker, there is still something unique and timeless about the opportunity to see an American president speak in person. Not so for the Fair and Balanced brigade at Fox, who automatically assumes that the Kenyan Socialist Usurper is shitting all over Real Murkins' vacations by his very presence. 

I know it's belaboring the obvious at this point, but Obama can't do anything right in these people's eyes. The fact that they still hide behind the laughable 'fair and balanced' label, and the fact that people actually buy that facade, is pathetic and laughable. 

Both Sides Do It - Senate Obstructionism Edition

James Fallows has a very useful piece up that showcases the Republicans' unprecedented, cynical, and childish abuse of the filibuster ever since the election of the black Kenyan socialist Usurper. He links to several recent articles from prominent media outlets that fault either Obama's failure or both parties for the intransigence of the US Senate. 

It doesn't take an especially astute observer to notice the way in which the GOP has effectively transformed the Senate into a 60-votes-required-to-do-anything deliberative body, but most Americans are also not hyper political junkies like myself, or the sort of people that might follow Fallows' blog. And that precisely highlights the problem - you have one party refusing to let the Senate consider any manner of legislation, and then our high-minded, objective observers in the media scoff at these petty squabbles and bemoan that both sides are at fault for the Senate being able to function in the tradition of the modern democracy which it represents. Most people have no idea what the fuck cloture even means. They just know that every bill goes to die in the Senate, that nothing ever happens, they hear from the media that both sides are to blame, and they conclude that both parties in the US Senate are a bunch of assholes.

And let's be clear: filing for cloture requires that the Senate muster up 60 affirmative votes to even proceed to debate and an up/down vote on the legislation begin considered. Again, I doubt most Americans know this distinction, but the GOP minority effectively prevents legislation not from being passed (although that is a byproduct) but from even coming up for a vote that would allow it to be passed or rejected. It's immature, infantile, and deplorable. They have essentially made the use of a nuclear option a routine way of doing business as the minority party. It would be a very different scenario if the GOP had the numbers in the upper chamber and they were bypassing cloture filings, but whipping their members or getting a few Democrats to cross over to block the legislation from passing in an up/down vote. But they are a caucus of cynical cravens that won't even let legislation get that far. 

Fallows links to this graph to illustrate this point:

Let us not forget that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that his number one goal is making Barack Obama a one term president. The abuse of the filibuster is just another means to that end, a cleverly devised ploy to make voters lose faith in their government, and conveniently aided and abetted by the empty suits in the media who give McConnell's strategy political cover by means of being too timid to report the facts. Because as we all know, facts have a well established liberal bias.

Anatomy of a Failed Media - Solyndra Edition

In case you haven't yet heard of Solyndra, the short version is that the wingnuts and the GOP have been nursing a collective giant boner over what is largely a contrived, overblown scandal filled with their favorite liberal boogeymen - government waste, government excess, and evil liberal non-petroleum based energy. Check out this LA Times article, linked to by Kevin Drum, for a muted but thorough background on the facts of the matter.

But on to more pressing matters. Just like any time the GOP trumps up some purely fanatical, bull shit "controversy" or "scandal," the stenographers in the evil liberal media rush to give it a leg up to avoid the appearance of bias. You know, the monkeys flinging poop at one another are talking about it, so we need to be doing the same:

And I won't include the cable news graph, because you don't need to look at that to know that Fox News has spent an inordinate amount of time flogging this scandal. While Media Matters compares this disproportionate coverage to the corruption at the Minerals Management Service (former name of the failed regulator that allowed awesome things like the BP Gulf oil spill to happen) and war contracting, it is worth mentioning that there are any number of exponentially more egregious crimes and abuses that have received very little outrage and even less coverage. What about the financial crisis? We had a group of asshole Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission who refused to even include the terms "Wall Street" or "deregulation" in their final report. You know, because poor people and minorities are what caused the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

I'll let you decide which is a more prominent case of the wholesale fucking of the American tax payer - trillions of dollars in tax payer funded bailouts to banksters (foreign and domestic) with no strings attached, who immediately returned to the same excess and same practices that lead to global economic armageddon, or a $528 million Department of Energy loan guarantee to a company that ended up getting undercut by a heavily subsidized Chinese market and subsequently went bankrupt. Neither are acceptable nor desirable, but again, which of these are worthy of our national media's golden retriever-like attention span (SQUIRREL!)?

And I'll reiterate for the millionth time - to date there have still been no high level indictments or convictions of high level banksters of financial sector executives despite reams of evidence of endemic fraud and consumer abuse.

Evil Kenyan Socialist First Lady Watch

Her latest transgressions include shopping at Target. I wish I were kidding.

It's the Weak Demand, Stupid

Paul Krugman debunks the conservative/teabagger red herring that CRUSHING REGULATIONS, "uncertainty," highest taxes ever, and President Obama's perpetual bruising of bankster and executive fee-fees are to blame for our faltering economy:

Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy. 

The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false. 

[...] 

Isn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No. 

After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more. Business investment always responds strongly to the state of the economy, and given how weak our economy remains you shouldn’t be surprised if investment remains low. If anything, business spending has been stronger than one might have predicted given slow growth and high unemployment. 

But aren’t business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.

Republicans and Very Serious People do not want to listen to this reality, but prefer to live in their own contrived Randian fantasy land, because subscribing to facts and reality would mean embracing a demand-side, Keynesian view of economic policy, which is inherently at odds with the snake oil that they traffic on a daily basis. And we all know that what really ails America is that corporations and banksters and plutocrats don't have enough free money.

The Fox News / GOP "Class Warfare" Canard

The political right is absolutely apoplectic right now with Obama's newly found populist stance on taxes and economic. It has been kind of fun watching them implode into a swirling morass of wails of class warfare. I've already written about how incredibly pathetic this talking point is, but I don't doubt that it won't be effective with the low information morons that watch the not-at-all-biased Fox News Channel to begin with. Nevertheless, Obama is not letting it go unanswered:

"This is not class warfare -- it's math," Mr. Obama said from the White House Rose Garden, addressing GOP critiques of his plan head on. 

"The money has to come from some place," he continued. "If we're not willing to ask those who've done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit... the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more, we've got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor." 

[...] 

"I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or teacher is class warfare. I think it's just the right thing to do."

Yup. It's not class warfare, it's common fucking sense. At least it is in every other Western modern democracy, but we are a little behind the times with our social contract here in America. Newly minted Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren also did an excellent job today of taking down this wildly assbackwards falsehood:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” she said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. 

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. 

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. 

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Expecting rich people to contribute back to the societies that have rewarded their success so richly? What a commie. 

More of this please. More of all of it. This is the grounds on which I want the 2012 election to be fought. It's a clash of ideals that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats.

Sheriff Joe: Racist Asshole

"Legitimate complaints" my ass:

Infamous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio does -- which is why he announced a five-person "Cold Case Posse" that will delve into the issue of President Obama's birth certificate.
The posse follows a request by the Surprise, Arizona Tea Party, who Arpaio met with on August 17. The Surprise Tea Party believes that the long-form birth certificate released by President Obama in April -- which put the issue to rest for pretty much everyone -- could be a forgery. 

"The Surprise Tea Party is concerned," they wrote, "that no law enforcement agency or other duly constituted government agency has conducted an investigation into the Obama birth certificate to determine if it is in fact an authentic copy of 1961 birth records on file for Barack Obama at the Hawaii Department of Health in Honolulu, or whether it, or they are forgeries." 

[...] 

"This investigation does not involve politics," Arpaio told WND. "I listen to all the residents of Maricopa County who come to my office with complaints, regardless what their politics are. 

"My door is open to everyone, and I don't kick them out. If a complaint is legitimate, I don't dump it into the wastebasket," he continued. "When I get allegations brought to me by the citizens of Maricopa County, I look into the allegations, just like I am doing here."

Uh-huh. So if myself and a bunch of other ignorant mouth breather types demand that Sheriff Joe investigate Gov. Jan Brewer's and the private prison industry's suspicious connection to the drafting and passage of immigration bill SB1070, I am sure he will jump right on it, because after all, this is not about politics! His door is open and actions will be taken if a complaint is legitimate!

Fuck this guy and the people who keep putting him into office. He is a disgrace, a complete failure at his job, and uses his office and badge for little more than to wage political wars against brown people and anyone else he deems an enemy. 

Our Economic Broken Record - Republicans Oppose Everything

This wasn't totally predictable or anything:

In a Friday memo to all House Republicans, GOP leaders came out against nearly all the major proposals in Obama's $447 billion job-creation plan, including his middle-class tax cuts and his approach to federal spending on transportation and school construction. 

The Republican leaders said cutting payroll taxes through 2012 would lead to a tax increase in 2013 -- an argument that didn't deter Republicans from a much bigger, 10-year tax cut in 2001 that was extended last December but is set to expire on Dec. 31, 2012. 

"There may be significant unforeseen downsides to large temporary tax cuts immediately followed by large tax increases," they wrote in their memo. "We are creating significant new uncertainty in an already uncertain economy."

This is just fucking crazy. They are now actually arguing that we can't cut taxes now, because when they return to their original level at a later date, that would be a tax increase. Am I the only one that sees the abject lunacy and idiocy in this argument? This is really what one of our major political parties now uses to justify its infantile bull shit?  And as many people have already noted - Republicans have finally found a tax cut that they don't like. Why? Because the payroll tax overwhelmingly benefits the wrong kind of people - poor and middle class citizens. If we were proposing a 200% tax increase on the working poor while abolishing capital gains and the top marginal tax rate, you know they'd be on board. They did vote for the Ryan plan after all. 

Anyone that has paid even one ounce of attention to politics for the last two and a half years know that the Republicans will never support anything the President proposes. So I will admit that while the American Jobs Act is long overdue and a much needed economic stimulus, I have never really seen its path through Congress. Sure the President wants us to call our congressmen and women, even the asshole Republican ones, but does anyone honestly believe that Democratic constituents calling Republican representatives and senators is going to make them shift from them their putrid ideological entrenchment? 

I think really the most likely scenario is that the economy is going to continue to suck tremendously well into the 2012 election season, thereby endangering Obama's re-election. We will get some sort of movement on economic stimulus between now and then, but it will be purposefully hamstrung by the Republicans who will ensure that it is a series of half measures or contains a bunch of their bull shit ideological sacred cows that will do nothing to stimulate the economy. The President's only chance between now and then will to be continue to bring Campaign Obama both to the American public and to his style of governance. If you can't get anything through Congress, then the one thing you can do is present an unmistakably stark contrast between the two parties values and ideas on how to rebuild a broken America. That started with the roll out of the American Jobs Act, and it continues with this:

President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials. 

With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid. 

Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages. 

Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday.

Republicans will never in a million years support a tax increase of any kind, especially not one on millionaires, or the "job  creators" as they are known among the mouth breathers. The problem that faces the Republicans is that a millionaire's tax is overwhelmingly popular with the public. They can spew all the bull shit they want, but the fact of the matter is that the public intuitively understands that there is a infinitesimally small slice of the population that controls pretty much all the wealth in this country, and they pay an absolute pittance in income taxes. As the NYT piece says, this tax would hit about three-tenths of one percent of tax payers. It doesn't matter how the GOP and Fox News try to spin it, with all the caterwauling about job killing tax increases or the delicate fee-fees of our job creating plutocrat overlords, the public is just not going to care when you're talking about hitting such a small portion of the tax base with this increase. It's good policy, and even better politics. 

Again, the Buffett Rule faces an even steeper uphill climb in Congress than does the American Jobs Act. But these are the sort of populist positions that Obama should have been taking long ago, since January 2009 on his first day in office. The public saw far too much of Obama as the most reasonable guy in the room. Maybe it's finally catching on that when you're in a room full of unhinged lunatics that want to savage the founding principles of this country and hand it over to rule by corporations and plutocrats, being the most reasonable guy doesn't count for much. Americans want someone on their side, and Obama appears to be finally understanding that.

Time For Obesity, Early Onset Diabetes Protests

It's my inalienable, Jebus given right to be a slovenly fat ass! Keep Michelle Obama's Kenyan socialism out of my bucket of KFC...that happens to be sitting on the other side of the room, that I can't reach, and I'm too fat to walk over there to get it, so I'll just wallow for a while because Medicare hasn't yet approved my claim for a Rascal from the Scooter Store.

Here He Is, The Biggest Douche in the Universe

Dick Cheney.

Nation Building

It only applies after you have invaded and dropped freedom bombs on brown people:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.” 

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.

Clearly the solution here is that we need to bomb ourselves, and then the GOP will be interested in finding money to invest in our crumbling infrastructure.

Hmmm, He Seems Like A Nice Guy!

I'm with Kevin Drum on this one:

"We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress. We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party."

With all due respect: Wake the fuck up, Mr. President.

If It Ain't Broke

Imagine that - Republicans are planning on using the deficit as a political tool to prevent Democrats from passing anything that might have even the remotest chance of improving unemployment or the economy. And the chances are remote. With Congress firmly gridlocked and with Dems loving nothing more than to negotiate with themselves, the litany of shitty half measures that will be served up will do little to make significant gains in the months ahead. But that is a feature, not a bug. Remember, we won't slide back into recession, and there's a light at the end of the tunnel in 2013. Because Obama's economist-free Council on Economic Affairs said so, that's why.

But in general, this should surprise no one. The GOP spent the first two years of Obama's presidency crying wolf about the deficit to impede legislative progress. Even when the Democrats tied themselves in knots to make bills deficit neutral, the Republicans found other reasons to oppose them anyway. And they were rewarded handsomely in 2010 by an ignorant electorate that collectively scratched its ass and grunted out "spending bad" and voted for the people in power who sounded most like them. So they are just going back to the same dogeared page in their playbook. It worked so well for them once, why would they try anything different this time around?

You Had Your Chance

One of Ezra's co-bloggers (not really sure who they are, they just started showing up in my RSS feed) has a bit in the WaPo this week about the gridlock in Congress on the economy and notes the following about GOP intransigence:

“Everyone’s got their spin on it — there’s no consensus,” says former congressman Tom Davis (R-Va.). “The parties are very dug in.” 

For instance, even if everyone agreed that the United States desperately needed help to revive its economy in the short term, it would simply reinforce the GOP’s line against the Democrats, Davis asserts. Most Democratic proposals for short-term help have centered on injecting immediate spending into the economy, the underlying argument being that the stimulus dropped off too early and didn’t go far enough. For Republicans, however, “the narrative is: ‘We tried your way, we’re worse off. Now you’re going to waste more and draw up the deficit more?’ ” Davis says.

Every time a Republican utters that talking point, Jebus kills a kitten. This is obviously their marching orders, and I would say its effective politically because it cleverly draws a contrast between the two parties, implies the opposition's policies failed, and it makes good use of the fact that most people are too ill informed to know any better.

But it's also a deeply cynical and ignorant line. By my watch, we tried it the Republican way for the better part of the last decade. They got their three trillion dollars in tax cuts that were heavily weighted towards the wealthy with grand promises of money and jobs raining from the skies, compliments of our plutocrat overlords. And we were told further that these same monstrous tax cuts would actually create more revenue! Because you know, when you unchain the hands of the plutocrats and free them from the heavy burden of the already lowest tax rates in the developed world, they give free money and jobs to poor people and don't just keep it for themselves.

Needless to say, none of that happened. The Bush tax cuts have become the single largest contributor to the OMGdeficit that Republicans have spent the last two years screeching about, and in some cases, holding the country hostage until it is reduced through draconian spending cuts. Job creation was so dismal that even the hyper conservative WSJ dubbed it the "worst track record on record."

Fast forward to 2009. Barack Obama is elected president and immediately calls for a significant spending bill to prop up a rapidly deteriorating economy. The Republicans immediately bitch and moan about deficit spending, how government can't create jobs, and demand a bunch of useless tax cuts (again) in exchange for the vague promise of their support for the bill. The final bill that passes both chambers of Congress  contains over 40% of non-stimulative tax cuts, and by the conclusions of numerous prominent economists, is far too small in its scope to properly deal with the magnitude of the recession that faces the country. Oh, and it is passed with zero Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate, despite their empty promises for votes in exchange for the fact that almost half of it is comprised of tax cuts. 

The stimulus bill didn't singlehandedly return the country to full unemployment and 5% GDP growth, but that was never going to happen. It was essentially hamstrung by the lack of political will within the Obama White House to push for a larger bill, and the ridiculous amount of tax cuts it contained. And despite those shortcomings, it provided a backstop to a faltering economy and prevented things from getting much worse than they would have in its absence.

So after all the promises of the capitalist utopia to be ushered in by Bush economic policies and ball pits full of $100 bills for us to swim in and the complete and total lack thereof, the Republican answer is to tell Democrats "you had your chance" after they enact a single piece of Keynesian legislation in the face of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.

Epic hypocrisy notwithstanding, that's some balls if you ask me.

Teabaggers - Not the Sharpest Tools

Real murkins don't need no dat gum fedrul gubmint:

All that evil government spending that they love to demonize? The very livelihoods of their home states depend on it.

Morans. 

Things That Should Not Provoke Partisan Meltdowns

I would say that this would be one of them:

Following McDonald's decision to offer "more nutritionally-balanced" Happy Meals and First Lady Michelle Obama's praise of its move, the right-wing media jumped to attack McDonald's for supposedly bending to the will of the "fat police" and making Happy Meals "less happy." However, numerous studies show that childhood obesity leads to significant health problems, and moreover, McDonald's reportedly made their decision in part so that parents could feel "less guilty" about buying their kids Happy Meals.

Follow the link to read the original McDonald's press release and the ensuing ridiculous freakout from the bat shit brigade. 

Seriously, I know some people are slowly starting to wake up to it, but what will it really take for people to finally realize that the Republicans are a bunch of unhinged lunatics? These people are just idiots. They don't want the EPA enforcing or expanding the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts because they want to be free to drink and breathe carcinogens and don't want no gubmint bur'crats tellin em what cancer they can and can't get. They mock and deride Michelle Obama for having the audacity to take up a cause so timelessly controversial as nutrition and childhood obesity prevention because they want the freedom to raise little fat asses if they damn well please, because this is America goddammit.

The default Republican position is always anti-whatever-Obama/Democrats-say, no matter how stupid or childish it makes them look. The President or first lady could comment on how they encourage Sasha and Malia to brush their teeth before going to bed and you'd have Fox News screaming about the tyranny of government imposed dental hygiene and the teabaggers staging tooth decay protests.

Time For A Sharia Law Intervention

Radical Muslims are now infiltrating our meteorological forecasts in Arizona:

The dictionary defines a “haboob” as a thick dust storm that blows in deserts. Arizonans, however, define a “haboob” as a jihadist harbringer of Muslim infiltration. Hearing local weathermen call Arizona’s recent massive dust storms by a term they’ve used “for decades,” one Arizona resident said, “I am insulted that local TV news crews are now calling this kind of storm a haboob. [...] How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term.”

These people are just total morons. There is no other way to describe it. Also, I am going to go out on a limb and venture a guess that our soldiers have been subjected to experiences and visuals far worse than the sheer horror of having someone utter "some Middle Eastern term." Grow the fuck up.

A Spot of Tea

Our former colonial overlords speak the truth:

British Business Secretary Vince Cable presented the “irony of the situation at the moment.” A former economist, Cable told BBC television yesterday that “the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few right-wing nutters in the American congress rather than the euro zone."

Not that the instability in the euro zone is anything to sneeze at, but the fact remains that the teatards in the House are openly inviting an unprecedented downgrade in the credit rating of the United States in the least, or triggering a global financial crisis at the worst. But I know it's difficult for the mouth breathers to think of anything "global" or "foreign," and it's certainly impossible for them to grasp that their pedantic, childish antics will have a real and detrimental effects beyond their short sighted fixation with national politics if the debt ceiling is not raised.