CapitalistImperialistPig

Paul Krugman has a good look at the origins and delusions of the Great Default Plot. It seems that it was cooked up in Mordor, AKA The Heritage Society, by the usual Koch Machine nuts. He thinks that their problem is not just their radicalism, but their complete lack of realism. To see what I’m talking about, consider the report in Sunday’s Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects — the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others — plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform. This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement. You’d have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, u...

Josh Marshall sees our current constitutional crisis as the public manifestation of John Boehner's weakness - the weakness of his situation and the weakness of his character. This weakness has made him unable to control the forces Ted Cruz and the Tea Party (AKA, the Koch Machine), have loosed. Such men are dangerous, especially in times of chaos and incipient catastrophe. The key though, again, is that Boehner is personally weak and situationally weak. He's afraid of what House Tea Partiers will do to him if he relents. So he's hoping that if he plays for time and takes the country right up to the brink of catastrophe some other option might become available. And yet Boehner is weak. The Tea Party's ability to push him further and further in their direction is testament to that. So at the last moment, does he really assert his power? I think it's very questionable that he has it in him. The forces he's trying to ride are much bigger than he is. There's go...

Kevin Drum notes the Administration's surprisingly lackadasical approach to warning of the hazards of default. Jack Lew was on MTP yesterday and could hardly be bothered to look worried about default. It's true that Lew took a pretty low-key approach, despite host Savannah Guthrie's best efforts. "Are you talking catastrophe?" she asked. Lew wouldn't bite, so then she gave him another chance. "It would be calamitous for the economy?" Still no bite! "It would be very bad," was the worst Lew could summon up. That's pretty soporific, all right. The problem, I assume, is that Lew is in an impossible situation. Breaching the debt ceiling would be pretty calamitous, but Treasury secretaries have an obligation not to panic markets with loose talk. Backbench congressmen, by contrast, can say anything they think might get them a few minutes on the evening news. Maybe it is time to try to panic the markets a bit. Something is needed to get B...

MoDo takes a dystopian look at a 2084 where Koch brothers drones patrol the skies of a ruined Capital. She blames that Canadian/Cuban terrorist: “Well, son, they knew there was something creepy about the ringleader, Ted Cruz,” the man replies. “His face looked pinched, like a puzzle that had not been put together quite right. He was always launching into orations with a weird cadence and self-consciously throwing folksy phrases into his speeches, like ‘Let me tell ya,’ to make himself seem Texan, when he was really a Canadian.” The boy looks alarmed. “A Canadian destroyed the world, Papa?” “Once the government shut down, a plague came, because they had closed the Center for Disease Control,” the man says. “Storms, floods and wildfires raged after FEMA was closed down and the National Guard got decimated.