CapitalistImperialistPig

It looks like a plausible deal on the debt limit has been reached, and if the pundits are close on the content, the result is a sweeping victory for the Tea Party and the Republicans as well as stunning defeat for Obama. More seriously, it will very likely do further damage to an already slumping economy and take another big step toward Republican victory in 2012 and the resulting and prophesized end of the World.

Haven't we now reached the point in Washington's little psychodrama when somebody is supposed to pull a rabbit out of the legislative hat and rescue the heroine?

Obama's recent numbers don't exactly confirm the stupid story referenced in the previous post. July 29, 2011 9,371,377 692,544 1,639 July 28, 2011 9,387,818 692,698 1,530 July 27, 2011 9,368,306 692,766 1,525 July 26, 2011 9,353,840 692,808 1,525 July 23, 2011 9,289,552 693,038 1,514 July 22, 2011 9,268,591 693,099 1,505 July 21, 2011 9,252,739 693,164 1,502 July 20, 2011 9,235,345 693,245 1,499 July 19, 2011 9,221,297 693,303 1,499 July 18, 2011 9,198,308 692,590 1,493 July 17, 2011 9,151,165 692,727 1,477

The latest cause célèbre in the idiot press is the notion that Obama's call for people to tweet their Congresspeople to compromise somehow backfired, since apparently some thirty thousand or so of his followers protested by dropping their followership - or whatever the heck it's called. A more interesting number would be hoiw many tweets Congress got. That thirty thousand looks big unless you compare it with his total - nine million plus. There it's hardly noise. It's hardly a significant protest on a controversial issue.

An innovative solution to the debt ceiling has caught the idea of both Wolfgang and Paul Krugman . It's got to be good.

Kevin Drum asks: Why Is Obama Such a Wimp? Bruce Bartlett has apparently theorized that it was because he never negotiated with Big Labor or The Soviet Union. Those hard-nosed types may well play differently than they did at the Harvard Law Review, and today's Republicans sure do. It's probably for the best - if Obama had been negotiating with Krushchev, there would probably be Russian tanks patrolling the Champs-Elysees right now. The guy really does seem hopeless. I read today that he wasn't getting any sleep because he was looking everywhere for a compromise. WTF? We really could use somebody with a pair in the WH. Hillary, where are you now?

Paul Samuelson was a brilliant Nobel Prize winning economist who used to write a column for Newsweek. Robert J Samuelson is some idiot hack that Newsweek hired to write about economics after Paul Samuelson left. His lack of knowlege of economics hasn't really handicapped his career since his actual job is to be a reliable right-wing mouthpiece. His latest column in the WaPo is It’s the elderly, stupid. Naturally, he leads with some transparent falsehoods. ...we’ve heard almost nothing of the main problem that makes the budget so intractable. It’s the elderly, stupid. By now, it’s obvious that we need to rewrite the social contract that, over the past half-century, has transformed the federal government’s main task into transferring income from workers to retirees. In 1960, national defense was the government’s main job; it constituted 52 percent of federal outlays. In 2011 — even with two wars — it is 20 percent and falling. Meanwhile, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid ...