On Lines In The Sand And A Triple-A Country

We've heard it all before. The President keeps insisting on a "balanced" approach when surely he must know by now that he is dealing with political extremists. YES, WE DO HAVE TERRORISTS in the Republican Party and their name is the TEA PARTY. This economic mess with politicizing a routine raise in the debt ceiling and the manufacturing of a phony "crisis" is what led to the current REAL CRISIS in our markets and the downgrading of our credit rating. A correction was coming, to be sure, given the events in Europe. But these ignorant, intransigent extremists in the Tea Party Caucus behaved with such monumental irresponsibility in government that it mushroomed into the PERFECT STORM we see today.

Standard & Poors is an ass. They were neck-deep in the Great Bush Recession of 2007 by enabling the criminals on Wall Street who recklessly brought our economy to its knees. They never put the brakes on or questioned the casino economy which burst the housing bubble. They rubber-stamped the swindles of Wall Street's biggest 'operators' pushing risky credit default swaps. Suddenly, with a change in administration and an African American president, S&P gets religion as they decide to give our nation a credit rating black eye?

But the brutal reality is, this ass of a messenger looked at the dysfunctionality in Washington and issued a political credit downgrade based on Wall Street's lack of confidence in our government. Democrats like Senator John Kerry are calling this the "Tea Party downgrade." With good reason. Some 80 or so extremists in the House and their cowering acolytes in the Republican Party have hijacked government, terrorized their leadership, and tanked our economy. Their icons aren't economists; they're right wing whackos like Grover Norquist who has forced much of the Republican members to sign a no-taxes-EVER pledge, lest they be "primaried." That's insanity, the tail wagging the dog. Here's S&P's indictment of Tea Party Republicans in Congress:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

With the market spiraling down and no bottom in sight, with the President bemoaning "lines in the sand" from extremists while failing to recognize that to LEAD HE MUST HAVE SOME LINES IN THE SAND OF HIS OWN, and with the unhappy metaphor that we will "always be a TRIPLE-A country" which made me think of baseball's farm system, Dan Rather said if this President "has some fight in him, now's the time to show it." Because now, the CRAZIES are running the asylum:

This is the TEA PARTY/REPUBLICAN jobless DEPRESSION. While Republicans cut ALL AND ANY jobs programs in Congress, Republican governors LAID OFF 37,000 GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES. So much for "jobs jobs jobs." SPEAKER BOEHNER, WHERE ARE THE JOBS!