It would be great if it came to the floor and was defeated – hah!

So David, is this like Christmas for you or a living nightmare? So many interesting things going on… so little time.

“Crying? Are you CRYING? There’s no crying in TeaBagistan!”

The biggest irony here with these TeaBagging yahoos is that if you examined their personal finances you you’d find them to be a total disaster. I’d bet my bottom last dollar on it.

The phony Rev Sharptonn is lying on TV right now. Saying Boehner plan will cut SS and MC. So will Reid’s plan and if oblunder had got his ways so would his. I have always known MSM is just a tool, but this outright lying takes it to a new low

Imagine how the tears would flow if somebody wrote in telling about how their arthritically paralyzed mom was getting kicked out of the nursing home cuz of Medicare cuts.

I’m sure there will be some Democrats to save him and make it all bipartisan and lovey-dovey.

I know. It’s just unreal. During the Bush years everyone thought “the media” had a “liberal” bias. It appears to just have an oligarch bias now.

Shorter Weepy: “I don’t have 216 fingers and toes! Oh noes!”

I don’t think it’s right to say he probably has the vote, to “He has no power whatsoever. What a rudderless ship.”
He’s waterboarding the TeaTards right now.

must have missed the liberal bias, because all I heard was non stop drums for war and more war.

I called both of my Senators today and told them to stop posturing for the teabag wearing mouth breathers and pass a raise in the debt ceiling. We are so slow at work now if I manage to work eight hours it will be because something came up but there’s nothing in the pipe as of 3:30 this afternoon. That’s all I need is to get laid off because the Republicans can’t help but wank. I also told them and my Rep what I thought about a “SuperCongress”.

During the Bush years everyone thought “the media” had a “liberal” bias.

No, not everyone thought that but that’s what the conservative media wanted you to believe because they take their orders from Limbaugh and Drudge and in their world, the worst thing that could happen would be for Matt and/or Rush to label them as liberal.

You mean like Joe, “it’s the American way to welch on paying child support”, Walsh?

What happened to Republican’s great strength, marching in lockstep?

Weird how both Parties use redistricting to tame their most tenacious, seems a lil un-democratic at the very least.

LMAO!

What could possibly go wrong?
Do they even know? Do they even care?
Their jobs are safe.
They will raise the debt ceiling. The markets are too “stable”.
The real question is what their last-minute kabuki will entail and what social services are cut.
As Margaret wrote, this whole kabuki harms a lot of people. And that’s just the kabuki. These things are soulless and have no decency.
They will cut SS and Medicare somehow. Catfood is still their best bet. And that’s what I would bet.
They WILL raise the debt ceiling. And with it gut social programs or schedule the gutting.

He is embarrassing to watch. I think 3 straight episodes of Chris Matthews would be better than him. /s

At a meeting of the House Republican freshmen and their leaders on Wednesday, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room — including the speaker’s.

They are all crying now Cripes I liked it better when they didn’t cry. Funny no tears for the Troops fighting 2 lost wars or for People who’s SS and Medicare are going to be cut as the Orange One sprays on his tan in three costs.

I was willing to give Boehner the benefit of the doubt all day, but wow, postponing the vote. He has no power whatsoever. What a rudderless ship.

…Eric Cantor’s office is now saying that the vote will happen tonight.

Cantor is Speaker in fact if not name now I guess he’s not even pretending anymore.

RE 14th amendment: “There are no off-ramps. There’s no way around this. There’s no escape,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday. “Only Congress has the legal authority to extend that borrowing authority. That’s our position.”

That’s pretty rich, from the Bush II administration which has demonstrated its respect for congress’s legal authority to authorize war.

Lying, deceitful, f’ers.

I guess even sociopaths are capable of crying, but what were they crying about ? My guess is they are crying because they didn’t totally screw every helpless old or sick person in the country, and their sociopath mom and dad are going have some harsh words for them. But they’ll promise to the folks that next time they’ll do better and try to take medical care away from more children in the US and drop more bombs on children in other countries.
Ok, that’s probably unfair, some of them probably had regular moms and dads who had nothing to do with them developing into sociopaths.

“Ok, that’s probably unfair, some of them probably had regular moms and dads who had nothing to do with them developing into sociopaths.”

Yes.

I find it the height of their sociopathic behavior that they are crying but not for the millions of the weakest and defenseless they are willing and happy to skrew.
These things work for the devil.

Just came out from lurking mode to comment. Hello Firepups! :)

Perhaps they are all crying because they have all done what Cantor did, bet that their country would default on payment of the debt? Just a thought.

back to lurking and reading :)

Eric Cantor’s office is now saying that the vote will happen tonight.

Interesting (to me at least) that it was CANTOR’S office saying the vote will happen.

I think Rachel Maddow nails it: “John Boehner is bad at his job.”

And I have no problem with men showing genuine emotion, including tears. But John Boehner crying. Puh-leez. He reminds me of a cheap drunk.

Lambchops!! Weren’t you around a long time back and commenting regularly? Glad to see you!

Yes, I was! I read here every day and learn so much from you and all the other Firepups. :) Glad to see you too!

“Lying, deceitful, f’ers.”

You are far too kind.
I have some other adjectives, but they would get me banned.

I read somewhere today, probably here (long but very informative post by “our own” letsgetitdone about coin seigniorage), that the 14th amendment has to be a very last resort, and it isn’t. Coin seigniorage would be a step before the 14th amendment, and it complies with legislation passed in 1996.

EDIT to add that I highly recommend the coin seigniorage post. It is tough to follow if you (like me) don’t really understand monetary theory, but it is worth your time!!

heh heh hee hee

Republicans can’t help but wank

Margaret you got such a potty mouth!

This does make Boehner look super-stupid, no matter what Cantor says, and even if the bill eventually passes, as Dday seems to think it will. At least two network anchors (Bob Shieffer & Brian Williams) just acted dumbfounded that Congress could be so dysfunctional. Williams (NBC) asked twice “does Congress get it?” about how angry the public is.

I think you’re overthinking this one, David. The entire Boehner plan is for show. Right now, the Tea Partiers in Congress are showing their crazy supporters that they’re making Boehner cry. And, even if the Boehner plan passes the House, it only lets him show the less crazy base of the Republican Party that he’s “serious” about spending. Otherwise, the entire thing is a waste of time.

The real issue is just how much Obama and the Democrats are screwing over the American people, supposedly in an effort to compromise with an imagined other side of the aisle.

Being an Obama-supporter, a Democrat, or a progressive brings nothing but anger at losing all the time.

Maybe it’ll be better for all of us if we switch to the GOP-Tea Party: we’d be just as unhappy, but we’d be unhappy while getting everything we want, just like them. The point: they know how to fight and win.

msmolly, was this today or earlier this week?

I think Rachel Maddow nails it: “John Boehner is bad at his job.”

Even when the House wasn’t dysfunctional under Speaker Pelosi’s leadership, we all saw that the House has no power. So much came out of the House, only to die in the Senate.

Roy: I was all right for a while
I could smile for a while
Kd: but I saw you last night
You held my hand so tight
When you stopped to say hello
Roy: you wished me well
You couldn’t tell that
I’ve been crying over you,
Crying over you and you said “so long”
Left me standing all alone,
Alone and crying, crying, crying, crying
It’s hard to understand
Kd: but the touch of your hand can start me crying
My deepest apologies to Roy Orbison”s estate if this besmirshes his song

She has said it over a number of weeks on several shows. Not this week….she is on vacation. It was almost a regular segment for awhile, because she’d lay out yet another screwup (forcing votes on the Ryan budget was one, I think) and then repeat, “John Boehner is bad at his job.”

Practically since he became speaker….she led off one with the two House Freshmen who didn’t show up to be sworn in because they were at some party.

Obama wanted to put on a big show for the “independents” aka the people who have yet to make up their minds, because they have no minds, to get their votes. Well, maybe he should just try acting “Presidential” for a change instead of trying to orchestrate a political drama to score points. I voted for him and sent him money, but never again. I will only support real, proven progressives with actual solid track records. Hey, let’s start our version of the Tea Party within the dem. party. We should put all our efforts towards democratic primary races only. Especially Senate candidates.

Google “John Boehner is bad at his job” and you’ll get lots of hits with Rachel’s name in them, including video clips.

The real issue is just how much Obama and the Democrats are screwing over the American people, supposedly in an effort to compromise with an imagined other side of the aisle.

+2

Is it too tacky to mention the Boner is a friend of lobbyists. And a very very good friend of the American Printing Stuff Society.

Mike Stark, an activist and blogger, intercepted Leader Boehner after his highly publicized “Pledge to America” unveiling to ask him about the accusation:

“Speaker Boehner, have you been cheating with Lisbeth Lyons, the lobbyist for the American Printing Association?” Stark asks. Boehner did not respond.

Stark later contacted Lyons, the Vice President of Government Affairs at Printing Industries of America, to get a comment on the allegations. She didn’t provide any.

The New York Post has since caught up with Lyons, who said the rumors were “unfounded.”

“As you can imagine, I was stunned by such a question,” Lyons told the Post. “I found it to be highly insulting, particularly as a female political professional, as well as unfounded. Beyond that, I have no further comment on the matter.”

But Boner has other Lobbyist friends also.

Completely agree with you.

boehner needs to come on some medical home visits with me then he’ll really have something to cry about when he sees how these people are living and what little they can afford.

A national ‘Take Your Millionaire Representative/Senator to Work Day’.

I find it hard to even try to joke about it when I think of the conditions under which many of your patients are living.

My hat is off to you and the care you are giving.

Do they even have the capacity for compassion, do you think?

“independents” aka the people who have yet to make up their minds, because they have no minds

Senator Sanders is an independent. Hartman gives him an hour every week but still trash talks the independents like you did, so I’m unsure if there is any point challenging this nasty point.

While I was partisan, I thought similarly of independents, problem was, my wife and a good number of very intelligent empathic and aware friends were independent as well. It’s easy to misinterpret where a lot of independents are coming from when you are a partisan. As it is, they are just used an excuse for Obama serving his masters. It fits into the whole left, right and center rhetoric. Problem is, it’s wrong.

Then there are the people who say a pox on both their houses and opt out of paying attention. It’s not about lack of minds, more a way to preserve whatever happiness they’re entitled to in this insane farce of a democracy.

The ony problem with coining is that it will NEVER HAPPEN!

No way in hayall it will ever happen, dwelling on it as he and others have is wasted white space . . . One read, ‘splain it for what it is, fine. But writing about it over and over will not bring it to fruition.

Not. Ever. Gonna. Happen. It’s a pony with a horn on its head.

The Reid plan won’t pass the House, the BOner plan won’t pass the Senate.

Is this where we are at this point?

I didn’t buy the newest scorecard so I’m behind on the kabuki and its actors . . . .

Larue, I disagree. It is probably the only solution that will work.

ETA: Yeah, maybe won’t happen, but it is what SHOULD happen to defang these insane actors.

That Tangled Web

Those cholos can’t even agree on what effect the refusal to raise the ceiling would have. At first this actually helped them cobble together a coalition of their various factions, since folks who suspected there would be no effect were happy to aid and abet the crazies who actually think a default would be good, because they thought it would be a risk-free gambit.

But now no one’s sure if there’ll be actual default or not. So the various sub-groups of cholos are thrown back on the fundamental disagreements that always divided them. That shit happens when you try to exploit fake veto points to hold the country hostage. You can find, as in this case, that the defenders of the status quo are as confused as you are about what actually happens if the ceiling isn’t raised.

Which is why this is not good for our side, and not good for the country. The problem is that the actual arrival of the debt ceiling being exceeded, is not going to clear things up, because what happens when it’s exceeded is not imposed on us from outside, it’s decided by the same crew that has led us thus far into the trackless wilderness. What happens is what we are smart and self-reliant and self-confident enough to let happen. If we were all responsible adults, the results of the legal regime we inherited from a bygone era when adults roamed the halls of Congress would very clearly be absolutely nothing — the ceiling was never intended to control the actions of Treasury, it was meant to force a vote in Congress — Treasury would go on observing its actual debt ceiling, which is however much Treasury has to borrow to meet all obligations. But we’re not responsible adults here, we’re a bunch of passive aggressives. We have our president pretending that the administraition will have no choice but to stop meeting 45% of obligations if the ceiling isn’t raised, because he imagines that will get the passive aggressives on the other side to back down. Fat freaking. You can’t budge passive agressives with passive aggression. They know that shit, they dish that shit out as their specialite, they’re not falling for that shit.

When the ceiling is breached, it looks more and more like the administration will actually start stiffing 45% of US obligations. They’ve claimed they have no choice, how do they go back on that when the day comes? And then, how does the other side respond? More to the point, how does the absence of another side respond? The actual event is going to fracture their coalition of the clueless even worse than the prospect of the actual event. There will be no cobbling them together to agree to a rise in the ceiling. So we will go on stiffing 45% of US obligations until we manage to deadbeat ourselves back into the Stone Age.

Al Qaeda couldn’t have done anything half this good. Al Qaeda doesn’t have our resources, least of all our inexhaustible reserves of passive aggressive bullshit.

Hi msmolly, Thanks for pointing that out. the same post also appeared here, on July 18, with a somewhat different title. Discussion of the post was pretty good here. But it was fantastic at both Pragmatic Capitalism linked above, and also at Naked Capitalism.

stiffing 45% of US obligations??

Like shutting down all federal operations in House Districts represented by a Republican including air traffic control, and closing all military facilities overseas, then doing a 200,000 man reduction in forces in our Military, including 90% of the O-1 to O-6 officers (like Generals and admirals).

I could go for that – it would be a very productive 30 days

Unnecessary

The debt ceiling in the ceiling law doesn’t need to be circumvented, as it is with this coin seigniorage, or the idea of having the Fed accept bad checks from Treasury, nor does it need to be declared unconstitutional, as in the 14th Amendment idea. It can simply be ignored by Treasury on August 3, because the ceiling in the ceiling law was only ever meant to compel Congress to consider the issue and have a vote, it was never meant to act to force Treausry to be unable to issue new US debt even in the face of US obligations that can’t be met if no new debt is issued.

The first rule that has to be followed in the face of potentially contradictory statutory requirements, is that a way must be sought to so interpret all applicable statutes that allows them all to be followed. If the debt ceiling is in the ceiling law is interpreted as binding on Treasury, as keeping it from borrowing any more if the ceiling is reached, that would create an unavoidable conflict with Treasury’s duty to pay all spending obligations, which carry the force of law, and for which there is no authority for Treasury to broker, to decide which 55% of obligations are paid, versus which 45% remain unpaid. If, to the contrary, the interpretation is placed on every law obligating spending — and all US spending, per the Constitution, is obligated by law — that these laws all raise the debt ceiling that Treasury must respect to whatever level of debt is necessary to cover all obligations, then the debt ceiling in the ceiling law can be readily interpreted as it has for nearly a century, as a measure that imposes a requirement only on Congress.

The debt ceiling law says that Congress must consider the issue of govt spending and how it is paid for, then vote to increase the ceiling, every time the national debt nears the ceiling. Interpreting it that way, interpreting it the way it had always been interpreted before the clown car stopped to disgorge the Teahadists onto the Capitol, allows every other law respecting taxation, spending and borrowing to be respected. Putting this novel interpretation on the ceiling law, that it is meant to be a veto point that can force a repudiation of government obligations undertaken by Congress in law, is not compatible with respecting any spending law. The novel interpretation is therefore not allowed, Treasury could not choose to observe any ceiling on debt other than whatever level of debt is required to meet all US obligations.

It is the only absolutely legal way to avoid caving to the GOP – so that is not Obama’s plan.

indeed the original debt ceiling was to make government more efficient by not requiring Treasury to get a law passed whenever it wanted to issue debt.

Sadly, no

Quite aside from the total lack of legal authority for the administration to broker spending, to decide which 55% of legal obligations are paid versus which 45% get stiffed, it just wouldn’t work.

I agree that military spending is mostly fat, mostly unnecessary to our national security — about 90% fat to give you my ballpark. But in the short term, getting the military back from overseas, then disbanding it down to <10% of its present size, would cost even more day-to-day than it does now to run the military. We wouldn't see the full 90% savings for years, decades, even, and wouldn't see any savings for months. That's no excuse to not start as soon as possible, since the countdown to savings doesn't start until we start to stand down the military, but it does mean that military reductions cannot even partially address an immediate 45% hole in what the Treasury has vs what it is obligated to pay somebody.

But, even more fundamentally, we can't cut govt spending by 45% without devastating the economy. This is completely aside from problems arising from not paying creditors. Even if we avoided that out of the remaining 55% of money we do have, just cutting out 45% of govt spending on anything would deliver a hammer blow to demand right when the economy is already at 10% unemployment from lack of demand.

Your suggesiton was perhaps meant in jest, and if so, I'm just rehearsing the counterarguements for the benefit of readers who may not have thought this through. A lot of people have said offhand it would be great if Congress handed Obama the chance to broker spending. I just don't think the idea bears scrutiny.

Absolutely. The idea was that, before, when Congress approved each bond issue separately, there was already a guaranteed forum to make the case that we were spending too much, or paying for spending too much with borrowing and not immediate taxation. But after Congress started allowing Treasury to authorize bond issues on its own, up to its projections of how much debt would have to be assumed to meet the difference between spending and revenue, it was thought that having a ceiling set by law would be necessary to make sure that the leadership couldn’t duck the issue. With a ceiling in place, the leadership would have to schedule a vote as the debt approached the ceiling, meaning it had to allow debate, meaning it would have to allow hearings.

No one ever thought that there was anything more to the debt ceiling than that until this year. Why we think different this year is beyond me.

Now CNN and Fox are reporting that Boehner will present a “tweaked” version of his plan for a vote Friday. Of course the reporters only reported what they were told to say, “tweaked,” and didn’t bother to ask what that meant.

Yeah, right there is all the proof we need that Obama’s primary goal is to slash the social safety net. If “not defaulting” was his primary goal, there’d be NO STRATEGIC BENEFIT to taking the position that the administration has no other options.