GOP Pushes RyanCare For All

With the United States Supreme Court, led by five Republican-appointed conservative activists, posed to dismantle President Barack Obama's landmark health care reform law, the GOP has tapped Tea Party stalwart Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to move forward with a new plan to expand his disgraced Medicare couponization scheme to include all Americans.

"While Republicans have advanced many good ideas on health care," Ryan told the conservative Hoover Institute think tank at Stanford University Tuesday, "it is my candid opinion that the party as a whole has yet to coalesce around a complete reform agenda aimed at dealing with the underlying problem - which is runaway inflation in the cost of health care."

Of course, the "many good ideas" all boiled down to more tax breaks for the wealthy, while cutting everyone else off at the knees.

The Politico reported Ryan and the GOP now want to expand their couponization scam to all Americans:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan says it's time for Republicans to rally around a comprehensive "replacement" to President Barack Obama's signature health care reform legislation - with the government giving a limited contribution to help Americans get health coverage.

That's the model Ryan wants to apply through Medicare, Medicaid and employer-sponsored health insurance. It's the approach he used earlier this year for Medicare and Medicaid in the House-passed budget, but he now wants to expand it to workplace health insurance by giving people a refundable tax credit to help them buy coverage.

In other words, the GOP aimed not only to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid, but also to alleviate employers of the bothersome bottom line-squeezing practice of offering health care benefits. Then, they'd give everyone a tax credit toward buying private health insurance. In other words, if someone's rich enough to afford a private, individual insurance plan, he'd be rewarded with a nice tax subsidy.

If he's not rich enough to afford a private, individual insurance plan, well, Ryan was a full-fledged Ayn Randian Tea Party zealot, and the Tea Party zealots in the audience at the recent CNN/Tea Party presidential shindig were the ones cheering and hooting for society to "just let him die."

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found the Obama health reform law's mandate to purchase insurance unconstitutional, and the Administration Monday chose not to ask the 11th Circuit to re-hear the case, indicating they were going to take their chances with the Supreme Court.

With a five-justice right-wing majority, the odds that the Supreme Court wouldn't crush Obama's law were somewhere between "none" and the proverbial snowball's chance.

"We know that the first step toward real, bipartisan advances in health policy must start with a full repeal of the president's partisan law," Ryan pontificated. "But the case for repeal must be matched with an even greater intensity by a case for replace..."

In the GOP's 2012 budget proposal, Ryan and Republicans schemed to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance industry cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office revealed wouldn't cover a third of seniors' health care costs.

Enraged constituents descended on GOP town hall meetings en masse last spring, demanding Republicans withdraw their Medicare couponization scheme. Ryan himself was besieged and required a police escort to escape a town hall with his skin, but smugly asserted voters had been "overwhelmingly supportive."

Far from contrition, Ryan now aimed to force everyone to buy private health insurance with limited "premium support."

While Medicare was the most efficient deliverer of health care, with administrative costs of just 3%, private, individual health plans were the least efficient, with administrative costs gobbling up 40% of premiums. While Medicare's overhead was limited to the cost of the government employees running it, private insurance overhead was an unlimited frontier of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.

Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly pulled down $13 million in 2009 all by her lonesome. And, that didn't include any fully-loaded corporate jets Wellpoint might have kept warmed up on the tarmac for her. Talk about "administrative costs."

As with any other GOP plan, Ryan's health care plan was just another tax break for the rich, who get a discount off the private plan they were going to buy anyway. In a GOP version of a win-win, Ryan's health care plan was also a giveaway to the insurance industry, which gets all the money that would have gone to Medicare, Medicaid, and employee compensation without having to actually cover anyone for that amount.

As with any GOP version of a win-win, ordinary Americans lost-lost. Most ordinary Americans wouldn't be able to afford the lion's share of monthly premium costs their Ryancare coupons didn't cover. And Americans who didn't have enough income to get tax credits credited, or didn't have jobs at all, a not unlikely circumstance in the current environment, were, well...

Cue the cheering crowd at any GOP presidential debate.

GOP Takes Disaster Victims Hostage, Demand Job-Slashing Ransom

Scuttling off into the night, House Republicans fled the Washington, D.C. scene late Thursday night after grabbing the nation's disaster victims hostage and issuing a ransom demand of $1.6 billion. Republican kidnappers had earlier in the week fallen out over how much ransom to demand, as some in the gang figured their original demand for $1.5 billion from a successful auto industry job-creation program wasn't enough. In the end, Republicans upped their ransom demand to $1.6 billion, adding $100 million from another Energy Department program that guaranteed clean energy loans.

In a bipartisan 59-36 vote Friday, the Senate quickly rejected the House GOP's demand for $1.6 billion from those programs in exchange for $3.65 billion in disaster relief. Even conservative stalwarts at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were appalled at the GOP perfidy, warning that cutting those programs would eliminate thousands of jobs.

Republicans attached the disaster relief to the continuing resolution that funded the government beyond Sept. 30, yet again threatening yet another shutdown if they didn't get their way.

"While we moved a responsible bill, it's time for the Senate to move the House-passed bill," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told reporters Friday after his minions had fled town for a week-long recess, making negotiating the ransom demand impossible. "It is really the most responsible thing to do, and any delay that occurs because of inaction by the Senate will only imperil the needed disaster relief for thousands of families all across the country."

"There has never been an offset for disaster assistance," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reminded everyone.

"We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday. Unless Congress could agree to a temporary resolution to keep funding the government, it could be forced to shut down in October.

"Listen, there's no threat of a government shutdown," Boehner had said Thursday. "As long as our demands are met,"  no one heard him mutter under his breath.

Republicans demanded that Americans choose between funding tornado, earthquake, hurricane and flood relief and funding relief from the economic disaster Republicans fomented with their fiscal policies.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted Americans to give up rebuilding their economy so his wealthy cronies in Virginia's 7th Congressional District could get pricey makeovers for their McMansions. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) wanted Americans to abandon a program that moved production of the Ford Focus from Mexico to Michigan and the Nissan Leaf from Japan to Tennessee so her state could get money to rebuild houses destroyed by a flooding on a floodplain.

"Disaster assistance is absolutely critical for my district," whined Emerson, who apparently didn't give a fig about the unemployment disaster she was exacerbating by gutting the job-creation program.

Cantor and Emerson hated that the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program they wanted to gut had already created 40,000 jobs, reviving an entire industry that didn't just build cars, but all the parts that went into them. Cantor and Emerson and Republicans hated that the auto industry provided ordinary Americans with good-paying jobs that actually let them buy the things they made.

"Again, while the Chamber understands the importance of reducing America's unacceptable debt and believes that all programs must be on the table," said Bruce Josten for the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, "the Chamber urges you to bear in mind the facts about the ATVM loan program, which promotes manufacturing in the U.S...."

Cantor and Emerson didn't want the American economy to be revived while Barack Obama was president. Cantor and Emerson and all their GOP ilk not only didn't want to revive an auto industry that had showed the world how to build cars, they didn't want to revive a nation that had given the world the car culture, with LA freeways and hot rods and low riders and muscle cars and beach music and drive-ins and fuzzy dice and tuck-and-roll and Candy Apple Red and Suzanne Somers in a white T-bird.

Cantor and Emerson figured America should just give all that up and subcontract it out to Korea.

Cantor and the people of Virginia's 7th Congressional District believed they were entitled to millions in disaster relief, but that people elsewhere weren't entitled to relief from the GOP economic disaster. Emerson and the people of Missouri's 8th Congressional District figured they were entitled to rebuild over and over on a floodplain, but people elsewhere weren't entitled to rebuild the nation's economy.

Given that the Commonwealth of Virginia already received $1.51 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised, perhaps America should just get on with remaking its auto industry and tell Virginians they'd already gotten as much as they were going to get. Given that the great state of Missouri already received $1.32 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised, perhaps America just should get on with revitalizing its car culture and tell Missourians to go jump in their floodplain.

Cantor and Emerson and the Republican breed figured Americans should just hand all their money to the GOP and die of cervical cancer, as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wanted by withholding HPV vaccine, or die of any disease, injury, or illness, as the cheering, hooting audience at the CNN/Tea Party presidential debate Sept 12 wanted by witholding medicare care from the uninsured and insurable, or simply be consigned since childhood to the GOP-shielded torture camps secreted in Emerson's Missouri backwoods.

Or, Americans could just ditch the GOP, and drive off in that white T-bird.

GOP Kidnap Disaster Victims In Third Hostage Take-Over

Failed Hostage Vote Leaves GOP Leaders Red-Faced

Needing to pay for disasters that wrecked the East Coast last month and to fund government operations past Sept. 30, House Republicans once again proved they were incapable of counting votes, drafting responsible legislation, or even passing their own bills. Taking the nation hostage yet again, this time Republicans couldn't even agree what their ransom demands were.

A Republican race so vile that presidential aspirant Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) casually condemned a yet unknown number of women to die from cervical cancer so she could score points with the Luddite anti-vaccine crowd; so reprehensible that hundreds of Tea Party zealots at last week's nationally-televised GOP presidential debate cheered for abandoning the uninsured to misery and death; so unspeakably evil that thousands of rabid GOP evangelical supremacists routinely consigned their own children to brutal torture camps secreted across the South and Mountain West, will try again Thursday to fulfill House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's vision of axing $1.5 billion from an auto industry jobs program so his wealthy cronies can get lavish makeovers for their Virginia McMansions.

Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) were red-faced when their first stab at taking disaster relief hostage so they could gut more American jobs failed to muster the required yeas to permit another GOP football-spiking, booty-shaking, finger-shooting end zone dance. They'd schemed to tack the disaster relief onto the continuing resolution needed to keep the government funded after Sept. 30, with the $1.5 billion theft of job-creation funds lurking inside it like the chest-bursting monster from the Alien movies.

Republicans wanted to restrict disaster relief for recent hurricane, flood, and earthquake damage to a paltry $3.65 billion, short of what was needed to address the multiple catastrophes that plagued the East Coast, but apparently sufficient to gussy up the overpriced tract houses Cantor's well-heeled supporters lurked in throughout Virginia's 7th Congressional District.

Knowing his pals couldn't enjoy their new Carrera marble counters and new Mpingo-wood decks unless they knew that getting them had caused children to go hungry and mothers to cry in anguish, Cantor aimed to raid $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which had already created 40,000 jobs. Plundering nearly half the remaining money set aside for that Bush-era job-creation project would certainly add to the economic misery endemic across the nation and add to his pals' enjoyment of their new McMansion makeovers, Cantor reasoned. Furthermore, it would prevent building more energy-efficient cars in America, earning a tip of the cap from oil moguls everywhere.

Unfortunately for evil-doers everywhere, the GOP scheme failed to pass muster Wednesday. Demonstrating yet again the GOP leadership had been ditching class and swilling beer down by the levee during third-grade arithmetic, their bill went down to ignominious defeat in the House of Representatives, 230-195. 48 Republicans joined all but six Democrats in opposing the scheme.

"We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year," complained Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). He told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "They can't get together the basic Republican votes on the House side to even pass the continuing resolution they agreed to just a few weeks ago, let alone some disaster aid for a country that's been hard-hit by a lot of disasters."

Many Republicans voted against the measure because it hadn't included more spending cuts to offset the disaster relief. More cuts would likely violate spending agreements forged in the debt-ceiling deal, but if Republicans couldn't speak with forked tongues, they'd never get to speak at all.

The greater problem was that some Republicans actually realised the disaster funding was inadequate, and figured it shouldn't be offset with cuts elsewhere.

However, many contrite Republicans promised their leadership they would vote for the bill given a mulligan.

"So far, not enough has switched," Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told the Hill. "A number of them did stand up and say they would vote yes, so that's what the Speaker has to decide over the next few hours: Are there enough to go with the offset we had yesterday, or if not, then we'll have to go with no offsets."

Over in the Senate side, Harry Reid (D-NV) had won passage of a disaster relief measure with bipartisan support, 62-37. Ten Republicans joined Democrats to pass a much more realistic $6.9 billion disaster relief package without requiring cuts to other programs.

Any crazy House GOP scheme that shorted disaster spending and gutted vital job-creation programs to pay for Virginia McMansion expansions was doomed in the Senate.

"We don't know what they're going to do over there today," said Reid.

Clearly, Republicans didn't know what they were doing either. They, along with everyone else, just knew it was going to be evil.

Obama Jobs Speech Feels Irrevelant After Humiliating Debt Ceiling Fight

When a beleaguered Barack Obama steps to the podium before a joint session of Congress Thursday night to deliver a speech on the most pressing issue facing the nation, one has to wonder whether congressional Republicans will even bother to show up.

One has to wonder whether anyone in America will show up. The President's jobs speech, humiliatingly wedged into a non-primetime 7 pm slot between folks on the west coast tidying their cubicles or getting stuck in rush hour traffic and the special Thursday night NFL season kickoff edition of Sunday Night Football, had the air of futile irrelevance.

Talk about diminished: White House spokesperson Jay Carney had to assure America that Obama wouldn't preempt the game's opening kickoff.

It was hard to imagine the President's jobs speech as bearing any sort of relevance. Clearly, Republicans would deny, deride and ridicule every proposal he made, no matter how innocuous. It was in the Republicans' interest to make sure the economy they and George W. Bush crashed in 2008 stayed crashed until 2012.

It was hard to imagine Obama having any sort of relevance in any venue. He was a man defeated and discarded by virile Republican legislators who held all the cards and called all the shots. He was a man who needed permission for every action.

Republicans had even demanded they be allowed to vet Obama's speech before he delivered it. One could imagine Obama raising his hand to ask House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) permission to use the bathroom.

And being told to wait.

Throughout the Republicans' grinding, unconscionable, summer-long hostage-taking of the normally pro forma debt ceiling hike, no one seemed to notice that Barack Obama and the prestige of the Office of the President of the United States had steadily, inexorably been strangled and humiliated to death.

Republicans masterfully leveraged ransoming the debt ceiling not just to extort outrageous budget-busting spending cuts they couldn't have dreamed of extracting through normal legislative processes: Republicans effectively destroyed the Obama Presidency, all but making good on their promise to hold Obama and Democrats to a single term in the White House.

Barring some last moment, fourth down, eighty-yard hail-Mary pass more appropriate, if no less likely, for the kind of football game following Obama's Thursday speech, rather than the football game that was the last fifteen months of his Presidency, future historians will doubtless mark the debt-ceiling drama as the debacle that destroyed Obama.

Before the debt-ceiling debacle, Obama was another President fighting a recalcitrant Congress. After the debt-ceiling debacle, Obama was an irrelevant outcast in tattered rags loitering next to the freeway on-ramp plaintively holding up a hand-drawn cardboard sign reading, "Will address Congress for food."

President Bill Clinton was right. Obama should have invoked the 14th Amendment, raised the debt ceiling unilaterally, and dared this opponents to take him to court as though they were shrieking harpies screaming for a big divorce settlement. It would have made Obama appear strong, decisive, audacious, even reckless: all traits Americans admire and respect. It would have saved his Presidency.

But Obama was a born appeaser.

It was difficult to pin down the exact moment Republicans destroyed Obama. Sometime between Obama's forthright call for a clean debt-ceiling hike, and his concession to consider the nation's budget deficit, and his vision for a $4 trillion deficit reduction Grand Bargain gone awry, and his scrambling around looking for someone, anyone, to return his phone calls, Obama went from Commander-in-Chief to Capitulator-in-Chief to chiefly ignored and irrelevant.

Tragically, Obama's debasement had been so unnecessary. Republicans controlled only the lower chamber of the legislative branch, while Democrats controlled the Senate and the Presidency. A strong President would have brushed aside the rancorous extremists of the Tea Party and the far right wing of a minority already disgraced by the Bush years, a mere fly buzzing around the periphery of power.

But Obama was intent on inclusion, consensus and compromise, without understanding his opponents would only see weakness, appeasement, and capitulation.

During the debt ceiling negotiations, taunting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) delighted in driving a frustrated Obama from the room virtually in tears as though the Leader of the Free World was some thirteen-year-old girl spurned by the cutest boy in class.

Surely, Obama had someone from Homeland Security, from law enforcement, from TV crime dramas to tell him you never, ever negotiated with terrorists. It was not as though Obama was on an island as congressional Republicans harangued him with their demands. The vast majority of Americans despised the Republican hostage-takers. Even such Republican stalwarts as former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill derided the hostage-takers as, "a form of al Qaeda terrorists."

Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), mistaking Obama's dedication to appeasement for stubborn determination, offered the President essentially a clean debt ceiling hike that quickly garnered bipartisan support as the clock ticked down toward national insolvency and default.

The Republicans actually blinked, disbelieving anyone could be so placatory as Obama, but Obama couldn't accept victory. Obama, flailing for a grand bargain as though trying to prove that was the only reason he'd allowed himself to be taken hostage in the first place, would only settle for defeat and humiliation.

McConnell and such old-guard Republicans as John Kyl (R-AZ) and John McCain (R-AZ), who backed the double-reverse clean debt ceiling hike at considerable political cost to themselves, will not make that mistake again.

Thus defeated, humiliated and emasculated, Obama will step to the podium Thursday night to beg Republicans to extend a middle class tax cut they won't extend without extracting more tax cuts, breaks and subsidies for the rich elsewhere in the budget, and to implore the GOP for two or three lousy hundred billion dollars in infrastructure repairs they'll just laugh out of town and which wouldn't be nearly enough to pull America from its economic malaise anyway.

Fortunately, no one will tune in to watch this penultimate debasement of the President of the United States. Everyone will say they were stuck in traffic, or they weren't interested in politics, or they were getting onion dip and a beer for kickoff.

In fact, no one wanted to see their President humiliated and debased. In fact, everyone will avert their eyes, as everyone does when seeing a tattered man in rags plaintively holding up a ragged cardboard sign.

 

Hurricane Spending Offsets Should Begin In Virginia's 7th District

Republicans, busy coddling the rich with ever more and greater tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies have found another excuse to slash federal spending and hand more money to their rich cronies and patrons.

Hurricane Irene ripped through the eastern seaboard, cutting a swath of misery from North Carolina to the Canadian border, and killing 43 people. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) figured any money the Federal Emergency Management Agency spent to pick up the pieces needed to be offset by cuts elsewhere.

Disgraced former FEMA head Mike Brown, who did a heckuva job tending to his stable of fancy horses while Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, figured Cantor was on the right track. The nation's worst emergency responder told - who else? - Fox News, "We have to start making these hard decisions facing the fiscal reality that the country is broke."

Or, the nation could make the hard decision to stop coddling the rich, and make them pay their fair share in taxes, as more than six in ten Americans consistently tell one poll after another. After all, when America collected a proper amount of taxes from the rich back in the day, it had been able to rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II, build a whole new America, educate a whole generation of Americans, invent the computer, the internet and the cell phone, and put Neil Armstrong and eleven of his buddies on the moon.

But America has coddled its rich to the point where it couldn't clean up after a single Category 1 hurricane.

"We're just going to need to make sure that there are savings elsewhere to continue to do so," Cantor told - who else? - Fox News. Cantor explained America just had to keep coddling its ultra-wealthy magnates and moguls by saying, "just like any family would operate when it's struck with disaster, it finds the money it needs... then goes without trying to buy a new car..."

Apparently, when disaster struck a Republican family, everyone struggled to make ends meet while Dad absconded with all the money and flew off to the Seychelles with his mistress.

What the Republican family needed was to divorce Dad and nail his philandering posterior with an enormous support settlement.

As long as there were Republicans like Cantor philandering with trans-national corporations and oil magnates and hedge fund tycoons, America needed to slam them with enormous settlements as well. Any spending offsets for Hurricane Irene should come directly out of Cantor's Seventh Congressional District in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Any spending offsets for disaster relief should come out of congressional districts that elected Republican lawmakers who figured there ought to be spending offsets for disaster relief.

To begin with, for every dollar in federal taxes the Commonwealth of Virgina sent to Washington, D.C., the Commonwealth of Virginia was collecting $1.51 in federal spending. Already, Virginia was getting way too big a slice of the federal pie anyway, while California and New York were only getting about 75 cents for every dollar in federal taxes they raised. Already, Dad was slathering his sleazy mistress with Chanel and Tiffany while Mom and the kids were stretching last night's Tuna Helper.

So, Cantor was right. America needed to cut Virginia off.

Cut off every Social Security check going to Virginia. Cut off every Medicare reimbursement going to Virginia. Cut off every government paycheck going to Virginia. Cut off the Pentagon. Cut off the CIA. Cut off the Navy bases.

Make I-95 and I-64 and every other freeway, highway, byway, boulevard, avenue, street, and alley built and maintained with federal dollars a toll road for local residents. Carve Virginia airspace out of the FAA's air traffic control system.

Pull every phone, fax, modem and pager number out of Virginia, and yank its ten-plus-one dialing out of the Federal Communication Commission-administered North American Numbering Plan. You didn't know the federal government owned all the phone numbers, did you? Tough tiddlies. Get your own numbers, and see if anybody will recognize them.

Repossess every conscious thought federally-funded education instilled into every brain in Virginia.

Every congressional district that elected a lawmaker who wanted disaster relief spending offsets should have those offsets come out of his or her district.

While we're at it, every state, every county, every district, township, hamlet or burg that's been spending more federal dollars than it's been raising should start looking into going without that new car Cantor figured everyone should go without. Every state, every county, every district, township, hamlet or burg that's been slathering itself with Chanel and Tiffany on the nation's platinum-plus card should get its line of credit cut until it paid back every red cent.

Alabama had been getting $1.61 in federal spending for every dollar it raised in taxes. Cut it off until it paid back every deficit penny for the past thirty years. Relief for last Spring's tornadoes? Quit dreaming.

Alaska had been getting $1.81 in federal spending for every dollar it raised in taxes. Cut it off.

Arizona had been getting $1.20. Cut if off.

Arkansas had been getting $1.41. Cut it off.

And, those were just the 'A's.' Virginia was way at the other end of the alphabet, with a ton of blood-sucking mostly solidly deficit-hawk Republican red states in between.

At least FEMA had already suspended tornado clean-up payments to Missouri. Missouri was getting $1.32 in federal spending for every dollar in federal taxes it raised even before it got Uncle Sam to start picking up the trash left behind when tornadoes trashed the state.

Or, Republicans and their constituents could begin to show a little appreciation for all the care and attention California and New York and Massachusetts and Illinois and New Hampshire and New Jersey and the handful of other primarily Blue states carrying this country had been lavishing on their spendthrift backsides. Or, Republicans and their constituents could stop coddling their oil tycoons and coal magnates and big pharma moguls and all the other plutocrats and their multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations, and make them kick in a few more scoots to keep the neighborhood picked up and freshly painted before running off to the Seychelles with their diamond-encrusted bimbos.

New car indeed.

Republicans, Dem Collaborators Threaten America, World Economy With Grand Bargain

The blind obsession some Democrats have with polishing their bona fides via a budget-slashing economic Grand Bargain with Republicans loomed as the greatest threat this side of Rome to the world's tottering economic prospects, to say nothing of the threat to tens of millions of Americans teetering on the brink of financial ruin.

The senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, onetime Democratic Presidential standard-bearer and present Super Committee numerary John Kerry, has emerged as the poster child for obsession-fearing and loathing under the donkey banner.

Kerry is horny for a Grand Bargain, and his eagerness to flop face down onto the two-lane blacktop of bargaining and let Republican big rigs flatten him as they hurtle toward dismantling Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid while extracting ever more and greater tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for plutocrat cronies and Boston Brahmins alike, had the handful of reasonable minds left in America mulling doomsday scenarios.

The bipartisan, bicameral Super Committee that Republicans won as part of their ransom for allowing the nation to raise its debt ceiling and continue funding operations is slated to produce a plan for reducing the federal deficit by anywhere from $1.2 to shoot-the-moon trillion dollars in time to spoil everyone's enjoyment of football games and Thanksgiving turkey. The full Congress was slated to enact either the Super Committee plan or a set of default cuts in time to spoil everyone's enjoyment of figgy pudding and Christmas goose.

Of course, President Barack Obama was the horniest horn-dog in the horn of horndom lusting for a $4 trillion Grand Bargain, and only the incomprehensible intransigence of right-wing Republicans on closing one or two of the tiniest, tiniest, insignificant, inconsequential and arcane tax loopholes ever conceived saved America and the world from a catastrophic disemboweling of government spending that would have cratered the global economy even more than the 10%-and-counting cratering the global economy suffered. To say nothing of the tens of millions of Americans who would have been forced to make do with smaller and smaller Social Security checks, and tens of millions more Americans who would have been forced to wait years more for Medicare.

But, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) for the unspeakable abomination that was the Super Committee, it became clear that the GOP, slowly awakening to the realization that they'd slammed the door in the face of the hooded scythe-bearing spectre who'd come to terminate the world's sole surviving superpower and allow the Republicans' plutocrat overlords unfettered dominion over the Earth, was now ready to concede on those one or two tiniest, tiniest insignificant, inconsequential and arcane tax loopholes in the interest of helping America onto that rowboat across the Styx.

Portman, along with Gang of Six negotiator Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), was known to be amenable to possibly adjusting the depreciation schedule of corporate jets in exchange for dismantling Medicare, handing all its money to insurance company moguls, and pawning off future seniors with worthless discount coupons (Buy one heart bypass surgery at full price, and get a second heart bypass surgery of equal or lesser value for 50% off!). McConnell and Co. were aware of Portman and Kyl's predilections when he selected them over such raw meat Tea Party zealots as Jim DeMint (R-SC).

And Kerry, conscious of the graying tousle atop his dome and delirious to etch his moniker on so many burnished plaques, would fall over his brogues to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to insurance company moguls, and pawn off future seniors with worthless coupons. Not to mention dismantling Social Security to hand all its money to Wall Street tycoons while pawning off future seniors with nothing at all. Not to mention gutting all the services, administrations and watchdogs shepherding the environment, and business, and industry that heretofore had made sure people weren't forced to brush their teeth with radioactive toxic carcinogens and rinse with radioactive toxic carcinogenic water.

All of which could lead to the horn dogs and Republicans gleefully announcing they'd cut $4- or $6-trillion off the federal budget, capped spending forever and ever, and adopted a budget-balancing mandate that mandated the budget be balanced at zero for the foreseeable future. And, as everyone had somehow forgotten that governments were supposed to be spending more to stimulate depressed economies rather than spending less to depress depressed economies, the global equity markets just possibly might remind everyone by cratering the world's bourses even more than they'd already cratered.

Even better for Republicans, the Democrats would have ceded the one redeeming feature that had thus far kept them ahead of the rampaging elephants in the hearts of the general electorate, namely pushing for tax reform instead of dismantling Medicare and Social Security in a country where 60% to 70% of the electorate preferred raising taxes on the rich to dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

And, so long as Democrats were ceding the high ground on the entitlements heretofore known as the Third Rail of Politics, they might as well cede the high ground on the economy, the cratering of which the majority of Americans had so far still been happy to blame on George W. Bush.

All of which - the cratered economy, the gutted entitlements, the dashed hopes for change that promised hope but delivered dash - must certainly lead to Obama's plunging approval rating to plunge even further, and set the stage for a tide of malaise some Bible-thumping Texan Republican populist could ride into the White House in 2012.

All of which must, certainly, be labelled as 'Plan A' over at the Republican National Committee.

Polls Show GOP Scorns Americans' Wishes With Super Committee Picks

Two new polls revealed once again that the vast majority of the American people believed the rich should pay more in taxes, but Republicans appointing half of the so-called Super Committee tasked with working out the second half of the recent deficit-reduction package were adamant that Americans' wishes would have no impact on their unwavering commitment to coddle the rich with more and greater tax cuts, tax breaks, and tax subsidies.

"What I can pretty certainly say to the American people, the chances of any kind of tax increase passing with this, with the appointees of (House Speaker) John Boehner (R-OH) and I, are going to put in there, are pretty low," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sneered his utter contempt for the wishes of the electorate he was supposedly sworn to serve.

63% of Americans wanted McConnell and Republicans on the Super Committee to increase taxes on businesses and higher-income Americans as part of any deficit reduction package, a new CNN/ORC poll revealed Wednesday. However, all six Republicans selected by Boehner and McConnell were Grover Norquist sycophants pledged never to raise taxes on their ultra-wealthy patrons.

Only 35% wanted the Super Committee to make major changes in Social Security and Medicare, while 64% believed such changes should be off the table.

McConnell, however, wanted the Super Committee "to come back with a wholly significant entitlement reform." Republicans were rebooting their disgraced plot to dismantle Medicare, hand all its money to their insurance company cronies, and pawn off future seniors with worthless vouchers. Most Republicans also wanted to plunder Social Security and hand all its money to their Wall Street money moguls to pile on the roulette wheel of international equity markets.

The Super Committee was part of the ransom Republicans demanded for releasing the federal government debt ceiling they had kidnapped. If the government hadn't been able to raise its self-imposed credit limit, it wouldn't have been able to fund operations, pay off existing obligations, or send out Social Security or Veterans' benefits, eventually leading to the first-ever default on sovereign American debt.

The Republicans' ransom also included a $2.8 trillion all-cuts deficit reduction package that has created havoc in global equity markets. In dicey economic times, when the government becomes the consumer of last resort, government should be increasing spending to stimulate the economy, but Republicans continued to insist that government slash spending to depress the economy.

The Super Committee was slated to develop the second half of the deficit reduction package, allowing Republicans another chance to heed the electorates' call for revenue reforms to reduce the nation's debt.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll also released Wednesday revealed 66% of Americans they surveyed wanted to raise taxes on upper-income Americans as a way to reduce the federal deficit.

60% believed major changes should be made to the tax code to increase tax revenue.

However, right-wing firebrand and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), espousing the party line, declared, "the House won't support increasing taxes."

The six Republicans selected for the Super Committee were all right-wing stalwarts committed to coddling their rich cronies with more tax cuts and subsidies, not to reducing the deficit by tapping the horded billions in their rich cronies' coffers.

Among the GOP Senators, Jon Kyl (R-AZ) was McConnell's trusted henchman, Rob Portman (R-OH) was the Bush Administration's budget director, and Pat Toomey (R-PA) was a Tea Party ideologue.

Among the GOP members of Congress, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) was the staunch Norquistist chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) was the Energy and Commerce Committee chair committed to giving coal and oil companies free reign to devastate the environment, and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) was the rabid anti-tax fanatic who chaired the House Republican Committee.

None demonstrated the least interest in representing the desires of the vast majority of Americans. All were committed to shielding their cronies' tax subsidies, shelters and havens.

Gallup found 66% of all Americans wanted the rich to pay higher taxes, but only 37% of Tea Party zealots felt the same way.

The Republicans were wholly committed to representing the interests of the tiny Tea Party extremist minority.

CNN/ORC found 63% of all Americans wanted to raise taxes on business and high-income earners, but only 24% of Tea Party zealots felt the same way.

The Republicans were wholly committed to representing the interests of the tiny Tea Party extremist minority.

64% of Americans didn't want major changes to Medicare or Social Security, but 47% of Tea Party zealots wanted to gut Medicare and dismantle Social Security, and let insurance company moguls and Wall Street tycoons run off with all the money.

Other recent polls revealed that 72% of Americans wanted to raise taxes on those making $250,000 or much, much more a year to keep Medicare and Social Security benefits secure, but Republicans and Tea Party zealots were committed to ransacking those programs so the wealthy could party in Ibiza.

"I think the focus needs to stay on spending. This select committee has been tasked with the job of trying to identify those cuts," Cantor rejected revenue reform to address the federal deficit.

Supply side ideologue Camp chimed in, "Last Friday's downgrade of our debt by S&P is a strong reminder of how important it is for this committee to lead and focus on restoring confidence in America by further cutting out of control spending..."

Never mind S&P felt it was Republican intransigence on taxes that imperiled America's sovereign debt.

The Republican juggernaut blundered blindly ahead, coddling the rich while devastating America's economy and wreaking havoc in global financial markets. Again. Still. Once and forevermore.

Primary Challenge Could Help Obama, Dems

Even before President Barack Obama began upsetting everyone with his debt ceiling deals, various voices, including progressive stalwart Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), had been suggesting a Democratic primary challenge would be good for Obama and Democrats.

The Republicans' whole raft of primary candidates, running the gamut from Mitt Romney soup to Michele Bachmann (R-MN) nuts, appeared extraordinarily redundant when the sitting President was politically somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon.

Democrats, on the other hand, would do well to put up someone to represent their traditional values.

"If a progressive Democrat were to run, I think it would enliven the debate," Sanders told WNYC radio in March. Sanders is an Independent who caucuses with Democrats.

Add Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to those who had suggested a Democratic primary challenger to the President would be a good thing for both Obama and the party.

"I think primaries can have the opportunity of raising the issues and making the Democratic candidate a stronger candidate," Kucinich said in February. "I think it's safe to predict that President Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, but he could be a stronger nominee if he receives a strong challenge in the primary."

A poll last fall found Democrats evenly split over whether Obama should be challenged in a Democratic primary. 46% were opposed to a primary challenge, while 45% favored one.

Even Ralph Nader figured Democrats ought to consider primary challengers to Obama, although he didn't nominate himself, as when he ran as the Green Party candidate against Al Gore.

The poll and Sanders' and Kucinich's comments came before Obama's approval rating dipped to 40%.

A primary challenge could help define Obama's positions, and might encourage him to engage and energize his party's base. At the very least, it would give Obama a chance to stand on a stump and campaign, rather than simply cede the primary season election coverage to Republican rivals. It would give Obama a chance to press the flesh and make speeches and do all the things he's good at, rather than just wrangle with recalcitrant lawmakers over budgets and policy disputes.

A progressive primary challenge could help Democrats define a progressive alternative, and redefine Obama's position in the political spectrum from left to center.

It could give the 72% of Americans who believed taxes should be raised on wealthier Americans to preserve Medicare and Social Security benefits an alternative who represented their priorities. It could give the 68% of Americans who believed federal debts should be addressed with a combination of revenue reforms and spending cuts, or revenue reforms alone, an alternative who represented their priorities.

Whatever happens over the next few days in the ongoing melodrama precipitated by the Republicans' unconscionable hostage-holding of the nation's debt ceiling, rank-and-file Democrats, to say nothing of the 72% of Americans who preferred raising taxes instead of cutting Medicare and Social Security, have become increasingly alarmed at how far to the right of Nixon Obama had proven to be.

The nation's debt ceiling is a self-imposed credit limit requiring Congressional approval to raise. Normally a pro forma vote, Republicans have been holding the debt ceiling hostage to political demands they could never have passed through normal legislative processes. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has warned that unless the debt ceiling is raised by Aug. 2, the federal government would no longer be able to fund operations, pay off existing obligations, or send out the 55 million Social Security checks hitting the mail room Aug. 3.

The President's bargain, hashed out with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) because he presumably was a more amenable pea-eater than House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), seemed to enrage everyone from placard-waving Tea Party zealots to House Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ). Not a confidence builder. Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and John Kyl (R-AZ) seemed to like it. Not a confidence builder.

The President's deal to get the debt ceiling raised was purported to reduce the federal deficit by some $2.8 trillion, with $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending over ten years up front, and an additional $1.6 trillion coming from more cuts and maybe, maybe, some tiny, tiny, non-Grover Norquist-offending revenue tweaks to be determined by a bicameral, bipartisan committee in time to spoil everyone's enjoyment of turkey and football games this fall. Meaning a group of three Democratic Senators and three Democratic Congressional Reps, along with three Republican Senators and three Republican Congressional Reps were supposed to come up with a list of budget cuts and revenue hikes by Thanksgiving, to be approved by simple majority votes in both chambers of Congress. Failing that, $1.2 trillion in mandatory across-the-board cuts, split between defense and non-defense spending, would kick in. Cuts to defense and Medicare were intended to hasten everyone's ardor for the committee process. The Medicare cuts were capped at 2% of Medicare costs, and were directed at insurers and health care providers, rather than beneficiaries.

Total discretionary spending would be reduced by $7 billion in 2012, with half coming out of national security. Like many a pro-football player's contract, the cuts were heavily back-end loaded.

In a bow to McConnell's earlier plan, lawmakers would vote against the debt ceiling hikes, and Obama would veto the disapprovals.

None of which resembled the balanced combination of spending cuts and revenue reforms the President touted and 68% of Americans favored.

Regardless, Obama would get, albeit in two bites, his $2.4 trillion debt ceiling hike, presumably enough to get him past the 2012 elections.

Whether this was a good deal, or whether it would even survive a vote in the House of Representatives, was fairly unclear to everyone involved. Tea Party enthusiasts were unhappy the deal didn't include the guarantee of a balanced budget amendment being sent to the states, didn't cut the deficit by the $6 trillion they wanted, and didn't include a single slogan, jingle, pledge or catchy tagline. Democrats were unhappy the deal didn't include any revenue reforms, and cut Medicare, although House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) managed to prevent a dreaded change to Social Security's cost of living adjustment formula.

(Incidentally, the current, more favorable COLA hadn't raised seniors' Social Security checks in two years, because the plunging price of giant-screen flat panel TVs had managed to offset rising fuel, food, drug and home heating costs.)

All of which made everyone with a set of convictions on either side of the tennis court particularly miffed, a tendency the President had repeatedly begun to demonstrate.

A Democratic primary challenge could help address the ambivalence under the donkey banner. It would let voters kick the tires again, and consider whether the shiny new conveyance they signed up for four years before was really a clunker, or whether it just needed a new coat of clear-coat polymer to shine up the paint.

And, should the President's approval continue to spiral earthward, it would position Democrats with a candidate who owned considerably less baggage.

Truman, The 14th Amendment, And Progressive Income Taxes

Ever since Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) suggested President Barack Obama invoke the 14th Amendment to raise the federal debt ceiling, there's been a minor brouhaha over Clyburn's assertion that President Harry Truman did so during his presidency.

Admittedly, "Give 'em hell, Barry!" loses something without the alliteration.

In fact, Truman never did raise the federal debt ceiling. In fact, since the nation started using the debt ceiling in 1939, Truman was the only President who didn't raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling was incrementally raised to the princely sum of $300 billion - hardly enough to keep Wendi Murdoch in shoes - during World War II, was reduced to $275 billion in 1945, and remained $275 billion until 1954, when Dwight David Eisenhower, or "Ike," who everyone apparently liked, was President.

Whether Truman was inspired by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to issue Executive Order 9981 integrating the United States Armed Services, as some have suggested, is another issue entirely. However, there is no mention of the 14th Amendment in the Executive Order, or reference to the amendment in the Truman Library's discussion of the Executive Order.

Whatever Truman did, Obama should certainly use 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling instead of submitting to Republican blackmail demands gutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Certainly, Obama should use the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling instead of allowing Republicans to blackmail the nation again a few months from now. Certainly, Obama should use the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling instead of rewarding Republicans with legislative changes they could never pass through the normal legislative process.

Obama should certainly use the 14th Amendment to raise the federal debt ceiling simply because Republicans are intransigent on the very reason Truman never had to raise the debt ceiling at all.

In Truman's day, the federal government managed to fund the GI Bill, rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan, poke the Soviet Union in the eye with the Berlin Airlift, and help develop all the technologies that gave us computers, the internet, cell phones and rockets to the moon without raising the debt ceiling.

In Truman's day, the federal government, wrestling with a troubled economy converting from war production to civvies, managed to send countless veterans to college or vocational training, and provided low-interest loans for housing and living expenses without raising the debt ceiling. In Truman's day, the federal government built war-devastated Western Europe, with its millions of displaced refugees, millions of demolished homes, countless destroyed roads, and bridges, and dams, and factories into the economic power it is today without raising the debt ceiling. In Truman's day, the federal government fought the Korean War without raising the debt ceiling.

In Truman's day, all that and much, much more was possible because, instead of borrowing, the federal government did this little thing called collecting taxes.

In his day, President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes, but had to raise the debt ceiling 18 times.

Today, instead of being able to rebuild 5,000,000 homes and care for 12,000,000 refugees in bomb-devastated West Germany as Truman did, a handful of the ultra-wealthy sit in luxury boxes at Yankee Stadium.

Today, instead of educating an entire generation of Americans and innovating the new technologies of the 21st Century as Truman did, a handful of rich codgers fuss over their art collections and trophy wives.

Today, instead of building the infrastructure for the next generation, we nip and tuck and botox and tan the spotted countenances of a privileged past generation.

Without addressing revenue, whether Barack Obama uses the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling doesn't make a hill of beans worth of difference in the world. The ruinous tax policies of the last thirty years have paupered a nation that could, and did, once rebuild one entire world and create a whole new one for the future. The ruinous tax policies of the last thirty years have managed only to concentrate 84% of the nation's wealth in the hands of 20% of its people, with no payoff except that a handful of people can plaster themselves with enough designer labels to look like prissy Nascar drivers and turn everyone around them into peasants subjugated by armies of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians.

84% of the nation's wealth is being spent on the creation of a world miserable even for the wealthy few, instead of the building of a better world for everyone. 84% of the nation's wealth, an entire future for a whole generation, is being horded away in arcane financial instruments and funnelled into the intellectually bankrupt social engineering of an ignorant and greedy few. 84% of the nation's wealth is being squandered on so many legal briefs and politicians' perks to bludgeon away oversight of business and industry, respectable wages for workers and educators and first responders, and environmental protections.

84% of the nation's wealth is being squandered on the exhausting one of world, instead of the building of many.

Whether Barack Obama uses the 14th Amendment to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling only matters in that it will allow the government to function a bit longer, send out Social Security and Medicare and veteran's checks for a few more months, and prevent the catastrophic cascade failure of the world's financial markets for another day.

Until Americans give themselves the revenue tools Americans had in Truman's day, whoever the future belongs to, they won't be Americans.

Polls: Neither Dem or GOP Debt Ceiling Plan Cleaves To Americans' Wishes

Yet another poll revealed how disconnected from ordinary Americans the Washington Beltway pols were.

A Reuters/Ipsos flash poll conducted Monday evening after President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) addressed the nation revealed 68% of Americans believed federal government debt should be addressed either with a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, or tax hikes alone.

Yet, both surviving debt plans being haggled over in Congress addressed the problem with cuts only, a strategy favored by just 19% of the American people

Poll after poll has revealed the fevered haggling in Washington has drifted further and further from the wishes of the electorate.

While 72% of Americans wanted to raise taxes on those making $250,000 or more to save Medicare and Social Security, Republicans subverted the discussion in Washington to one about lowering taxes on those making $250,000 or more, while voucherizing Medicare and privatizing Social Security.

While 56% of Americans want to address the nation's debt with a combination of cuts and tax hikes, and 12% want to address the debt with tax hikes alone, Republicans wrestled the Washington budget discussion away from a discussion of cuts and revenue reforms, and into a discussion of the size and timing of an all-cuts scheme.

While 60% of Americans said keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits as they were was more important, Beltway Republicans numbered among the 32% of Americans who said reducing the deficit was more important.

Republicans making $75,000 or much, much more a year were the only demographic group that prioritized deficit reduction over maintaining Social Security and Medicare, by 68% to 28%. And, Republicans making $75,000 or much, much more a year have been controlling the discussion on Capitol Hill.

Republicans have successfully monopolized the debt ceiling conversation, making it all solely and exclusively about the amount of the tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies the rich would receive. All discussion of revenue reform was banished from the table. Instead, all discussion focused on slashing vital services all Americans relied upon, so the funds for those services could be handed to the already-rich.

Republicans controlled the conversation on the strength of a great PR campaign. Republicans characteristically pulled out Madison Avenue sound-bite pledges and postures. They pulled out yet another catchy-sounding slogan, Cut, Cap and Balance, to sell their scheme for the forced voucherizing of Medicare and plundering of Social Security so they could hand a $6 trillion tax subsidy to their already-unspeakably wealthy patrons and cronies. They wrestled the Washington discussion to when, not whether, to implement Cut, Cap and Balance.

Instead of discussing tax hikes on the richest Americans, Republicans hijacked the discussion to make it about the biggest tax subsidy the rich have ever enjoyed.

It is the Republicans' mastery of the message, their sovereignty over the sound-bite, that lets them, time and again, fool the ignorant into voting them into office so they could continue their thirty-year plundering of the nation. Their policies have paupered the country, concentrating 84% of the nation's wealth in the hands of 20% of its richest residents.

The Republican mantra of more tax breaks for the rich and more service cuts for everyone else continued to fool many into believing those tax breaks and service cuts somehow helped them. Tax breaks for the rich never created jobs, lowered health care costs, or cleaned up the environment. More service cuts never improved education, or put more cops and firefighters on the street.

Some softening of support for Republicans might have revealed a softening of American gullibility.

Despite Tea Party admonitions that failing to raise the debt ceiling posed no problems, 83% of Americans said they were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the looming Aug. 2 deadline to raise the nation's credit limit.

Despite Republican demagoguery, Reuters/Ipsos found a plurality of Americans, 31%, blamed Republicans for the debt ceiling deadlock, while 21% blamed President Obama. Just 9% blamed Congressional Democrats. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 42% would blame Republicans if debt hike negotiations failed, compared to 36% who would blame Obama.

There was some indication Americans considered Republican bravado as overreaching. Only 30% said they favored retaining their present members of Congress, while 63% said they preferred to look for someone else. Republicans might be swept out of power as quickly as they had been swept in, changing the focus of discussion on Capitol Hill to more closely match Americans' wishes.

Beltway Debt Ceiling Noh Play Winds Toward Final Act

Ah, the excruciating screech of annoying Japanese stringed instruments. The tooth-jarring shriek of annoying Japanese woodwinds. The mind-numbingly inscrutable Japanese Noh play that has held the Washington Beltway in its thrall for all these many months with all its many classic elements, might, just maybe, be trundling and lumbering to its inevitable final curtain. Like all Japanese Noh plays, it has been excruciatingly tedious. Like all Japanese Noh plays, it has been interminably long. It has been incalculably stylized. It has been performed with jerky posturing and screeching dialogue that has all been very symbolic and reassuringly predictable. And, most importantly, all the players have worn masks.

The playbill said that unless lawmakers raised the federal government's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by Aug. 2, the Emperor and all his Taishos and all their Samurai wouldn't be able to hold their courts or flail their peasants or send out any of the 55 million Social Security checks languishing in Treasury Castle.

But, the scheming Republican clan would not deign to raise the debt ceiling unless all the rice harvests and all the rice-wine barrels in the land were first handed to the great plutocrat gods.

And so, the actors paraded onto the stage, posing their poses and posturing their postures as the woodwinds shrieked and the strings screeched. Every strutting samurai with a plan fell to dust and became a moaning ghost. Every moaning ghost became a strutting samurai with a plan.

Finally, the leaders of the two great clans presented their final, final, schemes to slay the demon, and great Lord Obama (it is a Japanese Noh play) cast his favor toward Senate Majority Leader Lord Harry Reid's (R-NV) plan (it's not a very good Japanese Noh play), as Lord Harry Reid was from Lord Obama's own favored clan. The other clan's House Speaker Lord John Boehner's (R-OH) plan was scorned by all, not least, shockingly but predictably, by his own treacherous samurai, who disdained it not because it was a scornful plan, but because it wasn't scornful enough. It may not be a very good Japanese Noh play, but it is accurate.

As Lord Boehner lay dying over his ruined plan, his trusted vassal, Lord Eric Cantor (R-VA) plaintively cried out to his disgraced and shamed samurai "to stop grumbling and whining and to come together as conservatives and rally behind the Speaker and call the President's bluff."

"I do think we're going to have some work to do to get it passed," croaked Lord Boehner as he contemplated his entrails, "but I think we can do it."

The Japanese woodwinds wailed plaintively.

To no avail. "I am confident that as of this morning that there are not 218 Republicans in support of this plan," crowed the most treasonous samurai, Rep. Jim Jordon (R-OH) of the hideous Republican Study Committee, fondling his snakes and toads Tuesday.

If that weren't enough, the even more hideous Club for Growth, a special snake-and-toad interest group that was very important to the Republican Clan, had damned and condemned Lord Boehner three times over their steaming cauldron.

The Japanese strings screeched implacably.

If as few as thirty or forty of Lord Boehner's ronins and ninjas failed to rally to his banner, his implacable foe, the great House Minority Leader, Lady Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) could whip her retainers into voting against Lord Boehner, plunging him into the great flaming cataract beneath the Mountain of Eternal Exiles.

Then, if as few as five or seven wavering members of the Republican Clan, fearful of offending their plutocratic gods with the inevitable collapse of the celestial bond markets should Lord Obama not get his debt ceiling hike, could quietly, quietly touch their sacred stones to Lord Reid's plan, and send it to Lady Nancy in the House. 

Finally, finally, it would be up to Lady Nancy, with the thundering volcanic cataclysm of Death Mountain bursting behind her, to gather some thirty or forty wandering vassals from the shattered remnants of Lord Boehner's once-great army, add them to her own legion of 193 brave samurai, and, gaining the mystical number 218, cry her war cry to the heavens, whereupon everyone would fling themselves into the abyss of the volcano, saving the celestial bond markets and placating the plutocratic gods.

Then, Lord Obama would be able to send out the 55 million Social Security checks languishing in Treasury Castle.

Of course, being a Japanese Noh play, which is unfathomable beyond imagining, there can be no telling who are Lords and who are samurai, and who are mere ghosts, what with all the masks and posturing and all. There is no telling who's who, or whether Lord Reid's plan might become Lord Boehner's, or whether Lord Boehner's plan might have been Lord Reid's plan all along.

There is no telling even who's doing what, or who they represent. Never mind that a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,001 peasants revealed that, should the debt ceiling not be raised and the great Engine of Commerce grind to a halt, collapsing the celestial bond markets, 39% would blame Lord Obama, but 42% would blame Lord Boehner's Republican clan.

Never mind that 63% of peasants surveyed said they'd seek new congressional Lords to send to the Capitol, as opposed to just 30% who said they were happy with their present congressional Lords.

And, never mind in the least that 72% of peasants surveyed said that the wealthy plutocrat gods should have their earthly taxes raised to pay off the nation's debt and preserve Medicare and Social Security.

Despite everything the peasant chorus might sing in the background, the great Lords will pray and burn incense and placate their plutocrat gods, balancing the budget on the backs of the rice-harvesting middle class and, being America, not Japan, their unrevered and abandoned elders.

Because that is what happens in every Noh play on the Washington Beltway.

Boehner Debt Plan DOA With His Own GOP "Nutters"

In case anyone out there was at all confused, a feisty British finance minister only needed to look around for a few minutes to figure out what, exactly, was wrong with Washington's inability to raise it's own, self-imposed credit limit.

"The irony of the situation at the moment, with the markets opening (Monday) morning," U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable told the BBC Sunday, "is 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."

Quite right. Cheerio.

A bunch of those right-wing nutters just about killed House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) two-stage deficit-reduction plan to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling just about as soon as he got it out of his mouth.

"While I thank the Speaker for fighting for Republican principles," opined right-wing nutter Rep. Jim Jordon (R-OH) in a statement released shortly after Boehner announced his plan, "I cannot support the plan that was presented to House Republicans this afternoon." Jordon is a member of the arch-conservative Republican Study Group. It was not immediately known which Bible verses they were studying this week.

In his primetime address to the nation Monday night, President Barack Obama echoed Cable's warnings about the perils the nutters posed. "We would risk sparking a deep economic crisis - this one caused almost entirely by Washington," the President said without referring to the nutters by name.

Boehner's deficit plan was apparently DOA with his own caucus even before the ink from the Speaker's pen was dry. It would slash $1.2 trillion from the budget immediately and raise the nation's debt ceiling by $1 trillion, then reopen the excruciating can of worms in six or eight months after a bipartisan committee of 12 lawmakers offered up another $1.8 trillion in cuts primarily through voucherizing and privatizing Medicare and Social Security.

Boehner's plan would also float the Republican's feverishly coveted and irretrievably doomed balanced budget amendment. A Constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress and ratification by 38 of 50 states, and there weren't nearly enough nutters in all of America to fill that order.

Despite Boehner's best efforts, the nutters weren't impressed. "We're just not running and gunning with this thing," said Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI).

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was meeting right-wing nutter resistance to his own plan to reduce the deficit and raise the nation's debt ceiling. Reid's plan would cut $2.5 trillion from the budget and raise the debt ceiling by that amount.

The Senate plan didn't raise taxes, but would doubtless draw Republican ire for not handing all of Medicare's money to insurance company fat cats and throwing seniors to the dogs.

"This proposal satisfies Democrats' core principles by protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and providing long-term extension of the debt ceiling that the markets are looking for," Reid said, apparently unaware those very features were anathema to Republicans.

In Reid's plan, $1.2 trillion in savings came from cuts to discretionary spending, including $400 billion in interest savings, $100 billion already agreed upon during bipartisan talks led by Vice President Joe Biden last spring, $40 billion in "program integrity savings," and $60 billion reforming Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, agricultural programs, and the Universal Service Fund.

Another $1 trillion came from winding down the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"It's an accounting gimmick," snivelled right-wing nutter Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) about the war savings. "I know they rationalize that, well, that appeared in the Ryan budget, too," Kyl said, referring to Rep. Paul Ryan's 2012 budget scheme, which was most infamous for voucherizing Medicare.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said Republicans, "included the exact same savings in the Ryan budget that passed the House. They never criticized such accounting then, it's hard to see how they could do so now."

Nonetheless, Kyl, in true nutter fashion, said, "Republicans, I don't believe in the Senate, will support a bill that purports to cut spending if that's the kind of the spending that it purports to cut."

As onerous as Reid's plan was, lacking any revenue reforms to address the nation's revenue crisis, it faced a serious uphill climb, as it was not nearly as onerous as Boehner's plan. And, as onerous as Boehner's plan was, even that wasn't onerous enough for the right-wing nutters.

Some nutters were distressed Boehner's measure required only a vote on the Constitutional amendment, not an outright amending of the Constitution. It was not immediately known whether Republicans understood the American people had to voluntarily approve an amendment before they got to change the Constitution of the United States of America.

Others disapproved of the idea of allowing Democrats onto a bipartisan committee. "That is a very legitimate concern," muttered nutter Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK).

At any rate, Reps. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) announced the Boehner plan was DOA with them. The right-wing Heritage Action group also nixed the idea.

Many Republicans have pledged not to raise the debt ceiling under any conditions, including right-wing nutterette Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Others, such as Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Jeff Landry (R-LA), allowed they would have to read Boehner's bill first before making up their minds, discrediting the notion that the entire GOP caucus was illiterate.

Reading was one thing, but counting was quite another. Asked whether he had the votes to pass his measure, Boehner deferred to House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

"We believe we laid out the position that we would not raise if we did not have the cuts and we would not have tax increases," McCarthy stumbled and mumbled. Well, a group that advocates home-schooling on Bible verses and Ku Klux Klan bylaws would understandably be light in the arithmetic department.

Boehner needs 218 votes to pass a bill in the House of Representatives, and, although his caucus numbered 240, right-wing nutters from various hot beverage coalitions and Bible study groups limited the votes he could count on.

Among the votes Boehner likely couldn't count on were the 193 Democratic ones Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) presided over.

"The latest proposal from the House Republicans is a short-term plan that burdens the middle class and seniors, and continues this debate about whether we will default in a few months from now," Pelosi said, ignoring imploring looks from Boehner and stubbornly indulging her annoying habit of constantly championing the needs of the American people rather than simply coddling billionaire plutocrats.

Rep. Chris Van Hollern (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, was less sanguine, calling the GOP plan, "a dangerous, reckless path."  

As to whether Boehner's plan might succeed in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said any two-step proposition was a "non-starter." Apparently, that would be a "no."

"The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn't vote for a dysfunctional government," Obama said, without explaining how any government that included Republican right-wing nutters could be expected to be anything but dysfunctional.

Reid and Boehner promised votes on their respective plans in their respective chambers by midweek. The nation hits its credit deadline Aug 2, and if the debt ceiling hasn't been raised by then, the government will no longer be able to fund operations, pay back loans, send out Social Security checks, or, to Rupert Murdoch's enormous relief, fund Justice Department inquiries.

Which, of course, is what the nutters hope.

Debt Ceiling Debacle: The 14th Amendment And The Republican Insurrection

The final, final, absolutely, positively, last ditch talks among House and Senate leaders collapsed with no deal to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, trundling the nation ever closer to the once-inconceivable possibility that the United States might not be able to fund operations, pay off loans, or send out any of the 55 million Social Security checks waiting to be loaded onto mail trucks Aug. 3.

The last real President America had, Bill Clinton, opined he would use an obscure clause in the Civil War-era 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, and let everyone rot.

Clinton said he would invoke the 14th Amendment "without hesitation," and "force the courts to stop me."

"I have talked to my lawyers," said a more timid President Barack Obama, peeling himself off the asphalt from the last time he'd flopped to the ground and let himself be steamrolled during debt hike negotiations. "They are not persuaded that that is a winning argument."

Republican and Democratic lawmakers Sunday retired to their respective corners and busied about developing separate plans to raise the ceiling and slash federal spending. Everyone had given up on trying to raise revenue, because that would have been the most sensible solution to the nation's revenue crisis, and no one wanted to do anything that anyone might construe as sensible.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), had spent the whole weekend trying to placate their Republican counterparts, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), because Boehner had discovered the President was nothing but a poo-poo head who only wanted to slash spending and save the country, making him impossible to talk with. Boehner then discovered his fellow lawmakers were also poo-poo heads who only wanted to slash spending and save the country, making them impossible to talk with as well.

With the talks collapsed, Reid began work on drafting a plan to slash $2.5 trillion off the budget without touching entitlements, and raise the debt ceiling by that amount.

Boehner and Republicans eagerly moved further to the right, gleefully announcing they were going to push their already-disgraced Cud, Cats, and Valance scam, as it had a catchy title that would likely fool poor and ignorant folks into believing the GOP cared about them.

Cud, Cats, and Valance would force all senior citizens to eat cattle regurgitants, compel everyone to serenade Republican overlords Rupert Murdoch, Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers with tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, and make everyone continuously change Wendi Murdoch's drapes and curtains at her whim. Actually, the scheme was much more destructive than that, as it would dismantle Medicare after the manner of Paul Ryan's couponization scam, and plunder Social Security on behalf of Wall Street fat cats.

The deepening intransigence of Republicans on raising the debt ceiling coincided with the opening of US Justice Department probes into the toxic quagmire of Murdoch's News Corporation.

Republicans who had previously been content to obstruct the government and extract as many tax breaks as they could for their liege lords, suddenly found themselves in a desperate struggle for survival thanks to the News Corp phone-hacking scandal exploding in England.

Apparently, the naked corruption and brazen racketeering infesting every corner of the Republican Party was so endemic, Republican leaders were horrified their coven would be demolished under even the earliest stages of the most cursory investigation. Destroying the government became critical to saving themselves.

Making the 14th Amendment all the more appropriate.

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

"You're not supposed to hold the validity of the public debt hostage to achieve political ends," said Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor.

As to Obama's concern the courts would nix his invoking the 14th Amendment, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said, "This is not a circumstance in which courts have any plausible point of entry."

"This is largely a political question," explained Prof. Balkin. "It is unlikely courts would decide these questions."

Section 4 of the 14th Amendment was written to make sure Union debts would get paid and Confederate ones wouldn't even if the Rebels somehow seized power and tried to do the opposite. Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas said,"Nobody would argue that Section 4 is clear in its meaning, other than at the time everyone though that the South, if they ever got back in control, would not pay Civil War debt."

Although the 14th Amendment was obviously broadly written to apply in all sorts of circumstances, in fact, the present situation was the exact one for which the Amendment was originally written. Today's Republican Party, with its strongholds in the Red States of the South and their Plains and Mountain West possessions, is exactly the same Confederate entity under a different name.

The Republican Party's allegiance may be pledged to numerous lords, but none are the United States of America. They are the liege men and women of oil moguls, the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch and Grover Norquist, but they are not pledged to United States of America. They may be Neo-Confederates, Ku Klux Klansmen, anti-American militias, and theocratist Evangelical supremacists, but they have no allegiance to the United States of America.

Norquist, for one, has emphatically pronounced his supremacy over the United States. When Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) dared to suggest he was an American first and Norquist's vassal second, Norquist's vengeance was swift and ruthless.

Bristling under Norquist's pledge to ruthlessly shield transnational plutocrats like Murdoch from taxation, Coburn complained, "Which pledge is more important? The pledge to uphold your oath to the Constitution of the United States, or a pledge from a special interest group who claims to speak for all American conservatives, when, in fact, they don't?"

"The pledge that Tom Coburn signed was to the Citizens of Oklahoma," Norquist elevated himself to the royal personification an entire nation. Norquist presumed to impose his whim upon hundreds of millions of Americans who had no wish to let Murdoch and the Kochs plunder the nation and accumulate their vast untaxed horde. Despite Norquist's posturing, to deal with debt, 72% of Americans want Norquist's plutocrats to pay their share in taxes.

Norquist's treachery had already enabled 20% of Americans to accumulate 84% of the nation's wealth.

By practice and custom, Elizabeth II of England speaks in the royal plural, but Norquist and Kochs' and Murdoch's Tea Party hireling thugs were simply larcenous usurpers. Tea Party Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) shamelessly demanded $700 million for her cronies to build a bridge to nowhere through the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, while she schemed to pauper the elderly and abandon disabled veterans. Tea Party Rep. Allen West (R-FL)  got $21 million for his cronies to build luxury expansions at vacation airport Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International, while he schemed to starve school children and discard disabled poor.

Republicans who plunder and ransom America are non-state actors in a state of rebellion against the United States. George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recognized them as, "a version of Al Qaeda terrorists."

Certainly the 14th Amendment demanded to be invoked in the very instance for which it was written: to stop Rebel traitors and terrorists leveraging the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

With McConnell Fallback Fading, Debt Ceiling Plans and Bickering Proliferate

Add President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to the burgeoning list of pols presenting, or offering, or, in this case, denying, various plans and packages and pledges and general posturing over deficit-reduction schemes aimed at ending the Republican hostage-holding of the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.

"There is no deal," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said of the President's deal. "We are not close to a deal." Obama had backed himself into a corner romanticising a Grand Bargain notion of big cuts and big revenue overhauls, as he'd been eager to demonstrate that he was relevant and serious about budgets and debts.

Everyone was wary of the last time Obama and Boehner tried to wrangle a deal, only to have Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) throw a hissy fit because it didn't include pointing the Death Star at the Earth and pulling the trigger. Or, did include some tax revenues, which, to Republican Tea Party zealots, was infinitely worse.

Obama's current negotiations alarmed fellow Democrats, as his new deal with Boehner was rumored to contain trillions in cuts with only a promise-with fingers-crossed to someday maybe, possibly, consider some tiny, tiny, non-Grover Norquist-offending revenues, confirming the President's haggling strategy continued to consist of flopping to the ground and getting flattened like a possum on a two-lane blacktop.

"The President always talked about balance, there had to be some fairness in this. This can't be all cuts," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) blubbered in exasperation. "The caucus agrees with that. I hope the President agrees with that, and I'm confidant he will," revealing the alarming lack of confidence the senator had in his commander-in-chief.

The President's non-deal suffered the same pox plaguing all the other plans: Democrats demanded that the revenue crisis required new revenue, while Republicans demanded all the money in Medicare and Social Security be handed over to their insurance industry and Wall Street cronies.

Obama planned to meet with Reid and Democratic leaders including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) Thursday afternoon, presumably to tell them how he'd thrown his own pastor and grandmother under the bus before he'd ever been elected President, so, as President, how throwing the rest of the American people under the bus was a relative cakewalk.

The deal that wasn't a deal apparently included $3 trillion in cuts, busting up Medicare and Medicaid, and generally Republicanizing spending and services, while promising to look at revenues someday in another galaxy, far, far, away.

Unless Washington politicos can manage the normally pro-forma task of raising the nation's self-imposed credit limit by Aug. 2, the federal government will not be able to fund operations or pay back loans or send out any of the 55 million Social Security checks gathering dust in the Treasury Department mailroom Aug. 3.

A while back, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), painfully aware that no one in Congress had the intestinal wherewithal to accomplish the mundane without first demanding excruciating caveats like having everyone eat all the hot dogs on Coney Island or telling Kim Kardashian to stop dressing so provocatively, came up with the brilliant stroke of letting everyone vote against raising the debt ceiling. Then, the President could simply veto the debt hike denial, and all would be well, barring the fantastically unlikely event that two-thirds of anyone on Capitol Hill could remain conscious long enough to override the Presidential veto.

Thus assured of continued continuity, Wall Street resumed climbing toward Dow 13,000, although it was smart enough to hedge by buying enough gold to send that stuff toward $1,600 an ounce.

Meanwhile, back on the Beltway, reassured that a way out of the woods was at hand, pols have been busily filling time with an exponentially-proliferating menagerie of alternate budget deals and wheels and steals to let everyone know how relevant and serious they all were.

The Gang of Sixes and Sevens, which now numbered eight, pushed their plan to cut $3.7 trillion off the debt over some umpteen years, including trillions in spending cuts and a trillion or so in what might or might not be new tax revenues, depending on who you talked to at what time on what day. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) signed onto the Gang Thursday, to show how relevant and serious they were, knowing that Gang leader Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) had, to everyone's relief, announced their plan wouldn't really be ready for a long, long time.

"The Gang of Six plan has not been drafted nor has it been scored by the CBO: It's not ready for prime time," Durbin Tuesday assured a nation nervous that lawmakers might actually have accomplished something. "Not drafted" meant their plan was still akin to something a bunch of potheads came up with at three a.m. on a Sunday morning, only to be forgotten by lunchtime. "Not scored" meant the Congressional Budget Office, which had to look at any money-related Congressional thing before anyone can vote on it, hadn't looked at it. Either process took much longer than the thirteen days left before America turned into a pumpkin.

The House of Representatives, eager to demonstrate they were neither serious or relevant, except as an Himalayan obstruction to anything trundling up the Interstate, passed their ridiculous Cud, Cats, and Valance plan, which required every American to chew on cow regurgitant, sing songs from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and hang curtains until their eyes bled. Not really, but, everyone was thoroughly confident the measure would never, ever, pever, jever pass the Senate, as it contained a Constitutional Amendment which would never, ever, pever, jever muster the two-thirds vote required in the Senate, let alone meander its way through ratification in 38 states before Aug. 2.

Cuds, Cats and Valance compared to the Republicans' original Medicare-voucherizing 2012 Budget proposal - the one that got universally ridden out of town halls on rails last Spring - roughly the way Hitler's Torah study groups compared to Mother Theresa's caring for lepers.

Cud, Cats and Valance's only redeeming quality appeared to be that it gave Harry Reid the opportunity to call it, "some of the worst legislation in the history of this country," in a country that once not only permitted slavery but also outlawed cold brewskies on Friday nights. Reid scheduled the measure to be shot down in the Senate this Friday, hopefully in time for everyone to go out for brewskies afterward.

But, problems also plagued the McConnell Plan, or, more recently, the McConnell-Reid Plan, since Reid had insisted he be considered relevant and serious by saddling McConnell's perfectly sensible nonsense with $1.5 trillion in cuts and a Congressional committee or two. Reid's manipulations have been disastrous, as the $1.5 trillion, Congressional-committee baggage he piled on has given House Republicans a new hostage to hold ad infinitum. House Republicans' new demand holds the amount of the debt ceiling increase to only the $1.5 trillion Reid offered to cut, or alternately, to chop the debt ceiling hike into tiny, tiny increments with corresponding cuts every few days while everyone casts around for a different solution.

Strapping $1.5 trillion in cuts to the McConnell Plan was a mind-numbing misstep, as it reduced the plan to just another deficit-reduction scheme vying for stage time with all the other deficit-reduction schemes. The beauty of McConnell's original plan was that it didn't deal with deficits and debts and the budget, but gave Obama the clean debt ceiling hike he always should have gotten.

Reid's vainglorious desire to be relevant and serious just might have killed America's last, best hope to remain relevant. Seriously.

Leaving everyone wishing for the good old days, when politicians were all irrelevant and silly.