Not true at all. The first bullet point that explains the reasoning for the downgrade in the article is this:

The debt is the most important issue.

The fact that they don't trust us to be able to solve the debt problem is the part you quoted. There's nothing in the text that would indicate that that's the more important factor. If we didn't have our huge debt, then the bullet point you quoted would be a non-issue.

So your reaction to the destruction of the US's good credit rating and all the devastation that's going to cause to the value of what generations have built in this country is to rail against the one group of people who are trying to get us to spend tax dollars responsibly? The Tea Party?

That makes no sense at all.

When you find yourself trapped at the bottom of a deep hole, stop digging!

Just look at your rhetoric, "Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.

I agree with cutting the military, and I agree with the fact that we shouldn't be the world's policeman.

The main thing that the US government *should* do, is to defend our citizens from foreign and domestic threats.

Social Security has a pretty decent store of financial instruments that they can liquidate to keep making payments for months in the event of a government shutdown.

Besides that, though, servicing of the debt is around $30B per month, and the Treasury takes in revenues of over $170B per month. There's more than enough there to fund servicing of the debt, social security, medicare, paying military personnel, and a slew of other government functions.

Default on August 2nd was never even close to the problem. Our rating was cut because the fear is that our debt will be $25 trillion in ten years and is spiraling out of our control. Unlike Greece, no one will be big enough to bail us out. We will take the entire global economy with us.

We had a chance to show the world markets that we could make real cuts to our budget and deficit. Forces of the State didn't like that and instead chose to pass huge amounts of debt and looming disaster on to our descendants.

There was never a danger of default. The US tax revenue every month is much greater than the debt servicing payments.

The only thing we were in danger of was a government shutdown. The "default" talk was all theater designed to scare voters.

The reason we were downgraded is because the "debt deal" was pretty close to useless. More theater.

The real problem (as the article mentions) is that we have such a huge debt in the first place. The Tea Party folks were vindicated by this slashing of our rating. They knew all along that it was about the debt. They tried to do something about it. The leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties should be tarred and feathered on their way out of office.

Cop Block is a brilliant resource for those wanting information on abusive state practices.

As always, government needs to be on a short leash. Give these folks too much power and they'll abuse it time and time again.

Please raise my taxes to pay for more of this shit.

A company I joined as employee #3 in the early 2000's tried to pull the same stunt. I caught it and raised holy hell to have it removed from the stock agreement.

If only there was a way to have credit card owners approve each charge through the entering of some kind of a pin.

If only credit card numbers weren't special since what really mattered was signed transactions.

If only every consumer had a personal device capable of signing transactions in his pocket at almost all times.

Call me a dreamer, but someday in the next hundred years, I think that all those "huge" technological problems could be solved and we could end this problem of having our credit card and social security numbers being exposed.

It's nice to know that Ben Franklin was so incredibly right:

      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

We've done this to ourselves. We've given these goons so much money and power to make us all safe from terrrrusts, and now our liberty and our safety are greatly diminished.

You were really in the right place at the right time... for the cop.

I wasn't aware of the hacking accusation for Zuckerberg (if it wasn't in the Social Network, I haven't really paid attention) - but those things only look similar on a technical level.

"The Palin Hacker" was hacking in the cause of subverting an election. As a society, we take messing with the election process a lot more seriously than we do messing with random web sites of would-be college entrepreneurs.

Exactly right. A settlement is in no way, shape, or form an admission of guilt or even an acknowledgement that the suit had merit. It's just handing someone some money so they'll shut up and you can continue to run your business.