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.

But she's not in office now. The level of zeal in pursuing an out-of-office governor turned vice presidential candidate fits in perfectly with my observations that the mainstream media in this country is biased against those to the right of the US political spectrum.

No kidding. Joe Biden would be this decade's Dan Quayle if he were a Republican. They'd be showing the bit where he asked the guy in the wheelchair to stand up over and over on the Daily Show. You'd see constant mention of his quote that "J-O-B-S, JOBS!" is a three letter word.

It's funny how the press seems to give him a pass. Such a mystery of the universe.

CO2 elevations raise the heat retention of the atmosphere. They don't "weaken" the atmosphere. If the solar cycle decreases the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere and that's offset by the CO2 retention, it could be beneficial to life on Earth.

Please stick to logic and science. Don't use climate change as the bogeyman that's out to get us no matter what we do, like some kind of Jason from Friday the 13th.

Because the police have an extraordinarily strong lobby and our elected representatives aren't interested in protecting our individual liberties.

A video recording is different because it completely shatters the long-held power that the police had of being believed. I'll never forget learning that simple truth in college when a police officer wrongly accused a friend of mine and I of doing something completely fabricated. We had our description of the actual events, the cop had some made-up story. Guess who the judge believed?

Cops have had the protection of belief for way too long. They've abused that power and even with pervasive video, they will continue to abuse that power.

Fortunately, for cases when it is available, video is the great equalizer. Cops don't like to have equal footing with citizens. They want to be right. They want to be believed. They want to have all the power.

Well, lawyers commonly charge their clients per printed page, faxes sent, etc. They make lots of money off doing things archaically.