George W. Bush: He Gave Rise to the Tea Party
During his five years in office, President Obama has often blamed his problems on what George W. Bush left him with: two wars, a historic recession, an out-of-control financial system and a huge budget deficit. But W.'s most enduring legacy to his successor may have been the tea party movement, and the political dysfunction that it has brought.

The U.S. Treasury divides the U.S. government's debt into two general categories: debt held by the public and intragovernmental debt. Debt held by the public consists primarily of U.S. Treasury securitiesâ"including bills, notes and bondsâ"that the Treasury sells on the open market to everybody from individual families and investors to government entities in the Peopleâ(TM)s Republic of China.
Intragovernmental debt is money the Treasury has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund and other government sources to pay for current government expenses.
Under Obama, intragovernmental debt has increased only about 10 percent, starting at $4,319,566,000,000 on Jan. 20, 2009 and increasing to $4,761,904,000,000 by the close of business on Sept. 30, 2013.

The union-brokered $2 billion bonus revelation comes as President Barack Obama sent a White House delegation led by Attorney General Eric Holder to Detroit on Friday to announce a $320 million aid package.
The timing of the unfolding bonus scandal creates a politically liability for Obama, as in 2012, Obama declared that his leadership kept Detroit from going bankrupt.
"We refused to throw in the towel and do nothing. We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt. I bet on American workers and American ingenuity, and three years later, that bet is paying off in a big way," said Obama.
Detroit, which has $18.5 billion in long-term debt obligations, is the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

From the beginning, proponents of The Affordable Care Act conflated the argument that the rising costs of healthcare were due to people without health insurance. They ignored the fact that most Americans have health insurance, and they failed to admit that the rising costs of health care have been ignited by players such as the medical insurance industry and big Pharma which were integral in crafting Obamacare.

Cost control will be the driving force to keep the system operating; therefore, rationing of care will be inevitable.

Now I am going to talk about the potential for a shutdown in just a
moment, but I think that the only phrase that describes it is political terrorism. "Nice global economy you got there. . .Be a shame if we had to destroy it. We have a list of demands. . . If you do not meet them all by our deadline, we will blow up the global economy" How dare you. How dare you.

Now that "bail-ins" have become accepted practice all over the planet, no bank account and no pension fund will ever be 100% safe again. In fact, Cyprus-style wealth confiscation is already starting to happen all around the world. As you will read about below, private pension funds were just raided by the government in Poland, and a "bail-in" is being organized for one of the largest banks in Italy. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

. . .what Ted Cruz is doing -- is signaling to the discontented that there really is another way. They can vote Republican in 2014; and, if they do so big time, there will be a correction of course.
The leadership of the Republican Party hates this. Like Jeb Bush in early 2009, they want "to get beyond Reagan." They want to surrender on immigration; they have designed a Republican healthcare bill that is little more than Romneycare writ large; and they desperately want to make nice with the Democrats. They do not really want a change of course. They merely want to take their turn as managers of the administrative entitlements state. They want to take advantage of discontent without having to commit themselves to a reduction in the size and scope of the government.

There is an unspoken sub-text at play here: what President Putin said in his column is pretty much what American liberals and leftists have been saying about the United States since the 1960s. From the standpoint of American liberals, there is nothing the least bit new or controversial in anything Mr. Putin wrote in his column. He is merely hoisting President Obama and his liberal friends by their own ideological petard.

The August jobs numbers are disappointing. The economy gained 169,000 non-farm payroll jobs, below the estimated figure of 175,000. Much worse, however, were the downward revisions for past months. Julyâ(TM)s job numbers went down 58,000. The total revision for June and July is 74,000 less than previously expected. Then there is the labor participation rate: It dropped to 63.2 percent. It hasnâ(TM)t been this low since 1978. Because so many people have left the work force, the percent of unemployed (i.e. those who havenâ(TM)t checked out of the job market) went down to 7.3 percent.
It is long since past the time that we can attribute feeble job growth to the financial collapse in 2008. The âoerecoveryâ started in the second half of 2009. What we see now is the Obama economy â" more people out of the job market, minimal growth and tepid job creation. The president is right â" we are no longer in a tailspin. The TARP and other financial measures that President George W. Bush put in place and Obama continued staunched the bleeding long ago. But we have a listless economy, a function of combined tax, regulatory and budget policies.