No, for me, it is the recklessness of the way Congress acted here â" with utter disregard to the ultimate consequences of what it was doing â" that is the story. Purely on account of partisan politics, Congress got good and liquored up, went out and got in the car, and sped down the highway at 90 mph, consequences be damned.
Which is why I think Levin's The Liberty Amendments is a fine going-in position. And to you jackwagons who think that I, and other reform-minded Americans, are somehow insincere, lying, duped, or otherwise duplicitous: fall off the planet.
Why is the Obamacare Rollout Failing?
Why, itâ(TM)s obviously because President Barack Obama and his top aides hate government, and therefore canâ(TM)t be trusted to run a major government program. When the government is run by political forces committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out. What we really need is a government that works, because itâ(TM)s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all.
Read the whole thing, which evolves into a poke at that rodeo Eclownomist, Paul Krugman.
For my humor-impaired buddy, damn_registrars.
But at least we all have a moment of clarity. The GOP is not, in any meaningful sense, a conservative, first-principles, Constitutionalist party â" and unless itâ(TM)s subsumed by the Tea Party, it never will be. Rather, itâ(TM)s content to be the lesser half of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party as long as it can collect some of the pork scraps from underneath the table of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Government. No wonder they keep losing â" they like it.
The recent unpleasantness has helped the GOP elite be perfectly clear.
Saving General Motors from bankruptcy was among President Obamaâ(TM)s most frequently cited achievements when he ran for re-election last year. Democrats everywhere touted the companyâ(TM)s revival as proof of the 2009 bailoutâ(TM)s wisdom. That was then. Now, Obama has quietly released the auto manufacturer from a bailout requirement that it increase its production in the U.S. Instead, GM is spending billions of dollars building up its production capacity in
... China.
This is happening despite the fact that the Treasury Department has to date recovered just $36 billion of its original $51 billion loan to GM. By most analystsâ(TM) predictions, American taxpayers will be out approximately $10 billion when the remaining stock is sold off. Which is a long way of saying that it now appears that taxpayers paid $10 billion to make it easier for GM to accelerate its foreign outsourcing and send more manufacturing jobs to China.
Sweet, sweet Detroit end state.
But I'm confident that our idiot electorate will look at a sane candidate in 2016, and vote for Benghazi Jezebel.
"The debt ceiling has never not been raised, so there is no debt ceiling," Coburn said on CNN's "New Day."
"And by having a debt ceiling and then raising it every time, it allows the politicians off the hook for making the hard choices. Iâ(TM)d rather have a managed catastrophe now, which I donâ(TM)t think will be there."
So I guess we just have to pass the debt ceiling to see what's in it.
When the parade of horribles does/doesn't show, I hope that both parties step up to the plate and, you know, negotiate.
But $222 trillion in debt canâ(TM)t simply be worked around. Will our commentariat and government officials ever discuss our current federal budget in terms of unfunded liabilities? Fear of being honest with the American people, especially baby boomers who have paid into these programs for decades, may be the concern. Or perhaps they simply think there will somehow be enough money to make good on the benefits promised.
This is why I can't put stock in liberal think tanks who're all "Yeah, we just gotta raise taxes & stuff and shore up these entitlements."
Improvement starts with honesty.
Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obamaâ(TM)s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute.
By that I mean when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously â" not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe â" Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?
Read the whole well-linked thing.
If the United States learns nothing else from the Obama experience, it must be that, while you can take a mediocre chap and turn him into a triumph of style over substance, the side effects are spectacularly bad.
Come to think of it, W. was a mediocre chap, too.
How does a society breed statesmen in the Postmodern era?
Pulls the #Shutdown into focus very nicely.
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.
A counter-argument would be that the dysfunction centers around the non-enumerated Federal power growth that is not seen as legitimate.
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
