Sooner Blue

Money Watch says: "...the federal debt ceiling is a mechanical matter, not a philosophical one. Since the end of World War II, the federal debt ceiling has been raised 81 times..."

And CNN says: "Since March 1962, the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times, according to the Congressional Research Service. Ten of those times have occurred since 2001."

Did you get that last part? Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling 10 times when GWBush was president.

And what about the debt ceiling being raised 17 times when Ronald Reagan was president?

What's different now?

I'll tell you--Tea Party Republicans won't negotiate with Obama in good faith because they think their game of brinksmanship will buy them time to hang an economic meltdown around the President's neck .. thereby hastening Obama's slippery slide to onetermsmanship. Plain and simple.

BTW--when President Obama uses the term "averting Armageddon" it could be a subtle reminder to sane people that Tea Party crazies are fundamentalist Christians who believe that the events in Revelation are going to come true any day now .. they don't care what will happen to our country .. they only see a swarm of locusts on the horizon.

First of all --the debt ceiling is not America's credit card limit. Okay? .. it's America's house payment. Big difference. The money has already been spent by Congress .. it's the bill for Iraq, Afghanistan, the Stimulus, Medicare Part D and so on...

Then, second, the GOP's "balanced budget" amendment is simply insane. Let's put it this way. I need loans to go to grad school which is of course debt, but by taking on that debt I'm increasing my value so later on I will not only pay off that debt but become worth more than before I took it on.

Now the US government takes on debt so it can do things like, I don't know, win World Wars and build massive infrastructure projects. If this "balanced budget" amendment passes, anytime the US wants to issue a Bond we're going to have a constitutional and economic crisis.

Great thinking Republicans, and I thought you guys were supposed to understand basic economics ...

I'll tell ya, these Republicans sure have built themselves a circus tent of a party. It's going to take them decades to take back the party from the Tea Party crazies .. if they ever do.

.. hopefully with an anvil tied to their ankles.

On Washington Week In Review, Major Garrett - used to work for Fox, now with National Journal - reported that even after the results of special election NY-26, more than 100 House Republicans have pledged to Paul Ryan that they are ready to "VERY AGGRESSIVELY" defend his plan to eliminate Medicare.

Suh-weet! ..

Even though voters oppose cuts to Medicare by 80% to 18% .. even among conservatives, just 29% supported cuts, and 68% opposed them.

Maybe all that hate and fury has destroyed GOP brain cells ...

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey shows Sarah Palin's popularity at an all-time low - just 25 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of her .. 53 percent a negative one.

When did the bottom fall out for Sarah?

Many people think her response to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was her Waterloo moment - when Palin got all defensive about putting Giffords in rifle crosshairs on her website, and showed little sympathy for Giffords and the other victims .. seeming to be more focused on herself.

It didn't even set well with her fellow Republicans.

I think that's when people finally realized that nothing matters to Sarah except Sarah.

Her spotlight stated fading and soon she morphed into a celebrity/reality TV figure .. even Republican voters stopped taking her seriously.

That prominent lefty blogger who declared his blog a Sarah Palin Free Zone would probably like to take the credit .. but she had as many fanatical followers as lefty critics.

Many of her fans saw Palin as a sex symbol who was also connected to violence .. she wore red hooker heels and talked a mean game about cross-hairs and killing. Tea Party men love this combination - sex and violence.

The Tucson shooting was the end of the fascination .. especially for old guard Republicans. Once the violence became real, she was exposed as hard-hearted and shallow.

Her Facebook and Twitter messages became sillier and extremely damaging, as if she needed more logs on the burning fire.

Palin's decline pretty much started right after the Republican Convention, when mainstream America discovered there was no there there .. but it took longer for conservative support to drop.

Resigning the governorship was a very big mistake .. if you're serious about holding a national office, you don't quit a state job that people have elected you to do.

I never thought for a minute that Sarah Palin was ever seriously going to run for President - I emphasize "seriously" - because as dim as she is, she’s smart enough to know that she doesn’t want all the work and responsibility that goes with the job.

So she quit her day job and devoted her attention to giving simple-minded sound-bite paid speeches, cameo appearances on Fox News, the TLC reality show .. and the book tours that got her out on the road, flying in private jets, and staying in nice hotels, all paid for by someone else.

The only way that Palin could keep riding the political/celebrity gravy train was to remain interesting enough to be considered a potential presidential candidate .. so she kept playing on the fears and prejudices of her base of Jerry Springer Republicans.

While Palin has been busy shooting herself in the foot, Michelle Bachmann and Donald Trump have stolen the affections of the true Tea Party believers.

Bachmann may be loonier than a squirrel on crack, but the Tea Party crowd adores her .. at least she's a bona fide politician. She is very serious about winning the nomination and the Presidency.

Gazillionaire Donald Trump has family jewels bigger than bowling balls, and he`s got name recognition .. he panders to the birthers only to get publicity for his TV show, not because he's serious about the Presidency.

Palin tried to recapture her base when she praised Donald Trump for bringing up the birther issue .. but it seems to be too little, too late.

Fox will probably dump her when her contract is up .. no one cares what she thinks anymore.

She's probably peeved that Michelle Bachmann is stealing her thunder .. but Palin still got what she was after .. a little power, lots of attention and oodles of money. She didn't lose .. all she wanted was to be a rich celebrity. That's all she ever wanted.

Been reading a lot about Social Security lately .. learned a couple things.

Many people fret that Social Security is teetering on the edge of collapse .. and anyone paying into this "pyramid scheme" today probably won't see a penny of their money after they retire.

Many other people don't agree.

Last week President Obama told a reporter, who had asked about the "crushing costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid," that "Social Security is not the huge contributor to the deficit that the other two entitlements are."

Greg Sargent wrote in the Washington Post that the president probably meant that SS is only a small problem and not a huge contributor to the deficit .. that SS shouldn't be lumped in with Medicare and Medicaid, which do have serious problems because of the rising cost of healthcare itself.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine, agrees:

"Medicare is a problem .. But unless you believe that the United States is literally going to collapse in the near future, Social Security isn't. Period."

Drum says that if payroll taxes never go up, then by 2040 Social Security benefits will have to be trimmed by about 25 percent. But "one way or another, at some level between 75 percent and 100 percent of what we've promised, Social Security benefits will always be there. This is not a Ponzi scheme. It's not unsustainable."

Many people argue that SS gets lumped in with Medicare and Medicaid because so many politicians don't want to have to pay back the loans they took out of the Social Security Trust fund to pay for other projects .. like tax cuts.

Many people think a few tweaks to the payroll tax could keep SS solvent forever. Drum points out that SS costs about 4.5 percent of GDP. But, as more boomers retire, it will rise about 6 percent of GDP by 2030. A simple solution would be to slowly increase payroll taxes by 1.5 percent of GDP.

Rand Paul and the Tea Party wail that we're all going to die unless we raise the retirement age to 70. Calmer people think we ought to just raise the cap on payroll tax, which seems far more practical and fair.

OR eliminate the cap altogether. That way, these fat cats who get multimillion-dollar bonuses every year would have to pay full Social Security taxes on them .. and their employers who pay them the bonuses would have to pay the full match. Poor babies.

President Obama seems confident he'll be able to tweak "minor adjustments" in the next few years .. but even if he's wrong, Social Security isn't going broke.

I read that over a life time the average couple will pay around $614k into SS and receive around $555k in return. This sounds more like a Ponzi scheme than a Pyramid scheme.

Read more about this here:

www.urban.org/publications/412281.html

www.urban.org/publications/310667.html

www.urban.org/retirees/Estimating-Social-Security.cfm

www.urban.org/publications/901397.html

.. it could give so many people a reason to live.

There's so much depressing news today .. let's go for some comic relief.

Washington (CNN) - Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, will travel to the early primary state of South Carolina later this month as she mulls a possible White House bid in 2012, CNN has learned.[..]"

Or at the very least - Palin/Bachmann for 2012. Just think, one can't stop winking and the other can't find the camera. Wouldn't debates be fun?

Of course, neither stands a snowball's chance in hell - the sixteen million people who watch Fox News are about the extent of the American people who share their values.

But maybe she's following sister Palin's lead, and just pretending to run for president .. just so she can keep herself in the news to stroke a big ego and promote her 'brand' .. to eventually make some big bucks in a short amount of time.

Then she can write empty books and charge huge speaking fees to talk to Tea Party sheep.

Bachmann made news recently by rewriting American history - her speech in Iowa where she claimed that the founding fathers "worked tirelessly until slavery was no more" .. forgetting about The Civil War and the 618,000 men who died fighting it.

She's done the same with current events like claiming Obama's Asia trip cost $200 million a day. Politifact has caught her lying many times.

Just last week she pissed off a lot of veterans - by suggesting spending cuts to disabled veterans.

Bachmann is an embarrassment almost every time she opens her mouth .. she has accused other elected leaders of being un-American, that there ought to be some sort of investigation. Can you say McCarthyism?

I have family in Minnesota, several live in her 6th District and complain that she has failed to actually work for them .. that she has introduced no important legislation that would do any thing for the residents of Minnesota, or for the rest of the country for that matter.

As Bachmann and Palin get closer to a commitment, it *has* to smoke out some GOP cowards who are afraid to speak against them.

It's going to be the highest of high comedy when these people start running against each other. Right now, they can agree on "Obama = Bad" .. but when they turn on their own it's going to be very entertaining.

Keep that popcorn coming, please!