Eric Clapton–Knocking on Heaven’s Door

There is now a deal, and Speaker Boehner needs Democratic votes to pass it because of his unruly and recalcitrant TeaParty membership, members of the Progressive Caucus must stop the deal. By stopping the deal at the last minute, the House Progressive Caucus forces President Obama to use his constitutional authority to ignore an illegal law that questions America’s public debt: the debt ceiling.

Kill the deal. Fourteen-four or Bust!

Wall Street Presents Barack Obama

Yesterday Grijalva was perfectly willing to hand over his Congressional authority to a new Catfood II Super Congress to slash Social Security and Medicare when he vote for the all-cuts Reid bill.

Keynes’s ideas aren’t dead. Congress is full of ignorant people who can’t understand those ideas or their implications for our situation today, but the ideas aren’t dead.

So, make the President do it! Make him solve the problem and avoid a default! That is the best thing that progressives in Congress can do now to save the economy and begin to kill the current austerity mania that will destroy the futures of our children and Grandchildren.

In midsummer 2006, while my wife and kids were on our yearly trip down to Seattle, to be with our extended Norwegian-Jewish-Cambodian-Icelandic-Swedish-Texan family, the so-called Israel-Hezbollah War was in full rage. My brother-in-law and I were watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN, as he interviewed one pro-Israel talking head expert after another, describing the war not just from the Israeli point of view, but from a right-wing Israeli standpoint.

After the program, he lamented that the voice for Israel in the American media, in public affairs and in politics is almost always from a perspective much further from the right than it should be to reflect the views of the average Israeli, or those of the American Jewish community. He longed for a new organization, based from the positions of moderates, to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish pro-Israel groups.

“But,” Lee lamented, “that’ll never happen.”

Some say it has now happened.

Rewarding the Republicans for their hostage-taking — aside from being bad policy — is disastrous politics. By caving to a bunch of extremely unpopular ideologues, Obama looks weak and feckless, not like “the adult in the room.”

The President thinks he can do business with anarcho-rightists. It won’t happen. The wreckers will destroy the economy rather than “do business”.

First, damn it, it’s not a Debt Crises. It’s a Default Crisis. The Right Wing has once again succeeded in getting the media to adopt its frame. Debt didn’t cause this crisis. Teabaggers bent on destruction caused it.