Unless President Obama changes course — but quick — what this means is: President Romney.

It was bad enough that Standard and Poors screwed the world economy by recklessly giving AAA ratings to worthless mortgage backed securities without ever reviewing the underlying pool of loans. But now they’ve decided to play the role of “enforcer” in Wall Street’s latest gambit: forcing the sale of US assets in an austerity fire sale.

The Congressional Budget Office’s projections from January of 2008, the last ones made before it recognized the housing bubble and the implications of its collapse, showed a deficit of just $198 billion for 2009, the year President Obama took office. In other words, the deficit was absolutely not “on track to top $1 trillion.”

Two of the ads did significantly better than the average, one came in right about there, and one was not performing so we stopped serving it before it actually got any clicks. That’s the great thing about online advertising — you really get a chance to see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your buy before you’ve sunk a lot of money into the ads.

Theses are the results:

There is the Shock Doctrine which holds that you can change things by taking advantage of disasters. Now we are seeing the process of legislating by the threat of disaster. It is new and it is worse.

The main goal here for the President was to isolate House Republicans as an uncompromising group of extremists who will stop at nothing to harm the ordinary working man in an effort to save the ill-gotten gains of the ultra-rich. But the problem is that this rhetorical flourish is in service to a position that moves us to an era of austerity, a path of major deficit reduction without shared sacrifice, which is likely to strike at the heart of the social safety net created and sustained by Democrats over the past 80 years.

• Two speeches, two nothing burgers.
• It was all positioning, says Ezra.
• Six ways forward.
• Thanks, GOP!
• Fool me once…

The two speeches of Obama then Boehner do explain how we’ve come to this point.

Uncle Kracker – Smile

Nothing says intelligent and well-read like indicting a continent for not burning adherents of a religion at the stake when they “take root,” or as the rest of us say, “move someplace and have the audacity to not covert to exactly what their neighbors practice.” The Inquisition worked out GREAT. Why isn’t everybody doing that?