Currently President Obama’s job approval rating stands at only 40 percent according to the latest Gallup poll. This is the lowest support Gallup has yet found in their polling.

Whatever S&P’s agenda, it has nothing to do with avoiding default risks or putting the US on sound fiscal footing. It’s time the media and Congress started asking them what their political agenda is and whom it serves.

Tell the SEC: Revoke Standard & Poors Authority as a Credit Ratings Agency. Stop S&P from using their ratings as a political weapon and escaping responsibility for their role in the 2008 financial crisis. [Editor's note: S&P downgrades US to AA+ with negative outlook / Reuters. Here's a rerun of last week's S&P post] By [...]

With only four days left until the August 2nd deadline and no deal in hand, more and more of the top Congressional Democrats have been coming out in support of the President using the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling. Yesterday the House’s second ranking Democrat Steny Hoyer (D-MD) came out strongly in favor of this tactic.

The amendment for the Boehner bill, which yokes a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution to the passage of a second round of debt limit increase, is available here. It’s just a page long – the BBA is the only change. The Pell grant stuff was just grumbling.

Right now, the United States government is being held hostage by fundamentalist fanatics like this.

I’m not a big Charlie Cook fan, and I think he’s deeply confused about economics in this post. But I feel like he definitely gets it right about the era we’re heading into.

• Is Boehner toast as Speaker?
• Reid sticks the knife in further.
• What’s next?
• Well, could be worse.
• Clips don’t kill people, right-wing terrorists kill people.

You know things are bad when you look to Rupert Murdoch stories to lighten things up.

Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tomomi Nishimoto — Hungarian Dance No. 5 by Brahms.