Tea Party

Cheese Whiz Wisconsin - Do Over Comes Up Short

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cheese whiz
Wisconsin Just Showed Us. You can call a do over on your reactionary votes from 2010. Hate your representative? Completely upset with the jobs crisis, now projected to continue ad infinitum?

Have a recall!

In the largest clustered recall ever, six Wisconsin State Senate Republicans faced a recall election and special interest money poured into the State:

Spending on the nine elections had reached $33 million, most of it from outside special interest groups. Interest group spending has far eclipsed the Wisconsin record of about $20 million set in 2008 elections that covered half the state Senate and all Assembly members.

The fight is over Governor Walker's war against organized labor in Wisconsin, along with his Tea party cohorts. His anti-labor legislation prompted a massive recall effort of State Senators who helped Walker push through his anti-labor agenda. The voter turnout is hitting Presidential election levels.

Saturday Reads Around The Internets - Credit Ratings, Crazies and Crisis

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shocknews
Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop. This week the fur is flying over the never ending economic absurdity spewing from our government representatives.

 

Did the GOP Play Math Hooky?

Scarecrow calls it on how the press doesn't even challenge outrageous economic fiction being spewed by politicians in did the GOP miss third grade math?

Compared to laying siege to government, hurting millions, and putting the economy at risk, it’s only a minor irritant, I suppose, one of the dozens of little misrepresentations that we are so used to hearing from the right wing that we just shrug our shoulders and wait for something new. But the fact the media almost never pushes back suggests that letting it slide is a mistake. And it’s just fractions!

Remember third grade math? Sure you do. It’s when you probably first learned fractions. Numerators! Denominators? Percentages! Pies! Well, it seems many right wingers skipped that year, because they can’t recall that a fraction has both a numerator and a denominator, so the size of the fraction depends on both.

So night after night, apparent third grade dropouts tell news anchors and talk show hosts, none of whom even sighs (sigh), that government spending has exploded under Socialist Obama. Before Obama, it was about 19 percent of GDP or 1/5th. But now its almost 1/4th, or 24 percent of GDP.

Tom Coburn said that on my public tv. Boehner and McConnell and Kyl say that. Every Tea-GOP and rightwinger has it tatooed on their foreheads, and Sarah Palin has is written on her palm. From 19 to 24 percent! Yikes!

The Simple but Horrifying Fallacy at the Core of the Tea Party

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Originally published on The Agonist

It’s hard to say if the Tea Party has an acknowledged leader, but someone who professes to be just that has chosen a very opportune moment to trash Speaker John Boehner’s attempts to craft legislation that would allow an increase in the debt ceiling. Judson Phillips, the CEO of Tea Party Nation, is the self-acknowledged head of the Tea Party, and in an editorial this morning in The Washington Post, he attacks Boehner’s legislation for providing “almost non-existent budget cuts.”

Phillips says:

As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

Here is what is fundamentally wrong and dangerous with the core assumption of the Tea Party: There are two ways to get to a debt crisis – you either spend too much money or you don’t take in enough revenue. Anyone who has done a family budget or a business budget understands there are two sides to every discussion of cash flow: cash flow in, and cash flow out. In government terms, this equates to taxes received and expenditures made.

Budget Blasts Bad Request

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It seems President Obama knows how to crash a party as well as a server. The House of Representatives website is crashed after Obama went on prime time television asking Americans to contact their representatives. In visiting John Boehner's website 15 minutes ago this error message was displayed.

Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)

About sums up the insane budget crisis doesn't it?

When Obama told Americans to contact their representatives to show support for his debt-ceiling plan, the response was so strong it overwhelmed some House telephone lines and websites.

On Tuesday morning, House officials said calls to telephone circuits there are hitting near capacity, with many callers getting busy signals. An alert advised members' offices to provide important contacts with alternative numbers, adding that outbound calls are unaffected.

In addition, Monday night and Tuesday morning checks of the websites of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., showed a "Server is too busy" response on an otherwise blank screen, as did the House Ways and Means Committee website on Tuesday morning.

This author is more horrified at our government in general and believes every representative should be required to pass an economics class before being sworn into office. Kind of like requiring bad driving school for repeat traffic offenders. With that, what are others saying?

The below video interviews Yves Smith pointing to the entire debt ceiling crisis being manufactured.

Ridiculous Budget Games

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The most mean spirited and absurd budget came out today while the Republicans are threatening to shut down the government. Yes, we know politicians, both parties, are all bought and paid for, corrupt as hell, but a government shut down? This affects real people and the real economy, not just federal workers but all of the Americans who rely on them. All federal workers except emergency services go unpaid, but guess who still collects their paycheck? Why the ones who caused it, our President and our lovely Congress.

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