Our National Credit Rating

Arabic Bible from the 1850s, from www.congregational-library.typepad.com

No, I don't have a clue whether S&P is playing politics or not.  I think having Ms Harris-Perry on O'Donnell last night as an economics expert was a bit of a mistake, as much as I like her general intelligence.  While she can make good conversation on any subject, the fundamental credit-worthiness of the United States is an arcane affair.  The United States, that is to say, is not your "family" budget, no matter how much Republicans want to use that metaphor whenever it suits their deeper purposes. 

The more interesting fact gracing the past twenty-four hours is that Tea Party rallies all across the nation were extremely weak affairs even when big Tea Party Stars turned out, as Ms. Bachmann did in South Carolina--a whole Tea Party State fer Christ's sake.  She drew hundreds, who no doubt watched with rapt attention her usual bizarro hand movements.  I'm convinced she's sending coded signals.  Check it out the next time she's on the teevee.  So, could it be that even Tea Party Faithful are actually realizing that maybe we'd better raise taxes?  That's certainly the obvious implication of all the debt crisis talk, after all--and why the Congressional TPers didn't realize that from the get-go I certainly don't know.  It's a Rube Goldberg machine to try to fix the budgetary situation the way Ryan proposes.  Just drop the Bush Tax Cuts, which is what they should have done back in December.  (And it's an interesting fact to me that they are still the "Bush Tax Cuts."  There was a lot of predicting about how now they were the Obama Tax Cuts--it doesn't seem to have "taken.")

The thing to remember, always, is that Republicans are always lying.  Here's a brief piece from Sadly No to illustrate the point.  If the general public would just learn to suspect a trick when they see the next shiny object, we'd all be a lot better off going down the road.

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/34927.html

It may turn out that the S&P credit rating announcement of yesterday is about as solid as the assertion that the United States is burning Bibles.  Wanna bet?  A better tack for the right wing lying machine might have been the shocking headline that Bibles are being translated into Pastun--a sure sign of shariafication to follow.  Meanwhile, the Right to Lifers are the primary imposers of Sharia Law in the United States.  They even kill doctors now and again.