The Debt Ceiling reflects on GOP's complete lack of economic or world view

Right now, the euro currency is in deep shit. As if debt problems in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal weren't enough, this week's Economist reports on the newest candidate in the Euro Zone's game of "Which country will default first?!", Italy:

Consider the stakes. Italy has the biggest sovereign-debt market in Europe and the third-biggest in the world. It has €1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion) of sovereign debt outstanding, 120% of its GDP, three times as much as Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined—and far more than the €250 billion or so left in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the currency club’s rescue kitty. Default would have calamitous consequences for the euro and the world economy.

Indeed, if Italy helped caused the euro currency to crash, the world economy would reel. But what countries would have a leg up in amassing capital from such a mess? There are trillions of dollars out there that investors want to use to purchase safe bonds with, and if the fates of strong European economies like Germany and France are tied into Greece and Italy, do you think investors will say "Oh yeah, those German government bonds are an awesome deal right now"? Fuck no.

In other words, investment in American bonds stands to benefit from the woes of Europe's actual debt crisis ... Except the Republicans are insistent upon manufacturing a default here.

Meanwhile in the background [in Italy] is the absurd pantomime of Barack Obama and congressional Republicans feuding over how to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling to stave off an American “default”.

I'm glad The Economist described our current budget battles with the words "absurd pantomime", because I can't think of anything else to describe it without various creative uses of the f-word. Here's a couple other f-words to describe the debt ceiling battle: It's a fallacy, the premise is downright false, and America defaulting on its debt should be a fantasy.

Europe is going through an actual debt crisis right now -- nobody wants to invest their money in European bonds. If the Republicans had any modicum of intelligence on world economic issues, they would understand that Europe's actual debt crisis means that America can cash in by selling low interest bonds. Which means we don't have a "debt crisis" since investors want to lend us money.

But don't expect our media to report this fact, they are hoodwinked by Republican talking points. It would be nice if our president told us we weren't facing a debt crisis, but he's apparently hoodwinked as well.

Pissed Off Again Naked Brunch

Woke up this lovely Sunday morning to the attached Republican Doctrine accusing us of a lack of patriotism, stupidity, and more in a love letter from a resigning Bush.  Well, Rethuglicans, it's a shame it's come to this.  Really LOW tactics.  From my neighbors no less.  I am surrounded by you maniacs.  To bad, so sad you are losing and WILL lose this Presidential election.  And, God Bless America on a fuckin' Sunday back at 'cha.

Click on the image to read page 1 of the diatribe.

Or you can click on these links to read each page; there are 5 of them.

• BushPg1


• BushPg2


• BushPg3


• BushPg4


• BushPg5

Be sure to pass this around and to your local Democratic Headquarters.  I am.

According to Polltracker '08 which averages all polls by state and then nationslly, Obama is kicking McCains butt.

Nationally  51.2% to 42.4% on average

Electoral Votes  Obama 306   McCain 157

Oh, Happy Day!

By the way, I printed a huge fuckin poster of Obama yesterday and I'm sticking it in my yard with the other three Obama signs already out there.  A better fuck you I couldn't have come up with.

Keyesian Revival? Not quite.

Being an educated American who's interested in politics and keeps up on current events, I thought I knew who all the presidential candidates were -- no matter how obscure. Hell, I even knew that John Cox has been in the race since March. But Alan Keyes? Alan M-Fing Keyes? Where the hell did he come from? And where did his beard go? And did he lose like 50 pounds or something? Keyes may be many things, but he's not a master campaigner if, by this week, he's only caught the attention of Americans like myself.

So when did Keyes start his quixotic run for president? Technically September, though he start pushing out feelers a month earlier, as TPM notes with a little irony: "Apparently there's a spontaneous grassroots movement to draft Alan Keyes into the GOP primary race -- oddly enough, the movement has emerged on Keyes' own website."

In the Keyes press release that TPM linked to, Keyes stipulates his conditions for undertaking another run at the White House: "Keyes — who in 2000 drew 14 percent in the Iowa Caucus and averaged 16 percent in his best ten states during the presidential primaries — says he is open to the possibility of running, if enough support exists at the grassroots for his candidacy." The aforementioned John Cox placed 11 in the Iowa Straw Poll, and Keyes..? Keyes didn't even have a place on the poll, since Cox came in dead last. So I guess Keyes sort of flip-flopped on his position about running for president.

And Keyes lack of support continues, unless you count the 2% he received in a Des Moines Register poll. I found three MySpace pages for Keyes, none with over 400 friends (the "official" Keyes MySpace page has 36 friends -- how lonely.) As for his website, there aren't many people on there if his forums are in any way indicative of the traffic he receives. His forums pages lists how many people are online. Obviously, this number varies every few minutes, but I haven't seen it peek over a hundred since I discovered his forums site a few hours ago. The super majority of those visitors are listed as "guests," not registered users. I know something about those guests -- most of them, I'm willing to bet, are spam bots. Judging from my experience administraing the domain of my former blog, loadedmouth.com, I can tell you that most of the time my site had at least a hundred "guests" online, but they weren't actual people. I know this because I had to manage thousands of spam comments flooding in each week from these "guests." So if 100 guests equaled five actual users online at loadedmouth.com (which it often did), the same equation works for Keyes's website, too. Which means that hardly anybody is reading it -- "hardly" in terms of the interest that a presidential candidate needs to generate, at least.*

As for his ballot access, I was surprised to learn that Keyes is on the ballot in 13 states. In four states, he bought his way onto the ballot; in other states, I assume he got signatures. Like iin Tennessee, where a candidate needs 275 signatures to get on the ballot; and Washington state, where is bar is set a bit higher at 1000 signatures. So, still, we're not talking any real popular support here.

So, thus far, that's the history of Keyes 2008 presidential campaign -- and I doubt there will be much more to add beyond this. After learning all of this, the question I've had since seeing Keyes in the debate still begs: what the hell was he doing there?

* - There's a possibility that my estimates on the people viewing Keyes website are wrong, If so, and if the number of "guests" are taken at face value as actual people, it's still not many people.

GOP Debate in Tampa

William March reports Salem News will host a Republican presidential debate. This is geared to the wingnut audience. Conservative talk radio stations WTBN, 560 AM; WTWD, 910 AM; and WGUL, 860 AM will carry the debate locally. The debate will be followed by a straw poll held by Townhall.com. Mitt Romney has agreed to paticipate.

I'm betting Jim Johnson will hand business cards to all the campaigns. We can't expect a guy to work for Victor Crist forever. That would mean Jim and I won't be able to debate about arcane policy matters that nobody cares about except us.

Update: Jim Johnson no longer works for Victor Crist.