98% of what Republicans wanted = credit rating downgrade

August 7, 2011

House Speaker John Boehner famously said that he thought the Republicans got 98% of what they wanted in the debt ceiling agreement, crappy as it was. Then, late Friday, Standard & Poor’s announced they had downgraded the U.S. government’s previously unsullied credit rating. God forbid Republicans had gotten 100%, eh?

Ben Hoffman urges us to read the Standard and Poor’s report on why the rating company downgraded U.S. credit.

S&P Explicitly Blames Republicans For Credit Downgrade

by Ben Hoffman

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Source

Obama should have let the Bush tax cuts expire last year, which would have dramatically reduced our deficit. The Republicans held the unemployed hostage and Obama negotiated a bad deal with the domestic terrorists.

Is there more in that report we should read before we get the torches, tar and feathers to meet with our Republican representatives in August town meetings?  Would they get the message with polite questions?


Walt Whitman’s thoughts on time, political trouble, and whether we should go to work on Monday, in August

August 7, 2011

Another gem from Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets:

On the Beach at Night Alone
by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

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On the Beach At Night Alone - image from Adventures of a Tiny Lady

Googled “on the beach at night alone” and found this, from Adventures of a Tiny Lady – copyright by AoaTL

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