Senate GOP votes to watch in debt-limit drama – On Politics – USATODAY.com http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/07/senate-key-votes-debt-limit-deal-/1?csp=34news

I thought these two comments encapdulated the debates nicely.

vintel7 (3 friends, send message) wrote: 33m ago Americans have only themselves to blame for this splintered government and for the fact that the nation is in financial dire straights. It was Americans that elected republican majorities from 1994-2006 in the Congress. It was stupid Americans that elected George W Bush to 2 terms in the White House. It was stupid Americans that elected the Republicans and many tea party extremists to the current Congress. Yet, if you listen to republican voters, they complain and act like spoiled narcissistic children when they don’t get their way. These low IQ voters act victimized and point fingers at and blame the government. In doing so they are hating and rejecting their own selves because it was they that elected the very people that they now blame for their problems. Inability to take responsibility for one’s self and life is indicative of the pervasive narcissism that afflicts this country…particularly among republicans. Acting like a victim or rather reacting like a victim is also a hallmark of narcissism and hence why we see this response consistently from republicans, who are indeed the “party of narcissism”. Republicanism is nothing but codified and politicized narcissism…which is not “excessive self love” like some pop psychologists teach but a profound disease of the mind and soul. This epidemic narcissism is the root cause of all of the USA’s troubles. Republicans are the “People of the Lie” that bestselling author M. Scott Peck wrote about in his book “The People of the Lie.” 5 Recommend | Report Abuse

Vickie803 (0 friends, send message) wrote: 57m ago Congress needs to be watched as we are increasing the debt ceiling -borrowing from China to raise Mexico. How insane is that. Our government is no longer protecting its borders and citizens suffer.

Apple Has More Money On Hand Than The US Government Etidbits.com – 3 hours ago With news that the United States Treasury could default on Monday if the Democrats and Republicans don’t compromise and raise the debt limit, it has been revealed that Apple – the manufacturer of the iPod and the iPad – has more money on hand than the … http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct3=MAA4AkgCUABgAWoCdXN6AWLYAQE&usg=AFQjCNGawfmldg5BTx0dja4OL8l1IxJ5jg&rt=HOMEPAGE&url=http://www.etidbits.com/apple-has-more-money-on-hand-than-the-us-government%3D6151&sig2=WIr4PDdVyNEQlFSX-ANnpw&ei=H3c1TvDdGoLsNPDRioID

(More info)

This one is funny, as we have yet another case where the numbers illustrate how the rhetoric fails.

Americans criticize government leaders for running up the federal budget deficit, but do they practice what they preach?

Not really.

Individuals are living beyond their means at an even greater rate than the government, based on recently released household debt figures.

U.S. household debt totaled $13.4 trillion at the end of 2010, or about 107 percent of the $12.5 trillion Americans earned in total household income last year, according to the Federal Reserve.

The government’s total debt of $13.8 trillion represented about 94 percent of the $14.7 trillion in national income, or Gross Domestic Product (GDP), last year.

Indeed, as this personal debt has risen, it has led to some changes in how such credit is used.

“People are still doing some spending, but what we’re seeing now is people using credit for basic necessities,’’ said Melodee Sheils, director of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of the Miami Valley. “People are using their credit cards now to survive.’’

Sheils says the counseling service’s clientele has changed dramatically from a few years ago, when many people were leveraging easy credit to buy cars and remodel their homes.

“When you’re talking about some of the things that people are charging now, you’re not seeing as much of the want as the need,’’ she said.

I find the whole “family finance” analogy a bit hard to swallow generally.  I don’t see how talking about running the world’s largest economy with over 300,000,000 people of all ages, abilities, and situations, an active military, and a multi-trillion dollar budget is in any way the same as budgeting for a small family.    Sure, there are some basic similarities, but the overall comparison loses any illustrative ability when you somehow equate paying for cable TV on the family level with paying for Medicaid on the national level.

The notion also loses functional metaphor status when you start talking revenues (which is the real point of using it, IMHO) and taxes.    If seems pretty simple that a family that wants nice stuff has to work harder to earn more money, but this falls apart when you think of a nation that wants nice stuff has to raise taxes to earn more money.

We’ve been told for the last 30 years or so that by cutting taxes, we can raise revenue.   We have a $14.3 Trillion dollar deficit to prove that isn’t true.  Now that the end results are in, and we know that cutting taxes didn’t raise revenue, or create jobs, we are being told by some that spending our own money on 0urselves* is the real problem, and we should stop doing that.

The Republicans get away with this because most Americans think we spend vast amounts of money on foreign aid,  and they assume that’s the “spending” the Republicans want to cut.

Let’s start with international assistance. Sixty percent of people we questioned say they’d like to put foreign aid on the chopping block. So would that make a dent in the deficit?

No – but try telling that to the American public. According to the poll, on average, Americans estimate that foreign aid takes up 10 percent of the federal budget, and one in five think it represents about 30 percent of the money the government spends. But the actual figure is closer to one percent, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget from the 2010 fiscal year’s $3.5 trillion budget.

There are just so many disconnects in the current worldview of Americans, both of themselves and their government, and what it does, that I have a sincere feeling that many of us are trying to solve the wrong problems by exacerbating the real ones.

We have build up this strange notion of ourselves as  Americans that we are all self-made, completely independent, self-sufficient, and don’t need nobody.    We think this *even as we pitch in to help one another*.     Now, it seems, we are starting to believe our own hype and saying stuff like this…

So yea… there ya go, another talking point bubble burst…which will absolutely not stop certain people from using it.

NYT: The Road Not Taken http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/opinion/19brooks.xml

I can summarize this whole piece with these rhetorical questions…would you hire someone who hates dogs to be a dog-catcher?  Would you want an atheist to lead your sermon? 

Of course not, you don’t want someone who a) hates the thing or b) doesn’t believe in the thing to run the thing.

You’d think after a while we could somehow use science to understand why this might be happening.

You’d think that.

DALLAS — If you thought last month seemed like the hottest ever, you were right.

Texas recorded its warmest June since 1895, according to the National Weather Service. The mean temperature for the month was 85.2 degrees.

…

In addition, October 2010 to June 2011 was the driest of any nine-month period for Texas since 1895. The state has recorded just 5.81 inches of rain so far in 2011, according to NWS maps.

The previous record was the stretch from June 1917 to February 1918.

[full blurb]

I guess it’s only fitting that Texas bear a good bit of the brunt of global warming.  It certainly has one of the highest concentrations of deniers and denier funders in the world.

I’m still wondering at what point folks are going to start to realize this train is heading only one direction if we keep pouring gas on the fire.      I thought that would have been already a settled case by now, as the deniers have been proved wrong again and again, but my optimism that logic works for everyone is misplaced.   It certainly doesn’t seem so, and continually breaking temperature records while HAVING THE WHOLE STATE DECLARED A DISASTER AREA didn’t even budge the needle, so my former optimism has waned considerably.

Not much to say here, except that it will keep getting hotter.   This isn’t an aberration, it’s the new “normal”.