Standard & Poors’ recent decision to downgrade the United States credit rating from AAA to a AA+ has caused not a little handwringing among the chattering classes. The move dominated the financial news over the weekend, and investors the world over are wondering just what it means for the future borrowing costs of the world’s largest economy.

Which is pretty silly.

Because truth be told, in the grand scheme of things and once the dust settles, Standard & Poor’s rating of United States debt will prove about as relevant to investors as an unknown blogger’s review of the latest Hollywood blockbuster is to the movie industry as a whole. Which is to say: about none at all. Indeed, it’s a mystery why the the rating downgrade caused any sort of flare up at all, given Standard and Poor’s miserable track record issuing ratings over the past few years. As both Paul Krugman and Daniel Gross have pointed out in recent columns, Standard & Poors’ poor judgment in assessing the risks of securitized mortgage debt helped enable the 2008 economic collapse.  Read more »

In these tough economic times, and as a public service, Fox Nation would like to remind you that the man currently occupying the White House is a nigger who hangs out with other niggers:

With a long history of racist garbage emanating from its on screen personalities, it quite frankly boggles the mind that this network is treated as a respectable organ of information, rather than the propaganda arm of the Ku Klux Klan that, time and time again, it shows itself to be.

(Via Crooks and Liars)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFHJkvEwyhk

…’nuff said.

 It took us until noon or so today before we managed to force ourself to actually read Grover Norquist’s Op. Ed. in today’s New York Times. You see, we’re so used to bubbling up and boiling over with fury every time we read a disingenuous, dishonest and mendacious opinion piece by a prominent conservative that we just weren’t sure we could take one more. In these pieces the author generally strikes a tone of deep concern for the federal debt, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare and the well being of  “average Americans,” proposes solutions that would devastate all three of those things while pretending to improve them, and then backs it up with a series of blatantly false studies, cooked statistics and fuzzy math.

But Norquist’s piece surprised us in that regard. For not only does Norquist dispense with artificial concern for the country’s debt picture, he’s quite straightforward in announcing that his entire program is built around the notion that the government must be dismantled at all costs, the deficit be damned. Read more »

Students of history will no doubt recall that in or about 1776, those of us who lived on the Freedomy side of the Atlantic decided that we didn’t much like paying socialistic taxes on stuff like tea and Playboy and three cornered hats and those funny shoes with belt buckles for laces, while having no say in how those monies would actually be spent. So we sent an RSVP to good King George explaining, with much regret, that as much as we’d like to come to his birthday party, we would have to decline his invitation this year as were otherwise engaged in declaring our independence and booting his red-coated troops from our lands.

Flash forward some 235 years and the British are apparently still sore over this slight, as evidenced by their contempt (dare I say jealousy) over the startling thing of beauty into which the English language has evolved under Yankee care and tutelage, while back on the British isles it remains stunted, ossified, abandoned and lifeless, having acheived very little in the past 300 years beyond the dropping of thees and thous. As evidence I present to you, dear Stinquers, the following story from the BBC, entitled Americanisms: 50 of your most noted examples, in which readers were invited to send in their most hated expressions from this side of the pond,thereby displaying their ignorance and sad lack appreciation for the myriad poetic possibilities of the mother tongue, which have been laregly realized only on these shores. Some examples after the break (with scattered commentary throughout):

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Wait, is that an image of John Evrett Millais’ Ophelia that we’ve posted in announcing the arrest of Rupert Murdoch lackey Rebekah Brooks? Our bad. We thought it was portrait of the former News of the World editor relaxing at the local hot-springs. We certainly didn’t mean to imply that Ms. Brooks should bring any harm to herself now that it is becoming clearer by the day that she headed up what can only be described as a criminal enterprise in journalistic guise. And at any rate, it would certainly be premature for the henchwoman to drown herself while the criminal mastermind still walks the earth. And we suspect he will, for some time yet. As long as somebody, somewhere, is still practicing honest journalism, as long as an independent newspaper still rolls off the presses, Murdoch’s voracious appetites will remain unsated.

And when Rupert Murdoch saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no proud journalistic institutions left to debase and destroy.

“We’ve been down this road before, and Republicans will not go down it again. In 1990, Congress and the President struck a deficit reduction deal that combined spending cuts with tax increases. Unfortunately, while the tax hikes remained, the spending restraint did not, and our debt has only marched higher.”

–Republican Senator, Orrin Hatch

Apparently, being a Republican means you can re-write history any which way you please, and not be called out on it. This morning, as I watched CNN, the 24 Hour News network ran a segment on President Obama’s call for a debt limit/long term budget compromise position that would involve spending cuts and tax increases at a ratio of about 5 to 1. CNN then quoted Hatch above, but for some reason saw no need to point out that Hatch’s statement is a bald faced lie, seemingly suggesting that the Clinton era tax increases (which left the nation with a $200+ billion surplus when the Democratic president left office) are still with us today, when in fact they were undone by his Republican successor, President Bush, who pushed through massive tax cuts that immediately plunged the nation into deficit. Hatch is correct that massive spending increases also followed, but conveniently fails to note that the spending increases, too,  were the result of Republican policies, such as unnecessary wars and a poorly conceived prescription drug benefit for seniors that was not balanced by either tax increases or spending cuts and which specifically excluded the government from using its purchasing power to negotiate better drug prices.