Maddow provides rare moment of Sunday morning Sanity

For a moment there was a rare moment of sanity and honesty on the Sunday morning shows. Where did the debt crisis come from? It was NOT a crisis about America's likelihood of financial default. It was a made-up crisis created by the Republican extremists in the House of Representatives - a made up crisis intended to create a hostage situation so that the extremists could get their self-centered irrational agenda passed because otherwise, no sane legislator would have given it a moment's notice.



The transcript is provided Here.

The insanity of S&P threatening to downgrade US credit

Kevin Drum has a very different take on the so-called debt "crisis."

There's something deeply weird going on here. Wall Street is allegedly worried over a default that's not going to happen, or else it's worried about the fiscal opinions of some rating agency analysts who don't know anything more about the financial future of the United States than anyone else. And those opinions don't even make much sense. The United States remains highly productive; the deficit of the past three years is completely justifiable; our long-term healthcare problems are exactly the same as every other advanced country in the world and exactly the same as they've been for years; and the current stalemate in Congress is — what? Six months old? They're talking about a downgrade of 30-year sovereign debt from the safest, most powerful country in the world based on a political spat that's been going on for less than a year?

This is crazy.

When it is stated this way it becomes completely clear that the entire thing is about the Republican crazies (A minority in the minority party) trying to force the majority of Americans to swallow libertarian economic and social prescriptions that will devastate the American middle class very quickly.

The Republican party was somewhat crazy under Nixon, quite crazy under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, utterly insane when they took over Congress in 1994, and became destructive of almost everything important in America when Bush/Cheney stole the 2000 Presidential election. Since then they have gone downhill. If they hadn't had the southern racists, FOX News, and some extremely rich and very weird families like the Koch brothers supporting them while the mass media has undergone a disastrous decline in revenues, no one would pay any more attention to the tea baggers than they do to beggars in the street in the poorer parts of a big city.

But those idiots are getting the attention they don't deserve, and as a result America is moving rapidly downward into the second tier of industrial nations as a result.

I see no chance that America will wise up and again become one of the premier nations in the world any time soon.

The endgame on the debt ceiling games.

This is the best description of what the idiots in Washington have really accomplished - nothing.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fineman and O'Donnell agree that it is going to come down to August 1 and we'll get an increase in the debt ceiling on a clean vote.

I really suspect that is too optimistic. I think it'll be a stalemate even at the end, with both sides blaming the other and the economy going to hell as they are paralyzed.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bill Maher is less optimistic. I agree with him.

In the meantime no one is doing a damned thing to increase jobs. That's the accomplishment of the Republicans with Obama's help. As Bill Maher says, in Nov ember 2012 the economy will have gone to crap (even worse than now) and the voters will have forgotten the lost Summer of 2011. Instead they are going to say "We elected a Democrat as President and we got a disaster."

I'd rather not be right on this.

Congress has damaged America's international reputation badly already

There is talk that the Congressional idiots are getting close to a solution to the fake debt crisis, but as Reuters reports it is already too late to protect America's reputation as a reliable nation that can get things done.

The base-case scenario is, still, that the debt ceiling will be raised, somehow. But already an enormous amount of damage has been done: the US Congress has demonstrated clearly that it can’t be trusted to govern the country in a responsible manner. And the tail-risk implications for markets are huge. Think of the speed with which the Egyptian government collapsed earlier this year, or the incredible downward velocity of News Corporation right now. When you build up large stocks of mistrust and ill will, nothing can happen for a very long time. But when something does happen, it’s much quicker and much worse than anybody could have anticipated. The markets might not be punishing the US government at the moment. But the mistrust and ill will is there, believe me. And when it appears, it will appear with a vengeance.

This fiasco, created by Republican intransigence over what is really a routine Congressional non-event (raising the debt ceiling) is going to come back and bite America big time and all the idiots in the Republican Party are going to be saying "No one could have predicted this outcome!"

But as usual, anything a Republican politician says is a lie. They screw stuff up out of ignorance and venality and then blame others for the outcome. It's happening again. Plan on it.