The coalition to destroy America is getting close to success.

There is a right-wing coalition that include the traditional American traitors from the Southern culture who are committing their treason again, the big business anti-labor moguls and the christian fundamentalists who spread their dogmatic "religion" to those who fear the changes American society has been making in the name of Civil Rights for minorities, women and the people who are in the LGBT groups.

The largely rural landowners and wealthy families in the South who currently dominate Southern politics fear the advance of large urban centers of the type like Atlanta which voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. Their reaction to this has been to become more shrill about social issues to maintain their political and economic power.

The "southern" fundamentalism that aids and abets the mostly southern radical right-wing politics, however, is most recently exported from California. There the most significant cultural driver causing its growth has, in my opinion, been the loss of political and demographic dominance of Caucasians over the last two generations. The resulting fear of loss of dominance has resulted in the dogmatic fundamentalist protestant religions. They have been spread nation-wide through the "christian" media empires.

Both of these groups are in political decline so they are redoubling their efforts to take control of the power center - the government (the only institution we allow to legitimately gain power through violence) - in order to halt the decline.

Did I mention the anti-union big businesses who are riding on this cultural change effort? They see the opportunity to roll back the unionization of America since the Great Depression so they are funding the conservative groups and also they and some very wealthy American families (DeVoss, Koch brothers, Coors, Scaife, Prince, Rupert Murdoch, etc.) are funding the right-wing "think tanks" to create and spread right-wing propaganda to legitimize the conservative movement.

It is interesting how the large multinational corporations like the Oil Companies and WalMart are using their international money movements to take advantage of the least regulatory nations so that they maintain oligopoly or monopoly profits to spend in more regulatory nations to delegitimize regulations that maintain the middle classes there. They also use the American military to control international trade in their benefit. This latter they are trying to force the American middle class to pay for through taxes the wealthy are legally allowed to avoid.

The tea party itself is now in decline, so the right-wingers used their access to FOX and to large sums of money to demonize the government for the economic disaster they themselves caused when Bush and the Republican right-wing were in power. But their decline is now proceeding more rapidly as the public wakes up to their true agenda. So the right wingers are now desperate to maintain what power they have in state governments and to try to gain control of the electorate.

The current economic mess is the result of the American conservative desperation. The tea partiers can't negotiate any "fair" or legitimate agreement with the Democrats because they are so far out on the limb that if they do they have lost everything. After such a negotiation their decline will only speed up.

To restate that, Boehner loses his job and the tea party loses everything if they actually resolve this crisis. But they are all that exists in the Republican Party now. Show me the elder statesmen Republicans who can step in and say "Enough!" and stop the insanity. Without such an intervention it is my opinion that Boehner and the tea party are going to take down the economy or force Obama to take extra-Constitutional steps to protect the security of the nation.

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Addendum 4:05 PM CDT
This is from Steve Benen:

Consider this George Will column from the other day:

The Tea Party can succeed in 16 months by helping elect a president who will not veto necessary reforms. To achieve that, however, Tea Partyers must not help the incumbent achieve his objectives in the debt-ceiling dispute.

One of those is to strike a splashy bargain involving big — but hypothetical and nonbinding — numbers. This would enable President Obama to run away from his record and run as a debt-reducing centrist.

Got that? The important thing isn’t to strike a compromise and prevent a disaster; the important thing is prevent Obama from claiming a political victory.

This is a striking mentality that makes progress next to impossible. But it’s a strain of thought that dominates Republican thinking right now — if Obama is going to look good by striking a bipartisan deal, the GOP priority must scuttle the deal, regardless of merit, to prevent Obama from looking good. As Ezra Klein noted yesterday, “[L]etting the president look like a dealmaker would potentially dim the GOP’s chances of retaking the White House in 2012…. And so Boehner walked.”

There's a reason why it's been difficult to understand the Republican position on the deficit. They are batshit insane.

Jonathon Chait explains why the Republican position on the federal deficit seems so illogical:

the evidence that's leaked out about internal Republican deliberations suggests the Republicans are not shrewdly trying to maximize their leverage. They're just barking mad. Robert Draper's profile of House Whip Kevin McCarthy peers in on the House caucus's thinking about the debt ceiling:

The freshmen have not been shy on this subject, either. McCarthy informally polled them when they first came to town in November for orientation. All but four of them said they would vote against raising the ceiling, under any circumstances. Then McCarthy (along with Ryan and the House Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp) began conducting more listening sessions. The whip recognized that it would be counterproductive to lecture the freshmen about the economic hazards of not raising the debt ceiling. He also realized that it’s one thing to pass a budget — which in the end is a nonbinding political document — and another thing to throw America into default. And so McCarthy has urged them to consider raising the ceiling under certain conditions and thus to view this moment as a golden opportunity to force significant changes from the White House. “We all ran for a reason,” he tells them. “What’s most of concern to you? What is it that we think will change America?”

As a result, the freshmen have begun to move away from a hard “no” on raising the debt ceiling to a “yes, if.” In the conference room, several freshmen have said they’ll vote to raise the ceiling only if the president agrees to repeal his health care legislation. Or if Obama signs into law a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, after all 50 states have ratified it. Or if he’ll agree to mandatory caps on all nondefense spending. Or if he’ll enact the Ryan budget. The whip writes down all their ideas on a notepad.

And Robert Costa at National Review has more reporting:

Rep. Tom Graves (R., Ga.) says he’s “starting to hear” a sentiment from leadership that is more in line with that of the conservative and freshman members of the conference. “It’s something that we have heard here recently, and we’re starting to hear more of it,” he tells NRO. “Out of today’s discussion it’s clear that the conference is unified behind the need for a balanced-budget amendment.” Graves said the House vote on a balance-budget amendment, scheduled for the week of July 25, would send an important signal to the White House.

Still, not every Republican leaving the closed-door confab was pleased. “Only one word comes to mind right now: chaos,” says one leading House conservative. “There is no plan. Cantor’s cuts would never pass the House, Boehner has walked out and Obama is not serious about anything. There’s nothing.” Another conservative member agreed: “It’s going to be a very rocky few weeks,” he says. “We’re holding, but beyond that, I have no idea what is going to happen.”

The predominant conservative view here seems to be that nothing bad would happen if we fail to lift the debt ceiling. Indeed, failing to life the debt ceiling is simply another way of imposing a balanced budget requirement, which would be good! (Even Mitt Romney has endorsed this plan.) Therefore, why should they lift the debt ceiling and allow the un-balancing of the budget, if they don't get a balanced budget requirement in return?

The more we find out about the House Republican caucus, the more obvious it becomes that they're not just trying to maximize their leverage by pretending to be crazy. They're crazy.

The budget proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

There is another budget in Congress besides the unreal idiocy offered by the libertarian/Republican Ryan. It's the budget offered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Paul Krugman describes the budget. He carefully points out how it is a proposal that gives the numbers showing how it will work, unlike Ryan's magic- and lie-based fantasy budget.

The CPC plan essentially balances the budget through higher taxes and defense cuts, plus some tougher bargaining by Medicare (and a public option to reduce the costs of the Affordable Care Act). The proposed tax hikes would fall mainly on higher incomes, although not just on the top 2%: super-brackets for very high incomes, elimination of deductions, taxation of capital income as ordinary income, and — the part that would be most controversial — raising the cap on payroll taxes.

[...]

Although I couldn’t find share of GDP in the working paper, it’s right there on the home page. Revenues are 22.3 percent of GDP in 2021. That’s 3 points higher than what Ryan claims his plan would produce, although he hasn’t explained how he’s going to make up for those $3 trillion in tax cuts for the rich.

This would be a record level of revenue for the peacetime federal government, but it would still leave the overall tax take, including state and local, far below levels in most other advanced countries. And the point is that this would balance the budget without the savage cuts assumed in the Republican plan, or even the still painful cuts in the Obama plan. We supposedly face a fiscal crisis; why shouldn’t significant tax hikes be part of the response?

Unlike the Ryan budget proposal, the progressive budget actually reduces the deficit, and it does so without smoke, fantasy and mirrors.

This budget exposes the fact that Ryan's presentation is not designed to reduce the deficit. It is intended to change the basic relationship of government with the American people, setting the model back to the days of the American robber barons.

The American MSM is not going to look at this budget proposal. It doesn't fit with the small-town atmosphere of the people in Washington,D.C. who style themselves as the "normal Americans" who should rule this country.

Curveball lied; American soldiers died; The Iraq War was a waste.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials, had powerful stories to tell American and German Intelligence officials about the Saddam Hussein regime's mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell used Curveball's stories as much of the basis for his speech to the United Nations justifying war against Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld relied heavily on Curveball's stories when he pushed for the American invasion of Iraq.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi lied so that America would take down Saddam Hussein for him and for his sons. There were no weapons of mass destruction. America has squandered thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on the invasion of Iraq based largely on those lies and on the overwhelming desire of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to invade that oil-rich country and to "finish" what George H. W. Bush had left "unfinished" after the Persian Gulf War.

Curveball is proud of his lies. Are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell proud of their gullibility?

As we watch the President and Congress go into negotiations about what American Federal programs to cut, remember that the deficit was based to a large extent on the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan is still going on because America did not have the military capability to fight two wars at the same time, so they starved the war in Afghanistan to fight the war in Iraq!

There is an informative five minute video with the Guardian article. I wonder how many duped American media outlets will run this news?

Here are the results of the deficit hawks' proposals

When Social Security retirement is stolen to pay for the tax cuts for the rich and for their interminable wars (wars always benefit the wealthy but are fought by the not-so-wealthy) the end result is going to be poor houses. Glenn Beck specifically proposes them.

What will get us there? The bankers and wealthy big business owners are gambling on stock market and bond market speculations. When they lose, they will again demand that the tax payers bail them out because their services are all that will be keeping the economy out of the next Great Depression. The result? Look at Ireland. This is Digby's blog. Here are the pictures of unrest from Ireland.

I really don't want to see that happen here, but the only thing stopping it is the fact that the U.S. dollar was and remains the world currency and will remain so as long as the federal government does not default on its treasury bonds - at least not to foreign banks. Defaulting to the Social Security trust funds is fine. What is being proposed right now is an internal default. Lower Social Security benefits so that the government does not have to pay back the Social Security trust funds the money they have borrowed in order to fight two unnecessary wars and to pay the outlandish tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. .

By lowering Social Security benefits, the federal government will then only be faced with raising taxes enough to pay back the Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern Oil Magnates who own the rest of the bonds. All the government has to do is keep on over-taxing the workers for Social Security and the wealthy and the bankers will do quite well. The only people who will be hurt are future retirees.

The working class is being taxed so that their tax money can make the wealthy better off. That's what the talk of cutting Social Security benefits to lower the deficit is about. But Social Security has never run a deficit, nor will it. .The deficit has come from wars and unnecessary tax cuts on the already under-taxed wealthy Americans.

Where did the federal deficit come from?

The Federal Government is now running massive deficits, and is expected to do so for several years into the future. Why is this the case, and how much of it is the responsibility of the Obama administration which took over the reins of power in January of this year? The New York Times has investigated this and reported. Here are some key excerpts from that report.

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it.

[...]

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

[...]

The solution, though, is no mystery. It will involve some combination of tax increases and spending cuts. And it won’t be limited to pay-as-you-go rules, tax increases on somebody else, or a crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse. Your taxes will probably go up, and some government programs you favor will become less generous.

The Bush administration was terribly profligate with the government's money and the result is that the taxpayers are going to get caught holding the stick. It's really that simple.

What won't be simple will be HOW we dig out of the mess the Republicans have left behind. Two wars and a recession on top of failure to manage government resources has left a horrible residue after eight years. Bush came in and spent money like a drunken sailor in a foreign port. But accountants and tax collectors do not live in the fantasy alternate universe that Rupert Murdoch is so respected for creating on FOX "News" Neither do the rest of us, as is becoming rapidly more clear. The complaints are coming from people who felt happy, war and protected there, but are now being evicted for not paying the rent.

It's long past time for the evictions. It'll be interesting to see what form the Republican Party takes, if any, once the necessary move back to reality is accepted.