Major Update: Gallup attempts to hide the big result in their latest survey behind a vague and useless question about “compromise”, but denial of reality only hurts those hiding behind the denial. Americans are more afraid of spending ourselves into permanent economic hell than whether the debt ceiling date passes:

Americans continue to express a strong desire that any agreement that is reached include plans for major cuts in future spending. Americans now by a 20-point margin — 55% vs. 35% — say they worry more that the government would raise the debt ceiling without plans for major spending cuts, than that the government would not raise the ceiling and an economic crisis would ensue.

This is no shock to anyone outside the Beltway Bubble. The problem of most concern is out of control spending, that is bankrupting us NOW. Forcing the government to live within its means is nowhere near as bad has tanking the world’s leading economy under a sea of liberal deficits. The people are watching and know who is heading in the direction the people want. – end update

The Tea Party has had an enormous effect on the tone and direction of debate in Washington, and today the old, tired and wasteful Political Industrial Complex is facing the first tangible results of this new movement. Today’s debt ceiling vote in the House has the old guard perplexed, and a bit scared, of the true change now possible in DC. And those who support the various Tea Parties are proud to take the blame (and credit) for where we have come:
Continue Reading »

There are lots of ways to spin a good delusion out of some recent polling, like CBS likes to do with their biased polls:

Poll: 71% shun GOP handling of debt crisis

Only a fool would translate this into thinking 71% want what the Dems and Obama are selling. The fact is, the conservative and Tea Party voters are not going to support posturing, speeches and foggy promises/deals. Until there is something tangible produced (like tomorrow’s vote), no support is coming.

That is because DC is out of political capitol. It is completely spent of trust and respect. Only clear and strong actions will get praise.

BTW, fudged polls are not going to change opinions. In the spectrum of believability, after BS speeches and vague promises comes political polls. As Ed Morrissey notes at Hot Air, this poll is so flawed it is not even based on mathematics anymore. It is pure propaganda. CBS News lots its credibility a decade ago. Digging their grave deeper is not changing any games here.

Anyway, right now the best way to turn these numbers around for the GOP is to stick with calling Obama’s bluff: Pass the bill in the House, and tell the Senate and White House to do their job. If Obama vetoes it, he will own all the fall out.

Enough zero sum games. We get cuts by legislation or by The Sword of Damocles – (the debt limit). Either way, the federal government is going on a fiscal diet.

The Sunday shows were full of liberals in deep denial over the 2010 election.

The talking points echoed from Fox News to ABC News was about how the vote tomorrow in the House of Representatives will not mean anything.

It was a silly and desperate act of pretending the 2010 election did not happen or had no meaning.

But the election did happen. And tomorrow will be the first time any legislation will have been put forth by anyone on the debt ceiling resolution. As Bill Kristol said, this is how it supposed to work. The Senate then should take it up, offer amendments and alternatives, but vote out their version. Then you go to committee. Then the President will have to act like the grown up he claims he is.

We The People spoke loudly in the last election. There was no doubt which party wanted to expand government and which wanted to reign it in. The latter won in a landslide of historic proportions. There is no confusion here, unless you are afraid to face reality.

Delusional denial is not the answer to last fall’s election. Anyone who wants to pretend it did not happen and it will not have repercussions is not truly American, or for democracy. The evidence of deep seated partisan fascism is in the denial of elections.

President Obama does not want to shrink government – at all costs. He and his administration have said they would rather tax small business (so called millionaires) to stave off government cuts. Even the Senate Democrats acknowledge they don’t want to make the cuts required to stop the destructive red ink:

Congressional leaders are giving tea party-backed Republican freshmen the run of the House this week with a plan to let the government borrow another $2.4 trillion — but only after big and immediate spending cuts and adoption by Congress of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget.

This “cut, cap and balance” plan is set to pass the House on Tuesday but is sure to stall in the Senate, where majority Democrats say it would lead to decimating budget cuts and make it harder to pass tax increases on the wealthy.

Seems like the perfect plan to me, and a majority of the voters here in Middle America. Anything that stops government from growing and puts on a track towards deficit neutral budgets without crippling taxes is going to have the same shape and direction. The Democrats want none of this – too bad they are unable to dictate their partisan desires in this American democracy.

President Obama has offered painful cuts, but without shrinking government down to a manageable size. We know this because he wants tax increases with those cuts – but not to offset those cuts. If he were to offset the cuts, we would only be getting higher taxes!

Painful cuts plus crippling taxes. That’s his plan. Pain without any progress. Less services along with less jobs, but more money for DC to waste.

Talk about delusional! And few lefties inside the Political Industrial Complex get this.

Earth (or America) to the DC Bubble: You don’t have to ‘get it’. You have to abide by our democratic process and live with it. Denial is not an option anymore.

Addendum: This is the best political ad of this election cycle

There is another dam about to break out here in Middle America, which naturally follows if the current political path to a new future fails.

In 2010 the people were crystal clear about which path they wanted leaders to take. And that path did not include ANY expansion of government failures. That was a political tsunami that wiped out big government Democrats across the nation – more so at the local level than at the top level (which is why the US Senate did not flip control, being the body the farthest from the reach of local voters). The damn that broke was our knee-jerk trust in government solutions. It was a huge political shift that has yet to play out, since we have only operated under this new general approach for a few short months.

But Democrats better beware, because the next dam they are playing with is much more powerful – and will take many generations to repair. And that dam is the basic key to governance – the support of We The People in our government. Our democracy operates not just by the consent of the governed, but by supporting participation. If this dam breaks then we will see widespread civil disobedience become the norm. The governed will begin to really push back against the political elite in a manner that will bring governance to its knees. That is the point of mass civil disobedience.

Take this incident for example – which had me and LJStrata rolling on the floor laughing:

Court records show 61-year-old Yukari Mihamae grabbed the left breast of the female agent Thursday at the Terminal 4 checkpoint.

Police say she squeezed and twisted the agent’s breast with both hands.

Officers say Mihamae admitted to the crime.

There’s no word why she touched the agent.

Mihamae now faces a felony count of sexual abuse.

Credit LJStrata for the thread title – too good to pass up.

The Feds better be careful on how they handle this. There are so many frustrated and fed up people passing through security check points that a wave of similar responses would cripple not only air travel, but also the court system. The irony of all this is the liberal left – with their nostalgia for the civil disobedience of 60’s and 70’s – are about to ignite a wave of Libertarian civil disobedience not seen since the Tea Party that launched this great country. It is no mystery that the Tea Party moniker took in 2010 to galvanize the rising tide of ‘small government’ forces now aligned against the heart and soul of big government liberalism. But if the voting booth fails to get the attention of the political elite, the next step will be impossible to ignore.

Would a wave of TSA disobedience send a signal to DC to get their paranoia under control so they start looking for terrorists and stop sifting through senior citizens’ Depends and accosting 6 year olds? Keep up the TSA madness and find out. Airline travel already is dysfunctional, adding a day more here or there won’t make much of a difference. More on that in a bit.

The debt ceiling debate is the focus point for the face off between big government and small government forces, all of which tie back to what is the reasonable and required level of government intervention in our lives. Right now, the arrogant and ignorant leftist busy-bodies are well over the line in terms of dictating what people should think, say, do for a living and make for an income. We know they have over reached. Heck, even they know it. But for some reason they cannot stop themselves. They will be stopped, now it is a question of how.

The left are completely afraid to give an inch on this manner now. Obama and the Dems say we should face painful cuts, but they are obsessed with adding a tax on the rich and small businesses. So obsessed they don’t even pretend that the higher taxes will go to reduce the pain of the cuts! They just want to stick it to the successful people. And they will shut the government down over this silliness.

Instead of giving up on taxes, they have demanded America make a choice between more government at all costs, or less government. Everyone outside the rabid left is heading towards less government at all costs. The argument is a lost cause. The left (and those trapped in the Political Industrial Complex bubble that covers the news media, talking heads, lobbyists, politicians and career bureaucrats) has no inkling things have shifted so much in Middle America. They are way behind the curve at the moment. So they don’t see the danger signs, any more than they saw the signs in 2010, or in Wisconsin and the reigning in union spending, or in Minnesota and reigning spending, or in NJ or VA and a myriad of places where real change is now taking place. There will be no unfettered growth in government. We don’t need ANY growth in government at all. We know it, the left can’t face it. So we have the coming stand offs.

America’s frustration is growing as its patience heads towards empty. If America decided to go to mass disobedience using the flash mob approach to start signaling the Political Industrial Complex – watch out. We could see a day where everyone brings a bottle of water to airline security, or everyone decides to delay their tax payments by a week or so, or any myriad of mass disobedience events. The bureaucracy could not handle any of these – trust me. It is lethargic, bloated and pretty damn stupid. It would crumble in dazed paralysis at each event.

The combination of this growing frustration and the internet/cellular communication (e.g., flash mob planning and coordination) could see civil disobedience on a scale that would boggle the mind. No more sit ins at one campus on one day. Think what would happen if everyone, on one day, brought that bottle of water to the TSA security line what would happen? Millions of unopened bottles of water piling up, consuming TSA resources. No real delays, just millions of gallons of water donated by air travelers. TSA would drown in a mountain of bottled water.

Simple, safe and effective. I would not call for a day of TSA groping – that would be beyond the pale and too much like lynch mob. TSA agents are Americans too and should not be the brunt of frustration. They are doing what they are told in most cases.

But if DC needs clearer messages, if the votes and polls and protests aren’t doing it, then next stage could be quite disruptive – and actually fun to watch.

Yes. As I suggested (see here and here) the best way to handle this debt crisis is to do it in stages, forcing the Dems to make foolish stances and accept incremental changes that leads the nation in a direction away from Obama’s economic abyss:

House Republicans said Friday that they planned to vote next week on a proposal to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion, with matching cuts and guidelines to control future government spending.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said at a news conference Friday that the House next week would vote on a “cut, cap and balance” approach. The House plans to separately vote on a measure that would amend the U.S. Constitution to require the federal government to balance its budget.

Each time we approach a new limit, the GOP extracts more from the Dems – all the way to the 2012 election cycle.

There is no way to sanely resolve these two items. First, Obama’s fantasy world:

President Obama on Friday kept up the pressure on Republicans to agree to revenue increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, claiming 80 percent of the public supports Democrats’ demand for tax increases.

And then the reality:

Just 34% think a tax hike should be included in any legislation to raise the debt ceiling. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 55% disagree and say it should not.

And more reality here.

And the other clear indication of the public’s mood was the 2010 wipe out of ‘big government’ democrats across the land and from the local to the federal levels. Someone should assess whether our young President has finally succumbed to the stress of the job he has taken on and failed at.

Waited to see what President Obama had to offer this morning, and sadly it was so moronic I am surprised (not really, more disappointed) that the news media can’t see the President’s lame shell game here.

Obama basically said this: I have identified a ton of painful domestic cuts, but I won’t support these painful cuts unless millionaires i.e., small businesses) pay a price (i.e., tax increases). What he NEVER said was he would use the new tax revenues to refund those painful cuts! Yes folks, his version of shared sacrifice is higher taxes for the upper class, painful cuts in programs and services for everyone else, and money for the bankers and lenders who buy up the debt!! What a deal!

The only question is why can’t we just do the painful cuts? He was going to do them anyway! Why not cut funding and leave the market to rebuild the economy. We know the government can’t do it. They wasted over $5 trillion dollars (that is over $16,000 per man, woman and child in the country) in new debt since Obama was sworn in. I would have preferred the $100,000 my family of 6 to lost Democrat incompetence. We could have done much more with it.

We have a choice here. Cut the money addiction in Washington and let Americans keep their hard earned money to create jobs, opportunities, careers, families, good lives – basically the American Dream. Or we give people like Obama, Reid and Pelosi our money so they can live the good life and dole it back out to us as they see fit.

The GOP, Tea Party and vast majorities of Independents trust Americans over the nuts in DC. It’s that new Libertarian force that arose from 2009 to 2010 in the electorate. The entire Political Industrial Complex that spans incompetent bureaucrats, politician, lobbyists and the partisan news media cannot do what Americans can do with their own money. None of them deserve America’s trust, let alone our hard earned money.

Pass what is needed in the House and let the Dems try and claim, as Obama said, he has no solutions to the cuts, but he plans to keep wasting money by starving our economy of the resources to create jobs. Bring it on!

Addendum: BTW, in case this is still not clear, if Obama raises taxes and then does not execute those painful domestic cuts, then all he did was raise taxes! So again, all he is offering is tax hikes alone, or tax hikes and painful cuts – only a naive journalist would be fooled by that one.

Update: Excellent open thread discussion at Hot Air

So, the answer to get us past the August 2nd debt ceiling conundrum is simple – stop funding Obama’s failed stimulus bill. Karl Rove has the numbers:

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, projects that the government will receive $172 billion in revenues between Aug. 3 and Aug. 31, but it is on the hook to spend $306 billion, leaving a shortfall of $134 billion.

Note that number. We just need to close that small spending gap to by another month and avoid this:

There will, however, be no cash for highway construction, no checks for federal workers or retirees, no agriculture payments, no open national parks. Interest rates are also likely to rise if U.S. debt is downgraded, adding massively to the deficit and further damaging the economy. This would be a disaster with no political winners.

So, where can we get this money so we can do the following?

The $172 billion in revenues collected over the rest of the month can pay the $29 billion interest charges on the national debt, Social Security benefits ($49 billion), Medicaid and Medicare ($50 billion), active duty military pay ($2.9 billion), Department of Defense vendors ($31.7 billion), IRS refunds ($3.9 billion), and about a quarter of the $12.8 billion in unemployment checks due that month.

Not so surprisingly the money to get past this month is money still stuck in the lethargic federal bureaucracy from the failed stimulus bill passed in Feb ’09:

Mr. Obama’s “untouchable” list includes his $1 trillion health-care reform, $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds, education and training outlays, his $53 billion high-speed rail proposal, spending on “green” jobs and student loans, and virtually any structural changes to entitlements except further squeezing payments to doctors, hospitals and health-care professionals.

As Mr. Rove notes, there’s plenty of money available to meet our obligations. It’s just Presidential ego that is in the way of a simple and less painful solution. All this money is for start ups we never could afford, but Obama, Reid and Pelosi passed anyway, thinking Americans were basically lemmings who would do whatever the political elite told them to do.

Sadly for Dems, their assumptions were as ridiculous as their spending spree.

Liberals and Progressive have such naive and fanciful world views. For example, they think the military is filled with evil, violent prone, people who had no choice but to have a military career because their IQ’s aren’t so good. They believe their is more racism in the South than in the North. They believe having a business and creating jobs is corrupt and greedy. They believe government sits on the right hand side of Gaia, and that government run health care is the best humanity has ever offered!

And so it is any wonder President Obama, the one time community organizer, has a warped and fanciful view of his constitutional power? He really thinks the President can just order everyone to comply with his directions (not to mentions we should be grateful he is among us)! Take his petulance yesterday, as he realized he had to work with the co-equal branches of government:

President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of a stormy debt-limit meeting with congressional leaders Wednesday, a dramatic setback to the already shaky negotiations.

…

“Eric, don’t call my bluff,” the president said, warning Cantor that he would take his case “to the American people.” He told Cantor that no other president — not Ronald Reagan, the president said — would sit through such negotiations.

So, the President really is ‘bluffing’ when he claims raising taxes on small businesses (the engine of job growth) will help the economy. No surprise there. As I noted yesterday, Obama refuses to cut back the bloated federal government, and demands everyone else pay to save the incompetent and failed bureaucracy that brought us the 2008-2009 economic melt down in the first place.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”

As I concluded yesterday, bring it on. Pass the short term bills in the Houseand force the Senate Dems to commit political suicide with their President, if they wish (and they won’t). The American people are not demanding, nor do they want, more taxes:

Obama is having a crisis of reality. He has never understood how economics work or appreciated the struggles and importance of business. He is an immature power broker who thinks just because the Democrats swooned at his ability to win the White House all of a sudden all his lack of understanding much of America suddenly transformed into ageless wisdom.

The arrogance is as tragic as it is pathetic.

The Senate Dems do not have enough far left members to hold any debt limit legislation the House passes. Once there is a reasonable path through this on the table, one with a bipartisan vote in the House as its launch point, the Dems in the Senate would be up against it to say “no – we must hurt the country and starve seniors to get our way“.

Pull the trigger on this nonsense. Pass the short term solution in the House and let the Democrats whine while the capitulate and Obama has to take all the heat or glory.

Addendum: A must read on the petulant elitism that President Obama has fallen back on as his grip on power collapses:

Obama: Well, let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. The public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury option goes. They shouldn’t. They’re worrying about their family; they’re worrying about their jobs; they’re worrying about their neighborhood. They’ve got a lot of other things on their plate. We’re paid to worry about it.

LOL! What a delusion! Yeah, we trust in the incompetents in DC to fix the decades of mistakes they produced that got us here in the first place? Look, it is time to put the political elite back in their place and once again subservient to the wishes of We The People. If Obama continues to not listen, then the backlash could reach impeachable levels. People are really, really frustrated. If that anger and fear bursts out and lands on his back as the target of all this he is done. He is already seriously damaged, but he has not come close to hitting bottom yet.

Though he is heading in that direction at full speed.

Barack Obama has decided to stomp his foot, hold his breathe and threaten to hurt senior citizens if he does not get his way:

President Obama on Tuesday said he cannot guarantee that retirees will receive their Social Security checks August 3 if Democrats and Republicans in Washington do not reach an agreement on reducing the deficit in the coming weeks.

Liar.

His administration has millions of options in front of him, the last of which would be to hold checks for our seniors. Talk about your childish temper tantrums. The federal bureaucracy is bloated with over spending and useless projects. Heck, just delaying the start of everything not yet fully up and running could buy months of time.

But the worst part of all this is the delusion that raising taxes is going to fix our economic problems. It won’t. Because the problem is not that we don’t waste enough money in DC (lining the pockets of lobbyists and the political elite).

The problem is our economy is not growing, and the best indication of that is the harsh fact that our work force has been shrinking by what has to be historic numbers ever since the liberals were voted into power in 2008 – and began to screw up on a scale never before seen.

Check out this data that comes out with the monthly unemployment numbers:

The chart shows [click to enlarge) the size of the US labor force in June over the last decade. As can be seen by the blue curve, the labor force began to shrink AFTER President Obama and the liberals came into power. The fantasy “Stimulus Bill” did nothing to stop the loss of jobs – basically because it takes the government at least a year to figure out how to spend money authorized by Congress, and by that time the Federal Bureaucracy has consumed a lot of it. Much more was sent to the states who covered workers who ended up being pink slipped anyway.

The red line shows the steady historic trend for work force growth in a growing economy. Since the 2010 census clearly shows our general population did not shrink over the same decade, the only rationale and sane conclusion is our economy shrunk under the misguided and wasteful policies of Obama, Reid and Pelosi. Furthermore, outside a slight reduced budget between May and September of this year, there has been NO imprint on the economic outlook from the newly elected GOP Congress. That is the only change that has been passed since the 2010 elections.

That red line shows 2.5 million fewer workers in the work force. It also shows that if the work force was at its normal level, we would be at 10.7% unemployment in June – not 9.1%, This trend has been running for months now (see here, here and here). The broader measure of employment pain is in the U6 number, which would be a crippling 17.2% if we added those unemployed, those underemployed and those who abandoned the work force all together.

Now President Obama is holding seniors’ financial security hostage until he gets to do more of the same. His policies brought in a paltry (and probably overly optimistic) 18,000 new jobs in June. With 2.5 million new jobs required to just get the workforce back to its proper level, and then many millions more jobs to get the unemployment down, it is clear taxing those people best able to invest and create all those needed jobs is basically stupid.

This simple and obvious fact is clearly beyond a community organizer to grasp. When one lives in a TV-Land world – where government is on the right hand of Gaia and average people are evil and incapable of even the smallest achievements – there is no way one can grasp the basic solution here. Unburden the engine of our economy – small businesses.

Do not do this!!:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”

Are these people kidding? We must kill off small business, strangle its ability to create the jobs we need to get back on track, in order to save wasteful and mindless federal programs????

This ‘vision’ is moronic. Simply moronic. And I do not think Geithner is expressing his own personal view here. I think we are finally seeing the warped and dysfunctional thinking that embodies Barack Obama.

The question for our petulant President is how many more lives of average Americans need to be sacrificed on the alter of progressive idiocy? How many more Americans must see their careers and futures lost to incompetent bureaucrats?

Tags: Economy, Geithner, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Taxes, Unemployment