Visual Source: Newseum
Lazy August Sunday.
NY Times:
S.& P. and two financial industry groups listened to various proposals for debt reduction and warned the lawmakers of the impact a default would have on world markets, according to a Congressional staff member in attendance. The staff member said the agency was providing guidance on what target to hit in budget savings, but lawmakers struggled to understand the agency’s views.
Since that meeting, several lawmakers have publicly questioned whether the ratings agencies have the competence to evaluate the country’s finances, and whether it was appropriate for them to be so deeply involved in discussions of fiscal politics. The criticism reached a fevered pitch after S.& P. announced Friday night that it was downgrading America’s credit rating, a decision that thrust the ratings agencies to the center of the debate over the government’s budget, and prompted renewed scrutiny of an industry that has been harshly criticized since the financial crisis.
Sen. Bernie Sanders:
I find it interesting to see S&P so vigilant today in downgrading the U.S. credit rating. Where were they four years ago when they, and other credit rating agencies, helped cause this horrendous recession by providing AAA ratings to worthless sub-prime mortgage securities on behalf of Wall Street investment firms? Where were they last December when Congress and the White House drove up the national debt by $700 billion by extending Bush's tax breaks for the rich?
Nicolle Wallace:
Unfortunately, you don’t have to look too far to see what happens when women fail to adjust for the double standards and higher thresholds for female candidates.
In 2010, it was painful to watch California gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman, an accomplished former Silicon Valley executive, get tripped up by a Hillary-esque emphasis on being “tough enough.” It was so overdone, she had to spend the final days of that campaign emphasizing her role as a mother and wife. According to the Los Angeles Times, her campaign’s last mail effort featured “softly focused pictures of the candidate as a young woman and of her two children when they were young, and quotes such as ‘At the end of the day, my family remains my greatest source of pride.’ ” This was an about-face from the aggressive campaign Whitman had waged about jobs and education, and it revealed the unique pressures on women to show voters all sides of themselves, but none too forcefully.
While you might gag on the parts about how wonderful and bold Michele Bachmann is, there's no question female candidates have a tougher road. That doesn't change the fact that Bachmann is awful on policy but skilled on politics.
Frank Bruni:
Above all, [Rick Perry's prayer rally] presented a spectacle that — let’s be honest — most of us in the news media don’t really get. Seeking relief from the country’s woes through a louder, more ardent appeal to God strikes us as too much hope invested in too magical a solution. It suspends disbelief and defies rigorous reason.
But if we stick with this honesty thing, don’t we also have to admit that to varying degrees and with varying stakes, there’s magical thinking in secular life, and that it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers? Didn’t the debt-ceiling showdown show us that?
That battle was defined largely by the unshakable, grandiose convictions of low-taxes, small-government puritans in the House, for whom Cut, Cap and Balance wasn’t so much a three-pronged wager as a holy trinity, promising salvation. While it’s inarguable that government has a tropism toward waste, and while tax increases should indeed be preceded by an inquiry into other options, the adamancy of the puritans’ position flew in the face of what many economists say, and it brooked no dissent. It felt more like theology than science.
Hendrik Hertzberg:
“Voters may have chosen divided government,” President Obama said Tuesday, just after signing the debt-limit bill, “but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.”
The President is making a common mistake here. He may be right about the second point*, but what about his opening premise? Is he right that “voters”—that is, actual human beings who vote—have “chosen divided government”?
In fact, few voters ever “choose” divided government, and those voters are never a majority. The majority always wants united government. Some voters want it united under Republican auspices, some want it under Democratic auspices. Almost no one wants divided government as such (although, of course, almost everyone would rather have their own party control part of the government than have the other party control all of it).
