Congress

Many people have been, deservedly, very quick to jump on John Boehner for the lies he told in answering the President's Address; but they have been a lot less anxious to lay out the lies or at least falsehoods told or implied by the President, himself. I don't intend to excuse the Speaker's lies or the Speaker, by showing that the President doesn't have clean hands. more »

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Dear Dems and Mr. President,

I've been a lifelong Democrat. But now, I don't know anymore. I'm still registered alright; but when I look at your behavior, I think I'm a freely floating voter resource now, and I'd probably respond to a poll as one in that amorphous blob of independents that stands for “the two parties suck; but we don't agree on much else.” I'm sorry about that. more »

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Congress provided the authority

, in legislation passed in 1996, for the US Mint to create platinum bullion or proof platinum coins with arbitrary fiat face value having no relationship to the value of the platinum used in these coins. These coins are legal tender. more »

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(Author's Note; Many thanks to lambert strether, beowulf, and Yves Smith for their reviews of this post)

Well, the debt limit crisis is upon us. Treasury Secretary Geithner says the US Government will not be able to meet all its obligations on August 3, unless the debt ceiling is increased by Congress. The Secretary says he is out of moves to extend this date. I don't think that's true. more »

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On most issues Lawrence O'Donnell is on the side of the angels. But O'Donnell, who held senior staff positions on Capitol Hill during the 1990's, is one of many Democrats and liberals who think the way to fix today's problems is by recycling yesterday's solutions - even when those solutions didn't even fix yesterday's problems. Nostalgia for the great compromises of the 90's is going to sink the Democratic Party, not help it. More importantly, it will lead to the wrong policy decisions.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the current deficit debate. When O'Donnell accepted Esquire's challenge to create his own "deficit commission," he was already reinforcing the mistaken idea that deficits are the nation's number one concern. I hosted The Young Turks broadcast (America's #1 online news show, I'm told!) for three days this week. The clip below shows O'Donnell's last comments on the deficit debate, along with our comments.

The short version of our reaction? Lawrence, we love ya, but you're completely wrong on this one. And this is exactly the kind of thinking that will drive us over a cliff if we stick with it:

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I've written a lot about jumbo coin seigniorage as a way of getting around the debt ceiling problem over the past 7 months, and others more »

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By now you have heard that President Obama has chosen to throw Social Security and the Medicare and Medicaid Programs over the side of his proverbial fishing boat as bait to see if he can get Republicans to give him another really lousy compromise, much as he did last December when he gave up billions upon billions of deficit reduction in order to help Republicans preserve tax cuts for billionaire more »

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Today, the MSM noticed that there's an issue of constitutionality related to the debt ceiling. more »

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Yesterday, The United States actually ran over the debt ceiling of $14.294 Trillion by $50 Billion or so, which means that the Treasury has issued $52 Billion more in debt instruments than is allowed by Congress's debt ceiling, which, in turn, means that the cu more »

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