The results of the hostage crisis

S & P just downgraded US creditworthiness--because of the irrationality of Congress. The result of all that hostage taking in Congress is going to be ongoing debt and higher costs. Because, as Sen. Mitch McConnell said, they will do it again.

Steve Benen remarks:

This wasn’t just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the ages. It’s the kind of thing that should scar the Republican Party for many years to come.

Indeed, consider the apparent consequences. This one radical scheme has helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt; it has riled financial markets and generated widespread uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it has severely undermined American credibility on the global stage.

Continuing in the reality-driven world of sober adults, Tom Friedman in the NY Times explains,

Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.

…For us to effectively compete…required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter.

Instead of doing that at the scale we needed — that is, building muscle — we injected ourselves with massive amounts of credit steroids…

There is no easy, one-policy fix. We need to help people deleverage, cut some spending, raise some revenues and reinvest in our growth engines — as an integrated strategy for national renewal. Something this big and complex cannot be accomplished by one party alone. It will require the kind of collective action usually reserved for national emergencies. The sooner we pull together the better.

But I'm not hopeful, based on what just happened. In fact, I am sadly confident that the Republicans in Congress are incapable of responding appropriately. Indeed, they thrive on ignorance.

People voted for these bozos. It's ultimately the voters' fault. This is what we get now, if you vote for anyone with an "R" after his name.   It's a shameful decline of  a political party. And craven as the Democrats are, I don't see how they could have negotiated more effectively, when the opposition was fully prepared to pull the trigger.

Image from MoveOn

Catholics on the campaign against equality

Over and over again, polls tell us that Roman Catholic laity--that is, the people in the pews-- are amongst the most supportive groups when it comes to marriage equality.  But the Roman Catholic hierarchy, that is, the Bishops and up, are amongst the most intense opponents, funneling millions into the anti-marriage campaigns.

Why, in Minnesota, the Archbishop actually suggested that parents reject their children rather than the church.  Yeah, how's that workin' for ya?

And NOM, the most active, yet secretive opponent to equality, is run by conservative Catholics as a front group for Catholic money.

The laity have practiced a sort of don't-ask-don't-tell, managing to ignore this, but stories of denying funerals to parishioners who are gay don't sit well with anyone.

As this excellent piece in ReligionDispatches points out, it's as though being gay is a unique sin.

In their zeal to deny any form of legitimacy to same-sex relationships, the bishops have neglected more urgent pastoral duties. Catholic schools and parishes are closing by the dozen in dioceses across the country, yet somehow the hierarchy and its allies in the Knights of Columbus have found millions of dollars to spend in one state after another opposing marriage equality, or its weaker cousin, the civil union.

Many Catholics, though, still believe in their church as an agent of social justice.

...The Church’s teachings on social justice compelled us to act as advocates for fairness, justice, and individual dignity, that its teachings on politics instructed us to vote for the common good, and that in making moral decisions, we were to follow the promptings of our own well-formed consciences

There are times, it seems, when our hierarchy is so committed to cultivating political power, and deploying our Church’s resources in contemporary culture wars, that they expect us to forget all of this. We won’t..

And then, of course, there's the hypocrisy, such as expelling children of gay parents from Catholic schools.

The archbishop argued that parents must be able to cooperate with Catholic schools in the education of their children, and that those who do not embrace Church doctrine cannot do so.

This was not an argument he employed against Protestants, or non-Christians, or children whose parents had remarried after a divorce. It was employed exclusively against lesbian parents. Because in the theological universe that our bishops are constructing to support their personal biases, there is sin, and then there is gay sin, and gay sin is so much worse.

Remember, BP used to be Roman Catholic--until the day she visited an unfamiliar church prior to Prop8, and a priest spat bile and hatred over homosexuals in a vile screeching sermon. Her many, many supportive RC friends urged her to stay with her regular congregation, to practice Don't Ask Don't Tell with the priest. But how can you have a healthy spiritual life if you can't be honest? So BP is now Episcopalian, where she is welcomed as a total person and our marriage is, literally, blessed.

So while it's great that these individual Roman Catholics at Religion Dispatches are calling out the bishops, there's a problem. The Roman Catholic church is not a democracy. The institution is still actively harming gay people, and pouring money into anti-equality efforts. And while individual RC don't agree and don't support that, what are they doing--what can they do-- to stop the abuse?

The end of the Democratic Party

Glenn Greenwald:

In other words, a slew of millionaire politicians who spent the last decade exploding the national debt with Endless War, a sprawling Surveillance State, and tax cuts for the rich are now imposing extreme suffering on the already-suffering ordinary citizenry, all at the direction of their plutocratic overlords, who are prospering more than ever and will sacrifice virtually nothing under this deal (despite their responsibility for the 2008 financial collapse that continues to spawn economic misery).  And all of this will be justified by these politicians and their millionaire media mouthpieces with the obscenely deceitful slogans of "shared sacrifice" and "balanced debt reduction" -- two of the most odiously Orwellian phrases since "Look Forward, not Backward" and "2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate" (and anyone claiming that Obama was involuntarily forced by the "crazy" Tea Party into massive budget cuts at a time of almost 10% unemployment: see the actual facts here).

Ian Welsh:

This “Crisis” is what Obama wanted.

Again, if he didn’t, he would have raised the debt ceiling in the lame duck. Nancy Pelosi was always very good at getting those sort of basic housekeeping bills through. It would have passed. Period. Obama wanted to cut SS and Medicare, and he needed a “crisis” in order to do it. He also needed a Republican House, which he had, because his policies during 2009 and 2010 didn’t fix the economy.

George Orwell:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.