It hardly matters at this point.  Barack Obama has said in so many words that he’s perfectly willing to let the U.S. Government default on our National Debt unless he gets cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Even after the Republicans have capitulated on these issues.

It is no wonder that he loses to ‘generic Republican’ by 8 points.  People who claim to believe in ‘Electoral Victory’ are lying to you.

Obama is ensuring he is a one term failure by rushing to enact his Republican agenda with the complicity of corporatists who wear a D only because it’s convenient.  His highly paid and constantly wrong (2010) consultants contend ‘not as scary as that guy over there’, combined with ‘I’m a blind partisan’ will defeat the truth of ‘I don’t care about you’.

Barack Obama doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you and by the way clap harder for the Confidence Fairy, Invisible Bond Vigilantes, and Tinkerbell, otherwise you’ll die.

And so that’s where I’d have a selling job, Chuck, is trying to sell some of our party that if you are a progressive, you should be concerned about debt and deficit just as much as if you’re a conservative. And the reason is because if the only thing we’re talking about over the next year, two years, five years, is debt and deficits, then it’s very hard to start talking about how do we make investments in community colleges so that our kids are trained, how do we actually rebuild $2 trillion worth of crumbling infrastructure.

If you care about making investments in our kids and making investments in our infrastructure and making investments in basic research, then you should want our fiscal house in order, so that every time we propose a new initiative somebody doesn’t just throw up their hands and say, “Ah, more big spending, more government.”

It would be very helpful for us to be able to say to the American people, our fiscal house is in order. And so now the question is what should we be doing to win the future and make ourselves more competitive and create more jobs, and what aspects of what government is doing are a waste and we should eliminate. And that’s the kind of debate that I’d like to have.

It’s hard to figure out exactly what his motivations are since his policy doesn’t make any kind of sense at all, even for rich people.  When ‘The Great Hair Cut’ takes place it will be all about deleveraging that $600 Trillion of Derivative Notional Value in the Shadow Markets.

Why?  Because there’s no place else to get the ‘money’.  It’s at least 10 times the ‘book value’ of all the World’s goods and services annually.  So while the slave owner may starve and whip his chattel, and force them to sleep naked in the cold, there is only so much blood in the turnip.

Bootlickers think they will somehow survive I suppose, who can have enough jesters and toadies?  Having been Capo di Tutti I’ll tell you they’re the first on the list.  They’ll continue to suck up anyway seeking to worm their way back into favor (see Pavlov).

Frankly it’s co-dependent behavior.  I’ve seen enough abusive relationships to know and I have an opinion- toleration is complicity.

How then to have an impact?

I call you to a life of resistance in the small and easily done things.  Move your money.  Use cash when you can.  Turn off your lights when you leave the room and properly inflate your tires.

I don’t think any amount of complaints will convince the Tsar he has bad councilors, but it’s certainly a minimum.  I do think that only votes get counted and I encourage you to do so early and often.  The thing about shunning is that it’s critically important that it be public and express the clear disapproval of the community.

Their guilty souls can’t stand that, witness the howls of outrage.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Italian parliament adopts stinging austerity budget

By Dario Thuburn, AFP

7 hrs ago

Pau to Lourdes 95 miles

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Yesterday’s first Stage in the Pyrenees was not as dominant a day for Contador as might have been predicted on paper.  He was awfully lonely at the finish and gave up time to his main rivals in front of the home crowd.

Now 30 Seconds is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, a margin like that over a single rival can be easily made up by a bit of bad luck like a flat, but the truth is that Saxo Bank looked totally feckless in the face of a strong Leopard Trek effort from the first serious climb.

Contador’s problem is that it’s not just the :30 and it’s not just one rider he has to beat.

In the General Classification the standings look like this after the first High Mountain Stage-

Don’t be deceived by that even 4 Minutes, while it was a great thing for France to have a Frenchman lead Le Tour de France on Bastille Day, Voeckler is not expected to retain the maillot jaune past Saturday if he can hang onto it that long.

The people to watch are the two Schlecks, Evans, and Basso.  Sammy Sanchez is only 11 Seconds behind and could sneak up.

This Stage ramps up with a Category 3 and a category 4 climb before the Sprint checkpoint and then heads for the unclassified Col d’Aubisque and steeply down to the finish.  I think team management is going to be a real issue because it will be very difficult to stick together and help your contenders over the Col and after that a serious gap could develop as the back markers struggle up and the leaders zoom to the finish.

Coverage on Vs. starts at 8 am.

• Jada Yuan Previews the Hell Out of the Tour de France in the New Yorker, 7/1/11 at 2:00 PM
• Le Tour 2011 official site
• Your The Stars Hollow Gazette Le Tour coverage tags-
• Le Tour
• Le Tour 2010
• Le Tour 2011

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 More than 40 injured in Pamplona bull-run festival

By Daniel Silva, AFP

3 hrs ago

Good for them.

About That McConnell Deal…

By: Jane Hamsher, Firedog Lake

Thursday July 14, 2011 6:36 am

The irony is that the Obamabots are so out of touch with who Obama is and what he wants they don’t realize that by cheering for the McConnell deal, and his prowess in making McConnell “blink,” it amounts to twisting the knife for him. It makes it impossible for him to reject the deal (in) the end – which empowers the GOP to hold out.

Cantor offered a temporary extension three times last night, and by both Democratic and GOP accounts, that’s what made Obama snap. He wouldn’t be rejecting it “even if it brings my presidency down,” and taking his case to the American people, if he thought he had scored some big victory.

You gotta feel sorry for the guy. His most ardent supporters are the dumbest motherfuckers in the world, and they don’t  realize he thinks they are digging his political grave.

What Obama wants is to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

dday–

Obama reiterated that his “strong preference is not just to raise the debt ceiling but also to take significant steps to restrain borrowing.” As I’ve said repeatedly, by his own words, he wants to use this as a leverage point. The family of the hostage victim has become the hostage taker. So you have to believe that this Reid/McConnell deal, which mandates spending cuts even though the Republican leader in the Senate took them off the table, is being tailored to placate a Democratic President.

He’s threatened to veto any bill that doesn’t do that.  He and the advisers he’s personally picked to listen to and put in positions of policy influence believe in provably false economic theories and ‘political science’ that’s equally suspect.

Electoral victory my ass.

Cugnaux to Luz-Ardiden 132 miles

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Our first High Mountains.  Lots of uphill, the sprint checkpoint and then 3 climbs- Hourquette d’Ancizan (category 1), Col du Tormalet (unclassified), and the finish at Luz-Ardiden (also unclassified).

The first is actually the steepest, but they range from 7.5% to 7.3% grades so they’re all pretty steep.

Contador will be looking to make a statement since he has a 3 day opportunity to put this away.  He starts out about 1:30 behind his competition.

Yesterday the Mad Manx took over the points competition with Gilbert and Rojas close behind and Greipel and Hushovd slightly farther back.  They’ll contest the intermediate checkpoint points but you have to expect the Stage winner to be a climber.

However there are always surprises.

Surprise early coverage on Vs. starts at 6 am!

• Jada Yuan Previews the Hell Out of the Tour de France in the New Yorker, 7/1/11 at 2:00 PM
• Le Tour 2011 official site
• Your The Stars Hollow Gazette Le Tour coverage tags-
• Le Tour
• Le Tour 2010
• Le Tour 2011

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Triple ‘terror’ blasts kill 21 in Mumbai

By Phil Hazlewood, AFP

1 hr 22 mins ago

“Neoliberal Economics has as much credibility as Stalinist Genetics.”- ek hornbeck

Some people point out that Evolution is just a theory despite a clear fossil record, the evidence of written history (parts even since 4004 B.C. and so Bishop Ussher approved), St. Bernards and Chihuahuas, corn and potatoes, the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon.

And Molecular Biology, one of those pesky ‘hard sciences’ with mathmatical models that predict replicable observable results that can be tested by experiment and when tested have proven true.

Economics?  Not so much.  One could credibly argue that as currently practiced it has all the mathematical certainty of Astrology (the planetary alignment is what it is and stars do chart their courses) and all it’s credulous superstitious magical thinking non-underwear changing during a hitting streak nonsense too.

As practiced currently by the constantly wrong and surprised it’s equal mixtures perfect markets and Jungian mystical mass psychology.

It’s fueled by enormous vanity and a refusal to admit one’s failure in theory given the evidence of experimental results that equals or exceeds the defenders of phlogiston and Ether.

Herr Doktor Professor–

If you come at the current Lesser Depression from my angle, there’s no great mystery. Consistency in modeling isn’t always a virtue, but still, it’s striking how much continuity there is in the analysis of slumps: there’s a clear line of descent with only moderate modification running from Hicks 1937 to liquidity-trap models of Japan (pdf) to models that add in debt/deleveraging. The situation we’re in seems fully comprehensible.

But at Chicago and elsewhere in the freshwater universe they’re playing Calvinball (and what a good coinage that was from Mike Konczal). All kinds of novel and implausible effects – effects that weren’t in any of the models they were using before the crisis – are invoked to explain why we’re in a sustained slump; strange to say, all of these newly invented models just happen to imply the need for tax cuts and a shrunken welfare state.

But I don’t think it’s just political bias: part of what’s happening, I’m sure, is intellectual embarrassment. These people come from a movement that declared, with great arrogance, that Keynesian economics was dead – then failed to produce a workable alternative, and now finds itself in what is very recognizably a Keynesian world. Recognizably, that is, to everyone but them, because admitting that Keynesian-type thinking is useful now would just be too humiliating.

Blaye-les-Mines to Lavaur 105 miles

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

The 11th Stage is the halfway mark time wise with 10 race days remaining after today including the Individual Time Trial and the Champs Elysees parade on the penultimate and final days.

This Stage is flatter than yesterday with only one category 4 and one category 3 climb.  It’s the last flat Stage until after the Pyrenees and 1 of 3 (including the Champs Elysees at the very end of Le Tour) left at all.

So you can expect the sprinters to put on a show.

Supposedly the Mad Manx is all pissed that former team mate Greipel beat him out by a wheel to score his first Stage victory ever yesterday (as opposed to Cavendish’s 17), but were I him I’d be far more concerned that I was 64 points behind Gilbert in the points competition.  Not that you can’t make up a lot of ground with a 45 point Stage victory, just that there aren’t a lot of opportunities left that suit his style.

Our first High Mountains start tomorrow and I’m not sure if despite all his bad luck Contador can be stopped.  He is 4:07 behind the leader Voeckler but Voeckler isn’t considered a marquee climber and Contador is reputed to be the best in the world.  The deltas to top contenders like Evans and the Schlecks are less than half that and margins in the mountains tend to magnify.

And he’s the home town favorite in the Pyrenees so it’s like Scuderia Marlboro UPC at Monza.

Despite their woes (3 riders down, Horner out, and Leipheimer mired in 36th) Radio Shack is a respectable 3rd in the team competition, only 1:02 behind Europcar and a mere 30 Seconds behind Leopard Trek.

So if there is going to be change it will be happening soon and then there are always surprises.

Coverage on Vs. starts at 8 am.

• Jada Yuan Previews the Hell Out of the Tour de France in the New Yorker, 7/1/11 at 2:00 PM
• Le Tour 2011 official site
• Your The Stars Hollow Gazette Le Tour coverage tags-
• Le Tour
• Le Tour 2010
• Le Tour 2011