Tempest in a Tea Party
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 30, 2011

SO I was chatting with Chris Coons, the new Democratic senator from Delaware who had a rare win over the Tea Party when he beat loony Christine “I’ve Dabbled in Witchcraft but I Am Not a Witch” O’Donnell in the midterms.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Coons is a smart guy who’s alarmed at finding himself in a vicious combat zone that makes “Shark Week” look like a guppy party.
He said he felt as if he were in “an alternative universe.” He wonders if the president, rather than using an analogy about late credit card payments, should explain that failing to raise the debt ceiling is like the nation’s refusing to pay its mortgage. And he glumly noted that there would be a “bouquet of blame” for everyone if Congress and the White House allowed the country to “Titanic.”
“You know,” I told the suffering senator, “there is an easy solution.”
He looked up hopefully.
“Witchcraft,” I beamed. “Too bad we don’t have a senator who knows some spells.”
Ancient incantations and eye of newt — not that Newt — would be the only way to conjure up a less embarrassing group of leaders.
The world is watching in fearful — and sometimes gleeful — fascination as the Tea Party drives a Thunderbird off the cliff with the president and speaker of the House strapped in the back. The Dow is hiding under the bed with a glass of single malt. Can it get more excruciating? Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.
Amid the chilling anarchy, there’s not a single strong leader to be seen — not even a misguided one. All the leaders are followers. You have to wonder if President Obama at some level doesn’t want to lead. Maybe he just wants to be loved.
The citizens of this country tremble at the thought that these are the people governing them. Should we stick our money under our mattresses? It’s not only the economy that gets nourished by confidence; it’s also politics.
The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. It turns out they wanted to come inside to get a blueprint of the historic building to sabotage it.
Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes. (Many are worried about primary races with even more dogmatic challengers, which is a truly scary thought.) If they can drag President Obama off his pedestal, even better. They think he looks down on them and sneers at their values.
Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.
As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”
Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.
More and more, 2008 looks like the tulip mania.
When Obama came before the cameras Friday to say that “any solution to avoid default must be bipartisan,” many Democrats wish he had just gone all unilateral and taken Bill Clinton’s advice to invoke the 14th Amendment. They yearned to see the president beat the political suicide bombers over the head with the Constitution. Impeaching a constitutional lawyer for saving the economy would be an even more difficult sell than impeaching a rogue for fibbing about a dalliance.
The Gingrich revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Reagan revolution and the Tea Party revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Gingrich revolution. The difference, though, is existentially striking: The Reagan and Gingrich forces wanted a leaner government, but they still believed in government.
The sighing, spectral Harry Reid does not look up to the task of taking on the freshman wolfen.
The laconic president emerges from the sidelines periodically to warn about economic default, but we’re already in political default.
Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.
Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the “hobbits,” as The Wall Street Journal and John McCain called them.
What if this is all a cruel joke on us? What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?

8 Dumbest, Most Insensitive Right-Wing Reactions to the Norway Shooting
The right-wing media has engaged in brazen finger-pointing and insensitivity toward the victims and other innocent parties.
July 25, 2011  |

Last week’s tragedy in Norway has left the world stunned. The magnitude of the bloodbath is difficult to comprehend. As news of the massacre began to trickle out, speculation was rampant as to the perpetrator and the motive.

Not surprisingly, much of the early accounts falsely alleged an Al Qaeda connection. As facts started to infuse the reporting, it became clear that the suspect, Anders Breivik, is an extremist, fundamentalist Christian, with harshly bigoted views toward Muslims, immigrants and leftists. His manifesto resembles the ravings of Glenn Beck with talk of cultural Marxism and Islamic colonization. Yet even after Breivik’s motives were disclosed, the right-wing media has continued to engage in brazen finger-pointing and insensitivity toward the victims and other innocent parties. For instance…

1) A writer on Andrew Breitbart’s BigPeace website set out to whitewash Breivik’s right-wing Christianity: “This Norwegian terrorist was not a Christian or a conservative. He acted contrary to the teachings of the Bible and conservatives from Burke to Madison. He was instead a jihadist, blinded by an ideology who resorted to violence…”

While Breitbart’s crew is anxious to disassociate mainstream Christians from this atrocity, rightists in America rarely offer that distinction to Muslims who regard terrorists like Bin Laden as apostates and not representative of their faith.
2) On the other hand, CNN’s Erick Erickson unapologetically went after Muslims anyway: “The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American Muslims [sic], but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam.”

Remember, this was after Erickson learned that there was no Islamic connection to the massacre. (Erickson was one of many conservatives who initially accused Muslims of the crime before Breivik was captured.)

3) A writer at RedState went off a cognitive cliff to claim that “We live in a world where we are perfectly happy to abort millions of children and then DEMAND to know WHY Anders Behring Breivik became the human sarcoma that he truly is.”

Never mind the fact that we already know Breivik’s crime was spurred by his hatred for multiculturalism; the RedStaters are determined to find a way to lay blame on any handy tenet of progressivism. Remember Pat Robertson blaming Hurricane Katrina on the gays?

4) Mark Steyn of the National Review is stumped as to why there have been allegations of Islamophobia: “So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an ‘Islamophobic’ mass murder?”

Yes, it is. Breivik explicitly targeted people associated with Norway’s Labour Party, whom he blamed for promoting multiculturalism.

5) Brian Kilmeade on Fox News queried his guest: “Are you surprised somewhat that Western newspapers, in this case the New York Times, seem to be jumping on the fact — they’re trying to equate Christian, what they say are Christian extremists, with Muslim extremists?”

Kilmeade utterly failed to grasp the irony that just hours earlier he and his network were baselessly accusing Muslims of committing the mass murder. Now he’s worried about the reputation of Christians, despite the fact that the shooter was a Christian.

6) Professional Islamophobe, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, found a unique way to blame Muslims even after she knew they were not involved. “Anders Behring Breivik is responsible for his actions. If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists. If anything incited him to violence, it was the Euro-Med policy.”

So according to Gellar, Muslims are responsible for violence that they cause themselves, as well as for violence caused by others who hate them.

7) After first asserting that the perpetrators were likely to have been Muslim terrorists, John Hinderaker of the PowerLine blog dug in, saying, “Was that wrong? Not at all. Any time mass murder attacks take place, it is not just likely but highly probable that they are the work of Muslim jihadists.”

This conveniently leaves open the opportunity to blame every future act of terrorism on Muslims, whether or not they are responsible.

As Norway mourns, the right-wing media has been boiling over with speculation that is both derisive and bizarre. And you can’t allude to bizarre derision without acknowledging Glenn Beck, whose unconscionable remarks exceed all the others by disparaging the actual teenage victims even before they have been laid to rest: “As the thing started to unfold, and then there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler Youth, or whatever. I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics?”

Well, for one there is Glenn Beck’s own 912 Project that sponsors the Tampa Liberty School, a Tea Party-themed getaway for schoolchildren ages 8-12. But that doesn’t excuse Beck’s inference that the slaughtered campers were akin to Hitler’s youth brigades.

All of these examples of ignorant bigotry took place AFTER it was known that the gunman was not Muslim, but an extremist Christian and far-right activist. Not surprisingly, the conservative press was just as blindly prejudiced in its initial reactions to the breaking news.

The despicably bigoted opinions expressed by the prominent, establishment commentators above reveal a dark and disturbing side of American conservatism. Their views percolate throughout the rightosphere and infect the broader community of conservatives. That endorsement of hate results in even more extreme views, like those expressed by this member of the Maine Tea Party: “Man of the Year 2011 – Anders Behring Breivik!!!”

If cooler (saner) minds don’t rise to moderate this overt hostility, the potential for more of this violence will persist, and there is no reason why it would not occur here in the United States. In fact, right-wing extremists have already demonstrated their capacity to do harm, as the survivors of Dr. Tiller, or the targets of Byron Williams will inform you. And let’s not forget Timothy McVeigh’s attack on a government that his militia-bred philosophy viewed as too liberal.

Why is The Military Using Nazi Rhetoric And Jesus In Its Nuclear Ethics Program?
According to Truth-Out.org, newly released documents reveal that the United States Air Force has been training young missile officers about the ethics of launching nuclear weapons by brainwashing them with New Testament passages and “commentary” from a former Nazi. The mandatory program not only forces religion on officers, but uses God and Nazi rhetoric to help them justify mass murder.

For starters, the mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare training includes mention of St. Augustine’s “Christian Just War Theory.” Says Truth-Out:

Augustine’s “Qualifications for Just War,” according to the way it is cited in a 43-page PowerPoint presentation, are: “to avenge or to avert evil; to protect the innocent and restore moral social order (just cause)” and “to restore moral order; not expand power, not for pride or revenge (just intent).”

Another PoewrPoint slide includes the words of Werner Von Braun, a former Nazi Party member,SS officer, and (evil) rocket scientist who used Jews in concentration camps to help build the V-2 rocket.

So why is the U.S. quoting an indisputably unethical mass murder in a “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare” tutorial?

Apparently, his justification of war with religion can be applied to American politics, and that alone makes it easy enough for Air Force policies to forget he was talking about genocide.

“We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision [emphasis in document] more than anything else,” Von Braun said upon surrendering to American forces in May 1945. “We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.” [emphasis in document]

Though not anywhere near as scary as the military using a Nazi’s justification for attempting Jewish genocide as a moral defense of war, the article also quotes an anonymous officer who said of the program, “It presumes ALL missile officers are religious and specifically in need of CHRISTIAN justification for their service.”

Teaching recruits about Christ “the mighty warrior” who believed in a “just” war may, for some, make pressing the button to release nuke a little bit easier.  But for those of us who do not want to see our nation undergo the same psychological control as did Nazi Germany, these tactics offer much more discomfort than a sense of security.

Read more on the shocking Air Force policy at Truth-Out.org

By Kristen Gwynne | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at July 27, 2011, 2:13 pm

You sometimes wonder just exactly what planet are some people on.

To whom the Deficit may concern;

If I purchase a house and obtain a mortgage thru my local Dollar Bank and make payments as required, I am being a responsible person and paying my bills. I get to keep living on that particular property as long as I keep paying my mortgage payments on time. If Dollar Bank for business interest having nothing to do with the fact that I save and loaned with them, decides to sell that mortgage to another bank, say Wells Fargo with whom I don’t save, loan or bank with at all, I still have to pay my mortgage payments when they are due and not one day later without penalty, just as the original contract required me to do. My point to the Tea Party membership, just because you don’t like who is in the White House presently, doesn’t give us as a country the right to fuck over the rest of the world financially speaking and not pay bills and agreements in place long before the Black man took office. I’m just saying, it is just that simple, we must meet our obligations in spite of who runs our politics.

Jul 19, 2011 6:01 AM EDT

Michele Bachmann’s star is on the rise. Her poll numbers are climbing. The donations are rolling in. And the press is scrambling for any scraps about her character, her past, what makes her tick. Digging deep into the Minnesota Republican’s record, reporters have found some tantalizing material: her alleged ties to the hatemongering pastor Bradlee Dean, her work to get a pardon for Ponzi schemer Frank Vennes Jr., and her husband’s apparent reference to gays as “barbarians.”

They’re juicy stories and they’ve gotten plenty of attention nationwide. But they aren’t news—a small cluster of bloggers in Minnesota broke all those stories years ago.
These are interesting times for Eva Young, Ken Avidor, and a handful of other contributors who write the Dump Bachmann blog, a small online outpost that punches way above its weight class. For seven years, Young and her compadres have devoted long hours to cataloguing Bachmann’s every move, first as an obscure state senator and then in the U.S House. Now the object of their attention is suddenly the front runner in Iowa, and a leading contender for the 2012 GOP nomination. Rather than celebrating their prescience, the bloggers sound downright dismayed.

“I don’t want to blog about her,” says Avidor, who has become the site’s most prolific poster. “I’ve quit three times. She’s not worth of even being considered a possible candidate. But unfortunately, she’s become a more serious joke.”
Dump Bachmann isn’t the first local political blog to suddenly draw the attention of a national media hungry for leads. Just ask the folks at Mudflats, an Alaskan site that hit the big time when its target, Sarah Palin, did the same. But the Minnesota blog stands out for its early influence—and the political pedigree of its founder, Young, who, like Bachmann, is a Republican woman who has achieved a level of notoriety in the ranks of the state party.


Artwork from the website, www.dumpbachmann.com, Ken Avidor, Dump Bachmann blog
Young, a Minneapolis resident who works in information technology as her day job, began the blog seven years ago, after stints as president of the Minnesota Log Cabin Republicans, the gay GOP group, and on the national board of the Log Cabin Republicans. She cut a quirky figure—an avid cat fancier who spoke her mind, commented up a storm on political sites, and didn’t hesitate to buck party orthodoxy. State GOP leaders don’t know quite what to make of her. “I probably haven’t talked to her in 10 years, but she was always kind of out there even then,” says Tony Sutton, the chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “She was a liberal Republican—or a liberal; I’m not sure she was really a Republican.”

Young began fixating on Bachmann as the rising star’s views on gay rights came into view in the early 2000s. The pol’s staunch opposition to gay marriage and comments suggesting homosexuality was akin to “bondage” and “part of Satan” cried out for more scrutiny, in Young’s view. “The mainstream media would cover the things that she wanted them to cover, which is she would say things in one way when she was speaking to the mainstream media and then say something completely different when she was talking to her base or going on Christian radio,” Young says. So she began collecting “Bachmannalia.” In the spring of 2004, Dump Bachmann was born.

At times, it has been a lonely road. Allies turned to enemies along the way, decrying what they describe as “obsessive” tendencies in Young and her crew. Mitch Berg, who writes the conservative Shot in the Dark blog and lives in St. Paul, says he used to be a friendly acquaintance. But he’s now an adversary, especially since Berg and Young got into a virtual tiff after Young allegedly posted his personal email to a blog while blasting comments he’d made about the perceived aggressiveness of lesbians.

Berg dismisses Dump Bachmann’s work as sensationalist. “I get the impression that they think their ends justify their means,” he says. “[Young is] probably the least deranged of the bunch—and I don’t mean to throw the ‘crazy’ term around lightly. But they’ve taken leave of the facts and substituted supposition for evidence.” Berg claims that no one really pays attention to the blog at home in Minnesota—its 3,000 visitors are dwarfed by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which draws 1,000 times that much a day. But even he acknowledges the group’s influence, theorizing that its anti-Bachmann onslaught may have actually helped her in her tight 2006 race for the House.

Young’s compatriots are more traditional bomb throwers. Avidor, an artist, is a liberal New York native and mass-transit enthusiast who was a Green Party member for a time. Karl Bremer, a third contributor who also writes his own Ripple in Stillwater blog—which also doggedly pursues Bachmann-related stories—is a former professional journalist with a graying goatee and a stint at a craft brewery on his résumé.

It’s time-consuming work; Young, who says she’s cut back recently despite Bachmann’s rise, often spent two hours a day on the subject over the years. But it’s paying off. Along with a handful of other outlets—including the Minnesota Independent and G. R. Anderson, a former writer for the Twin Cities alternative weekly City Pages now best known for being ripped off by Rolling Stone—Young and her fellow travelers have laid much of the groundwork for big national outlets, helping to establish a picture of Bachmann’s political past. Bremer also snagged an award from the Minnesota chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in June.

“
‘The mainstream media would cover the things that Bachmann wanted them to cover, which is she would say things in one way when she was speaking to the mainstream media and then say something completely different when she was talking to her base or going on Christian radio,’ Young says.
”

With their influence has come the sinking sensation of seeing other, bigger outlets borrowing their work. The Wall Street Journal scored a neat scoop on July 11 about how the anti-tax Bachmann’s only stint in the professional world included collecting taxes for the federal government. But Dump Bachmann posted on the same case in March 2006. Bremer went so far as to contact the Los Angeles Times after that paper ran a story about Bachmann receiving government aid for a family farm without crediting earlier versions. “Bulls–t! I broke it in 2007,” Bremer says. “It’s frustrating seeing national media come in here and think they can scoop us for our work for the last 10 years. I’ve spent hours driving to the other side of the district to plow through court records that aren’t online, or staying up until 3 in the morning going through campaign reports on the FEC,” Bremer says. “I don’t care if somebody comes in and uses my research, but gimme a link or credit!”

Antipathy for the mainstream media gives the Dump Bachmann crew common cause with their quarry, who by and large keeps the national press at arm’s length. Like Sarah Palin, to whom she’s frequently compared, Bachmann is adept at using the press as a foil and punching bag. After she was mocked for mixing up Concord, N.H., and Concord, Mass., Bachmann told Laura Ingraham, “We all know there’s a double standard in the media … As we know, all 3,400 members of the mainstream media are part of the Obama press contingent.”  Young’s frustration at what she sees as lazy and biased reporting by the Minnesota media has remained a unifying and inspiring force for Dump Bachmann. “I wouldn’t be doing this if the mainstream press had done its job,” Avidor says.
Hunter and prey also share an almost messianic sense of purpose. Prior to her announcement that she would run for president, Bachmann painted herself as a reluctant candidate, searching for a sign from God. “If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it,” she told WorldNetDaily. “When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That’s really my standard.”

Young also feels a calling, though not a religious one. “Part of what has made me continue is I knew there were readers who continued to read it,” says Young, who considers herself an independent these days. “There are people who are anxious awaiting the latest news, and you feel like you can’t let them down.” Bremer recalls branching out from Dump Bachmann to start Ripple in Stillwater so he could write on other topics—only to find that most of his posts ended up focusing on the congresswoman after all.
The bloggers and Bachmann have only rarely crossed paths. Young says she’s spoken with the congresswoman three times, and describes each encounter as relatively civil. She’s debated the congresswoman on a Twin Cities Christian radio station, and once questioned Bachmann at a debate. “She kept saying, ‘Oh, everybody, that’s Eva Young.’ I don’t think anyone knew why that was important.” After the event, she even scheduled a lunch date with an aide. More recently, though, the bloggers say they’ve been unable to get calls to Bachmann’s office returned.

The bloggers know that they’re entering a fateful passage; Bachmann has said she won’t run for reelection, and despite her current strength in early soundings in Iowa, the odds that she’ll win the GOP nomination are long. Could it be that the end is near for Dump Bachmann? “She’ll be gone som day, and maybe we’ll be able to write about somebody else,” Bremer says with a tinge of weariness. “There’s always another fraud to write about.”
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

David Graham is a reporter for Newsweek and The Daily Beast covering politics, national affairs, and business.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

House Republicans have lost sight of the country’s welfare. It’s hard to conclude anything else from their latest actions, including the House speaker’s dismissal of President Obama’s plea for compromise Monday night. They have largely succeeded in their campaign to ransom America’s economy for the biggest spending cuts in a generation. They have warped an exercise in paying off current debt into an argument about future spending. Yet, when they win another concession, they walk away.

This increasingly reckless game has pushed the nation to the brink of ruinous default. The Republicans have dimmed the futures of millions of jobless Americans, whose hopes for work grow more out of reach as government job programs are cut and interest rates begin to rise. They have made the federal government a laughingstock around the globe.

In a scathing prime-time television address Monday night, President Obama stepped off the sidelines to tell Americans the House Republicans were threatening a “deep economic crisis” that could send interest rates skyrocketing and hold up Social Security and veterans’ checks. By insisting on a single-minded approach and refusing to negotiate, he said, Republicans were violating the country’s founding principle of compromise.

“How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries?” he said, invoking Ronald Reagan’s effort to make everyone pay a fair share and pointing out that his immediate predecessors had to ask for debt-ceiling increases under rules invented by Congress. He urged viewers to demand compromise. “The entire world is watching,” he said.

Mr. Obama denounced House Speaker John Boehner’s proposal to make cuts only, now, and raise the debt ceiling briefly, but he embraced the proposal made over the weekend by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, which gave Republicans virtually everything they said they wanted when they ignited this artificial crisis: $2.7 trillion from government spending over the next decade, with no revenue increases. It is, in fact, an awful plan, which cuts spending far too deeply at a time when the government should be summoning all its resources to solve the real economic problem of unemployment. It asks for absolutely no sacrifice from those who have prospered immensely as economic inequality has grown.

Mr. Reid’s proposal does at least protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And about half of its savings comes from the winding down of two wars, which naturally has drawn Republican opposition. (Though Republicans counted the same savings in their budgets.)

Mr. Boehner will not accept this as the last-ditch surrender that it is. The speaker, who followed Mr. Obama on TV with about five minutes of hoary talking points clearly written before the president spoke, is insisting on a plan that raises the debt ceiling until early next year and demands another vote on a balanced-budget amendment, rejected by the Senate last week. The result would be to stage this same debate over again in an election year. Never mind that this would almost certainly result in an immediate downgrade of the government’s credit.

We agreed strongly when Mr. Obama said Americans should be “offended” by this display and that they “may have voted for divided government but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government.” It’s hard not to conclude now that dysfunction is the Republicans’ goal — even if the cost is unthinkable.

A Transcript of President Obama’s remarks as prepared for delivery: (via email from The White House)

Good evening. Tonight, I want to talk about the debate we’ve been having in Washington over the national debt – a debate that directly affects the lives of all Americans.
For the last decade, we have spent more money than we take in. In the year 2000, the government had a budget surplus. But instead of using it to pay off our debt, the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts, while two wars and an expensive prescription drug program were simply added to our nation’s credit card.

As a result, the deficit was on track to top $1 trillion the year I took office. To make matters worse, the recession meant that there was less money coming in, and it required us to spend even more – on tax cuts for middle-class families; on unemployment insurance; on aid to states so we could prevent more teachers and firefighters and police officers from being laid off. These emergency steps also added to the deficit.

Now, every family knows that a little credit card debt is manageable. But if we stay on the current path, our growing debt could cost us jobs and do serious damage to the economy. More of our tax dollars will go toward paying off the interest on our loans. Businesses will be less likely to open up shop and hire workers in a country that can’t balance its books. Interest rates could climb for everyone who borrows money – the homeowner with a mortgage, the student with a college loan, the corner store that wants to expand. And we won’t have enough money to make job-creating investments in things like education and infrastructure, or pay for vital programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Because neither party is blameless for the decisions that led to this problem, both parties have a responsibility to solve it. And over the last several months, that’s what we’ve been trying to do. I won’t bore you with the details of every plan or proposal, but basically, the debate has centered around two different approaches.

The first approach says, let’s live within our means by making serious, historic cuts in government spending. Let’s cut domestic spending to the lowest level it’s been since Dwight Eisenhower was President. Let’s cut defense spending at the Pentagon by hundreds of billions of dollars. Let’s cut out the waste and fraud in health care programs like Medicare – and at the same time, let’s make modest adjustments so that Medicare is still there for future generations. Finally, let’s ask the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their tax breaks and special deductions.

This balanced approach asks everyone to give a little without requiring anyone to sacrifice too much. It would reduce the deficit by around $4 trillion and put us on a path to pay down our debt. And the cuts wouldn’t happen so abruptly that they’d be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small business and middle-class families get back on their feet right now.

This approach is also bipartisan. While many in my own party aren’t happy with the painful cuts it makes, enough will be willing to accept them if the burden is fairly shared. While Republicans might like to see deeper cuts and no revenue at all, there are many in the Senate who have said “Yes, I’m willing to put politics aside and consider this approach because I care about solving the problem.” And to his credit, this is the kind of approach the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, was working on with me over the last several weeks.
The only reason this balanced approach isn’t on its way to becoming law right now is because a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a cuts-only approach – an approach that doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to contribute anything at all. And because nothing is asked of those at the top of the income scales, such an approach would close the deficit only with more severe cuts to programs we all care about – cuts that place a greater burden on working families.

So the debate right now isn’t about whether we need to make tough choices. Democrats and Republicans agree on the amount of deficit reduction we need. The debate is about how it should be done. Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask corporate jet owners and oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get. How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries? How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for?
That’s not right. It’s not fair. We all want a government that lives within its means, but there are still things we need to pay for as a country – things like new roads and bridges; weather satellites and food inspection; services to veterans and medical research.

Keep in mind that under a balanced approach, the 98% of Americans who make under $250,000 would see no tax increases at all. None. In fact, I want to extend the payroll tax cut for working families. What we’re talking about under a balanced approach is asking Americans whose incomes have gone up the most over the last decade – millionaires and billionaires – to share in the sacrifice everyone else has to make. And I think these patriotic Americans are willing to pitch in. In fact, over the last few decades, they’ve pitched in every time we passed a bipartisan deal to reduce the deficit. The first time a deal passed, a predecessor of mine made the case for a balanced approach by saying this:
“Would you rather reduce deficits and interest rates by raising revenue from those who are not now paying their fair share, or would you rather accept larger budget deficits, higher interest rates, and higher unemployment? And I think I know your answer.”

Those words were spoken by Ronald Reagan. But today, many Republicans in the House refuse to consider this kind of balanced approach – an approach that was pursued not only by President Reagan, but by the first President Bush, President Clinton, myself, and many Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate. So we are left with a stalemate.
Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling – a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.

Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up. In the past, raising the debt ceiling was routine. Since the 1950s, Congress has always passed it, and every President has signed it. President Reagan did it 18 times. George W. Bush did it 7 times. And we have to do it by next Tuesday, August 2nd, or else we won’t be able to pay all of our bills.

Unfortunately, for the past several weeks, Republican House members have essentially said that the only way they’ll vote to prevent America’s first-ever default is if the rest of us agree to their deep, spending cuts-only approach.
If that happens, and we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.

For the first time in history, our country’s Triple A credit rating would be downgraded, leaving investors around the world to wonder whether the United States is still a good bet. Interest rates would skyrocket on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans, which amounts to a huge tax hike on the American people. We would risk sparking a deep economic crisis – one caused almost entirely by Washington.

Defaulting on our obligations is a reckless and irresponsible outcome to this debate. And Republican leaders say that they agree we must avoid default. But the new approach that Speaker Boehner unveiled today, which would temporarily extend the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts, would force us to once again face the threat of default just six months from now. In other words, it doesn’t solve the problem.
First of all, a six-month extension of the debt ceiling might not be enough to avoid a credit downgrade and the higher interest rates that all Americans would have to pay as a result. We know what we have to do to reduce our deficits; there’s no point in putting the economy at risk by kicking the can further down the road.

But there’s an even greater danger to this approach. Based on what we’ve seen these past few weeks, we know what to expect six months from now. The House will once again refuse to prevent default unless the rest of us accept their cuts-only approach. Again, they will refuse to ask the wealthiest Americans to give up their tax cuts or deductions. Again, they will demand harsh cuts to programs like Medicare. And once again, the economy will be held captive unless they get their way.

That is no way to run the greatest country on Earth. It is a dangerous game we’ve never played before, and we can’t afford to play it now. Not when the jobs and livelihoods of so many families are at stake. We can’t allow the American people to become collateral damage to Washington’s political warfare.
Congress now has one week left to act, and there are still paths forward. The Senate has introduced a plan to avoid default, which makes a down payment on deficit reduction and ensures that we don’t have to go through this again in six months.

I think that’s a much better path, although serious deficit reduction would still require us to tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform. Either way, I have told leaders of both parties that they must come up with a fair compromise in the next few days that can pass both houses of Congress – a compromise I can sign. And I am confident we can reach this compromise. Despite our disagreements, Republican leaders and I have found common ground before. And I believe that enough members of both parties will ultimately put politics aside and help us make progress.

I realize that a lot of the new members of Congress and I don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues. But we were each elected by some of the same Americans for some of the same reasons. Yes, many want government to start living within its means. And many are fed up with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle-class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few. But do you know what people are fed up with most of all?

They’re fed up with a town where compromise has become a dirty word. They work all day long, many of them scraping by, just to put food on the table. And when these Americans come home at night, bone-tired, and turn on the news, all they see is the same partisan three-ring circus here in Washington. They see leaders who can’t seem to come together and do what it takes to make life just a little bit better for ordinary Americans. They are offended by that. And they should be.

The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government. So I’m asking you all to make your voice heard. If you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your Member of Congress know. If you believe we can solve this problem through compromise, send that message.

America, after all, has always been a grand experiment in compromise. As a democracy made up of every race and religion, where every belief and point of view is welcomed, we have put to the test time and again the proposition at the heart of our founding: that out of many, we are one. We have engaged in fierce and passionate debates about the issues of the day, but from slavery to war, from civil liberties to questions of economic justice, we have tried to live by the words that Jefferson once wrote: “Every man cannot have his way in all things…Without this mutual disposition, we are disjointed individuals, but not a society.”
History is scattered with the stories of those who held fast to rigid ideologies and refused to listen to those who disagreed. But those are not the Americans we remember. We remember the Americans who put country above self, and set personal grievances aside for the greater good. We remember the Americans who held this country together during its most difficult hours; who put aside pride and party to form a more perfect union.

That’s who we remember. That’s who we need to be right now. The entire world is watching. So let’s seize this moment to show why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on Earth – not just because we can still keep our word and meet our obligations, but because we can still come together as one nation. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.