THIS (gated, sorry) was the most amazing thing I read today. It's a couple of weeks old, but bear with me here. It comes from a post by Judson Phillips, the Tennessee lawyer who heads Tea Party Nation, a far-right pressure group, objecting to prospective defence cuts proposed by the administration, which he refers to as "the Party of Treason". Rather than downsizing from 11 to 9 carrier task forces, Mr Phillips says, we should be building even more aircraft carriers:

If we decided to build a couple of new carriers, thousands of workers would be hired for the shipyards.  Thousands of employees would be hired for the steel mills that would provide the steel for the hull and various sub contractors would hire thousands.  Do you know what that means?

It means they would receive paychecks and go out and spend that money.  That would help a recovery.  That is a shovel ready project!

Increasing spending for the military does a couple of things.  It not only not only stimulates the economy, it protects our nation.  That is a better investment than say spending money on teaching Chinese prostitutes how to drink responsibly.

Would higher taxes with a larger reduction in the deficit have been worse than the Tea Party US credit downgrade, double-dip threatening recession and crash on Wall Street for the Have-Mores? Bush administration conservatives recently compared Obama to Daffy Duck for hurting himself in the debt deal.  As the economic outlook, and every kind of investment but gold sinks, did the rich Kochopolis supporters of the GOP and Tea Party shoot themselves in the wallet?  The hundreds of billions they are losing on The Street are chickenshit compared to the small increase in taxes Obama wanted in the debt deal.

When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.

In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety.

...

But there was no story - and there has been none since.

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

The stock market is in the midst of its biggest retreat since the financial crisis.

The Dow Jones industrial average plunged as many as 400 points Thursday afternoon. It is now down more than 1,200 points since July 21.Thursday's losses turned the blue-chip stock index negative for the year.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index is down 3 percent, bringing it nearly 11 percent below its recent high of 1,363 reached on April 29. A decline of 10 percent or more is considered to be a market correction.

Investors are increasingly worried about economic weakness in the U.S. and a debt crisis in Europe.

"We are continuing to be bombarded by worries about the global economy," said Bill Stone, chief investment strategist at PNC Financial.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 330 points, or 2.8 percent, to 11,566 in afternoon trading. The S&P 500 lost 39, or 3.1 percent, to 1,221. The Nasdaq composite shed 86, or 2.3 percent, to 2,606. The losses put the Dow on track for its biggest one-day drop since October 2008.

Paul Waldman, at The American Prospect online earlier today.  

The update to his short piece:

UPDATE: Mitch McConnell has endorsed the hostage-taking metaphor!

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.

Translation: Some Republicans wanted to be terrorists, but it turns out it’s better to be a hostage-taker.

International aid desperately needed by starving Somalis is ready to be shipped, but leaders of an Islamist insurgency blocking its delivery show few signs of lifting their ban, aid workers and diplomats said.

The deadlock continued even as Washington on Tuesday night softened its line on aid for Islamist-held territory in Somalia. Agencies who take food to these areas no longer risk prosecution if any US-funded supplies fall into the militants’ hands, as was previously demanded by strict anti-terror laws at the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

If my research -- conducted primarily via Netflix -- is correct, America used to be a paradise for introverts. If you weren't a lone cowboy riding the range in a driving snow, you lived on a farm miles from town, opening your front door onto a field of seven-foot-tall corn stalks. Social interactions were planned weeks in advance. (Elections are held on Tuesdays, after all, because that was the soonest people could get to the county seat.) In a time when towns tried to encourage interaction by scheduling seasonal barn dances, the pressure to attend a friend's cocktail party was obviously far lower. Introverts had weeks to come up with good excuses -- and all sorts of ailments (whooping cough, scarlet fever) to blame.

Then the industrial revolution ruined it. Encouraging people to move to cities, the new world forced interactions from the moment you left your house. Telegraphs made it simple for people to send you messages and telephones then removed even the need to answer your door. Cars were invented, meaning you had no excuse for not traveling across town. Then planes removed any excuse to not travel across the country. The darkest hours for introverts were at hand.

But technology, long the domain of the geeky introvert, stepped up to the challenge. A brilliant first volley was the answering machine: ostensibly a device meant to ensure that a call wasn't missed, it quickly became a tool to ensure that you could miss any call you wanted.

Reposting this, with (hopefully) the correct link this time...

Moody’s will likely affirm the United States’ triple-A credit rating with a negative outlook, the ratings agency said Friday, signaling that there will be no immediate downgrade but could one come in the medium term.

Moody’s expectation, if the government fails to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, is based on the likely scenario the government will continue to service Treasuries obligations, even if it needs to prioritize bond payments while discussions continue on raising the debt ceiling.

“If the debt limit is not raised before Aug. 2, we believe that the Treasury would give priority to debt service payments and could thus postpone a potential debt default for a number of days,” Moody’s said in a report.

Does the Get Obama Party care? No. They think the worse things get the better their chances in the next election. A Bloomberg analyst predicted over two weeks ago a doomsday bank run if the GOP kept playing politics with the national debt, as the assurance of FDIC insurance will evaporate.  A rush for cash and the selling of stocks, bonds, and even gold and silver. Banks will no longer be backed by the full faith and credit of the FDIC either if the government cannot borrow. We have seen the selling of stocks, now Treasury debt is dumped, next it could be lines of depositors at your local bank wanting their money out now:

Over the last week, big banks and companies have withdrawn $37.5 billion from money market funds that invest in Treasury debt and other ultra-safe securities, the biggest weekly drop this year. Meanwhile, in the vast market for repurchase agreements, in which many financial firms make short-term loans to one another, borrowers are beginning to demand higher yields.

These moves underscore how companies and big financial institutions are beginning to rethink their traditional view that notes issued by the United States Treasury are indistinguishable from cash.....