A piece on the numerous US defaults in American history:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...153_story.html

krystal ball is much hotter than alex wagner and abby huntsman is on that show too.

with some gold standard nonsense thrown in for good measure.

It is based around Pew polling research on the tea party.

So 42% of tea partiers support the Christian movement.

How does that compare against R and D's?

Oh sweet, always nice to find articles by goldstandard hucksters like Jim Grant who nearly called the top of the gold bubble by telling his goldbug followers when it was at $1770 and asked about investing in gold, "there is no telling how high it will go".
http://www.planetgoldbug.com/category/james-grant/

Or this one where he predicts Bernanke's QE will cause a gold standard.
http://www.thegoldstandardnow.org/james-grant

And only 11% of tea partiers "disagree with conservative christian movement".

It's an amazing feat of cognitive dissonance that conservatives spent years whining about how the US was broke, Social Security was broke, the US was gonna default because it was broke and it was all teh librulz fault for giving away phones to the homeless... but now apparently the line is that defaulting is not that big a deal, just silly librulz talking doom and gloom about USA#1'Murica.

Speaking of schadenfreude, I caught an awesome thread over in hannityland titled, "Preparing for the Death Panels".

best responses so far:

redstate always delivers the lolz. man post election night was so awesome. oh man. but this is pretty good these days too. but man 2016 cant come fast enough. can u imagine the gop primary. so great. i am not gonna get anything done i fear. so much fun.

There's no dissonance, you just don't know what you're talking about or you're intentionally setting up strawmen that your liberal friends here won't pick up on.

GOP is pretty ****ed right now, the internal conflict of the old school vs the tea party types will continue to plague them until it gets resolved. Breaking off into a libertarian party would probably be best for the long term, imo.

if whining about the country being broke and not able to pay its bills and running itself into the ground and about to self-destruct and about to become a new province of china and needing a new bloody right-wing revolution because the kenyan muslim socialist blackie in the white house wants to give everyone a cell phone and then being all "nope, default is no big deal, being broke doesn't matter" isn't cognitive dissonance, then i just don't know what the **** is anymore.

Lol, like you for example.

do i need to actually cite right wingers actually saying this kind of **** and then being like OH NO BIG DEAL NOTHING WILL HAPPEN?

Yeah, and 48% have never heard of the movement.

Those numbers are not the smoking gun you seem to think they are re: the tea party being mostly religious nutters who only want to cut spending because of 'magical religious thinking' or whatever ridiculous assertion it was in that link.

Whether or not the tea party is more religious than R or D remains to be seen, but it's not a majority of conservative Christians based on the pew #s.

I know this is just a waste of time, but that article is not saying default is not a big deal. Turn Prophet was just talking out of his ass.

It's unclear whether he was referring to that article or me, but it doesn't matter because he's wrong either way.

I never said that defaulting wouldn't be a big deal either. What I said was that we didn't have to default even if we didn't raise the ceiling. Do you understand the difference?

i wasn't talking about whichever specific article you're mentioning. i was talking about real live people (some even congressmen!) who couldn't stop talking about how blackie mckenyan socialist obamaobummerstalinhitler is spending the country into bankruptcy and how awful not paying the bills would be when we were officially broke who are all of a sudden saying that default ain't so bad when faced with the debt ceiling that they willingly backed themselves into.

They're actually anti-cognitive dissonant.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. In a state of dissonance, people may sometimes feel "disequilibrium": frustration, hunger, dread, guilt, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, etc.



They don't feel any discomfort at all. Cognitive dissonance is actually good because it means the ethical mind is warring against the ego mind. These Tea Party guys are all ego, any thought or belief they have ever held is forever unquestioned merely because they were the one to think it.

Try reading the other statistics in the report, they are more socially conservative than generic republican/lean republican voters on the major social con issues.

Another survey done on Teaparty being mostly social cons rebranded:

-Nearly half (47%) also say they are part of the religious right or conservative Christian movement. Among the more than 8-in-10 (81%) who identify as Christian within the Tea Party movement, 57% also consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement.

-They make up just 11% of the adult population—half the size of the conservative Christian movement (22%).

-They are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and less than 1-in-5 (18%) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.

-They are largely Republican partisans. More than three-quarters say they identify with (48%) or lean towards (28%) the Republican Party. More than 8-in-10 (83%) say they are voting for or leaning towards Republican candidates in their districts, and nearly three-quarters (74%) of this group report usually supporting Republican candidates.

Don't kid youself. Tea Partiers think the country was formed on belief in God. Why do you think they get all bent out of shape over "In God We Trust", homophobia and abortion?

Yeah, it's been a pretty standard line of O'Reilly's and Hannity's for years now--that this country was founded on christian principles. And that modern day politicians (read: progressives and dirty libruls) were trying to undo the very christian foundation of our government. Of course this kind of perspective reflects a lack of basic understanding of both our country's history and the progressive movement in general, but this is one of the key points of attack from the right. It is deeply part of their methodology and tactics, in preserving their voting coalition.

I do believe that the religious right is the strongest element of the Tea Party. They are strangely akin to the pharisees of the bible. They put on a huge show to show how much they love the troops, how much the shutdown is Obama's fault, how much they want to kill Obamacare to save the country. At the end of the day they have shut down the government, putting troops and troops' families into great insecurity, reducing our scientific progress drastically, and basically making us look like fools on the world stage. Their primary principle is spite, and they do believe that Obama represents some kind of apocalyptic scenario--that is why they are willing to make the especially strange play of "threatening default" on their own country. A truly bizarre move.

You know you could have brought this up one of the first few hundred thousand times the term 'cognitive dissonance' was used around here. I think we've all effectively hijacked the term to mean 'has no problem holding conflicting thoughts without attempting to reconcile them'.

Don't have to default, can just cut 40percent of discretionary government spend overnight and go through a recession/depression

This has been explained to you numerous times Jim. You aren't smart enough to have an informed opinion on this.

If we take that as a given, then we can never balance our budget or we will slip into a depression.

We're already printing 1T per year to buy treasuries and mortgages. And you are admitting this deficit spending is also mandatory just to keep us at the stagnant sub-2% levels we are at.

Yet you simultaneously claim that we have no spending problems and/or that the economy will be fine and I'm just a nutter doomsdayer or whatever. And you say I'm wrong when I say our current scenario will only get worse the longer we go down this unsustainable road.

There is no reasoned, responsible way out (or at least our politicians are not capable of it, if they were, we never would have gotten this bad off in the first place)

Someone is going to have to get stiffed on entitlements. We'll have to break promises. It's just a matter of when.