Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Another day....

Another day older and deeper in debt.  Another day closer to the debt ceiling.  I know the media talking heads and, given higher futures on the stock market, Wall Street are giddy at the prospect of a deal but I am not celebrating and I won't even if a deal is struck.  I will be asking who they are going to screw to get it.  And, from what I have seen so far, the whole mess will be on the agenda for early next year.  I have no great confidence that those idiots will do anything constructive.

I know where you are coming from, Kay.  I try not to be angry about the situation we find ourselves in.  Not easy.  Instead I try to figure out how to keep from being too screwed to badly.  I would love to find a way to get along without relying so much on Social Security but that is hard when it is 100% of my income and when jobs that will provide an income sufficient to replace it are few and far between.  What really burns me up is the broken record we can't seem to get off.  The parties in Washington haven't been able to agree on a budget for the last four years and so we have inadequate continuing resolutions that are anything but inadequate.  And how many debt ceiling confrontations have we had? And now they have set up another for early next year.  And elections don't seem to mean anything any more.  Not when the Senate requires a 60 vote majority to move legislation to a final vote.  And, as noted yesterday, the Repthuglicans leading the house have rigged things so that any legislation they don't want passed can't even be brought to the floor even if it would likely pass.

Evidently my pessimism isn't all that out of line with our current zeitgeist according to this poll.  I think this sums up the whole situation (my emphasis):
People feel eroded,” said Democratic pollster Daniel Franklin, who helped conduct the survey. “They’ve seen the strength of the middle class wane, and correspondingly, the country as a whole begin to falter. Now they’re looking for new ideas, new strategies to rebuild their hopes and they haven’t found them yet.”
The Agonist sums up the problem right nicely.  We have a bunch of fraudsters and psychopaths in Congress.

Evidently a number of Google users aren't happy with the new policy to used subscribers' profile pictures and comments in ads.

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