Chuck, whats your point? Raising the debt ceiling is absurd, but it's better than our entire national financial infrastructure coming down like a deck of cards by pissing off China and everyone else. We're screwed. The only option we have is prolonging the pain, unless we want to be Greece II by 2012.

The minority party always pretends it's a big deal. Nothing new here.

That said, Goolsbee's a fucking tool for saying the shit he did.

@1,
Grease II was a terrible movie. 2012 was pretty bad too, but ok for a throwaway popcorn flick.

Sorry, I got sidetracked.

Considering the other option is financial ruin (or, MORE, BIGGER financial ruin) if we don't, I'll take our president being a hypocrite.

Is it possible that raising the debt ceiling in some circumstances is a good idea but not in others?

@5: Threatening to default on debt payments is never, ever, a good idea for the US, and that's what threatening to raise the debt ceiling amounts to. It's usually the repubs who like to play this particular game of chicken -- I didn't know Obama was a one-time participant as well. If the republicans want to play chicken, they should find some other traintrack to play it on.

@6 we could always nuke them if they didn't like us defaulting.

Anyone want to talk about how we wouldn't have to raise the debt ceiling, at least until the end of the year, if we had corporations that paid their taxes, didn't give massive unpaid tax cuts to ANYBODY, cut social security income, or actually put people back to work? I'm all for raising the debt ceiling, but if all you're going to give me is more debt, more war, less jobs, you can go fuck yourself. I wouldn't vote for this debt ceiling increase until the private sector gave us 1 million jobs by July, and if they wouldn't give us that, I'd raise the debt ceiling and put those million people back to work. I wouldn't invade Afghanistan and I wouldn't continue to spend chinese money on giving us our own money back. This insanity needs to stop sometime, and I don't care anymore that allies are hoping they destroy America forever (and by destroy it, they mean ruin the ability to get cheap and easy money from a bunch of corrupt assholes at the fed reserve, which is starting to sound pretty awesome compared to this bankers take all shit). Should have thought about that before you cut social security and ramped up a failed nation state just because it plays nice with you. Truth is a politicians nightmare! I find myself still in political awe of Obama pre-election, then once he's elected fucking it all up royally.

Clinton didn't raise the debt ceiling.

I retract my comment. Learn something new everyday.

@1: Or, you know, we could tax more and spend less. Then we wouldn't have to raise it.