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Verbal Arrows Fly... Dems, Reps,
Stock Market in Chaos following downgrade
The dialog flooding County News Online emails is reminiscent of the old
Roman Empire movies where thousands of arrows fly back and forth
between the battling armies.
It’s everyone’s fault (not ours), from the “terrorist” Tea Party to
President Obama’s “lack of leadership” and the Democrat Party’s
“spending addiction.”
Following Friday’s S&P rating downgrade, the stock market responded
accordingly with a drop of more than 500 points.
FoxNews on Monday morning: Credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s
downgrades mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, farm lenders and
32 banks and credit unions following downgrade of U.S. debt.
Politico... President Barack Obama on Monday defended the nation’s
fiscal health and decried Washington partisanship, in his first public
remarks since Standard and Poor’s downgraded the nation’s top-notch
triple-A credit rating. “We didn’t need a ratings agency to tell us
that we need a balanced, long-term approach to deficit reduction,”
Obama said, asserting that “we’ve always been and always will be a
triple-A country.” He said the real problem is “a lack of political
will in Washington” and that the nation’s challenge is “the need to
tackle our deficits over the long-term.”
Politico: The partisan battle lines were quickly drawn: Republicans
blamed Obama for reckless overspending, and Democrats said tea party
intransigence blocked the sort of “grand bargain” that might have
fended off a downgrade. Read the story here.
Wall Street Journal: “S&P downgrade damaging... The real reason for
White House fury at S&P is that it realizes how symbolically
damaging this downgrade is to President Obama’s economic record.
Democrats can rail all they want about the tea party, but Republicans
have controlled the House for a mere seven months.”
Politifact: President Obama has become “the undisputed debt king of the
last five presidents.”
House Speaker John Boehner has not been quiet, either: S&P Decision
the Latest Consequence of Washington’s Spending Binge. Following
another disappointing jobs report and S&P’s decision on the United
States’ credit rating, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) urged President Obama
in the Weekly Republican Address to abandon his ‘stimulus’ policies and
support solutions that will promote long-term economic growth --
solutions like a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution and the
House-passed Path to Prosperity budget which would preserve and protect
our entitlement programs from bankruptcy. Read the text and watch the
address here.
CBS News, Politico, FoxNews, Msnbc.com Monday afternoon... Dow Jones
closed down 600 points to a new low at 10,813, a loss of 5 percent.
This is on top of recent losses of more than 10 percent.
While verbal arrows fly, some Democrats have turned on their
president...
Politico: “Political thermonuclear explosion... Forget about the
economic consequences, which could be very bad, this is a political
thermonuclear explosion that probably just wiped out President Obama’s
re-elect,” fretted one senior Democratic official. “The worst part is,
if this White House showed a gram of leadership on the debt
crisis we could have avoided this historic embarrassment.”
Politico: “The numbers add up to defeat.” Privately, however, Obama’s
team is concerned about the factors beyond its control, talking of an
imminent need to retool their economic message and strategy heading
into 2012. Absent the president’s ability to defy political gravity,
one Obama adviser conceded, “The numbers add up to defeat.”
One Democrat, Howard Dean, said however that “I think they’ve been
smoking some of that tea, not just drinking it.” Read the story below:
FoxNews.com...
Dems Use Downgrade to Amplify Anti-Tea Party Charges
Published August 08, 2011
In the wake of a bruising battle over the debt ceiling and now a
first-ever credit downgrade, Democrats have launched a salvo of
rhetorical attacks on the Tea Party and appear determined to blame the
movement for everything from the debt crisis to the sputtering economy.
“I think they’re totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not founded
in reality. I think they’ve been smoking some of that tea, not just
drinking it,” former Democratic presidential candidate and Democratic
National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said.
The term “Tea Party downgrade” gained currency over the weekend as
Democratic leaders took to the airwaves to cast Standard & Poor’s
decision to downgrade U.S. credit as a Tea Party-triggered event.
They argue that because the rating agency cited the toxic political
environment in its decision, the Tea Party is culpable.
Republicans counter that Standard and Poor’s also cited the country’s
failure to tackle its debt problem -- something the Tea Party has urged
Washington to do. They accuse Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner of
lacking a plan to grow the economy, and suggested he resign over his
role in the latest turn of events.
“When you open that refrigerator door, the lights don’t come on,” Rep.
Allen West, R-Fla., told Fox News. “I don’t think that Timothy Geithner
really has a handle on the fiscal situation here.”
The anti-Tea Party talking points didn’t start with the downgrade
decision Friday. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and others have
been hammering the Tea Party throughout and since the debt-ceiling
debate, casting the movement as public enemy No. 1 as Washington enters
the next phase of deficit-reduction talks and the 2012 campaign season
gets underway.
As Reid told reporters last week, he and his colleagues are worried
about the “Tea Party direction of this Congress.” And despite repeated
calls for civility, lawmakers are using some heated rhetoric to try and
neutralize the Tea Party’s influence.
In a fundraising email last week, Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin
condemned what he described as an effort to “appease the
hostage-takers,” saying most Americans “have no use for the Tea Party
extremists.”
In a widely reported conversation, Vice President Biden met last week
with House Democrats who described Tea Party lawmakers as “terrorists.”
Then came the credit downgrade, from AAA to AA+, and the Tea Party
swiftly was implicated by Democrats.
“The fact of the matter is that this is essentially a Tea Party
downgrade,” Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod told CBS’ “Face the
Nation,” where Dean also appeared. “The Tea Party brought us to the
brink of a default. ... It was the right thing to do to avoid that
default. It was the wrong thing to do to push the country to that
point.”
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., also said the
Standard & Poor’s decision was “without question the Tea Party
downgrade” because Tea Partiers held bipartisan lawmakers back from a
bigger deal. This was a reference to House Speaker John Boehner’s
decision to walk away from talks with the White House aimed at a $4
trillion deficit-reduction package over concerns about revenue
increases.
But former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee dismissed the recriminations as
mere “talking points.”
He said the president, despite his calls for civility, either approves
of these messages or has “zero control” over them, and “we need to call
him out on it.”
Huckabee, who has an eponymous show on Fox News, also lamented, from a
creativity standpoint, that politicians were essentially reading from
the same card.
“When you hear these words over and over, these are not the words of
people who are creative enough to come up with their own talking
points,” he told Fox News. “These are people who are reading from a
script. And it frustrates me that you’ve got people elected to high
positions who can’t even come up with their own phrasing, for heaven’s
sake.
Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, floated another talking point over the weekend, blaming the
downgrade on the “Roadblock Republicans” who “forced” Boehner to
abandon a bigger deal with the president.
On the other side, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said on his
group’s website that it is Democrats causing this mess. “This is the
Obama depression and this is the Democratic downgrade,” he said, adding
that the Tea Party is also fighting “establishment Republicans” to cut
spending.
But Standard & Poor’s Managing Director John Chambers said there’s
“lots of blame to go around.”
He agreed with several officials that the environment in Washington is
“dysfunctional,” and said the fact that the dysfunction put the United
States within hours of hitting its debt ceiling was a driving factor in
the downgrade decision. The second factor, he said, was the country’s
“fiscal trajectory.”
“The fiscal situation in the United States is not sustainable,” he told
Fox News.
Read the story at FoxNews
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