This article exposes all the objections I have had to the current political derailing of the real issues by both the Tea Party and Pseudo-Progressives.

We’ve carried big deficits before without large unemployment numbers during the Bush/Reagan administrations.

There is no immediate causal tie between unemployment and government spending. There is a direct causal tie between unemployment and the freezing up of capital brought on by Wall Street crime.

Venture capital and debt financing (also known as leverage) is the lifeblood of a capitalist economy.

The speculative bubble grown by the big investment houses drove down equity and credit availability.

Capitalism is all about risk embodied in rates of interest. If risk shoots sky high then business comes to a standstill and those that survive freeze hiring.

This is the damning truth that has been successful defused by the guilty corporatocracy through deliberate political diversions.

Cheney famously said “Ronald Reagan proved Deficits Don*t Matter.”
No one in the Corporate media wrote about or talked about “dangerous deficits’‘
until Obama became president.
Now, just like the Military/Corporate/ Media complex created “Al-Qaeda’ and
Islamophobia and our country and lives changed for the worse,now   our lives
revolve around “solving” another fake issue that degrades our freedom and
quality of life.
To E.J. and his fellow propagandists : How do you Assholes sleep at night?

Hark

Climate change, overpopulation and…the GDP growth fetish are the overriding problems, at least the latter two are as they plus the neo-conservative capitalist system that dominate our economies and lives are behind the inability to deal with climate change or anything else.

All of the above and more. The GOP/Tea Party united to deceive each other and the DEMS allowed them to control. As said before, there is no true leader thank goodness. The GOP had agendas and they are exercising their rite to exorcise but have done so by lying to America. JOBS they said, JOBS first and foremost. Lie, Lie, Lie as they have demonstrated. They clearly had no plan for/to follow through. The Tea Party elbowed their authority to return to the “Old Day World” and incorporating religion into politics, and were subverted along the way by corporate “wise guys” with the knowledge and ability to use. Together united, the GOP and Tea Party were stronger then the DEMS and they knew it. Combined with the Karl Rove/Koch Brothers of the world and the money they could generate it became unfortunately impossible to win in the last elections for the DEMS, so they gave up until it was too late. What they have proved so far is that it has been the best funded united political joke played on America in my memory. Money needs to be eliminated along with religion from politics. The GOP and the Tea Party will split. Too many idiots want to be in charge and they have them all. When the DEMS decide to expound on their accomplishments comparatively and in minority strength can come majority attitude. They must get their act together though and realize the middle class must be saved and courted. It is strength if you can remove the money from politics. I look forward to the challenge of demonstrations and their effectiveness. Wisconsin is showing how it can be used especially when the reason is right. If you don’t deceive you can receive. Just be smarter. This should be easy considering. Considering I won’t be stupid again. Sideline note: if one doesn’t believe just what the money boys can do, I heard just prior to the middle east protests that gas prices here in the USA would shortly be going up to $5/gal..Sure enough, the middle east erupts(hmm-m-m-m) and gas prices will be going up to $5/gal. because of the trouble in the middle east. Wonder where their investment money was placed? Michael Moore, can I join you on your next venture into putting pressure on the money guys? I want them gone.

The largest threat doesn’t have anything to do with public
employees, it has to do with union leadership being undermined
by Conservatives/Moderates and Republicans.

“Only a body dominated by millionaires could define “shared sacrifice” as telling nurses’ aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people.”

This is the ‘New World Order’ the repubs and faux Democrats spoke of—basically an enslavement of the whole world through cutting of needed services. Where is the moral representative of the people who actually has influence to bring about real change?

I guess MORE people will have to stand up like we are doing in Wisconsin, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain etc.

The only reason the TEA party gets any type of success is because you don’t have a viable alternative willing to stand up for the majority of American working people who pay the most in tax dollars to help run your Country but get the least consideration in return.

The Tea Party isn’t winning anything. Not the corporate Tea Party, anyway. Their presence at the Wisonsin protests was abysmal, despite the fact that the Koch brother’s funded their ride in.
You guys in the media breathed life into the Tea Party. They are a tiny percentage of the population, and the corporate media focused on them because the corporate media agrees with them.
I’m sick of this “Tea Party, Tea Party, Tea Party” crap when the real story is the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes and are so angry at the lies and looting, they’re ready to explode.
And Obama? He made poltical choices, not budget choices. It was with his political future in mind that he kept the Bush tax cuts in place and that he keeps the war going. The spending cuts on the poor are not necessary. Obama chose to harm the poor and enrich the rich even further. He chose not to prosecute and jail the criminal CEO’s. All political choices to further enrich himself and give himself more of that power he craves so much. May he be exposed for the fraud that he is before 2012.

There is no “Tea Party”. The correct term is “Tea Puppets”.

In a land where prostitution is illegal, everyone must become a prostitute to survive.

If you truly want your country back, push to abolish the Fed.  Please educate
yourself on this raping of America by the international corporations.  Bring our
money supply back into our own hands.  It won’t be easy, Kennedy was
assassinated when he tried. It is the only way to stop the prostitution of US
workers to the International Banking Consortium.

It’s not surprising ‘the Tea Party’s winning’.

Almost all of America’s talk radio is that non-sense (go to rural and sub-urban
America and just about all you can get is stupid sports guys - and now stupid
sports chicks, Christian crazies and right wingers foaming at the mouth.

Then, go to ‘alternative’ (‘main stream’ or ‘lame stream’ or what have you, i.e.
‘regular’) media and what do you get?

The news readers all quoting the right wingers fulminations.

The Tea Party has the absolute best media operation in America: captured
media and media that simply repeats Tea Partiers. Wow !

How can the Tea Party not be winning, when every single media is slathered
with their non-sense: 75% preaching it, and 25% repeating it.

Reality, to Tea Party folks, is an illusion they face when they run out of dope.

And EJ told us Obama’s health care ‘reform’ was actually reform.

So, you see, there really is no reality.

Nothing is, but saying makes it so.

Right EJ!

I can’t agree with you the tea party has the power to
divert attention from the most pressing issues, but
they can act as a excuse for the few monopoly led media
“sources” to blanket the nation with irrelevant reports
which aren’t worth our time to listen to anyway.

...“tea party partisans can claim victory in fundamentally altering the country’s dialogue.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong!  The corporate-controlled media can take credit for that. The tea party just hands them silly evocative headlines to exploit.

The real battle goes on secretly, behind closed doors in Congress, the White House and the lobby offices.

Find a way to crack the media and get them doing what they are supposed to do reporting on Congress, the White House and the lobby offices ect.  Then things could change.

Dionne is media. Hedges is media. Scheer is media. Robinson is media. Editors and reporters and commentators are media.  NBC, CBS, PBS.  If they can’t “crack” media, who will? Can’t be that they don’t know what they’re doing!

Get your act together, boys and girls.  Blow that whistle!  Or stop complaining.

I can’t believe for a moment that Mr. Dionne actually took seriously anything that was said in the state of the union speech. Where have you been the last year or so? That corporate shill in the White House is noted for making pretty speeches full of uplifting rhetoric and then going about his business of selling out everyone who voted for him.

If you weren’t part of his millionare MSM class you could be a lot more objective. The tea party is nothing more than a fabrication of the media used as a guise to cut government spending on everything but enriching the already enriched. The same media which insists upon perpetuating the lie that Social Security is responsible for the deficit and starving the elderly and disabled will cure the problem—a problem caused by unfunded, illegal wars and tax breaks for the rich. How about doing some real investigation for a change and looking into what the problems really are rather than carrying water for a morally bankrupt administration.

I’m sorry, but the tea party—more appropriately called the tory party as they would have been George III’s boys back in the day—is just the latest face of America post World War II. When Americans agreed to accept the filthy premises of McCarthyism, we started down the road to where we are now. For a long time our allegiance to our corporate overlords served a lot of us well, and I would remind readers that it still serves a sizable number of people.

I’ve been listening to people screaming about regulation for decades. I’ve been listening to people screaming about unions for decades. I’ve been listening to people screaming about OTHER people’s government checks for decades; they never scream about the government check they receive.

When you realize how stupid and greedy people are, it’s deeply depressing.

Having an elitist, such as Mr. Dionne, Jr., comment on anything other than who gets into Harvard, is quite funny. Has this person ever even lived alongside those that made less than he did?
Perhaps, we should look at what Mr. Dionne, Jr., is insinuating and that is that we should just allow government to become the only industry in America. In his way of thinking, getting rid of all political parties and having only a single voice that follows whatever the government believes, would be nirvana.
Instead of Mr. Dionne, Jr. extolling how great the State of the Union address was, he could have explained how high speed rail would help our nation’s economy.

peterjkraus - not to mention that funding for Iraq and
Afghanistan is never mentioned in all the hoopla over
the budget.  That funding comes out of the
discretionary budget, or so we’re told, but now that
this fascist state of ours has made war somewhere with
someone a permanent event, a fact of the fascist state
is being engaged in a permanent and inevitable and
planned war forever - funds will always be available
and like death and taxes impossible to avoid.

Hard not to be drowned out when every damned news outlet is trumpeting budget cuts.

Hhhhmmmm, let’s see, consolidation of news outlets by rich and conservative billionaire’s, now all are parroting each other, congress and presidents of both parties allowed it to happen, all reading off the same sheet of music….

We are well and truly f——ed with the backstabber-in-chief in charge, who never met a billionaire he couldn’t suck up to, no matter how odious they were.

Better start stocking up on dog food,folks before they run prices up, and you starve.

Both the Tea Party and the GOPers share a dilemma, neither has an outstanding, obvious ‘leader’. One who shares their conviction that continued unrestricted accumulation of wealth and power by the wealthy and powerful will be the salvation of our foundering ‘democracy’.

They should join forces and face the obvious. By chance, there is a leader who is available right now who agrees wholeheartedly with their philosophies, and has no other current commitments, and would be instantly available to take over their leadership role.

Why don’t they place a call to Mubarak?

Big B - Your comment is right on-point. So many of the issues at the forefront of American “public” discourse are nothing more than fabricated non-issues. The real stories have been either hushed-up or ignored by the MSM because there’s no $ or long term survival by snubbing the noses of the powerful elite in the U.S..

Bottom line: everybody’s gotta pay and the rich pay more.  Simpson-Bowles needs to be taken out from under the bus and re-examined.

If “shared sacrifice” has become code for “tax breaks for the rich,” let’s come up with another slogan.

Fixing unemployment? 
Eliminate payroll taxes.
Fund FICA & Medicare with a non-regressive, point-of-purchase National Sales Tax (about 3%).

—————-
other notes:

“..any discussion of the problems caused by concentrated wealth ... is confined to the academic or left-wing sidelines.” -Dionne

Really?  Where, then, does this place Robert Reich, Thomas Friedman, Tim Noah, Robert Sheer + the Washington Post, NY Times, Slate and TruthDig?  Or Dionne himself? 

————
“You haven’t seen a lot of news stories describing the impact of long-term unemployment on people’s lives…”

Unemployment is our #1 challenge (see above), thus a worthy topic.  But as the Geico man asks, “Have you been living under a rock?”  I see one such story about every week going back over 2 years.  EJ, just watch the 7:30am segment of Today for a weekly fix.

“Take five steps back and consider the nature of the political conversation in our nation’s capital. You would never know that it’s taking place at a moment when unemployment is still at 9 percent, when wages for so many people are stagnating at best, and when the United States faces unprecedented challenges to its economic dominance.”

I doubt that the real unemployment figure is as low as all that frankly. Even the term “economic dominance” makes me shudder and shows plainly that Dionne is a part of the problem here.

I see the Tea Party as a symptom and nothing more than that. We have a crisis of leadership in this nation, and because of that simple fact people turn to extremism and willingly follow demagogic leaders who lie and distort to their own benefit.

If Dionne’s Democratic Party was still an effective and clear voice for the people of these United States we would nto see such a popular flocking to the extreme right. But, alas, we the people have been abandoned by that Party, left leaderless.

Unless and until we replace (or reform) that party to be one that speaks with clarity and truthfulness, the people will continue to be easily misled.

I don’t know who the author thinks the Tea Party is,
but there are a lot of angry folks out here who see
the Constitution being eviscerated and the police
powers of the state being expanded beyond all
reasonable cause. We see that neither hysterical
faction of the Business Party has any inclination of
righting the wrongs, reversing the excesses, and are
whores to their donors. There are ways to neuter the
damage being done, and that is to make the state
irrelevant. There are many ways to go about doing
this, but first one must become inoculated, and that
means reading books, something very few people do.
The schools turn kids into dullards, as they were
designed for the age of industrial production.
Television and the MSM propaganda mill complete the
job. War is good for business, don’t ‘cha know. 
Invest your children. Wave that flag. Root for the
home team.  Drink your beer.

Big B is right. We have become the biggest Fascist
experiment in history, and we don’t really seem to give
a damn. Industry has gone to China, our financial sector
gives Vegas a run for the suckers’ money, retail has
been Walmartized and the service industry is all that’s
left: that part, anyway, that does not answer phones in
India and give advice in Mexico and Costa Rica. And
don’t even mention the Supreme Court, whose committment
to democracy has been amply demonstrated these past two
years.

That small group of Americans calling themselves
“patriots” has sold us down the river. ANY tax
reduction, any subsidy, any trade deal that benefits
them must be eliminated. If we want our democracy back,
if we want to avoid the Third World fate some regions of
this country are already mired in, we need drastic
measures.

The Egyptians, the Bahrainis, the Yemenis can do it, but
we, “Home of the Brave, Land of the Free” are incapable
of it.

It’s all about the control of the media by a very few conservative multinational corporations, EJ, wkae the fuck up!

The “tea party” would be a minor footnote if it weren’t being organized and overly publicized on a daily basis by the corporate media that created this “movement” in the first place. The “tea party” has accompliced for its corporate benefactors exactly what this experiment was meant to prove, and that is that a corporation can not only effect political discourse in this nation, but the entire policy structure, with just some well placed and ever droning free commercial messages from the supposed fourth estate.

The MSM has become a public relations arm for corporate america. If you haven’t figures that out yet, well, what can be said..