The debt ceiling is an unconstitutional gimmick that violates the 14th Amendment, and it could be eliminated for good by restoring to the government its constitutional authority to create money.

Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other "Left, Right & Center" panelists discuss House Speaker John Boehner's decision to allow a vote on a debt ceiling increase despite resistance from fellow Republicans, The New York Times' call for an end of the debt limit and the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

From now on, it's the Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah House.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced Tuesday that he now opposes his own plan to avoid the kind of debt ceiling fiasco that nearly led the nation to default this month.

The deceiving viral video that helped America justify fighting proxy wars in Africa has left its mark; Obamacare critics rant against Canadian style health care, but there are key differences between our system and that of our neighbor to the north; meanwhile, France is belatedly outraged about the NSA leaks. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Rather than resolving the debt crisis, lawmakers' 11th-hour deal to raise the debt ceiling, which threatened to push the global economy over the edge, simply delayed it Financial Times chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, tells Bill Moyers the US debt ceiling is “the legislative equivalent of a nuclear bomb aimed by the U at itself”.

The Senate reached a budget compromise Wednesday that will end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.

The key in politics is to snatch victory from the jaws of victory.

Smelling blood in the water, Senate Democrats over the weekend rejected a Republican proposal to reopen the government and raise the debt limit.