We are all tea party hostages.

This debt ceiling bill is bull s&^t! And it was a phony issue created by wingnuts and the tea party crowd to slash benefits and the safety net for the folks who need it most here in A-merry-ca. Congress has never failed to vote for raising the debt ceiling before, but these are strange times here in A-merry-ca. People can't find work, people who have wealth are just sitting on it and are not investing, and our government is so dysfunctional that their approval rating is lower than that of a convicted pedophile.

I love how Katrina vanden Heuvel summed it all up:

"In the melodrama that is consuming Washington this hot summer, featuring the spectacle of how much Tea Party Republicans will be able to extort for agreeing not to blow up the economy, the values and priorities of most Americans were early casualties. That reality will drive — no matter what the resolution this week — new, independent citizen mobilizations challenging both Republican zealotry and Democratic cravenness.

The debt-ceiling debate has lasted long enough for most Americans to start paying attention and to realize just how divorced both parties are from basic common sense. With the economy faltering and 25 million people in need of full-time work, most Americans want Washington focused on how to create jobs and get the economy going, not on slashing spending for the rising number of poor children while sheltering tax havens for millionaires.

Equally inexplicable is the president’s apparent eagerness to negotiate with a legislative faction willing to hold the entire economy hostage — and one prepared to extort concessions in backroom deals that it could not achieve in any normal legislative process. Negotiating with fiscal terrorists only encourages them.
On National Public Radio last week, Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican deputy whip, was giddy about the potential for calamity. Asked if it was a mistake to try to cut spending by threatening the U.S. economy, Cole replied: “No, I don’t think so. Frankly, I think it’s one of the good things that’s come out of this. We’ll never have a debt-ceiling increase again without serious efforts to deal with the long-term spending.”

Whatever the terms of the eventual agreement, we know they will be remarkably cruel. As Robert Greenstein, the respected director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted last week that every plan on the table now is far worse — cutting more from programs for the poor, exacting pain on the most vulnerable in our society — than anything Jim DeMint, the most extreme right-wing senator of all, was demanding last year." [Source]

O, this is not change that I can believe in. I understand that there is a degree of politics involved here, so you had to kick the can down the road after 2012. But did you have to let the wingnuts pick the can to kick, the shoes you will use to kick it, and which one of your feet you will kick it with? No wonder your base is fit to be tied and the leader of the CBC is calling this proposed debt ceiling bill a "Satan Sandwich". (Tea party sandwich, "Satan sandwich, what's the difference?)

Finally, if you happen to be a black man in A-merry-ca, you just might want to start putting your money under the mattress. Why? Because your black ass just might end up in jail for putting your own money in the bank.