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After watching Ali Velshi fill in on some of CNN's coverage over the holidays on this "fiscal cliff" debacle, I would definitely be happy to see him take Erin Burnett's place on CNN in the evening. He corrected wingnut Rep. Tim Huelskamp on the air this Tuesday and the following evening after the House finally voted to pass the Senate's bill, he didn't let Rep. Tom Cole get away with trying to blame S&P's downgrade of our credit rating on the budget deficit.

After Cole again explained that he was happy with the Republicans passing this deal because they got a lot of what they liked and that they planned on leveraging the debt ceiling to get some of the spending cuts they want, Cole said this:

COLE: We didn't have a downgrade because of the debt ceiling debate. We had it because we weren't dealing with our deficit. This is...

VELSHI: That's not entirely true. (CROSSTALK) No, no, It's not entirely true.

COLE: It actually is. (CROSSTALK)

VELSHI: Congressman, I really enjoy talking to you. I think you're one of the best around. It's just not entirely true.

COLE: Look, you can't have trillion dollar deficits for four consecutive years and have it going forward...

VELSHI: Give me five minutes and I'll pull out S&P's report. I mean, I'm not the guy to have this fight with. I don't know as much about Congress as you do, but I do know about this.

Velshi went on to give him a hard time about the Republicans not being able to get their act together in the House and he's exactly right, that report did not blame the deficit. It blamed the politicians not being able to work together.

When Cole attempted to put most of the blame for the Simpson-Bowles commission going nowhere onto President Obama, Velshi reminded him that their vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan voted against the plan as well. Velshi didn't give Democrats a pass for their part in any of this brinksmanship we've seen going on, but he made sure to let the viewers know we're dealing with a really dysfunctional House right now.

It was nice to at least see the Representative not be allowed to get away with just completely revising history. I'd have been happier after watching this if he wasn't allowed to pretend that it's going to be acceptable behavior for them to continue their hostage taking during this upcoming debt ceiling debate. I've still got my issues with Velshi, mainly due to the fact that's he's on board for austerity measures and cuts to our social safety nets and like so many of them, seems obsessed with the deficit instead of getting Americans back to work. But compared to Burnett, who he's been filling in for, he's a breath of fresh air. It would really be nice to see more of these anchors do what he did here again, which is call out a politician on the spot when they lie on the air.

For a little reminder, here's what that S&P report said about the downgrade:

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Fox's Neil Cavuto claimed he really didn't want to take up for Standard and Poor's and defend their record, but it didn't stop him from accusing the Congress from conducting a "witch hunt" in their defense now that investigations are being called for after they downgraded the United States' credit rating.

Apparently Cavuto and some of his cohorts on Fox have been carrying water for S&P for the last week or so.

From Media Matters -- Fox News Objects To S&P Downgrade Inquiry By Screaming "Witch Hunt":

Fox News personalities have expressed outrage that Congress is reportedly considering investigating Standard & Poor's (S&P) controversial decision to downgrade its U.S. credit rating. But S&P has significant credibility issues, and executives at rating agencies - including S&P - have routinely testified before Congress, including about their role in the Enron scandal and the financial crisis.

As Congress Prepares To Investigate S&P's "Downgrade" Of The U.S. Credit Rating ...

AP: Senate Moving To Investigate S&P's Downgrade Decision.

On August 8, the Associated Press reported that the Senate Banking Committee "is gathering information on Standard & Poor's decision to issue the first-ever downgrade of the government's credit rating." [Associated Press, 8/8/11] ...

Fox News Shouts Intimidation And "Witch Hunt" ...

Fox's Cavuto On Possible Investigation Of S&P: "You Can't Threaten Everyone."

From host Neil Cavuto's discussion of a possible Senate investigation of S&P with Larry Sabato on Your World: Read on...

While telling every one else not to panic in reaction to drops in the stock market after the S&P downgrade, Stephen Colbert packed his "hobo satchel" full of gold, weapons and a chicken as he prepared to make his escape from the United States.

After noting that the only other two countries with a rating of AA+ are Belgium and New Zealand, Colbert concluded:

The credit downgrade reduces Americans to waffle-eating Kiwis who put mayonnaise on their French fries and have a serious Hobbit infestation.

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During the opening of Andrea Mitchell's show today before President Obama came on to talk about Standard and Poor's downgrading the credit rating of the United States, Chris Matthews made the ridiculous assertion that they actually had some credibility after all we've seen out of that ratings agency over the last few years.

MITCHELL: Let's talk about the S&P. Clearly a political judgment by the S&P about the future of debt reduction and long term solvency. Is that exceeding their grasp? And was it wrong as the White House and Treasury claimed?

MATTHEWS: Well it's done. And it has power in itself and uh... they have credibility. We live with the S&P everyday. And the value of our stocks and how our portfolios are doing, depending on how the S&P rates it. I think it probably has more to do with our dollar and the value of our dollar. I think gold's going up because of that. And that's a more of a near term thing than the obviously unrealistic assessment that we might actually renege on our debt.

But I tell you, I think this is really big and I think it has to do with the towering size of the U.S. debt. And the more we read about Greece; the more we read about the periphery countries of Portugal and Spain and Italy too... in trouble, the more we look at one thing, how's their debt compared to their GDP? And by that standard we have problems.

We can't keep saying we're different, that there's American exceptionalism at work here. Because if we're exceptional why do we keep rolling up our debt? And that's a question I think the liberals, the Democrats, progressives are going to have to deal with. They can't simply say it's a problem of the idiot right. You can't blame it all on them. There are some idiots out there on the right. There's some people on the right who will not look at the overall big picture. But the big picture's indefensible. And that's the problem.

Thankfully CNBC's Ron Insana was there to say... well, not so much Chris. As he pointed out for reasons that have already been noted here, S&P has no credibility. And as he noted, we're not Greece.

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Alex Seitz-Wald over at Think Progress seemed to think this exchange between Paul Ryan and Chris Wallace potentially signaled some shift by him with his rhetoric on whether he'd be open to revenue increases after we ended up getting our credit rating downgraded by S&P. I would beg to differ and think it just sounded like a lot of the same weasel words we've been hearing out of the lot of them when it comes to whether they'd actually ever support raising taxes on their rich campaign donors.

While he did not draw the hard line that we've been hearing out of him that any deal has to be "revenue neutral", so much of this just sounds like the same old same old with what they consider a revenue increase in the first place and with the demands that any deal had better include "entitlement reform", I find it hard to believe that what he said to Chris Wallace here represents any real shift from what we've been hearing from this guy for some time now.

And given his track record, does anyone actually believe that Ryan would ever support tax increases in any way, shape or form? And he never says he'll support raising taxes on anyone. What he said is this:

RYAN: So if you just raising revenues to chase ever higher spending that is not good policy. And I don't think that's a good agreement. If we are convincingly restructuring these entitlement programs and getting that spending line down to meet that revenue line, then can you have higher revenue growth through more economic growth and tax reform, yes -- the answer is yes.

"Higher revenue through more economic growth and tax reform" does not equal raising taxes on anyone. It equals their same double talk that if you lower rates for upper earners and corporations, you're going to get more tax revenues coming in, which is trickle-down economics nonsense that we've been hearing from this Ayn Rand fan for as long as he's been allowed an interview on television. And tax "reform" equals lowering rates while supposedly closing loopholes, tax loopholes that can just be put right back in place later. And tax loopholes that Republicans stubbornly refused to support from day one of these negotiations over raising the debt ceiling in the first place.

I don't think we heard any shift from Ryan here on his previous positions. It's just more weasel words and double-speak trying to con Americans into thinking that we should support more policies that make the income disparity in the United States worse and that do nothing to fix our problem with the deficit or actually raise tax revenues, unless of course those taxes are raised on the middle class, or what's left of it, and the poor, or taking it out of their hides with destroying what's left of the social safety nets that are currently protecting a good deal of our elderly and our sick living in abject poverty.

I'll be glad to eat my words later if Republicans do actually agree to tax increases as part of these negotiations over the coming months, but I'm not holding my breath for Ryan or whoever gets appointed to this new committee to do so. I think Think Progress gave him way too much credit for looking like he might actually be willing to bend from the rigid stance we've seen Republicans take ever since President Obama got elected and especially since they got control of the House.

Full transcript below the fold.

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From Mother Jones -- VIDEO: Tea Partiers Cheer the Downgrade of America's Credit Rating:

Is the tea party happy that Standard and Poor's, the credit rating agency, downgraded the United States' credit rating for the first time ever?

You'd think that was the case if you were in the crowd at a tea party rally in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, on Sunday morning. The Tea Party Express rolled into that northeastern city as part of its tour to bolster the six GOP state senators facing recall elections on Tuesday. But the most shocking moment of the event wasn't the vitriol spouted by tea party leaders, which has dominated news of the tour stops in recent days. Instead it was the cheers that erupted when one of the Tea Party Express' speakers described the recent downgrade as the tea party's fault.

Here's what happened: Midway through the Fond du Lac event, Florida talk show host Andrea Shea King took the stage. She told the audience that commentators were describing the downgrade of US debt to AA+ from AAA as the "tea party downgrade," laying the blame squarely on Congress' right-wing faction and its supporters. But rather than boo those who claim the tea party caused the downgrade, the 200 or so Wisconsinites in attendance cheered, sounding almost proud to blamed for the downgrade.

As they noted, pretty astounding that these people seem pretty happy to be taking credit for the full faith and credit of the United States taking a knock. Makes me wonder if they even understood what the hell the speaker was talking about.

Transcript via Mother Jones:

SHEA KING: This week—I wrote it down—they are blaming the credit downgrade on the tea party movement.

CROWD: Yeah! [Cheers, clapping]

SHEA KING: They are calling it "the tea party downgrade." They are objectivizing [sic] us.

Let's just all hope these astroturfers are wasting their time up there with these recall elections this week. God knows how much outside money is pouring into that state over the last few weeks.

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While I do not agree with all of the points Fareed Zakaria made during this segment, like comparing protecting our social safety nets to the Republicans rigidity on tax increases and painting those as being somehow equivalent; especially if you're talking about raising the retirement age on Social Security instead of raising the income cap to keep it solvent for the long term. That said, I was glad to see someone point out just how destructive the Republicans use of the filibuster has been as he did here. And I agree with his points on the need to do more spending on education and infrastructure to get our economy growing again.

Transcript via CNN:

ZAKARIA: We've downgraded ourselves. We've demonstrated to ourselves, the world, to global markets that our political system is broken and that we are incapable of implementing sensible public policy.

The actual cut to the 2012 budget, which is the only budget over which this Congress has any control, is $21 billion out of a total of $3 trillion in expenditures. Everything else can and will be changed by future Congresses. What the deal does is once again kick tough choices down the road, this time to a Congressional supercommission that will have to come up with a larger plan to reduce our debt. And it does nothing to spur growth, and, without growth, the debt and the deficit will expand well above current projections.

The manner in which the deal was produced has added poison to an already toxic atmosphere in Washington, making compromise even more difficult. Democrats now feel they need to mirror the Tea Party's tactics because they worked and they are becoming unyielding on any cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare. Republicans, emboldened by the success of their bullying, have closed ranks more solidly around a no-tax agenda, which is great, but the only solution to America's debt dilemma needs to involve both cuts to entitlement programs and higher tax revenues. Congress is more polarized than ever before, and that polarization has resulted in paralysis. More than two years into the Obama administration, hundreds of key positions in government remain vacant for lack of Senate confirmation. The Treasury Department, for example, had to handle the global financial crisis, recession, bank stress tests, the automaker bailouts, as well as its usual duties with about a dozen of its senior positions, almost its entire top management, vacant, nobody in there.

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Well, we had one bright spot on the Sunday morning talks shows this weekend -- the fact that Rachel Maddow was a panel member on Meet the Press. The downside, she got stuck debating Republican hack, Alex Castellanos who just regurgitated one Republican lie-filled talking point after another during the entire segment.

When responding to whether his buddy Mitt Romney should have shown some leadership and weighed in on the debt-ceiling debacle before it was over with or not, Castellanos tried blaming the downgrade by S&P on government spending and too much debt. But Maddow corrected him about just who exactly they blame if you actually read their report -- Republicans playing chicken with the debt ceiling and their rigid refusal to ever allow taxes to be raised.

MADDOW: To the extent that we are taking the S&P downgrade as a serious thing, that we believe that S&P has the credibility to have done this, and this actually does levy a blow against the U.S. economic credibility. I mean, honestly, we should talk about the fact that during the financial crisis, S&P was handing out AAA ratings to any pile of junk tall enough to reach the doorbell and ask. So they do not have the most credibility on this. But if we are going to take them seriously, let's take them on their word about why they did this. They said they did this because of brinksmanship over the debt ceiling. They did not say they did this because there's too much government spending.

GREGORY: All right. Let's, let...

MADDOW: They said they did this because of Republicans holding the debt...

CASTELLANOS: Because of the debt.

MADDOW: No. The debt ceiling. Brinksmanship...

CASTELLANOS: Yeah, but the debt ceiling is the ceiling...

MADDOW: ...is their word.

Naturally Castellanos did his best to interrupt her so she couldn't make her point. Austan Goolsbee got a chance to follow up and agree with Maddow on the fact that Republicans were the ones out there actually insane enough to be pretending that default might be acceptable.

Steve Benen made some similar points in his post from today A pox on one house:

But for all the complaining I do about this, it’s only fair to note when someone gets this right. National Journal’s Edmund Andrews, for example, had a good piece yesterday that specifically rejected the notion that the downgrade is “a pox-on-both-your-houses curse at the intransigence of both Republicans and Democrats.” [...]

And who instigated this brinksmanship, refused to compromise, and delayed a resolution until literally the last day?

Putting aside, at least for now, whether S&P has the credibility to make such sweeping condemnations, it’s worth emphasizing the extent to which the agency pointed the finger at congressional Republicans. It not only directly attributed blame to the GOP hostage strategy of the past few months, it lamented the very idea of allowing “the statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default” to “become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy,” before complaining that “the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues.”

Andrews added, “[I]t’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.”

Full transcript below the fold.

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John Kerry left little doubt where Democrats plan on laying the blame for Standard and Poor's deciding to downgrade our credit rating -- squarely on the laps of those "tea party" Republicans in the House who were actually saying default would be acceptable.

From TPM -- Kerry Slams ‘Tea Party Downgrade’:

Senator John Kerry (D-MA), appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, blamed Republicans and in particular Tea Party intransigence for the unprecedented S&P downgrade of U.S. credit from AAA to AA+.

"I believe this is without question the Tea Party downgrade," he said. "This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered the will of even many of Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal."

Kerry intimated that the "grand bargain" that President Obama initially negotiated with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), a package of larger spending cuts and revenue increases, was scuttled by a smaller group of Republicans who were not willing to negotiate at any cost.

"There were some people in the Republican party - and Mitch McConnell even admitted this - who wanted to default, Kerry said. "He said there were people in his party who were willing to shoot the hostage. In the end they found that the hostage was worth ransoming." Read on...

It looks like the Democrats got on the same page with their talking points for the day since David Axelrod said the exact same thing on Face the Nation today.

From our friend D.C. Douglas who continues to be a thorn in the side to these "tea partiers".

Tea Party! America Thanks You! (A DC Douglas Tweak):

Actor, voice over artist and Tea Party gadfly, D.C. Douglas, released another video thanking the Tea Party for its contributions to the debt ceiling debate. Immediately upon it's release, his video took on even greater meaning.

Though this video's release occurred at roughly the same time that Standard & Poor's credit downgrade for the US became official - it was mere coincidence. Twitterverse, however, picked up on the video's sentiment and began forwarding it to friends as way of expressing their less-than-warm-n-fuzzy feelings regarding the Tea Party's hand in the credit downgrade.

Apparently this was not without some merit. In S & P's statement, they write "[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned..."

In essence, Congressman John Boehner chose to move into the far right Tea Party's territory rather than into the Republican mainstream. So, in effect, it seems even more fitting that America should Thank the Tea Party!

Dedicated to FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Nation, Americans For Prosperity, Tea Party Express and National Tea Party Federation!

Written, produced, edited by Lance Kibbe' Baxter

D.C, Douglas:
Film/TV • http://www.DCDouglas.com
Voice Over • http://www.MyVoiceOverGuy.com
Blog • http://www.DCDouglasBlog.com
Gadfly • http://www.dcdouglasgadfly.com/
FaceBook • http://bit.ly/B0LCu