Paul Ryan: A One-Man Fiscal Cliff?

Paul Ryan demonstrating his patented "Budget Karate Chop"

There were a couple of funny hashtags trending on Twitter the day Romney announced Paul Ryan as his choice for Vice Presidential running mate. Republicans were giddy about the prospect of a Romney/Ryan ticket, and together with horrified Democrats, they propelled the #RomneyRyan2012 hashtag to the number one spot for at least a full 14 hours. One excited tweeter cited the top-trending status as proof that Romney had knocked it out of the park, to which I felt obliged to reply, "Yes, haven't seen this much excitement since McCain picked Palin."

The thrust of the #BidenDebateLines thread seemed to be that Biden was a doddering fool, and that the silver-tongued Ryan would give him a sound thrashing in a debate. My contribution to the campaign is this debate line: "My opponent is on record as wanting to dismantle Social Security and Medicare... I think we're done here." Go ahead, Joe. That joke is on the house (pun intended).

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Snooki Kabuki: Comedy, Tragedy, and Tea Party Stupidity

For weeks now, our government has been mired in a bizarre drama the likes of which we've rarely seen, and for weeks I've struggled for a metaphor to fully convey the surreal, theatrical attributes of this manufactured crisis. I finally settled on kabuki, the time-honored Japanese genre of dramatic play. If you're at all familiar with kabuki, you'll have to agree it's an apt metaphor, encompassing the elaborate staging, overt symbolism, and stylized extravagance of the Debt Ceiling Drama, not to mention the fact that—as with true kabuki—the characters' interpersonal and political struggles have completely overshadowed the plot. Sure, this particular surreal drama could potentially tip us into a global depression, but it's the political struggles that seem to have captured the attention of the audience—for now.

Tea Party Zombies Push GOP into Boston Harbor

When President Obama dramatically took leave of the theatrics in Wednesday’s futile debt negotiations, news outlets predictably focused on the melodrama. Right wing pundits pounced on the President as churlish and panicky, with Rush Limbaugh painting a cartoonishly dismal picture:

Picking The Lock Boxes At Social Security And Medicare

Sociologist and author Margaret J. Wheatley once made the eminently sensible observation, "Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather," she said, "the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole." Sadly, Dr. Wheatley neglected to add a necessary exception to her otherwise serviceable rule—politics.

Pat Buchanan Blames Obama For Spooking S&P

My first article at PoliticusUSA.com:

Conservative scribbler and erstwhile Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has always been crazy, but apparently it hasn't kept him from going insane.
In a recent American Conservative article ludicrously titled "Barack Hussein Hoover," Patrick "Sybil" Buchanan begins by raising the specter of "a debt crisis to dwarf the one that befell us in 2008," a frightening prospect indeed. The theory is that if the US is unable to arrive at some consensus and get our debt under control, a global crisis will ensue, and the myopic soothsayers at Standard & Poor's have recently stoked such fears by revising their outlook to "negative" on their triple-A rating of US debt. In an overwrought attempt to forecast a catastrophe before it happens, S&P offers their prediction "that congressional negotiations could result in no agreement on a medium-term fiscal strategy until after the 2012 congressional and presidential elections."