Doncha love the T-party nutter!!
All that victimhood/entitlement and the sheer brazeness of it all.

Paul,
it's not just victimhood/entitlement and brazeness --there is also the Christian Right's agenda, which goes beyond shrinking the size of the government. It includes censoring the arts, declaring Muslims unfit for public office and denying equality to gay men and lesbians because they engage in sinful “aberrant sexual behavior.” America has to be remain a society based on Judeo-Christian values.

Opinion polls show that a large proportion of Americans hold biased, ignorant beliefs. These are the 40 percent who believe in biblical creationism, the 41 percent to 48 percent who believe that “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated,” the half of Americans who believed that Barack Obama would raise their taxes when his plan was clearly to cut taxes.

These people are Republicans and they aren't into compromise. They've captured the federal budget and they have convinced many Americans that the core problem is the size of government, rather than their shrinking paychecks and growing economic insecurity.

What is good for "the miners" is good for Australia.

Almost 20 years ago, I met a Californian who had been visiting Australia every 2 years since the mid 70's.

He told me that he fell in love with the place on his first visit. We reminded him of the best of America.

But he also noted that we were going down the same road. The only difference was that we were about 5 years behind the US.

Does anyone doubt that a local version of the Tea Party would grow quite vigorously on our soil?

The Republicans hold that America has a massive debt crisis that will burden our children and grandchildren and crush us underfoot. The path forward, the GOP says, is to slash spending and provide confidence for the business community to invest and create jobs.

Democrats have basically accepted this premise. Since the beginning of the Tea Party–influenced 112th Congress, Democrats have attempted to outflank the opposition with more and more fiscal austerity.

As a result, the debate has moved far to the right in rhetoric and substance. Balanced deficit-reduction solutions have given way to all-cuts solutions.

Obama didn’t just embrace deficit reduction; he doubled down on it by seeking a $4 trillion “grand bargain” with Republicans to cut spending and entitlements and raise a pittance of revenue.

its odd that the Democrats have joined he GOP in making a fetish of reducing the budget deficit over the next decade and making reducing the deficit their No. 1 economic priority.
They appear to agree with the Republicans that diminishing the deficit will somehow revive economic growth and restore jobs.

The real narrative is that Americans don’t have jobs, so they’re not buying stuff. Because they’re not buying stuff, companies aren’t hiring. Congress is not doing anything to solve the jobs crisis; Republicans—with little resistance from the president—are actively pursuing a contractionary fiscal policy that is weakening a sluggish recovery.

The Republicans are going to hammer Obama on the bad economy.

Obama is now saying that he'll fight for what the American people care most about: new jobs, higher wages, and faster economic growth. He talks about extending tax cuts for middle class families, make sure the jobless get unemployment benefits and an “infrastructure bank” that would borrow money from private capital markets to pay private contractors to rebuild the nations roads, bridges, airports, and everything else that’s falling apart.

Where's the money going to come from? Hasn't the debt deal tied his hands? Hobbled the capacity of the government to respond to the jobs and growth crisis.

The Republicans policy is one of of huge tax cuts and big defense spending hikes and these coexisted by running up the budget deficit.

Under the debt deal they showed that want to cut spending on things they don’t like, but not on things they do like. So they go cuts to social security and not defence spending.

Will the Democrats go along with that?