Randi Rhodes: Orange Crushed

It looks like John Boehner’s big debt ceiling plan is in some major trouble. Oh well, John, back to the cocktail napkin to draw up another one. The House vote on the Boehner plan has been delayed from today until at least Thursday… yeah, like spoiled fish is going to smell better if you let it sit a day. The big problem was that the Congressional Budget Office estimates show Boehner’s plan wouldn’t cut spending nearly as much as he said. Wait! John Boehner exaggerates? Now there are people all over Washington thinking “maybe Boehner didn’t mean it when he said I was his bestest friend forever.”

Brilliant! Boehner’s plan already doesn’t raise the debt ceiling enough. Republican leaders responded to the CBO report that it doesn’t cut deficits either by saying that then they’ll amend the bill so that it raises the debt ceiling even less. Every time somebody points out something wrong with Boehner’s proposal, Republican leaders say “No, wait! We can make it worse.” The only good news for John Boehner in all of this is that he won’t remember any of it tomorrow morning.

Leaders in Washington are more worried about a U.S. credit downgrade than they are about an actual default. The problem is that you don’t need complete default to have a disaster. A credit downgrade could wreak havoc on this economy. The Titanic didn’t have to ram that iceberg to end up sinking, it just had to graze it.

Rush Limbaugh says that the government is making up the heat wave. Wow. First we had a mental recession, and now we have mental heat wave. Either this country is really going crazy… or our problems are real. Rush claims that the heat index, which takes humidity into account, is “manufactured by the government.” Hey, who are you going to believe, Rush Limbaugh or your own lying, sweating pores?

Finally, according to campaign finance filings, Michele Bachmann spent $4,700 on hair and makeup shortly after entering the presidential race. To be fair, it’s not clear if that money was spent on her hair and makeup, or on her husband Marcus’s hair and makeup, which would be a shame, since he’s the only one who would get to see it.

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FLASHBACK 1944: Looking back at this excerpt of FDR's State of the Union address is a stark reminder of just how far America has been dragged to the Right since then...