Former Congressman David Stockman also headed Reagan's Office of Management and Budget. Not of the Reagan White House Office, but the Office of the entire United States. Here's what he said about the failed budget negotiations:
"Fiscal governance in Washington is totally kaput. They never pass an annual budget resolution and enforcement plan, which was taken as a sacred duty back in the day; and there are never even annual appropriations bills for the mere 25% of the budget still subject to the Congressional “power of the purse”.
Instead, what occurs is a perennial string of short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs) followed by an 11th hour, 3000 page pork-ridden “Omnibus Appropriations” bill that no one has read and which gives log-rolling (i.e. more domestic for more defense) a new definition.
In short, the debt ceiling was the only fiscal control mechanism left. And even that has been neutered time after time in the last decade by the hideous, flat-out lie that if the Treasury on any given day is one dollar short of being able to cover all of its due bills it must default on each and every one of them including interest payments, thereby destroying the credit of the United States. Yada, yada.
Finally, that lie was being put to the test and would have been eviscerated sometime next week. Yet after a lifetime on the public teat, Kevin McCarthy like his two GOP predecessors surrendered to the Doomsday Machine because he works for the GOP wing of the Swamp, not the voters, current and future.
And he did so while expectorating the most risible of lies: Republicans are changing the culture and trajectory of Washington—and we’re just getting started.
Not close. Not in the ballpark or even the catcher’s box behind home plate.
The deal does absolutely nothing to change the current “trajectory” toward fiscal disaster because it reduces nary a dime of built-in spending for defense, entitlements/mandatories, veterans and net interest, while those items account for 89% of the $80 trillion of built-in spending over the next decade."
...there was a sober silence in the room. Samuel Adams, a key figure in the American Revolution and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, spoke up to say,
“We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and from the rising to the setting of the sun, let His kingdom come.”
Colonel Douglas MacGregor predicts a continuation of the Iran war soon, once all sides have replenished missile stocks.
"Washington’s political class manifests much less regard for the long-term strategic interests of its own citizens—their security and prosperity. As a result, Washington pays an exorbitant price in reputation and treasure for policies that confront Palestinians with the choice of death or expulsion from their homelands.
"Assumptions of tacit acceptance or rapid capitulation are implicit and dangerous.
[The Muslims will not 'do a deal.']
"When Hitler was briefed on the expected Soviet reaction to Operation Barbarossa, Major General Ernst Koestring, a Prussian officer fluent in Russian from a family that had lived in Moscow since the reign of Catherine the Great, advised: “Initially, German forces will advance rapidly. The various peoples on the Soviet periphery will likely welcome the German forces. Resistance will be weak. But when the Germans advance into ...