This from Andrew Sullivan:

Every time you think the ultras in the current GOP won't go there, they do. They'll sabotage economic growth for short term political advantage. They'll sabotage their own president in negotiating with allies. They're happy for the US to default if it means they can damage Obama. Their own plan for immediate, drastic austerity would be catastrophic for the global economy. Their pre-Arab Spring belligerence would shut America out of a critical opportunity to ease tensions with the growing and burgeoning Muslim world. And they have no problem treating the world economy as a partisan plaything.

If they claw their way back to power this way, our system really will be broken for a long time. And the great possibility of an adult conversation on pragmatic grounds to help the economy will be lost. And this is emphatically not Obama's fault. He tried. They threw it back in his face again and again. Which means, I believe, that we should double down in backing him, instead of the ear-splitting whine coming from the left.

The GOP spin machine and complicit media — including, disturbingly, NPR — would like you to believe that the recent special elections are incontrovertible predictors of the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. (See Nate Silver's A Guide to Cutting Through Special Election Spin.)

But while two recent special elections sent Republicans to the House where they already have a majority, two recent national polls show an uptick in Obama's approval, and beating hypothetical presidential challengers.

Alter Net's Joshua Holland has a cogent analysis in TruthOut.org of the discussion in liberal circles of whether Obama should be considered a success or a failure. In a particularly even-handed critique, Holland argues that:

... [T]his is actually a debate over whether one should do what one can within the political constraints of the day, or expend a lot of energy trying to move the political dialogue in one's preferred direction.

Holland also suggests that the Obama political team bears some responsibility for the ambivalence in progressive circles:

Obama didn't promise to do what he could to dig the country out of eight years of disastrous Republican governance: he promised to change Washington – to usher in a new era of comity and reason -- and people believed him. They shouldn't have, because at the end of the day, progressives still faced any number of structural hurdles.

In an earlier commentary, Holland noted:

... [T]he message is as hopelessly naive in the real world of American politics as it is appealing on the stump, and for a simple reason: it assumes that the GOP -- dominated as it is by "movement conservatives" in the Delay-Rove mold -- and it's corporate backers are interested in engaging in a thoughtful debate over how to make America a better country. If that were the case, then bridging the divide through calm words and negotiation would certainly be better by leaps and bounds than the ugly brand of politics we have today

A question that has puzzled me for some time is whether right-wing ideologues actually believe their own nonsense about economics, or whether it's just Frank-Luntz-esque political sloganeering.

As Matt Miller wrote in the Washington Post last month:

You can feel the Republicans’ pain; tax cuts have been the party’s defining issue since Ronald Reagan rode them to power in 1980. But in an aging America, the numbers no longer work, and Republicans have failed to develop a new conservative vision to replace their fading mantra.

A new Quinnipiac poll finds voters blame Bush over Obama 54 - 27% for the poor economy. The poll finds that by a margin of 67 - 25% voters believe that solutions to the deficit should include tax hikes for the wealthy and corporations, and not just spending cuts. And 62 - 32% voters believe that it's more important to reduce unemployment than to reduce the federal deficit.

Jane Hamsher has a timeline of S&P's downgrading of US credit rating to AA+ from AAA, suggesting that it is:

• A political agenda, citing S&P singling out Social Security and Medicare contributions to the deficit, ignoring wars and the Bush tax cuts.
• Retaliation for Obama signing the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, which repealed credit rating agencies' exemption from liability for ratings errors, holding them to a standard similar to that applied to auditors.
• Part of a campaign to deflect blame for contributing to the financial crisis by caving in to pressure from client firms in assigning AAA credit ratings in 2006 and 2007 to mortgage securities later downgraded to junk status.

Read the full article at FireDogLake.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman observes:

...[I]t’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?

Just to make it perfect, it turns out that S&P got the math wrong by $2 trillion, and after much discussion conceded the point — then went ahead with the downgrade.

The graphic below is from the July 24 New York Times based on figures from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Read Jonathan Cohn's New Republic article.

"... [I]it's as if you put charges on your credit card, then decide later whether you're going to pay for them," The Atlantic's James Fallows told NPR's Guy Raz yesterday.

This is money past Congresses and this Congress, too, have already voted to spend....

... [R]atings agencies have already said that even though, of course, people know that the U.S. government is not going to finally renege on its obligations, the interest rate that the U.S. has to pay for its Treasury notes and other debt will probably go up if there is this default because it's always been defined as the most riskless investment in the world.

And if and when that happens, essentially interest rates for everything else - for mortgages, for city governments, for state governments - they will all go up, too, because almost all of them are benchmarked to the supposedly riskless Treasury rate.

Readers old enough to remember will recall that 'voodoo economics' was the label applied to Ronald Reagan's economic policies by George H.W. Bush in 1980. The policies were based on the aptly named "Laffer curve," which purported to show that high tax rates reduce tax revenue by lowering the incentive to produce. (The model also predicts that tax rates below an optimal level for a given economy will reduce tax revenue; today's Republicans conveniently ignore this provision.)

Despite being embraced by mainstream commentators like David Brooks, who called it a "moment of truth," Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) budget proposal is a return to 'voodoo economics.'

"Ludicrous and Cruel" says Paul Krugman in his recent NY Times column.