Links for July 6th

  • The Register: Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results
    Good. .co.cc sites are almost uniformly worthless—a hive of malware sites and search engine spam.
  • Andrew Sullivan: Boehner’s Economic Terrorism
    "For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does."
  • Salon.com: The final nail in the supply side coffin
    For the twelve people who still believe in trickle-down economics, the current economic climate is the final proof of its failure. We've got low taxes, record corporate profits, businesses are sitting on huge piles of cash…but ain't nothin' trickling down.
  • DosMan Drivel
    MS-DOS creator Tim Paterson maintains this blog, in which he recounts his work developing operating systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Of particular interest to me is how hardware and code were co-optimized to read from and write to floppy discs in the most efficient manner. The work at that point was incredibly low-level in a way that must have been very satisfying to develop.
  • Slate: How the voters of 2004 are blocking same-sex marriage in 2011.
    This is something that I've complained about here in Virginia—that by using a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage, we have bound ourselves to the wishes of our past selves. There can be no doubt that gay marriage will be legalized in Virginia, but it's going to require a lot of work to get done.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

8 replies on “Links for July 6th”

  1. “And when that fanatical faction was responsible for huge spending binges in the recent past, for two off-budget wars costing $4.4 trillion, a new Medicare benefit, and tax revenues at a 50-year low relative to GDP and tax rates below the levels of Ronald Reagan”…you invoke the 14th Amendment, raise the debt ceiling by administrative order, and deliver a message to the Republican leadership: “Nuts”.

  2. “For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does.”

    No, it’s what the debt limit is there for. A majority of the Congress doesn’t want to go further in debt so until they can agree on what to cut, they’ll not go further in debt. I’m amazed that such a sensible idea as the debt limit has lasted this long!

  3. The nerve of those guys. To actually expect that a debt limit serve as a restraint on debt that exceeds the limit.

    WTH are they thinking!?!?

  4. The budget allows congress to spend no more money until they’ve decided what to cut. The debt ceiling allows them to break our financial promises and bring the world economy crashing down.

    There’s a fucking difference.

  5. My only question is, and maybe there’s a good answer, but what’s the point of having a debt ceiling if it’s not really a ceiling (can be raised at the whim of congress)? Why do we even have a “debt ceiling?”

    There has to be an answer, right?

  6. The debt ceiling process was created to facilitate waging war. Which is exactly how neo-conservatives indebted the US for the $3 trillion, off-budget Iraq Misadventure. All the more galling because Republicans would now have us give up Medicare and Social Security to cover their borrowing.

  7. My only question is, and maybe there’s a good answer, but what’s the point of having a debt ceiling if it’s not really a ceiling (can be raised at the whim of congress)? Why do we even have a “debt ceiling?”

    I think that’s a perfectly good question. What it comes down to is that congress can’t set a limit that it can’t amend. I don’t think we’d want congress to be able to set a limit that it can’t amend. What if they set a debt limit, and the U.S. was promptly invaded by China? We want a congress that can immediately fund that war, not that has its hands tied by a constitutional amendment, which is the only way that I can envision a debt limit that acts as an actual limit.

    There is one advantage to the current arrangement: Congress has to have a discussion every time that they raise that debt ceiling. It’s been raised many, many times over the decades. This is the first time that there’s been a fuss, at least that I know about. Without a ceiling, they’d just keep spending, and there’d never be any need to justify it, whether quietly—but on the record—or loudly—like this time.

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