It appears the debt ceiling fight is going to get nastier. And crazier. Senate Republicans actually are making noises about a balanced budget amendment. Funny they never talked about that when George W. Bush was president.

Paul Krugman says using the debt ceiling for political extortion is new in American politics, but Ezra Klein says it isn’t. Republicans tried it before, during the Clinton Administration. Their demands at the time included elimination of the Commerce Department.

Back to Krugman, who writes,

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

Sheila Bair, who is coming to the end of her five-year term as chair of the FDIC, testified to Congress this week that even coming close to default on the debt could be catastrophic. And yes, she’s a Bush appointee, but apparently not crazy.

Specifically, Ms. Bair, herself a Republican, said that if the markets get spooked – even if the debt ceiling is ultimately raised – the consequences could have long-lasting impact on interest rates, which would hurt consumers, businesses and even the national debt itself. If the government gets close enough to default, even if it doesn’t happen, “you’ve increased interest costs, you’ve increased Treasury’s borrowing costs and you’ve created a bigger deficit problem. So why even go there? Why even flirt with it? I just don’t understand it – it’s very harmful and will make the budget deficit worse.”

Ms. Bair said that there’s obviously no “immediate fix” to the deficit issue, but lawmakers don’t seem to get that.

This is going to be a lot of hard work, a lot of hard decisions,” and involve some combination of entitlement reform and revenue increases, she said. “It just seems like all those things are so obvious [but] the political process doesn’t seem able to produce the tough decisions that really need to be made and execute on them.”

Looks like somebody’s getting fed up, finally:

White House Spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday afternoon that President Barack Obama rejected an invitation from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to meet about cutting the deficit.

“What the senator invited the president to do was to hear Senate Republicans restate their maximalist position. We know what that position is,” Carney said.

Update: Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is inviting President Barack Obama to the Capitol to hear first-hand why his proposed tax increases will not pass, The Associated Press is reporting.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-rejects-invitation-to-meet-with-senate-republicans-on-debt-ceiling-2011-6#ixzz1Qn22Fe00

That’s the thing with righties. They’ve been reciting the same dogma for decade after decade, yet they always assume no one else has heard it before.

Elsewhere: SEC rules in favor of Colbert. Seriously.

The mindless hysteria of right-wing sheep.

From the other blog — something inspirational — a hate crime victim is trying to save his assailant from execution.