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Thinking that cartoons having any bearing on anything at all is patently ridiculous

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“It’s as if Obama has avoided emasculation by becoming a star in a fake little drama of his own creation, in which the audience (so far) consists mainly of MSNBC viewers, source-greasing reporters and Bloomberg editorialists. No wonder he has ‘reality tv’ on his mind. …”

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That’s according to Gallup, and ... among independents, 46% oppose raising the limit; 18% favor it.

51% say raising the limit without a cut in spending is worse than not raising it.

32% went the other way.

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46% trust the GOP leadership on this one; 43% trust Obama.
...
Despite intense lobbying of Congress by President Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and others in the administration about the economic urgency for raising the nation’s debt limit, fewer than one in four Americans favor the general idea of raising it.

Americans are significantly more concerned about the budgetary risk of giving the government a new license to spend than they are about the potential economic consequences that would result from not raising the debt limit.

Both of these findings put Americans more on congressional Republicans’ side of the debate than Obama’s
....
This is an Everyman Issue in that everyone who has run into credit card debt knows what you have to do first: Stop spending.

Talk about eating peas underscores the need to cut spending.

I don’t think that is what Obama meant.

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Liberals have driven the debt-ceiling debate into the class-warfare swamp, promising most Americans they will continue to get something for nothing. This is a painless proposition for demagogues; the vast majority of Americans are not “rich” so it’s easy to propose that those earning more money should fix the problems created by big-spending politicians. This undermines America’s entrepreneurial spirit.

President Obama is pushing for what he calls a “reasonable proposition” of tax increases mainly on those families with incomes of $250,000 or more. “We weren’t balancing the budget off of middle-class families and working-class families,” he said last week. “And we weren’t letting hedge-fund managers or authors of best-selling books off the hook.” Left unsaid was that the top 10 percent of earners are already on the hook for around 70 percent of total income taxes, and the bottom 50 percent pay next to nothing. If “fairness” was as important to liberals as they say it is, they would be seeking balance by raising taxes on the low end of the income scale.