Standard & Poors Lowers The Boom

But first, a few leftovers from yesterday.

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Would this story qualify as hopenchange having finally killed all hope?

More than two-thirds of Americans now believe the jobs lost in the recession are unlikely to ever return and an equal amount believe the country’s days as the most powerful economy are over, a new poll shows.

However, two-thirds still hope that the United States’ best days are still ahead, an IBOPE Zogby interactive poll of likely voters shows.

The poll also found that likely voters are more pessimistic about the economy than they were a year ago. In June 2010, 23% believed businesses would add jobs, a figure that has now dipped to 17%.

Translation: Two thirds of Americans have given up on (or wised up to) Barack Obama and are ready to reverse course and put the GOP back in unified power.

Not the spin that notorious Obama fanboy Zogby would put on it, but still....

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Why would so many Americans be so pessimistic about America's economic future, you ask? After all, hasn't The One's propaganda orifice assured us that the economy will "continue to grow"? If Godbama says it, doesn't that settle it?

Evidently the markets have become a bunch of ungrateful blasphemers:

Gripped by fear of another recession, the stock market suffered its worst day Thursday since the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 500 points, its ninth-steepest decline.

The sell-off wiped out the Dow's gains for 2011. It put the Dow and broader stock indexes into what investors call a correction -- down 10% from their highs in the spring.

"We are continuing to be bombarded by worries about the global economy," said Bill Stone, the chief investment strategist for PNC Financial.

For the day, the Dow closed down 512.76 points, or 4.3%, to close at 11,383.68. It was the steepest point decline since December 1, 2008.

Thursday's decline was the ninth-worst by points for the Dow....It was the most alarming day yet in the almost uninterrupted selling that has swept Wall Street for two weeks. Since July 21, the Dow has lost more than 1,300 points, or 10.5% of its value. It has closed lower nine of the 10 trading days since then.

Oh, you get the point. Just as you all get whose policies have bludgeoned the economy to such a prostrated nadir.

Barack Obama's presidency is crumbling around him, nobody is listening to his B.S. speeches anymore, and the crisis he so desparetely needed is now a buck he can't blame on his predecessor or hot potato to anybody else.

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Which segues deftly into today's bright, sunny development:

The U.S. had its AAA credit rating downgraded for the first time by Standard & Poor’s on concern spending cuts agreed on by lawmakers to raise the nation’s borrowing limit won’t be enough to reduce record deficits.

S&P dropped the ranking one level to AA+, after warning on July 14 that it would reduce the rating in the absence of a “credible” plan to lower deficits even if the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit was lifted. The U.S. was awarded the top credit ranking by New York-based S&P in 1941. It kept the outlook at “negative.”

‘The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics,” S&P said in a statement today.

Well, folks, we could have gotten our fiscal house in order with "Cap, Cut & Balance," or Paul Ryan's "Path (Back) To Prosperity," both of which the GOP House dutifully and faithfully passed. But Barack Obama and Senate Donks stood in the way and said no, demanding still more of the hard-left policy dreck both here and in Europe that is dragging the entire global economy down to depressionary oblivion, and all the inevitable chaos and instablity that will come with it.

As Glenn Beck is fond of saying, "The truth has no agenda," and the above is truth nakeder than any Paris Hilton internet video. And, for Red Barry and the Dems, inescapable.

Unless Jim DeMint has anything to say about it:

Some of the 28 Republican senators who voted for the new debt/deficit law may find themselves on the receiving end of powerhouse conservative Senator Jim DeMint’s ire.

The South Carolina Republican pledged after last year’s elections that he wouldn’t support any challengers to his Republican Senate colleagues. But the debt deal greatly upset him, and he may back opponents to Republican senators who voted yes on the bill, a source close to DeMint told The Hill.

Friends, God bless the Tea Party's motives, but its utter, brain-dead hostility to the realities of twenty-first century political tactics has me feeling about Jim DeMint and the rest of his tighty-righties the way I felt about Christine O'Donnell last fall.

Looks like my nightmare scenario wasn't so far-fetched after all:

Let's say that November is every bit the Donk bloodbath it looks to be....Question: In which direction are Tea Party expectations going to go after a joyride like this cycle has been?

Answer: Through the roof. They're going to expect the moon and all its green cheese. Permanentize the Bush tax cuts. Cut the federal budget back to 1984 levels. Abolish half the Cabinet-level departments. Repeal ObamaCare. Impeach Obama AND Biden so John Boehner can keep the Oval Office warm for Sarah Palin in 2013. The sky won't be the limit. There will BE no limit.

And that's just the first hundred days of the 112th Congress.

And they'll likely get none, or very little, of it until 2013 at the earliest.

What is reasonable to expect is that no more damage will be done, and the groundwork will be laid for more gains in 2012 and the dethroning of The One based upon his obstructing all of the above - and, believe it or not, he IS going to be president for another two years and the Consitution DOES give him veto power. But I am now seriously questioning whether all these new-to-politics folks are capable of grasping this. I wonder if they understand that advancing an agenda takes a long time and a lot of (ugh) politics and (shudder) compromises and (gag) coalition-building at times. That there is, has been, and will always be, like it or not, give & take, mutual backscratching, and yes, deal-making involved with moving the proverbial chains.

TPers' experience in politics will have been like the rookie whose team wins the Super Bowl in his first season, and then he never even makes the playoffs again the rest of his career. You know what such players always say: "I thought this it how it'd be every year. I didn't know how hard it is just to make the playoffs, much less advance and get to the Big Game." And when they don't get everything they want by next spring, they're going to get impatient, they're going to get angry, and they're going to blame not Democrat obstructionism, but the "RINO" establishment for being too "weak" and "spineless" and "wishy-washy" and "betraying the people who elected them" by not "ramming" everything through like ObamaCare was....

Now look a little further ahead and picture Mike Huckabee clotheslining Sarah Palin out of the GOP primaries and Mitt "RomneyCare" Romney emerging with the '12 presidential nomination. Party split, nay MELTDOWN, anyone? And the door would open wide to Hopenchange with the Pelosi Poliburo, Reloaded.

Before Delaware, I had no such worries. Now they seem almost inevitable.

Okay, so Huckles won't be Romney's pulling guard, and maybe Rick Perry can cut off Mitt at the knees before he can McCain his way to the nomination if the Texas Governor ever hauls his kiester off the Fred Thompsonesque "Will he or won't he?" schneid. Otherwise, those words of mine from a year ago are harrowingly prescient, IMHO.

It's like a race to the bottom of the ocean to see who can drown themselves first.

Or Eastwood Ravine.