Evidently Boehner doesn't know how to click the link to Whitehouse.gov. . .

The majority of our nation's top economist agree that our economic and political systems are broken and completely disfunctional, that is unless you belong to the class of wealthy elites who control Washington. The systems no longer produces the results they were designed for. Washinton has no problem debating everything else from education to health care, etc. However, our economic policies are off limits.

Clearly, the political status quo in Washington do not want a debate to take place as it would effect their power and control. The fears our founding fathers had of our government coming under the control of the few and powerful is now a reality. Corruption in Washinton has been documented to be," systemic, epidemic, and total."

Just like Wall Street and the corporations found a way around regulations, the American people will find a way around those in Washington that have a lock on our democracy. It has already started to take shape with the Tea Baggers on the right and the Occupy Movement on the left. It will take years to make change, but as the middle and poor classes gain more understanding of the inequaties placed upon them by the greedy oligarchs, the boil over effect will gain momentum and change will take place. Unfortunately, it will probably be bloody, and those in power in Washington will find themselves on the wrong side of history!

Michael, and Rick, you made very good comments.

Boehner lied to David about the amount of tax increases that have taken effect. First of all, he claimed that reversing the Bush rates on those who have more than $450,000 in income a year will generate a trillion dollars in additional taxes over the next ten years. The number that I have heard from legitimate sources has been $800 billion. Then he claimed that (ending the payroll tax holiday) would generate $650 billion. In the first place, the payroll tax holiday was part of the stimulus plan that was opposed by the Republicans, and was never intended to be a permanent tax cut. Boehner must be projecting the end of that that tax break would add up to $650 billion over the next ten years. That money cannot be used to balance the budget because the FICA tax is dedicated to Social Security and Medicare.

Boehner is nothing but a propagandist and the worst Speaker of the House that I have seen in my lifetime. First of all, he is not a leader; he is a follower who is terrified of the Tea Party extremists. The income tax increase on high income people was only just part of what is needed. The capital gains tax cuts were not reversed. Tax credits for oil companies were not removed. Tax breaks for companies who have moved their operation off shore have not been eliminated. Boehner is a traitor to the United States. He will do more damage to our country than foreign terrorists. He and his Tea Party team mates in the House can do more to damage to our country from within the government. After all, their stated goal is to reduce the size of government. The sequester will demonstrate just what that means to our economy.

I do not want to jinx this, but this devastating thing might end up being a huge positive.... it is funny that in the movie, "Game Change", John McCain's last line in the movie was, "The extremists will destroy the party if you let them.". Well... he is right... and here we go. I do not see this being forgotten and a Republican was never been such a negative thing to be called.... until recently... and even more than ever now. Soooo... what is red, orange, yellow and absolutely beautiful now??? That would be the house republicans and Mitch McConnell + supporters... on fire. Sad.

Does Boehner realize that those things that the house republicans proposed failed for really good reasons? And does he realize that these need to be proposed and passed by the house anyway? Just because the senate and white house saved them on the cliff does not mean that it should be the normal. Soooo.... when do we vote for new people in the house??? Gotta get this changed.

Boehner is a liar and he is not able to control his party. The American people will work hard to take control of the House. We will not stand for the extreme behavior of the Republican Party. We the American people will not stand for a Party that only cares to protect the rich and big corporations. The poor and middle class Americans will have our day. In 2014 we will the Democrats take control.

The Treasonous Tea Party

The most successful anti-American terrorist organization in the world is not Al-Qa'ida, it’s not Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any possible collective combination of foreigners. The radical group that is choking this nation’s economy, destroying its Constitution, dividing its people, and crippling its defenses is a home grown anti-government insurgency that Timothy McVeigh would happily join; it’s the Tea Party. Unlike other insurgencies that employ violence to inflict casualties, instill fear, and demonstrate the powerlessness of government to stop them, this group of traitors infiltrated our democratic institutions by simultaneously exploiting widespread voting apathy among its opponents and energizing a base by stoking ignorance, bigotry, and irrational fear. The movement is led and bankrolled by a few shadowy billionaires consumed by greed and bent on preserving and increasing their immense wealth and political power. When measured objectively, the “success” of their treachery has been monumental.

The March 1 sequester marks their latest success; a Rube Goldberg budget mechanism accepted as ransom payment in exchange for an economy held hostage via the debt ceiling and threatened with death by shut down; a sequester that was preserved when they torpedoed the “super committees” with uncompromising cuts-only dogma. This action – that they fight to keep in effect – has already significantly degraded military readiness and will soon see this proud nation furlough its national security civilians – a breach of trust with our most noble public servants, many of whom are military veterans, and all of whom are essential to the training, equipping, and deploying of our forces or who personally man security posts critical to protecting our nation. These patriots have already endured a Tea Party mandated pay freeze for the past two years – now they are forced to take a 20% pay cut with absolutely no reasonable explanation as to why. How’s morale? Let no one doubt that this puts additional stress and strain upon Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coastguardsmen who are already dealing with an epidemic of suicides. Let no one claim that this does not embolden potential enemies and boost the morale of the Taliban in Afghanistan because it already has. Al-Qa’ida could not even conceive of an attack that would simultaneously prevent a US carrier from deploying to the Persian Gulf, halt the construction of another, dock the growth of the US economy by 1%, push 750,000 out of work, force the US to shamefully turn a cold shoulder to its poor, elderly, and most vulnerable child citizens, and demonstrate to the world that it’s oldest, richest, and most powerful democracy is no longer capable of accomplishing the basic functions of government. Tea Partiers in the House displace the blame and cry, “let the Senate pass a budget” while knowing full well that fellow Tea Partiers in the Senate are a de facto ruling minority that shamelessly employ an endless filibuster to prevent any progress. Meanwhile, all who hate and plot against the US dance in celebration.

The ingeniousness of the sequester cannot be fully appreciated unless one takes into account the long strategy the Tea Party employed to bring it about. In the midst of the worst recession since the depression, they craftily employed irrational fear and willful economics misinformation to change the national dialogue from recovery and employment to reducing national debt. They told us we were just months from becoming as insolvent as Greece. Though laughable given that investors the world over are essentially paying us to convert their money to US Treasury bonds, and an insulting national comparison from a stature standpoint, debt nevertheless became the only preoccupation of our government. And though debts and deficits are always only solved via a combination of revenues and cuts, the Tea Party insists on only cuts; and cuts right now – cuts that any student of basic economics would tell you should never be enacted in the midst of a recession because it will slow or even reverse a recovery. But recovery is not what the Tea Party wants; they want to destroy the government – at least the parts of the government that don’t serve their billionaire bankrollers. For it was the generosity of these benefactors that fed the largest expenditures ever in the 2010 mid-term election which in turn led directly to Tea Party victories at the federal level. Their like-funded victories at the state level meant partisan Tea Party Congressional redistricting that preserved a House majority despite a 2 million vote deficit in the 2012 election. But these expenditures were only possible after Tea Party infiltration of the Supreme Court and a sweeping decision based on ham-fisted logic concerning a lawsuit brought forward by a Tea Party organization – a truly diabolical victory for America’s oligarchs.

But then, all this fear over debt wouldn’t be compelling if the debt isn’t first made really big; and how better to destroy government than to bankrupt it? There too, history shows the Tea Party’s visible hand prints; they are responsible for the largest contributors to our debt. First, they deregulated banking and finance, erasing all the protective barriers erected following the Great Depression and put friends of the banks in charge of oversight who blindly allowed the banks to enrich themselves on a huge housing bubble. When it popped, they deliberately delayed and disrupted government action which vaporized the wealth of ordinary Americans, sapped 9% from the economy, and bled out 9 million jobs. Second, they championed tax cuts and spent extravagantly on the wares peddled by friends in the industrial military complex: 80’s tax cuts in the face of the largest defense buildup of the cold war which doubled the debt; 90’s tax cuts in the face of a recession and the first Gulf War; 2001 and 2003 tax cuts in the face of two wars (the one in Iraq was a neoconservative war of choice sold to Congress on a stack of lies and fabrication) which doubled the debt again; and a more recent insistence on more tax cuts as part of stimulus – all of which disproportionately benefit the rich and exponentially added to the debt until revenues as a percent of GDP fell to their lowest level since the 1920s and grew the gap between revenues and expenditures to its highest point ever – well over a trillion dollars. Paint the new African-American President as a big-government, socialist, other; exploit a European debt crisis by making irrational comparisons to small dysfunctional economies like Spain, Greece, and Italy; and voilà, debt crisis. Gun violence? Immigration? National Security? Global Warming? 14 million Americans unemployed? No matter, it’s the debt stupid; oh, and never mind the facts; it’s purely a spending problem...

And so the Tea Party marches on, self- proclaimed as the nation’s saviors from the crises they themselves engineered to wield again and again, destroying the US government from within by pushing the most destructive actions on the most vulnerable. They have their 2013 crises all lined up, first the sequester, then the continuing budget resolution, then another debt ceiling vote; perhaps they’ll overturn the Voting Rights Act too, and then consider Gerrymandering the Presidential electoral college... Public opinion and elections results be damned, the Tea Party will not rest until the United States government is so crippled and feeble that little Grover Norquist can gleefully drown it in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bathtub. Let’s all share their vision and pledge allegiance to the new United Oligarchy of Ayn Rand; “one nation, bought and paid for, divided by class, with liberty and justice to the highest bidder.” Your average Joe may profess to be a US patriot willing to die to protect his country from its enemies, but in drinking the Jonestown Kool-Aid he has unwittingly spawned and fed a Tea Party cancer within our government. By view of its collective actions and apathy for the human consequences, this cancer now manifests the greatest threat facing our nation. If Joe doesn't frick’n wake up, he’ll trap us all in the acrid, polluted, and violent slums that will surround the gated community where the light on the hill still burns – but for only upon a very privileged few.

The Tea Party is the cancer in our politics. The tea party is holding the moderate Republicans hostage.

The tea party is the work of the Koch Bros. If you look at everything that is going on, the one thing that always ties this together are the Koch Bros. Even the S Court is in their pocket. Scalia and Thomas, maybe Roberts. I just sat back and was looking for the one thing and that was it. Robert Reich of Berkley wrote a great piece this week. Think was on Huffington Post.

David better effort, but still way off. You could spend the next 5 years moving the ball off the GOP 1 yard line. The facts are 1% of the people have 99 percent of the money, yet the compromise just keeps coming up(yes I hate to say it even the Dems are pushing compromise so said they are selling out the middle class and the poor too). Tax the rich, get rid of the loop holes all revenue side and reform medicare. Go to single payer the Medical community is out of hand charging outrageous fees for service. The Rich own the game and the media and have the discussion right where they want it all on there side of the field. David nice try with Boehner you can't agrue with a liar, but you should bring on some Truth charts showing the income and wealth in this country. Every time you have a GOP guest show them that before they start talking. Corporate America owns the game,wages,media, and the Rich just Love it. I can't believe I am living the days of the Kings and the Castles alll over again due to the most uneducated stupid greedy mornic baby boom generation that drank the kool aide and voted against themselves they entire lives!! What an EPIC disaster.