Did Mike Lee filibuster the vote?; Cleaver's "Satan sandwich"; Conyers calls for march on White House; Unions punish members who seek non-union jobs; Defining moment for Obama; Our non-healing President; How can one do business with Pelosi?; Putin on America; Obama's birthday party; Barack 's bluff was called; The death of the Socialis left;

Political Ticker reports: Sen. Mike Lee of Utah told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday night that he will filibuster Monday's Senate vote.
Breaking a filibuster would require sixty votes in the Senate. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/31/sen-lee-threatens-to-filibuster-debt-ceiling-vote/
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RealClearPolitics reports: "I am concerned about this because we don't know the details. And until we see the details, we're going to be extremely non-committed but on the surface it looks like a Satan sandwich," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri) said on MSNBC. http://realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/31/dem_congressman_debt_deal_a_satan_sandwich.html
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The Media Research Center tv reports: At a press conference held by the House "Out of Poverty Caucus", Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) lambasted President Obama and called for people to march on the White House.
Conyers says, "We’ve got to educate the American people at the same time we educate the President of the United States. The Republicans, Speaker Boehner or Majority Leader Cantor did not call for Social Security cuts in the budget deal. The President of the United States called for that. My response to him is to mass thousands of people in front of the White House to protest this." http://www.mrctv.org/blog/rep-conyers-obama-weve-had-it-calls-protests-white-house
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Redstate writes: Nathaniel Musser, a former member of the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters, according to his lawyer, could not find work through his union. So, as union members sometimes do, Musser found work on his own–at a non-union company.
As working non-union is against many trade unions’ rules, the Carpenters’ union filed internal union charges against Musser and imposed a $300,900.00 fine against Musser.

According to ChicagoUnionNews.com, Musser is alleging in his court documents that the union maintained a policy that precluded members from resigning from the union. http://www.redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/07/31/ex-union-member-fights-200000-union-fine-for-working-non-union/
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American Thinker opines: There comes a time and a point in history which indelibly define a President.  Oftentimes the event may not be of major import in the greater scheme of things but the management of it is of such prominence that the success or failure in the handling of the issue is permanently attached to the individual.  Such a moment has happened to Barack Obama.  His incompetence, inability to lead, prevarications, petulance and immaturity in the debt ceiling crisis have indelibly created an image of abject failure in the minds of a critical mass of people in the United States and around the globe.  He will never be able to overcome the portrait that has been etched in too many minds.
Barack Obama's only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans.  His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade.  Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign.  Thus, spending cuts created out of whole cloth, combined with tax increases aimed at stoking the embers of class envy, were bandied about by his party in order to justify an increase in the debt ceiling of $2.4 Trillion. 
Little does Barack Obama understand that he has forever branded himself as an incompetent and failure.  His narcissism and lifelong history of receiving public adulation will not allow him to comprehend the damage.  He does not understand that now few will listen to his speeches, no matter how well delivered; that few will believe what he is saying, as he has lied and obfuscated the facts so often.  Many world leaders have already arrived at the conclusion that Barack Obama is a leader that cannot be trusted, the citizens of the United States are beginning to  understand that he is a man without a core set of principles thus incapable of guiding the ship of state.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/obamas_failed_presidency.html
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Big Journalism opines: Obama stood in front of a crowd in Tucson that had anxiously sought leadership amidst the chaos of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting; a teachable moment that had The Guardian gushing about how the President had delivered “calm amid the toxic rhetoric.”
That moment of calm has long since dissipated. Where once the President had denounced discourse that places “the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” we hear Republicans blamed for holding the American people hostage to their economic policies. Where once we were urged to talk “with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” we now hear tea party members being denounced as terrorists.  This message has been a coordinated and vicious attack amongst the media, the Democrats, and most assuredly, the President.

It is enough to make one wonder, where did our healing President go? Where is the man that calmed during a time of toxic rhetoric? Where is the man who urged Americans to talk in a way that helped rather than harmed?
That man is a myth. He simply does not exist.
We will never hear the President denounce such vile language from his side of the aisle. In fact, we consistently hear the drone of silence from a supposed leader, where such silence equates to consent. http://bigjournalism.com/rweiss/2011/08/01/media-democrats-and-the-president-have-been-in-lockstep-with-the-tea-party-as-terrorists-message/
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National Review writes: Nancy Pelosi said the following about Republicans:  We're trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.", adding that Medicare would just disappear. National Review opines:  “They don’t just want to make cuts. They want to destroy. They want to destroy food safety, clean air, clean water, the Department of Education. They want to destroy your rights.”I want to ask you: How do you do business with someone like that? How do you do business with a party like that? “They want to destroy”? (I’ll grant that we think the Department of Education a total boondoggle.) “They want to destroy your rights”?
I want to ask you: How do you do business with someone like that?  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/272939/problem-pelosi-c-jay-nordlinger
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Reuters reports on the words of Russia's Putin: "They are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy," Putin told the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi while touring its lakeside summer camp some five hours drive north of Moscow.
"They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar," http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-russia-putin-usa-idUSTRE77052R20110801
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UK Daily Mail opines: Tickets for the fundraising [Barack Obama birthday] dinner cost an astonishing $35,800 a person. Additional contributions of $50 will gain entry to the concert with limited seating, while $1,000 donors receive 'premium' seats for President Obama's birthday and $10,000 tickets include 'preferred' seating along with the chance to take a photograph with Obama.

While some might say the U.S. debt pool could do with the thousands, all proceeds will instead go to the campaign to re-elect the President in 2012 and to the Democratic National Committee fund.

After days of heated discussion, the President faced bitter reaction to his last minute debt deal today with accusations that the agreement was a sly method to push through higher taxes to hit the middle classes at a later date.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2021286/What-debt-crisis-President-Obama-serenaded-Jennifer-Hudson-50th-birthday.html#ixzz1Ts2p7FI3

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The NY Post opines: If Barack Obama loses next November, we'll look back on Sunday -- July 31, 2011 -- as the day he became a one-termer.
He demonstrated the one key quality common to all unsuccessful leaders: Haplessness.
In the most confrontational partisan moment of his presidency, Obama ended up looking remarkably powerless. He didn't get his way. To put it mildly.
The deal he endorsed on the debt ceiling will long be an object of debate for both right and left. There's so much for everyone to dislike in it that people are lining up to rage against it, even though it will surely pass.

But there won't be much debate over the fact that just 10 days after Obama insisted he would not agree to any deal without tax hikes -- "Don't call my bluff, Eric," he warned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor -- he assented to a deal without any tax hikes.
"I'm going to the American people on this,"  [I believe that Obama got the ONLY thing he would have truly fought for: the debt ceiling debate off the table til after his possible reelection.]
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/it_the_day_the_emperor_officially_mwR1iZyJRMqnrIbhaoGt7I#ixzz1Ts4mgsY5

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The UK Telegraph opines: The real story of the US debt deal is not the triumph of the Tea Party but the death of the Socialist Left

 For British conservatives, the US debt deal is a thing of beauty. Under the terms of the deal, the federal government will cut spending by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years and there won’t be any corresponding increase in taxation. That is to say, the American Government has agreed to tackle its deficit by spending cuts alone. The British Government, by contrast, is planning to cut its deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax rises – and it’s cutting it by a smaller amount. 
The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100099357/the-real-story-of-the-us-debt-deal-is-not-the-triumph-of-the-tea-party-but-the-death-of-the-socialist-left/
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The Hill reports: [Explaining "baseline budgeting"], Rep. Ron Paul writes: No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the "cuts" being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases.
In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all.  If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of "cuts" that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to "cut".  It would only take us 5 years to "cut" $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending.  That is hardly austere or catastrophic. [Fight on, Representative!]
.http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/174717-when-a-cut-is-not-a-cut
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