Congress remains on (another) vacation, we're about to go to war, its fallout is utterly unknown, the red, white and blue is slated to go fiscally dark at September's end (before which our congressfolk will have worked in session for nine days), and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announces that the three giddyups of the apocalypse--"the schedule, the inherent variability of cash flows, and the dire consequences of miscalculation"--should maybe compel this Congress to actually do something about the debt limit before mid-October. This Congress.
How seasonally appropriate, in a zeitgeisty kind of way, that we're sliding into The Fall.
WH PressSec Jay Carney continues to speak in simple, declarative, "unequivocal" sentences about the debt ceiling--"We will not negotiate with Republicans in Congress over bills Congress has racked up"--just as the haunting House leadership continues to prattle in tangles of counterfactual horseshit: Reaching the debt limit is "a reminder that, under President Obama, Washington has failed to deal seriously with America's debt and deficit." (Other, that is, than slashing the latter in half--and at the worst possible time.)
Halloween really should be canceled this year, for reasons of superfluity.