China Says: Well Look What Happens When You Can't Control Your Spending

Instead of trying to get our biggest competitor, and the other most important country in the world to shape up into a democracy, Obama spends his time telling them the dollar and our banks will be okay.

It's a forced move. We have a huge deficit. There's no point in anyone's spending any more time Bush-bashing because it's not productive, but it bears emphasizing to the tea-partiers: this deficit didn't magically appear on 20 January this year, and where were you for the previous eight years? But it bears greater emphasizing to everyone else that we have to do something to fix this (like not pass a massively expensive health care bill to add to the fire) or we will soon have greater problems than not being able to encourage reform in the biggest nation on the planet. Bruce Bartlett has one solution that - forgive me - any Republican with balls would be getting behind.