Debt Deal | featured news

China’s official news agency, Xinhau, which often voices the true feelings of the country’s political elite, described the recent battles over the Washington debt deal as a “madcap farce of brinkmanship”

The president is the most visible symbol of what voters see as a badly dysfunctional government. Some Democrats say he could have negotiated better. Though he succeeded in staving off a historic default, President Obama emerges from the debt talks in a weakened political position with limited influence over a divided Congress.

Fitch Ratings said on Tuesday the agreement to raise the borrowing capacity of the United States means the risk of a sovereign default is "extremely low" and commensurate with a AAA rating.

The story is that as Mark Twain and novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked Twain, “Do you think it will stop?” Twain answered, “It always has.” The debt-ceiling impasse has, as things generally do, ended, and a post-mortem validates conservatives’ portrayal of Barack Obama and their dismay about the dangers and incompetence of liberalism’s legacy, the regulatory state.