Pelosi remains the most divisive partisan Speaker in the history of the house. PBS presents her as reasonable - obviously another lefty history presented as non-partisan. PBS/NPR should be required to register as a lobbyist.

Obama took over a sinking ship. We're still floating. Twenty years from now, that is what will be remembered of his first term.

No, this is not the first time, or even the second time that the federal debt ceiling has featured Congress butting heads with their collagues or with the President on the subject of the debt ceiling.

One of many times that Congressional representatives voted against raising the debt limit was when then-Senator Barack Obama did it, as a protest vote in 2006.

For a rather complete annotation of Obama's 2006 speech, see this column by the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler, of whom I am no particular fan, mostly because he is so ordinarily tipped in favor of Obama. It took a real whopper of lying flip-flop by Obama to earhn this treatment:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/annotating-obamas-2006-speech-against-boosting-the-debt-limit/2013/01/14/aa8cf8c4-5e9b-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_blog.html

Not that Obama's collossal flipping on this issue merited any mention on today's The Takeaway. DESPITE Major Garrett's having asked the question of the President in yesterday's press conference, and the President having entirely dodged the question. Actually, the President has been pressed on the issue in the past, and he has said he regrets his vote as having been a political one.

I will watch the Frontline story, but only with my usual expectations; that it will be interesting, literate and powerfully slanted toward a narrative favor Democrats and the left. I have no doubt, for instance, that it will favor Obama insofar as his administration fought to pass an national health care plan, and that if Obama is to be criticized at all, it will be from the further-left perspective that the CIA's drone attack program is extreme and perhaps illegal.

And I do very much understand that The Takeaway is not a neutral reporter on the "Frontline" series; a series which exists as a kind of video extension of public radio and all of its prejudices. Where public radio producers and reporters mix with PBS producers and reporters. As with Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal's interbreeding with Frontline on campaign finance issues.

On Today's Takeaway, I heard the voices of Democrats like Rahm Emmanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and at least one other unidentified Democrat, all categorizing Republicans and complaining about the last Congress, without one single Republican's voice in defense or balancing the story.

Michael Kirk calls the debt ceiling "an arcane" bit of legislation, suggesting that it was unusual or crazy to oppose passage of the debt limit. Well how about that; after Senator Obama himself had opposed raising the debt ceiling.

I make the rather simple and obvious presumption that every single Republican office on Capitol Hill knows "Frontline," and the NPR/PBS tendency to demonize their party. And that few if any of them would cooperate with such a one-sided propaganda machine. Because they have seen Frontline's one-sidedness in the past. We'll see tonight whether this Frontline episode was a fair one or not.

"..if you vote (Republicans) for the debt ceiling, the people who put you in office are going to knock you out".

Now we know why Pelosi and Reid never passed a budget, never raised the debt ceiling and never raised taxes in 2010 when they controlled Congress and spent trillions.

It was a massively reckless political set-up manufactured by the Democratic Party leadership that threw the nation into an ongoing and dangerous economic crisis and it was done for cynical and selfish political reasons.

Anyone who presciently objected to the recklessness of spending trillions with no serious budget from Obama, Pelosi and Reid was demagogued, derided and defamed and still are.

The only way the nation can default on it's debt is if the President chooses to default.
There is enough revenue to avoid it unless the President deliberately chooses default for political effect.

All the above is ignored in the discussion. Why?