Obama laying the wood on GOP over debt ceiling

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Round up of President’s remarks: NYT; AP/Google; CBS News; NPR

TPM — “There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or it can fail to act and put the nation into default,” said Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney. “The President and the American people won’t tolerate Congressional Republicans holding the American economy hostage again simply so they can force disastrous cuts to Medicare and other programs the middle class depend on while protecting the wealthy.”

Fomalhaut B, the Zombie Planet, roams around its star once

Space.com — The latest observations of the odd planetary system revealed that the dusty debris disk surrounding the star Fomalhaut is much wider than previously thought. The debris belt spans a vast region of space between 14 billion and 20 billion miles (22.5 billion to 32.1 billion kilometers) around the star. Stranger still: The planet Fomalhaut b appears to approach with 4.6 billion miles (7.4 billion km) of its star at the closest point in its orbit, then swing way out to a point about 27 billion miles (43.4 billion km) away at the farthest point. Scientists call the extremes of such a planet’s path a highly eccentric orbit. Fomalhaut b’s path, scientists say, sends the planet crashing through the surrounding debris disk during its 2,000-year orbit around its parent star.

My mysterious chest pain is about to turn into a dream day

I’ve been walking on egg shells ever since the mysterious chest pains two weeks ago described here. The symptoms didn’t match a classic MI, but they didn’t respond quite like an ulcer or a gall bladder deal either, and they seem to get a little worse when my heart rate increased. That last thing scared me shitless. It started when I saw my PCP last week, she suspected some sort of upper GI issues and did a routine EKG as a precaution. A few minutes later she came back in, looking grim, and told me I needed to see a cardiologist immediately. She wouldn’t say what her concern was, I’m not sure if she knew, but the look on her face scared me. So off I went to the cardio and found out I DO have a serious condition … [Read more…]

Today: AIG considering (Passes) suing US government for bailing out AIG

Final update, just in: Maybe the spectre of public shame in the midst of a PR campaign trying to sell us on what a great corporate citizen AIG really is made a difference, the board has declined to pursue a lawsuit against the US government bailout that saved them. Even the Wall Street journal had a hard time believing they would.

Update 1/9/2013 10 PM Central: I’ve already seen some anecdotal evidence that a faction of the dumbest mushroom conservatives are drawn inexorably to defend AIG — when informed of the basic facts they know intellectually it’s a bad idea to take AIG’s side, but they just can’t  seem help themselves, they keep getting pulled back to insanity, as long as the government is being sued and it involves the word bailout. If the AIG board is dumb enough to decide to try and sue us today, my spidey sense is screaming this could blow up into a great wedge issue.

Hell hath no fury like a company that is too big to fail and American International Group, the largest insurance company in the world, is proving it by considering a suit against We the People for saving their worthless ass. Let’s be clear: AIG wasn’t merely a victim of the 2008 meltdown, its financial products division was the primary architect of the derivatives and virtual exchange that caused the collapse. After destroying the world economy and throwing millions of lives into chaos, the board is now considering a $25 billion suit against the US government that saved it: [Read more…]