Digby has Zero’s latest excuse for cutting Social Security, and no one is buying it outside of the Villagers.

Apparently the “longtime Obama aide” who is attempting to deflect the building anger has the historical perspective of a mayfly. The Hedgemony, the guys who were in office when Zero was elected, tried to sell privatizing Social Security. The Shrubbery put on his ‘show and tell’ claiming that US Treasury bonds were not real assets, so there wasn’t an actual Social Security Trust Fund. Of course, the people behind the attempt have at various times thought that Enron stock and Lehman Brothers bonds were ‘real assets’. The gang that convinced the world of the need for a war against Iraq, got their heads handed to them when they messed with Social Security.

As Duncan keeps saying the problem is ‘People got no jobs. People got no money.’ Start really putting people back to work fixing the infrastructure using all the money that people are throwing at us to get those US Treasury bonds, and all of the problems go away. Putting more people out of work with austerity, and taking money from Social Security recipients is just going to make things worse. From Duncan again: “Contractionary Policy Is Contractionary.”

I’m sorry, but pretending you are the IRS and all I have to do is go to a bogus web page and enter my my bank routing information to receive a refund for an overpayment is not very credible. The IRS uses the US Postal Service for these types of transactions and always suggests that you might want to use the amount in question to offset the next year’s tax liability.

The whole e-filing business has certainly given people some wrong ideas about how the system works, especially the con artists. If they paid taxes once in a while they would know these things.

She came back yesterday to post on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. She hadn’t posted since April of 2007 after she had moved to Syria.

It is good to hear from her and know that she is safe, but painful to know what the US has done to her country for no real reason.