In 1996 - President Bill Clinton said this:

I have a mission for you - and it's not impossible.

If a plane falls out of the sky this month - blame Speaker of the House John Boehner and his little buddy, Eric Cantor.

You know, nature hates vacuums - and so does government.

The Republicans appear to have won the debt-limit debate - successfully getting trillions of dollars in spending cuts - and bringing us all closer to their vision of a miniature-sized pocket government.

But one thing everyone seems to forget is that as government power shrinks - something else has to fill that power vacuum.

And that something has always historically been the power of either great wealth or corporations.

The corporations have created a monster.

Remember this warning from Presidential candidate Ross Perot in 1992 about what "Free Trade" will lead to?

This is not about the numbers.

Ever wonder why it is that Fox News can lie over and over and over again - yet continue to call itself “News”?

David Sirota: I’m David Sirota filling in for Thom Hartmann. The criminalization of poverty, the effort to just kick poor people out of our communities. This is happening all across the country. Punitive laws being passed to essentially, again, criminalize poverty in the middle of the recession. Now we’re going to be talking about this in this coming hour.