Isn't most of the debt ceiling nonsense falling on the Republicans' heads, though?
In the blogosphere and pundit circles? Probably.
In popular opinion? It's falling on "Congress" in a generic sense (about a 14% approval rating, despite the overwhelming majority of incumbents having been recently voted back into office).
I think in general, there's just a mood that our government is utterly dysfunctional and broken, but most people can't see a way to fix it. Plus, they like "their" Congresscritter, which is part of the problem. A dysfunctional Congress may just be evidence of a dysfunctional nation.
I wouldn't say that the US federal government isn't all that utterly dysfunctional and broken when compared with, say, our own or that of other countries. It's in a bad way certainly, and it's essential to have more co-operation, but I still think David Cameron or Nick Clegg would give a lot to be in Obama's shoes right now.
I'd just like to throw in a bit I was pondering recently that I don't think I spoke about in the Presidential Elections thread; if the population of Texas were largely left-wing in their political alignments, say, pretty radical Socialists, would that help to to deal with some of the problems that would come up in the event of Texan independence? You know, the fact that Texas is very polarized between rich and poor, with the social problems among the "great unwashed" eventually crippling the country. There is also a problem with the water I hear; people just aren't getting enough access to the reservoirs, or there's not enough reservoirs being created. Maybe if the socialists were old-school Christian Socialists that would help at least in a small way to get around the problem of the entrenched religious conservatism.
Perhaps if they had some socialistic projects like collective-farms/ranches whatever (not to replace the current free ones, these would be newly created by the government) and some similarly structured groups working en masse on creating new water supplies for the fledgeling country, that could reduce unemployment and also make the country more self sufficient. Perhaps they could even get into creating more windfarms/solar panels/maybe wave power converters along the coast and so on to provide a source of renewable energy for when the oil runs out.