That’s the outlook as the market opened this morning… Down 200 points at the opening bell.  Thank you Tea Party for the S&P credit downgrade.  For the first time in history, the US credit rating has been downgraded.

We’ll talk about why that happened this morning on the show with Down With Tyranny‘s Howie Klein, and Crooks and Liars‘ Nicole Belle.

Today’s recommended reading comes from Dr. Drew Westen… His awesome op-ed in the Sunday NY Times: “What Happened to Obama?”  Howie also recommends Paul Krugman’s Sunday NY Times piece “Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt” as a companion…

Today’s Fools on the Hill stories, courtesy of Nicole Belle:

The country really had a terrible, horrible,  no good, very bad week last week between the 11th hour raise of the debt ceiling and the subsequent S&P downgrade of the country’s creditworthiness. All that madel the traditional media and the conservative politicians spin mightily to find ways to rationalize their roles in driving the country over the economic cliff: lots of finger pointing, false equivalencies and wide-eyed questions about why the S&P could possibly downgrade us.

Paul “Ayn Rand’s Poster Boy” Ryan actually had the huevos to claim that the S&P downgrade vindicates the GOP. Excuse me? While I have my own issues with the S&P trying to dictate government policy, especially in the light of their own ignoring of toxic assets before the housing crash, but c’mon. S&P specifically mentioned the intransigence of considering revenue (which ONLY came from the GOP) as the rationalization for the downgrade.

Rachel Maddow had to make that exact point to fellow Meet the Press panel member Alex Castellanos, eager to use this bad news as an opportunity to take cheap (and frankly, not all that accurate) partisan shots.

Meanwhile, UT Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz shows why coming up with any kind of real solution is so difficult when investment strategist Mellody Hobson offers some really cogent and outside the box solutions for our economic woes. His immediate response? To dismiss it immediately as something she didn’t suggest for a result she never promised. Of course, Chaffetz also felt that the tea party *did* do a lot of compromising, so clearly, that S&P comment on intransigence was referring to someone else.

Fareed Zakaria makes a lot of good points in his “Fareed’s Take” segment in saying that we downgraded ourselves, although his insistence that we have to include entitlement cuts smacks of Villager wisdom and not sound economic understanding.

And finally, it’s not part of the Sunday shows, but it’s so disgusting and it’s so indicative of the toxic political environment, I can’t let it go unmentioned Tea Party Nation’s Judson Phillips appearance at a rally in Wisconsin for Alberta Darling. Phillips told the fairly sparse crowd that he couldn’t imagine being proud to be a liberal, since liberal ideology was “responsible for a billion deaths.” Facts are so 20th century.