Yet no one is talking about the most obvious trigger of all — no budget cuts until the official level of unemployment falls to 5 percent, its level before the Great Recession.

The biggest trigger on the minds of Washington insiders is $1.2 trillion across-the-board cuts that will automatically occur if Congress’s supercommittee doesn’t come up with at least $1.2 trillion of cuts on its own that Congress agrees to by December 23.

That automatic trigger seems likelier by the day because at this point the odds of an agreement are roughly zero.

Here’s the truly insane thing: The triggered cuts start in 2013, a little over a year from now.

Yet no one in their right mind believes unemployment will be lower than 8 percent by then.

The cuts will come on top of the expiration of extended unemployment benefits, the end of a payroll tax cut, and continuing reductions in state and local budgets — all when American consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) will still be reeling from declining jobs and wages and plunging home prices. Even if Europe’s debt crisis doesn’t by then threaten a global financial meltdown, this rush toward austerity couldn’t come at a worse time.

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That absence was pretty much undeniable. Still, in Salon, Glenn Greenwald has shrewdly criticized liberal-Democrat scorn for Occupy Wall Street. On the other hand, Mother Jones criticizes the movement on bases other than those that Greenwald attacks....

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As he always does, Paul Krugman described "the stupid narrative" best in a short blog post, "The Downgrade Doom Loop." It may go like this, he warns:

1. US debt is downgraded, sparking demands for more ill-advised fiscal austerity

2. Fears that this austerity will depress the economy send stocks down

3. Politicians and pundits declare that worries about US solvency are the culprit, even though interest rates have actually plunged

4. This leads to calls for even more ill-advised austerity, which sends us back to #2

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I ducked the question because I honestly have no idea -- and I have no desire to refight the bruising battles of the 2008 Democratic primary. I'm firmly on record questioning the notion that Obama was the clear progressive, compared to Clinton. There was absolutely no evidence that was true. One advantage to Clinton, I thought, was that she knew the extent to which the right wing would go to sabotage a Democratic president. On the other hand, I had sympathy with people who dreaded a sequel to the ugly Clinton Wars, and thought a different Democrat might have a better chance to avert a rerun of '90s-style partisan warfare. I didn't agree, but I thought that was a fair and reasonable hope.

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There are great paradoxes inherent in this move. During these troubled times, United States Treasury bonds are still currently considered one of safest places to put your money in the world. And that may continue -- the black humor traded by financial journalists is already flying. As CNBC's John Carney tweeted, "Can't wait for headline: Treasuries Rally As Investors Flee to Safety Following Downgrade."

The practical impact of this downgrade may not immediately change anything -- U.S. Treasuries will still be desirable in an uncertain world.

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I can explain the magnitude of the federal debt pretty easily: The recession caused revenue to plummet, and tax rates have been very low for years. Plus wars. But I explained that with words. Who reads words? No one, unless those words have lines next to them, or colored bars.

The New York Times made a chart blaming Bush for the debt, and it was so popular that it made another one that added a line explaining whom we owe the debt to. (Ourselves, mostly.) The White House made a chart that was basically the New York Times chart but with Bush's additions to the debt in red, for Republicanness. (Though a lot of it was gray, for "no one's fault, really, debt just happens.")

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As for those throngs of sightseers, defying the malarial heat and clogging the DC streets and sidewalks? I imagined them engaged in that phenomenon known as "last chance tourism" -- getting to a location before it disappears, like the melting glaciers of the Rockies.

But my bleakest fantasies aside, Washington and America still stand, although the shining city on a hill Ronald Reagan liked to extol has been graffitied with the intemperate sloganeering and mudslings of Tea Partiers and others of the right who believe the best government is none at all, and selfishly would have those in need huddle, jobless and hungry, in the dark. (What’s the old joke: How many laissez-faire economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None -- the market will take care of it.)

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The natural question on everyone's mind is why? We've known the U.S. economy has been slowing for months, and no mind-blowing new shocker emerged in the economic data on Thursday.

From a left-wing Keynesian perspective, it is tempting to wonder whether the debt ceiling deal's likely contractionary impact on economic growth is finally sinking in, but even that explanation doesn't seem sufficient to account for a market plunge on this scale.

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But Gallup finds that Democrats favor the plan by a 58-28 percent margin, with liberals supporting it at a 51-35 percent rate. That's compared to Republicans, who oppose it by a 64-26 percent margin and conservatives, who are against it by a 64-25 percent spread. Overall, Americans are against the plan, 46 to 39 percent.

These numbers are helpful in several ways.

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David Lynch's ambient, ambiguous video called "How Things Have Been Going" shows that the director knows as much about this crisis as the rest of us.

 On the other side of the spectrum, you have Matt Damon, who always keeps abreast of current affairs ... especially when they concern the GOP using his buddy Ben Affleck for its videos.

 "The Office's" Rainn Wilson chose Twitter as his megaphone, agreeing with Damon that as a wealthy person, he should be taxed more.

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Except, the Dow Jones industrial average has been dropping for eight straight days, and the sell-off accelerated as it became clear that the deal was done. How ironic!

But it's almost certainly wrong to attribute Tuesday's big sell-off, as some commentators would like us to believe, to the sudden realization that a fiscal contraction is sure to retard future economic growth. By Tuesday, investors had already figured out that there was going to be a deal -- that scenario, as the market-watchers like to say, was already "priced in." What they didn't know, and what has been fueling negative investor sentiment all week, was how bad the numbers on manufacturing activity and consumer spending were going to be. There has been almost no good news in the economic data for several months now. Each additional negative piece of data solidifies a bleak narrative: The economy has stalled.

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Which is another budget showdown, as soon as the end of next month, with all sorts of shiny new opportunities for hostage taking, extortion, grandstanding and, best of all -- spending and tax decisions that fail to address our pressing economic needs.

Just a few weeks after the House and Senate come back from the summer recess, three things will happen. The U.S. government will need to raise the debt ceiling again, the federal gas tax will expire, as will, most important, the continuing resolution that authorizes government spending.

Let's break these three opportunities for congressional warfare down:

The debt ceiling:

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What I didn't anticipate was the stock market's reaction to a debt deal. I didn't think it would trigger a market surge, but I don't think anyone anticipated that in the two days since the deal was announced Sunday night, the market would lose all the gains it made so far in 2011. It's now clear that it's not just the voters -- the markets are more concerned about the weak economy than the deficit. If the jobs numbers expected Friday are bad once again, look for a deeper market plunge.

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But even worse than the suffocating anticlimax was the feeling of dangerous pointlessness. Because even as congressional leaders and the president, amid their endless torrents of mutual recrimination, devoted countless hours in recent weeks to crafting a deficit reduction plan, economic conditions in the U.S. have been steadily deteriorating. We haven't had any surprises on the debt ceiling front since Sunday, but we have learned a couple of new things about the economy.

On Monday, an index of manufacturing activity delivered its worst performance in two years. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending fell for the first time in 20 months.

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So there will be no disastrous default. But there is also no joy in liberal Mudville. While some conservatives are grumping their dismay that all their hostage demands weren't met, or that cuts in defense spending are too high, the truth of the tale can be found easily in the gamut of partisan reaction.

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In a critical and entertaining portrait of the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni presented Norquist as an absolutist obsessed with forcing modern political life to conform to ideas that Norquist associates with the American founders’ first principles.

Of course, Norquist is by no means alone in taking that position. That the Constitution came into existence to keep taxes low, the federal government small, and national debt at zero is an article of faith among many who, like Michele Bachmann, have taken to calling themselves "constitutional conservatives." And faith is required to believe it, as the Norquist interview shows. To make his supposedly constitutional argument, Norquist cites the First Amendment on freedom of religion and the Second on the right to keep and bear arms, and then goes on to cite absolutely nothing, in either the articles or the amendments, that so much as hints at a constitutional requirement to balance the federal budget, avoid debt, tax no more than people like Norquist deem appropriate, and keep government small.

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Among them, smaller than expected discretionary funding spending cuts in 2012 and 2013.

The immediate cuts: It may seem like a lot, but the $917 billion in the first phase of cuts were carefully negotiated by Vice President Joe Biden and his group. They include $350 billion in Pentagon cuts -- a win for liberals. They don't touch entitlement benefits, another win. And they set top line numbers for the next decade of budgets that aren't draconian. It still cuts where liberals might prefer to spend, but most of the savings are backloaded to avoid extreme austerity in next few years of fragile economic recovery. Just $7 billion would be cut in 2012, and only $3 billion in 2013. And of that combined $10 billion, half would come from the Pentagon.

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The commission: Again, for all the liberal carping about a "Super Congress," the commission of 12 members -- three from each party in each chamber -- set up to find the second phase of $1.5 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving is actually rigged to force some revenue increases. Yes, the Bush tax cuts are off the table. But there are plenty of loops holes, subsidies and other corporate welfare programs that are on the table. And with such a strong trigger, it’s hard to imagine at least one Republican not voting to kill corporate jet subsidies over slashing $500 billion from the defense budget -- even if the revenues aren’t offset. The question is: who are Republicans more afraid of, Grover Norquist or the joint chiefs? Democrats’ money is on the joint chiefs.

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