Mitch McConnell proposes simply raising the debt ceiling. This is supposed to be some sort of brilliant political move. Obama will be blamed for the ever-increasing debt ceiling. The Republicans will be able to hammer him with it in 2012.
Utter nonsense, all of it. McConnell is being too clever by about 300%. The President should accept the offer and get on with his business. Why?
–House Speaker John Boehner, referring to President Obama and distilling the current mood of Washington debt talks into seven words.
From Ezra Klein. I’d say “doing nothing” and the fiscal commission’s proposal are questionable datapoints for “White House concessions” because Obama never endorsed the Simpson-Bowles plan or proposed letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, but I think it’s fair to say that the chart illustrates some Democrats’ frustrations that Obama is negotiating with himself when it comes to spending and revenues.
Ron Paul announced on Tuesday that he won’t seek re-election to Congress while he runs (again) for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Hey wait: Ron Paul is still in Congress? Okay, I knew that. But a lot of Americans may think of him as both something more and something less than a congressman — a free-floating permanent talking head-slash-presidential candidate. So what does this mean? Probably not much. At 75-years-old, Paul probably doesn’t have a whole lot of political mileage left in him anyway. His Galveston, Texas area district is likely to replace him with another conservative Republican. As for his presidential prospects, the Texas Congressman says he’s decided it makes sense to focus on just one race to improve his (extremely long) presidential odds. But it hardly seems that the chief obstacle to Paul’s presidential aspirations has been the distraction of a Congressional re-elect.
There’s an important distinction sometimes lost in the current debate over raising the debt ceiling. On Aug. 2 (or thereabouts), the U.S. government is not going to default on its credit obligations, not just yet anyway. If the borrowing limit isn’t increased, the Treasury Department is going to start taking some very unpleasant steps that everyone will regret in order to prevent a default. While the public may have mixed feelings about — and a tenuous understanding of – raising the debt ceiling, there’s certainly no ambivalence about getting active duty troops their pay or receiving Social Security checks. Obama made this point in the abstract at Monday’s press conference, and he’s able to make it directly to “the folks at home” in this interview with CBS News, albeit with a big assist from the interviewer.
The battle to bring marriage equality to New York was fought by some unlikely heroes. The bill’s champion, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, didn’t support gay marriage until 2006, long after predecessors from his party. Ken Mehlman, the Republican strategist who engineered George W. Bush’s re-election in part by campaigning on a constitutional ban on gay marriage–and then came out as a gay man himself–helped marshal support among recalcitrant factions in Albany. Much of the money was ponied up by a cadre of conservative financiers. And then there were the four Republican state senators who bucked their party to nudge the bill over the line, 33 to 29.
The decisive 32nd vote was cast by Republican Stephen Saland, a Poughkeepsie lawyer first elected to the state legislature in 1980. In an interview with TIME — his first with a national publication since his decision to support the bill, thus ensuring its passage — Saland recounted the process of deliberation that culminated in a historic vote.
Pete Wehner simply can’t get over the notion that the President of the United States is a narcissistic messianist. The latest evidence: Obama’s call, on Monday, for both Republicans and Democrats to make concessions in order to reach a budget deal that begins to solve some of our long-term debt problems. Outrageous, huh?
Oh, Joe, it is on! You can trash-talk me or my family or even my questionable taste in basketball teams. But how dare you take a backhanded swipe at my dearly beloved stimulus? You know, the poor thing has no one to defend it but me. And me again. And yet again. So, its infrastructure spending was too “rushed,” and sent cash to the “least difficult and imaginative projects,” huh? Them’s fighting words!
A huge power vacuum has opened in southern Afghanistan with the assassination Tuesday of Ahmed Wali Karzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s half brother and, fundamentally, the godfather of Kandahar. U.S. officials are debating whether he will be followed by a more benign tribal autocrat or someone alleged to be just as bad — and how much influence the Taliban will have over whoever fills his shoes.
Quick answer: There will be blood.
The William Wallaces of the Republican Party are defending our freedom again, this time our freedom to buy inefficient light bulbs. The GOP-controlled House is about to pass a bill to repeal the lighting efficiency standards that Congress passed and President Bush signed in 2007, standards that the lighting industry actually supported. The federal government sets energy-efficiency standards for all kinds of products, but Republicans have decided that these are particularly tyrannical, because they ban all incandescent bulbs. Thomas Edison invented incandescent bulbs! What’s next: banning rotary-dial telephones?
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