The Senate tomorrow is scheduled to begin deliberations on the long-term omnibus to fund the government for the rest of the year. In an example of why this will surely take longer than two weeks to decide, Dems aren’t even sure they can dispense with votes on both the House and Senate versions until Friday [...]
As Adam Sorensen points out below, Mitt Romney is having a heckuva time trying to explain why doing the right thing–introducing universal health care with an individual mandate–was the wrong thing in Massachusetts. The problem when a politician starts making an argument he doesn’t really believe is that there are bound to be loose ends. [...]
Senator John Ensign is expected to announce in the next hour or so that he will not be seeking a third term in 2012. The Nevada Republican has been battling for his political life since copping to an affair with a former staffer and the wife of one of his closest friends. Ensign had been [...]
Dear Congress, Cutting non-defense discretionary spending won’t fix anything. Please get around to the real problem at your earliest convenience. Love, The CBO That’s the gist of the above chart (click to enlarge) and accompanying post from Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf . In fact, that graph shows that Congress could cut all non-defense [...]
As Crowley gamely explained, he has to, but can’t. Defend the program unapologetically and his primary opponents will savage him over the obvious parallels to Obama’s ACA. Disavow Massachusetts and he opens himself up to the more lasting, and perhaps more stinging critique of a very capable Republican candidate that has haunted him in the [...]
1. Yes, a bunch of states have banded together to sue the federal government over the individual mandate in Florida, but in addition, there are more than 20 other Affordable Care Act lawsuits winding their way through the federal court system. 2. The Obama Department of Justice has assigned a team of about a dozen [...]
This is what a worst case scenario looks like: Qaddafi is ramping up the use of airpower against the rebels, increasingly confident that NATO and the U.S. won’t intervene. Actually, this is a next-to-worst case scenario: the real horror would be if Qaddafi breaks out the mustard gas. Either way, we have the spectacle of [...]
OK, we need a name for this. As the next election season draws near and the White House eyes the proto-presidential machinations of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, they are increasingly engaging in a certain devious form of political sabotage. It’s premature to launch outright attacks, but the White House is clearly having a lot [...]
A poll out today from Quinnipiac, as noted earlier, asked voters to rank 23 national figures from 0 to 100 degrees on a “feeling thermometer.” Among the talking heads and former leaders were the GOP’s potential 2012 candidates. Their numbers seem to illustrate the party’s problem with the prospective field: For the most part, people [...]
BBC’s premier news magazine program, Newsnight, has a story out today on Sarah Palin (full disclosure, I was interviewed for it). They went up to Alaska where they interviewed Palin and, more interestingly, her parents. I wish I could embed the video, but, alas, BBC doesn’t allow it. So here’s the link. Palin’s parents, Sally [...]
