–House Speaker John Boehner, referring to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to cede an unconditional debt ceiling increase to Obama in exchange for opportunities to beat the President up about it.
Michael Scherer and I have a story in this week’s dead tree edition peeking inside President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner’s grand bargain talks. They may have failed, but both men should be recognized for striving to do big things in an atmosphere where the lowest common denominator is often the most celebrated. My [...]
Midway through consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren’s appearance before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper had heard enough. Republicans had been grilling Warren all morning, often on the basis of confusion or misinformation, and frequently with an openly hostile tone. It wasn’t quite as uncivil as Warren’s last, infamously contentious appearance before [...]
This week in London, an attorney for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been making the case against extradition for his client to Sweden to face potential charges of rape and molestation. Here is how Assange’s own lawyer summarized one of the incidents in court: “They fell asleep and she woke up by his penetrating her. [...]
If you want to understand the House GOP freshman holdouts in the debt ceiling debate, Ron Paul’s first television ad of the cycle (above) or the more general election-minded candidates’ silence, this chart is not a bad place to start:
The economy and the budget may be consuming Barack Obama’s presidency, but don’t forget that his candidacy was largely–perhaps even mostly–about foreign policy. At the core of Obama’s rationale for running in 2008 was his promise to restore America’s international strength, and diminish the threat of terrorism, by withdrawing our troops from Iraq, closing Guantanamo [...]
Moody’s puts Treasury debt on review for downgrade. It’s difficult to summarize this excellent Megan McCardle piece on the mutual misunderstanding between Washington’s debt ceiling politics and Wall Street’s default mechanics. Mitch McConnell is incredibly forthright in explaining his escape hatch plan to Laura Ingraham:
Jared Bernstein, the liberal former economist for Vice President Joe Biden, posted this chart Wednesday morning, which helps to frame the current debate over shared sacrifice in deficit reduction. To explain the current fiscal mess the country now finds itself facing, one must look at both lines.
President Obama and House majority leader Eric Cantor engaged in a high-stakes test of wills during Wednesday’s debt-ceiling negotiations at the White House, trading dramatic ultimatums in the most intense round of talks yet. With tempers boiling over, Cantor took his grievances public in an unprecedented press conference after Obama issued a veto threat and [...]
David Rogers over at Politico, who has been doing this–extremely well–for about as long as I have, has word that the President of the United States monstered down on Representative Eric Cantor in Wednesday’s deficit ceiling squabble. This is so refreshing on so many levels. Cantor has been using this crisis to undermine his leader [...]
