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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 [...]
–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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
