Obama is said to have offered an increase in Medicare retirement age. But because the President knows that a grand bargain is incredibly unlikely to fly, what he “offers” should be interpreted through the lens of negotiating tactics. More on Boehner-Cantor. Goldman isn’t worried about default. They’re worried about economic fallout from suspended government services. [...]
This is huge news, but I’m not sure what it means. Ahmed Wali Karzai was the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan. He was President Karzai’s half-brother. He was most likely a major drug lord; he was definitely on the payroll of the CIA. He was therefore an iconic figure: the embodiment of everything that [...]
At his press conference on Monday, President Obama made clear that his frustration with House Republicans’ intransigence in negotiations to raise the federal borrowing limit did not extend to their leader. “I think Speaker Boehner has been very sincere about trying to do something big,” Obama said, one of several compliments he paid in an [...]
House Speaker John Boehner assigned his No. 2, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, to hammer out a deficit reduction package to be attached to raising the debt ceiling with Vice President Joe Biden two months ago. It was a calculated move: whatever the end product was, Cantor had a stake in it and therefore had [...]
I just got off the phone with Senator John Kerry, who told me more about his Infrastructure Bank proposal. It sounds pretty good to me. The basic bottom line is this: a $10 billion federal contribution will leverage about $640 billion in private investments…money from entities as diverse as union pension funds to foreign sovereign [...]
Check out this Iowa radio reporter’s account of a Newt Gingrich appearance there on Monday, and see if a theme jumps out at you. I’ll help with some bolding for emphasis:
I think a certain amount of reporter-source tension is a good thing, but this may be taking it too far.
Rupert Murdoch’s troubles are spreading, as more and more of his British news outlets are implicated in the ugly hacking scandal rocking the United Kingdom. How far will that scandal spread and will Murdoch’s American media properties, like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal or the New York Post, be implicated? So far, that looks [...]
The President was masterful, and prohibitively Cheshire catty, in his debt-ceiling press conference Monday morning. He was in the position he likes best: way above both parties, asking sacrifices from all, the grownup in a roomful of Congressional infants. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself, which is nice–he deserves a little pleasure amidst the [...]
Two Republican presidential candidates have committed to “The Marriage Vow”—a campaign pledge created by The Family Leader, a Iowa Christian organization run by former gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats—and managed to endorse a bizarre assessment of slavery in the process. The four-page document, designed as a promise to fight against same-sex marriage, contains a spectrum [...]
