There are plenty of reasons Congress is playing a high-speed game of chicken with the debt-limit negotiations, but one of the main ones is that the two parties can’t agree on what would happen if they crash. On one side, the …
2012 Election
If Debt Talks Fail, Who Gets the Blame?
That’s essentially the political query of the moment and CBS News polled the precursor to that question:
More Americans disapprove than approve of how President Barack Obama is handling the negotiations with members of Congress
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Obama’s New Mega-Money
On Friday, President Obama’s campaign released a list of bundlers, the elite fundraisers who collect checks from their very rich friends and families, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to a presidential candidate throughout an election season. There are plenty of holdovers from Obama’s 2008 campaign — famous names like Vogue …
The Truth Behind Marcus Bachmann’s Controversial Christian Therapy Clinic
The therapists at Bachmann & Associates aren’t very good at turning gay people straight. I don’t just mean that the Lake Elmo, Minn., based Christian therapy clinic, founded by Rep. Michele Bachmann’s husband, professional …
House Republicans Push Ahead With Their Own Deficit Reduction Plan
With White House negotiations stalled and an Aug. 2 deadline looming, House Republicans will bring an alternative solution to rein in spending while raising the U.S.’s borrowing authority to the floor next week in a bid to break …
Tim Pawlenty: So Right, Something Is Wrong
Walter Shapiro, writing in The New Republic, gets at the center of the Tim Pawlenty zeitgeist with a new profile, a piece that not only features the phrase “spurning dentistry” and tours the candidate’s childhood neighborhood, but also compares a portion of his gubernatorial career to smoking too much pot in college. The core of the …
Compromise as Liability
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUNIeOB0whI]
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:
Fiscal Reality: The Problem Isn’t Just Government Spending
Ron Paul Leaving Congress
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 …
Eric Cantor, the GOP’s Hard-Line Lieutenant, Sways Debt Talks
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 …
Cantor in a Box
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 to support it in front of …
The Newt Inc. Campaign, Cont’d
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:
Two GOP Candidates Wedded to “Marriage Vow”
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 …