Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), presumably an Orioles fan, is the man who saved Roger Clemens from possible jail time. Sort of.
Republicans demanding Obama protect seniors from consequences of default.
I’m getting the sense that Republicans have only just now realized that the debt default they’ve been jonesing for for six weeks amounts to a thermonuclear government shutdown. Not just national parks and monuments. Social Security checks, Medicare reimbursements, payments to defense contractors who make the bullets. The whole deal.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya … News Corp?
Rupert Murdoch, with son Lachlan, in London.
The AP is reporting that the Justice Department is looking into the allegations that News Corp. hacked into the cellphones of 9/11 victims. We’re told to expect a statement from DOJ shortly. More when we have it.
Ben Bernanke tells Congress deep spending cuts could derail an already fragile recovery.
An overhead view of the Three Gorges Dam that spans China’s Yangtze River, part of our inspiring and sobering Slideshow of the greatest engineering feats of modern China.
I’ve mentioned a few times that the abysmally low poll numbers for many freshman Republican governors around the country are not matched by similarly situated freshman Dems. But no one is remotely in the same category as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York. Not even remotely. New York is in the recession like every other state and he’s pushed through major fiscal retrenchment in Albany. But he’s not only popular, his approval and favorability ratings continue to rise. The latest Siena poll has his favorability rating at 71% and the TPM Poll Average has his approval rating at 63%
Top Dems say they can’t negotiate with Eric Cantor.
Sen. Schumer (D-NY): “If Eric Cantor decides everything, I fear we’ll be in default.”
We’ve written a lot about the enormous impact that a downgrade of U.S. government debt would have on the cost of borrowing, driving up interest rates and increasing the short-term budget deficit and long term debt account.
But as Bloomberg reports, the impact on non-federal governmental entities will be enormous, too. The credit rating firm Moody’s acknowledged as much yesterday when it put U.S. government debt on its watch list for possible downgrade.
Some 7,000 top-rated munis would be automatically downgraded if the U.S. government lost its AAA rating. In addition the credit ratings of a host of state and local governments, housing bond programs, higher education and non-profit institutions, and other entities dependent on the federal government would be reviewed, Bloomberg reports.