This afternoon I heard Sen. James Inhofe taking to the Senate floor singing the praises of Laurent Gbagbo, the now-deposed renegade President of Ivory Coast who was just arrested yesterday with the help of the French and turned over to the custody of the country’s internationally recognized elected leader Alassane Ouattara. I figured: there’s gotta be a story behind this. Turns out there is — and it has to do with the group behind C Street, the evagelical flop house up on Capitol Hill that caters to philandering evangelical members of Congress.

Here’s the story.

House Dems send letter to President Obama warning not to touch Social Security.

President Obama’s staff is signaling that tax increases on upper income earners are going to be a key component of the plan he lays out tomorrow to balance the federal budget — I suspect all that means is that he won’t support re-upping the Bush tax cuts yet again. And as you’d expect, as makes perfect sense to do, every Republican leadership office is now sending out press release after press release saying in various ways, “No Obama Tax Increase!”

For all conservatives and for a lot of independents and a decent amount of Democrats, that brings things into focus. Who wants their taxes raised? I don’t. Any conversation about taxes only makes sense when placed against a larger context.

Do you want to raise taxes to close the deficit or abolish Medicare?

For all I’ve said on this topic, this is why I think the White House is making a big mistake: lack of balance, lack of fairness, blah blah blah. That doesn’t focus attention or get people looking at the stakes. I don’t think you can really get very far if one side is cutting to the heart of the matter with a resonant message and the other side talking in generalities.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has just said that the House GOP will just let the debt limit expire. Without doing anything.

Once things get really bad, then they’ll talk.

In a sort of non-preview preview of tomorrow’s budget and deficit speech from the president, White House spokesman Jay Carney says the Ryan budget “fails the test of balance.”

Gov. Walker (R-WI): Court delays may force me to lay off a lot of people.

White House Spokesman Jay Carney seems to be making a broad defense of the president’s stance on the budget today and a rather mild critique of the Ryan budget. We’ll have more shortly.

John Podesta says not raising the debt limit is suicide … for Republicans.

I guess we’ll hear more tomorrow. But the signal that Simpson-Bowles is going to be the Democrats’ starting point in budget negotiations doesn’t suggest anything good about where the president wants to take this debate. The broader point though is that as long as the president is talking purely about dollars, he’s losing and will continue to lose. Read More

Well, if you’d harbored any illusions about the coming budget battles not being a complete friggin’ disaster for the Dems, it might be time to push those illusions overboard right now and just kick back and enjoy the fishing.

With Republicans staking out their ground on the back to the 19th Century Ryan Budget plan, Dems and apparently the White House are deciding to make their starting point the … Bowles-Simpson Plan.