Looking back on the Newt/Medicare brawl in 1995, former Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman has some good advice for President Obama.

White House tries staking out a position on the debt ceiling.

Donald Trump, more stupid than racist or more racist than stupid? Here’s his latest angle on why President Obama wasn’t born in the USA. Watch it.

Weirdly, Trump doesn’t seem to realize that for the purposes he’s discussing, an American mother makes you an American citizen. Period. Full stop.

What makes this all comical and egregious is that I don’t get the impression that Trump is any sort of conspiracy theorist or racist. But if that’s what’s necessary to pump up his latest ‘campaign’ stunt, bring it on.

Today, one month after the devastating great quake of 2011, Japan was rocked by a 6.6 magnitude aftershock and widened the evacuation zone around its tsunami-devastated nuclear reactors. Images of Japan four weeks after the cataclysm:

Former Reagan OMB director David Stockman on Paul Ryan’s long-term budget plan:

It doesn’t address in any serious or courageous way the issue of the near and medium-term deficit. I think the biggest problem is revenues. It is simply unrealistic to say that raising revenue isn’t part of the solution. It’s a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone with this religious catechism about taxes.

More of what Stockman said in an interview with TPM here.

To paraphrase the late Sen. Moynihan, with familiarity deviant behavior loses its power to shock. It’s now taken for granted that the White House must make major concessions if Reps. Boehner and Cantor are to allow a vote to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. A few months ago, even Cantor was saying that at the end of the day, the vote would be held and the limit raised. But coming off his Friday deal, even Boehner is threatening to let the nation go into default on its debt unless the president offers a package of concessions with “something really, really big attached to it.”

Yglesias calls this “hostage taking,” which is a decent word for it. But strip away the titles and suits and as one of our readers put it last night, these are the words of a gangster or a street hoodlum. Your money or your life. Make me an offer or I’ll kill your kid. Read More

I’ve said some critical things below. But I should also mention that in relative terms I don’t think last Friday’s deal is that big a thing. We’ll only be able to judge its significance when we can see it as part of the president’s larger strategy, the unfolding series of decisions he’ll have to make over the next twelve months. Read More

This article from the Times has some interesting tidbits on what to expect in the president’s Wednesday speech on the budget deficit. A key point, the article suggests, is that it’s not just the Friday night budget deal that is prompting this but also Rep. Ryan’s (R) release of his budget plan. Read More

I just had the historic experience of getting dinged at the New York Times website for having gone over my 20 article limit for the month and needing to pay up. At first I thought, This is what I get after giving them a pass on the Dowd thing? Anyway, even though I didn’t have anything else I wanted to read at that moment I clicked through to another article to see what would happen.

Sure enough, there it was for about 2 seconds until a sign popped up telling me to subscribe. It gave me a quick explanation and then there’s this big button with the text “See My Options >”

I have to say it made me laugh. Because, like, isn’t that the conversation you have with your doctor? My options? Is it that bad?

Late Update: I should add on a more serious note that, unlike a lot of others, I don’t see anything wrong or wrongheaded about what the Times is doing. And of all the ways to implement a paywall this strikes me as one of the better thought out approaches I’ve seen. The old one — taking your opinion columnists out of circulation — bordered on insane. The paid vs ad supported question is a strategic one. Different approaches make sense for different kinds of publications. But there’s hardly anything wrong with placing a value on your product.

I’d spent part of the weekend writing a post on why the White House has to decide now that it won’t get into any more policy debates with hostage takers — a point Matt Yglesias explains here. I hope to return to it. But first a different point: The White House is signaling that it will come off Friday’s budget deal with a new and more aggressive plan to cut the deficit and ‘reform’ Medicare and Medicaid. Top White House advisor David Plouffe notes that the president’s plan will use a “scalpel and not a machete.”

Frankly, that strikes me as the sort of over-clever language political handlers come up with when they’re in the midst of dealing themselves a losing political hand. Read More