As people start to realize that chief GOP budgeteer Paul Ryan’s budget is … well, what the Republicans actually want to do if they get back into power, Ryan himself has now been enlisted in the effort to distance the party from the budget he’s prepared for them. On TV this morning he was saying, Budget? Heck, my shadow budget is hardly a budget at all. Take a look.
Minority Leader John Boehner has been out for months calling on President Obama to televise all meeting on health care reform. But now that President Obama has House Republicans coming to a health care summit to actually discuss the policy he seems to have soured on the whole live TV cameras idea.
He’s worried that the actual discussion of the two parties health care policies might be embarrassing or be a “set-up.”
Yet another Democrat retires from Congress. Only he’s a Republican. This time it’s Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI).
Quinnipiac has a fascinating new poll out surveying public opinion on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The topline is clear. 66% say the current policy is discrimination and 57% say gays and lesbians should be able to serve openly. But the divisions by sub-group, while not really surprising, are fascinating nonetheless. Take a look.
Democrats are launching a concerted effort to go after Republicans who voted against the stimulus plan but take credit for its spending back home, TPMDC has learned.
Meanwhile, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) isn’t waiting around, sending a letter to the Republican budget committee chairmen in the Missouri legislature taking them to task for decrying stimulus funds even as they use nearly $1 billion in federal stimulus funds to help balance the state’s budget.
You can read her letter here.
When I moved to Washington last August, I wasn’t anticipating a harsher winter than I ever experienced in the Midwest. Scenes from the epic winter of 2010:
Take a moment to read Justin Elliott’s piece on how this week’s GOP-driven kerfuffle about Mirandizing the Christmas bomber doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
One of the amusing things about the emerging debate over Rep. Paul Ryan’s GOP “shadow budget” is that there’s really no dispute about what Ryan’s budget proposes to do. The debate is over whether what it proposes is desirable (and, not for nothing, over whether the assumptions it rests on are valid). But I guess pointing out that Ryan’s budget privatizes Social Security and eliminates Medicare is just a political attack — even if everyone on both sides agrees that’s what it will do.
The big story is the ridiculous amounts of snow. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Classic moment last night on The Daily Show when Newt Gingrich explained that it was okay to mirandize “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and not Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because Reid, unlike Abdulmutallab, is a US citizen.
Only, of course, Reid is a British citizen. Watch the video here.
What was so classic about this to me isn’t that Gingrich got a fact wrong. That happens, though to some more than others. But it was a larger illustration of how much Republicans are flailing to find any ‘fact’ to plug in to explain why the Abdulmutallab arrest was an outrage even though it went down just like every other arrest of a terrorist on American soil in like forever.
Reid’s a US citizen, had a lot of facial hair, used his shoes not his underwear, had an easier to pronounce name, didn’t have federal holiday miranda exception. Just anything you can come up with. Toss it against the wall, see if it sticks.