The disciplinary hearing for that wackadoodle Pennsylvania police chief was interrupted last night when someone dropped a gun.
Top GOP Rep. acknowledges defunding Obamacare is “off the table.”
Since we’d gotten a number of questions from readers, I jotted down a short post a couple days ago explaining that we’ve removed TPM from Flipboard, Google Currents and a number of other similar aggregator sites. I didn’t expect that the note would create a mini-storm in the digital news and ad community. So I wanted to explain and elaborate on just what I meant and why we’re doing this. Just note, this post is mainly about the tech, publishing and advertising world. So if you’re here for Shutdown coverage or just politics, this may not be your cup of tea.
I was just listening to Wolf Blitzer explain that Republicans realize they’re getting killed in the world of public opinion but keeping the government closed and threatening a debt default. But they’re worried, he explains, that if they open the government and take the debt default off the table they’ll lose a lot of their leverage to force things like repealing Obamacare, cutting Social Security, Medicare and other similar stuff.
It’s getting hard to keep track of the hostage metaphors here, but if I have this right then the latest from Boehner means the House GOP is keeping both hostages — government shutdown and debt limit — but has agreed not to shoot the debt limit in the head for another six weeks.
Press conference following meeting of House Republicans about to begin. Watch.
Indications coming from House Republicans are that they may pause before leaping over the edge and agree to raise the debt ceiling for a few weeks. The White House has indicated it will accept a short-term, no-strings-attached debt ceiling increase, but it’s also getting in another shot at Republicans for going so far down this road. Even Michele Bachmann is now calling default “foolish.”
With former Sen., now Heritage Foundation sachem Jim DeMint’s (R) new open letter to the President over the “temporary slowdown in government”, it’s more and more clear how prescient Josh Green’s profile of DeMint really was. Boehner is just the messenger. DeMint is the guy who’s now running Congress.
Dylan Scott on a little-noticed rules change the House GOP made just before the shutdown started that still has Democrats seething.