If you were enjoying your evening last night, you may have missed the day’s biggest development in the fight over the Bush tax cuts. Specifically, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), an influential conservative, is privately and publicly urging House Republicans to do what President Obama wants and extend all of the Bush tax cuts except for those benefiting top earners alone.
I’ve argued that the move makes tactical sense for Republicans, and that’s more or less what Cole’s telling his colleagues: The top income tax cuts are Obama’s leverage. Take them out of the equation and the mix of remaining leverage points (the sequester, appropriations, the debt limit) actually favors Republicans. Read More
TPM Reader JR on reaping the whirlwind …
Josh’s blog posts recently from TPM readers JT, JB, and KE struck a nerve with me, especially the one from KE on being Asian-American and taking it personally when Republicans and conservatives attacked Obama.
I am Indian-American, born and raised in Iowa (my childhood in Ames and Marshalltown and college years back to Ames) to immigrant parents. Obama’s heritage and identity as a racial minority is a big deal to me, no question, and was an attraction to me in 2007…he is the only Presidential candidate ever to get my money in a contested nomination fight, before he was the presumed nominee.
DC rocked by news that public overwhelmingly supports tax hikes on high income earners and really does not support raising the age of Medicare eligibility.
For all the fiscal cliff drama and nonsense, this is the story I’m following super close.
Nude protestors swarm John Boehner’s office to protest cuts to AIDS funding.
“Boehner, Boehner, don’t be a dick, budget cuts will make us sick.”
To critics of all the recent focus on Grover Norquist, the power of his anti-tax pledge isn’t mythical, or really even that important. Their explanation is rather straightforward: Republicans don’t want to raise taxes not because Norquist tells them they can’t, but because they don’t want to raise taxes. Because rich people don’t want their taxes to go up.
This is materially true, but I think it’s an incomplete account, both of the unique situation Republicans face right now, and of the interesting way Norquist fits into the bigger picture. Read More
Could John McCain really be this dumb? On an interview on his Benghazi/Susan Rice double down he just questioned how it was we had so much more information so quickly about the raid on the bin Laden compound than we had about the attack in Benghazi.
Now, you may remember that the facts of what apparently happened in the bin Laden raid changed pretty dramatically from the initial accounts. But set that aside, you tend to know more about a raid you spent a year planning and executed yourself than a raid on your compound which, as kinda tends to happen in these cases, you didn’t know about in advance and happened in the dark.
Choice McCain quote after the jump … Read More
As I mentioned last night, the new drama in DC is that Democrats need to solve a new hostage crisis, only now with a twist: Grover Norquist has taken Republican officeholders hostage and Democrats have to ransom them so they can make a deal. Like I said, Why? This is their problem. But along those lines Republicans are now proposing increasingly silly workarounds where they can raise taxes without violating the Grover pledge. Like second virginity, these ‘solutions’ are just more of those oxymorons that are not only impossible but based on a ‘problem’ that is intrinsically moronic and needless. Here’s the latest example.
Like I said, get a life. Get into therapy. This isn’t anyone else’s problem.
TPM Reader YF asks something I’ve been wondering. Is it really such a hot idea to cap the home mortgage deduction at all?
First- haven’t the GOP been harping about making the tax code simpler for years? Doesn’t the ease with which they have got behind a salad of rolling deduction caps and comically absurd apply-upper-bracket-rate-to-lower-bracket-money voodoo totally expose their actual and only concern to be protecting the 1% from paying their way? I know, we knew this already- but won’t someone in the MSM ask them about this?