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?
200,000 turn out to protest Morsi constitutional power grab in Tahrir square.
From TPM Reader ML …
Your libertarian friend’s reasoning about top rates versus deductions may make sense as a hypothetical Fabian strategy, but I doubt that is the principle behind the majority of Republicans’ and conservative activists’ rejection of higher rates and alleged acceptance of limiting or ending deductions. I will bet that the majority have not come to some sort of psychological acceptance that rates will inevitably rise, and that they simply can delay the first round to mitigate the cumulative result. While Walsh and West got defeated, the overwhelming bulk of Tea Party freshmen were reelected in a Democratic year, so why should they suddenly come to accept the need for higher income tax rates, even if only for the future and not right now? Their reelection “vindicated” them.
Is it the end of the line for Grover Norquist, with a handful of Republicans now saying they’ll break their pledge and support tax hikes in the fiscal cliff negotiations? TPM Reporter Sahil Kapur will answer your questions at 4 PM Eastern this afternoon in a TPMPrime Live Chat. Got fiscal cliff questions? How is Norquist so powerful? Get your questions in now.