The White House issued the following statement regarding the Bowles/Simpson plan: Read More
Ezra Klein, on the Bowles-Simpson proposal:
The co-chairmen have some interesting policy ideas for how to balance the budget, but as of yet, they’ve not made any discernible progress on the political deadlock preventing us from balancing the budget. And it’s the deadlock, not the policy questions, that they were asked to solve.
One of the legislative priorities for Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who’s vying to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee is defending the “traditional, incandescent light bulb” against government regulators who want to replace it with “the little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones.”
Incoming Chief of Staff to Tea Party Rep.-elect Allen West calls Speaker Pelosi “garbage.”
Bachman shut down in quest to enter House leadership on Tea Party’s coattails.
It’s worth paying very close attention to the Minnesota governor’s race recount. As you’ll recall in the 2008 Senate recount, a significant part of the Republican motivation for dragging out the legal process wasn’t just to try to secure a victory for Norm Coleman but to deny Al Franken the Senate seat for as long as possible — and thus deny Democrats the cherished 60th vote in the Senate.
This time around any delay in Democrat Mark Dayton taking office means Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty gets to hang around with all the powers of the office and — for the first time — a Republican majority statehouse. But Republicans wouldn’t play dirty pool, right? Ahem … Read More
The Daily Show gets to the bottom of the mystery “missile” off the California coast. Watch.
Via ABC: “Sen. Conrad: Extend All Tax Cuts; Time to Get ‘Serious’ About Deficit”
The big political kerfuffle of the morning is actually a substantive one with long-term consequences. In an interview last night with Huffington Post, David Axelrod appeared to concede that Democrats would probably not be able to extend the Bush tax cuts permanently for middle class but would instead have to extend both the middle class cuts and the high-income cuts on a temporary basis.
“We have to deal with the world as we find it,” Axelrod said. “The world of what it takes to get this done.”
The White House is pushing back hard against HuffPo’s rendering of what Axelrod said, but as Brian Beutler notes, there’s not really another plausible reading of Axelrod’s remarks.