Christine O’Donnell thought Joe Biden had had her phones tapped when she ran against him for senate in 2008.
From TPM Reader TK …
I’d love to see you highlight Nouriel Roubini’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post, where he proposes using the revenue gained from letting the $250,000+ tax cuts expire to lower payroll taxes in order to fight unemployment and increase the spending power of working families. From both a policy and political perspective, this seems like a complete no-brainer. Imagine forcing every member of Congress to vote on whether to lower the payroll taxes paid by working men and women and their employers or to instead lower taxes on millionaires — the perfect campaign issue.
On TV this morning, Sen. John Cornyn, Senate GOP campaign chief, suggested some openness to compromise in the tax cut debate. Specifically, he seemed to come off the demand for a permanent extension of all the 2001 tax cuts and express an openness to some temporary extension. He still seemed dead set though on extending the tax cuts not just for all the money people make up to $250,000 but also the cuts for everything up from $250k to one billion dollars in annual income.
Always fun to see Mitt Romney trying out whatever the political flavor of the moment is. He just told the crowd at the Values Voters Summit that “Washington is assaulting America’s values” like the “sanctity of life and the preservation of marriage.”
Watch our live updates from Summit here.
Mike Huckabee comes out for bringing back denial of care for pre-existing conditions.
As has been observed by others before me, there is a strange brew of the sexual and the political in conservatives’ admiration for the hyper-femininity and sustained outrage of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and the leggy Fox anchors. Now it culminates in a new film from the Citizens United crew (makers of Hillary: The Movie and America At Risk). This one is called Fire From The Heartland, and it argues that everything that makes women strong is “their femininity and their morality,” as Coulter puts it in her narration. You don’t want to miss the trailer.
Congressional Democrats are making some meandering progress on pushing through the Obama plan tax cuts. But it’s hard to go more than five minutes without seeing examples of how so many of the folks on the Hill just cannot get their head free of the kind of legislative and procedural myopia that makes it almost impossible to win elections when you don’t have a president of the opposite party in office with approval ratings in the 20s or 30s percent. What’s worse, a lot of politicos around the country who aren’t even on Capitol Hill seem to have the same myopia even though they’re not up there with their nose in the rules of parliamentary procedure.
When I dial in on what’s happening up on the Hill I hear a bunch of talk about what sorts of parliamentary tricks and procedural maneuvers they can use to maybe kinda get an Obama Tax Cut bill through for incomes under $250k per year.
And then we get emails like this one from TPM Reader MB (and apologies to MB but this email is just too illustrative) …
Why should Pelosi take the fall? Why not Harry Reid?
Pelosi got burned on the Climate bill shepherding blue dogs to vote for the bill. We all know what happened in the senate. Why should she repeat the same performance without getting concrete assurances that the senate would vote on a similar bill?
Someone please tell me where on this blogging interface I can find the button for the primal scream emoticon because this just should not be so complicated. Read More
Wisconsin DA busted for sending sexually suggestive texts to domestic abuse victim.
From TPM Reader JH …
I’m sure I’m not the only note you’ll get on this, but (as yet another ex hill staffer) I don’t think the “expiry over $250K” vote is nearly as easy a vote as you make it out to be. Certainly it polls well, but a lot of members see the $250K+ people as their donors, coevals, colleagues, friends, etc. Most of the people (lawyers, lobbyists, business owners, PR people) who walk through the door of your average congressional office on a daily basis (excepting constituent tourist visitors) are making well over $250K.