In his comments on the Koran-burning festival in Florida, John Boehner said it’s equivalent to the plans to build a Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan. But are legal; but both unwise.

We just received a press release from the Washington National Cathedral announcing that Rahm Emanuel and his Bush-era counterpart Joshua Bolten will appear together next month for a panel titled “Governing Across The Divide,” to be moderated by CBS’ Bob Schieffer.

Hand-wringing about the purported collapse of the center in American politics is a cottage industry in Washington so no surprise here. But inviting Rahm to a panel on “how civility and cooperation might return to the discourse,” as the press release puts it? What’s next in the cathedral’s line-up: Richard Daley on “Good Government in The Big City”?

Ed. Note: “Governing Across The Divide” is apparently not a reference to the Anglican schism over homosexuality.

Good times as ABC’s Jonathan Karl presses Nevada GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle on her statement that big government is a violation of the First Commandment because it substitutes government for god:

I said that? No I didn’t say that. Actually, that was a discussion I was having with CBN. We were talking in very Christian terms. That’s what Christian broadcast is — that’s their focus — so you speak the language of the folks that you’re communicating with. And I was speaking in their language. And the language that I used was that in our country, we have become a country that has put our faith, not ‘in God we trust,’ which is on our money — as you know.

Just speaking their language.

The full text of Obama’s speech underway right now in Cleveland.

The latest stimulus proposals from President Obama contain almost nothing but the sort of pro-business goodies Republicans have pushed for for years but, as Brian Beutler reports, you wouldn’t know that from how Republicans are reacting to it.

This should be referred to as the M&Ms election. It’s all about Muslims and Mexicans. We talked with some prominent academics about what is fueling the current Islamophobia in particular. Rachel Slajda reports that it’s all about the “Other.”

It turns that a big chunk of the Stimulus spending hasn’t even hit the economy yet. Check out this chart.

I didn’t want to let any more time go by without noting Peter Orszag’s exceedingly lame debut oped in the New York Times yesterday. The takeaway that most took away was: extend ALL the Bush tax cuts for two years. Not just the ones for lower and middle income Americans which could play a significant stimulative role (or the absence of which could further depress demand) but the high income ones too, even though there’s not a lot of good stimulative argument for doing so. Orszag knows numbers and I don’t. So I’m not disagreeing with the economic argument. But look what Orszag actually says.

He says quite clearly that extending all but the upper income tax cuts is the best way to go. But then he writes it off saying that Republicans might not agree to that so, whatever, just do the whole thing. In other words, take a political fight in which the Democrats have the economic argument on their side and in which they most likely have the political argument on their side too and instead of contesting that ground — just concede the whole argument in advance and start the debate on the basis of the Republicans’ maximal position.

Whatever the economic models say, that’s painfully naive as a matter of politics. And politics is not some meaningless froth hovering over the reality of policy. It’s inextricable from it.

Late Update: Greg gets Orszag to sorta kinda half not really walk it back. Boehner take note!

Following up on the Orszag post below, here’s John Boehner’s translation of Orszag’s massive budgetary boner.

Just out from the orangeman …

“If the president is serious about finally focusing on jobs, a good start would be taking the advice of his recently departed budget director and freezing all tax rates, coupled with cutting federal spending to where it was before all the bailouts, government takeovers, and ‘stimulus’ spending sprees.”

So Orszag’s self-compromise is now an endorsement of Republican policy, which Boehner now uses to attack the president. Who could have predicted …

On the second point, on first blush, it seems like Boehner is just doing a mixing of confusion references and lying. But the first part is accurate.

Here’s a chart from BP’s internal report on the eight “critical factors” that contributed to the blowout and destruction of the Deepwater Horizon: Read More