White House Spokesman Jay Carney seems to be making a broad defense of the president’s stance on the budget today and a rather mild critique of the Ryan budget. We’ll have more shortly.
Gov. Walker (R-WI): Court delays may force me to lay off a lot of people.
In a sort of non-preview preview of tomorrow’s budget and deficit speech from the president, White House spokesman Jay Carney says the Ryan budget “fails the test of balance.”
Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has just said that the House GOP will just let the debt limit expire. Without doing anything.
Once things get really bad, then they’ll talk.
President Obama’s staff is signaling that tax increases on upper income earners are going to be a key component of the plan he lays out tomorrow to balance the federal budget — I suspect all that means is that he won’t support re-upping the Bush tax cuts yet again. And as you’d expect, as makes perfect sense to do, every Republican leadership office is now sending out press release after press release saying in various ways, “No Obama Tax Increase!”
For all conservatives and for a lot of independents and a decent amount of Democrats, that brings things into focus. Who wants their taxes raised? I don’t. Any conversation about taxes only makes sense when placed against a larger context.
Do you want to raise taxes to close the deficit or abolish Medicare?
For all I’ve said on this topic, this is why I think the White House is making a big mistake: lack of balance, lack of fairness, blah blah blah. That doesn’t focus attention or get people looking at the stakes. I don’t think you can really get very far if one side is cutting to the heart of the matter with a resonant message and the other side talking in generalities.
House Dems send letter to President Obama warning not to touch Social Security.
This afternoon I heard Sen. James Inhofe taking to the Senate floor singing the praises of Laurent Gbagbo, the now-deposed renegade President of Ivory Coast who was just arrested yesterday with the help of the French and turned over to the custody of the country’s internationally recognized elected leader Alassane Ouattara. I figured: there’s gotta be a story behind this. Turns out there is — and it has to do with the group behind C Street, the evagelical flop house up on Capitol Hill that caters to philandering evangelical members of Congress.
Here’s the story.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): I’m all for budget cuts–but not in my state!
This is so priceless I have to post it again. A Republican U.S. senator says he’ll “tie the Senate in knots” because the budget deal in which Republicans demanded and got billions of dollars in spending cuts wipes out $50,000 — that’s right $50K — for his home state.
The senator? Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The expenditure? An Army Corps of Engineers study on deepening the Port of Charleston.
As you may have noticed Sidney Harman died last night. I’ll leave to folks who knew him to eulogize. My only contact with him was a brief meeting in his DC office about a dozen years ago. I’m writing this because I figure many of you know that he was a speakers magnate, the husband of a former member of Congress and for whatever reason saved Newsweek and arranged its marriage to The Daily Beast. What you might not know is that Harman was a very important benefactor of many progressive causes going back decades.