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Some weeks, not much happens in political news, and other weeks it seems like almost too much happens. This was one of the latter types of week.
A comprehensive immigration reform bill has been approved by the Senate committee responsible for immigration laws, and the bill will now move to the Senate floor. This is good news for people who want to see immigration reform, obviously, but the bill’s still got quite a ways to go before it reaches President Obama’s desk for his signature. There are, in fact, six more hurdles the bill will likely face, and some of them are dauntingly high.
Things have gotten so bad in Washington that both pundits and Republicans are beginning to use the "N-word" to describe the president. No, no... not that N-word! Instead, Obama is now actively being compared to Nixon. This comparison is patently...
There are several metaphors to describe the week President Obama is having. Firefighting. Damage control. Playing defense. Today, however, I went with "weathering the storms" because of the unfortunate optics of Obama giving an outdoor press conference today under an umbrella, as the skies dripped down. Into each president's life some rain must fall, in other words.
Is it time for Attorney General Eric Holder to (as is frequently said in politics) "spend some more time with his family"?
Looks like I spoke too soon. Last Thursday, I posted an article about the expected good news on the federal budget deficit for 2013. Today, the actual numbers were released. They are even better than expected.
The scandal currently unfolding at the Internal Revenue Service is actually being downplayed by some who feel that tax investigations into groups advocating an anti-tax attitude is more than justified on the face of it. Admittedly, all the facts are not yet in, but the scandal started when the IRS itself actually publicly admitted wrongdoing. So while there's a question of who knew about it (and who should be fired), the fact that scandalous behavior was happening isn't really even in question. Because it was, indeed, scandalous behavior. Any time a federal agency decides to intimidate those in the political arena in any way, large or small, it should be seen as a scandal by everyone -- no matter your political leanings. Because we've seen what happens when this sort of thing is allowed and encouraged, and it isn't a pretty sight.
Being a student of the political lexicon, I would like to propose a new definition for an old term -- a term we've all used since roughly the second grade. I refer, of course, to the "wedgie." For those who are astoundingly unaware of what this term literally means, I would refer you to your local second-grader (pick any boy age 7 or 8 and ask him... and after he rolls around the floor screaming with laughter for awhile, he'll explain and even demonstrate the "wedgie" for you, I'm sure). Ahem.
The arguments over the federal budget deficit may be about to turn a corner, of sorts. Republicans have been expecting a gigantic budget fight to happen anywhere from now to the middle of the summer, forced by the deadline of the debt ceiling. This fight may not actually happen, though, and it's for a fairly stunning reason: earlier projections of when we would hit the debt ceiling are proving pessimistically wrong, and we may not actually hit it until October -- which is into next year, in budgeting terms (the federal fiscal year starts on the first of October). This could shift the entire paradigm of the political battle over the deficit and debt from one of pointing fingers of blame to one of scrambling to claim credit for policies that "are now working." Which will -- if it happens as now predicted -- make for an interesting change in the debate's dynamic, to say the least.
Welcome back once again to our monthly examination of President Barack Obama's job approval polling numbers. In April, Obama's numbers returned to a normal level, after experiencing a very short post-election "honeymoon period" with the public which bounced his numbers up to a peak, and then bounced them right back down again. You can plainly see this effect in this month's chart: