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Wedgie: When a political party's "wedge" issue turns on them and instead of dividing the other party, begins to divide their own.
Usage: "Boy, the Republicans are really getting a giant wedgie on immigration, aren't they?"
Welcome to our planet. Sorry that your saucer landed in the U.S. during our messy debt ceiling crisis. I'm happy to answer the questions it prompted you to ask. First: "Is America exceptional among Earth countries in how it funds government?" Yes, the United States operates very differently from most countries that we call democracies. Except for little Denmark, no other democracy has a "debt ceiling." Indeed, no other industrialized country on Earth limits how much the government can borrow and owe.
Yesterday, the citizens of five counties in eastern Colorado voted to "pursue becoming the 51st state." While seceding was on the ballot in a total of eleven counties, six wound up voting the notion down. But Washington, Phillips, Yuma, Kit Carson and Cheyenne counties all approved the measure. The chances of East Colorado becoming a new state are pretty slim, but maybe there's another answer to their pleas for autonomy.
While Obama hit an all-time low in one recent poll which made a few headlines this week, he's actually not had that bad a month, relatively. In fact, his monthly average job approval number rose for only the second time in his second term. Obama had good news and bad news battling it out this month, and his polling reflected this tension. But the news for Obama in October was a lot better than you might think.
To put this another way, while most focused on one broken promise from President Obama this week, he actually made good on an earlier promise -- which is nothing short of astounding and deserves a lot of attention.
"I will not yield to this monkey court!"
The hearings have started on Capitol Hill, and there will likely be plenty of fodder mined by Republicans over the awfulness of the Obamacare exchange launch for weeks to come. That much is certain, at the very least. But I can't help but wonder what the future will look like this time next year, especially on one key question: will "red" states begin to set up their own state health insurance exchanges, or will they continue to allow the federal government to run their exchanges for them?
President Obama today addressed the problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act's website... kind of. He tried refocusing media attention from just the website's problems, and he promised that the problems would be fixed. But he didn't actually admit what those problems were. Today, to be fair and evenhanded, we're going to take a look at the president's statement extolling the good things his signature healthcare reform law has accomplished, as well as the bad things he couldn't quite bring himself to talk about in detail.
I don't know about anyone else, but the image that popped into my head this week was Ted Cruz drunk in some dive of a karaoke bar, doing his version of "I Fought The Law, And The Law Won."
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.