[ Posted Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 – 16:59 UTC ]
One person who (assumably) won't be celebrating the fifth anniversary of Romneycare is Mitt Romney himself. This is because the entire issue has become the biggest albatross around his neck, politically, as he tosses his hat in the 2012 presidential ring. So don't look for him to be cutting a "Romneycare fifth birthday cake" today. In fact, as far as Romney is concerned, it would be just fine if everyone conveniently forgot about the issue altogether.
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[ Posted Friday, April 8th, 2011 – 16:51 UTC ]
Sigh. What's depressing about the whole thing, to me at least, is how the entire knock-down-drag-out fight is merely the preliminary round. This whole government shutdown walk-to-the-brink-and-stare-into-the-abyss thing is nothing more than the warmup for the next budgetary battles -- which will be much bigger. The entire initial fight is about staking out ground for the next two fights -- raising the debt ceiling, and the 2012 budget. Nobody involved -- not the Tea Party Republicans, not President Obama, not John Boehner, not Harry Reid -- really cares all that much about how this particular round ends up. They're all stuck thinking: "If I give in now, they'll want more later" -- and they're all entirely correct.
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[ Posted Thursday, April 7th, 2011 – 17:14 UTC ]
The president and the newly-resurgent congressional Republicans at an impasse. Republicans put a bill on the table which was unacceptable to the White House, because of ideological "riders" added. The debt ceiling has to be raised. Republicans talk of reducing the size of government and deficit slashing. The president says they just want to make deep cuts in Medicare. The government shut itself down.
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[ Posted Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 – 16:42 UTC ]
In the midst of a budget fight not seen in Washington in over a decade -- with the possibility of a government shutdown looming -- it's interesting to see how the two men at the heart of the standoff seem to be the least fervent ideologues of either party. What this means for the negotiations themselves is anyone's guess, but it's hard not to see how uncomfortable both Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Barack Obama are at this sort of bare-knuckles game.
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[ Posted Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 – 17:29 UTC ]
The Democratic National Committee announced today they had named Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz as their next chairperson. She will replace Tim Kaine, who is leaving the post to run for the Senate in Virginia. This is an excellent choice for the D.N.C., and Wasserman Schultz should be welcomed to her new post by all Democrats who want to see their party succeed.
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[ Posted Monday, April 4th, 2011 – 15:06 UTC ]
President Obama's poll numbers slipped back a bit in March, bringing an end to his recent "bump." This was Obama's first bad month in a while, ending the positive trends Obama had set for the past two months in approval rating, and for the past five months in disapproval rating. In March, Obama lost all the ground he had gained in February, but still finished the month up from where he started the year. In a statistical twist, Obama's approval and disapproval numbers for March, 2011 exactly matched his numbers for March, 2010.
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[ Posted Friday, April 1st, 2011 – 16:47 UTC ]
To clarify that title: when you pull a prank on this particular day, you're supposed to reveal yourself as the prankster by yelling "April Fools!" (or even, as a purist might insist, "April Fools'!"). I am not doing so, hence the absence of the exclamation mark. Sadly, my task is today is not to prank anyone (I did that last year and promised I wouldn't do it again), but to catalogue the recent spate of foolishness from our national political arena. A sober list of the fools of April, rather than an excited "April Fools!" gotcha, in other words. Well, maybe not all that sober. You decide.
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[ Posted Thursday, March 31st, 2011 – 16:01 UTC ]
The media is currently obsessing over the prospects of a government shutdown next Friday, and over the congressional budget negotiations currently taking place which could prevent it from happening. But this is a relatively small fish to fry, because the real budget battle will be officially joined next Tuesday, when Republican Paul Ryan unveils his budget plan for 2012, complete with 10-year projections. What is currently being debated pales in consequence to the fight over the 2012 budget, although it may take the media a while to realize it, because it is so much more fun to say "government shutdown" in a scary voice on television.
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 – 16:13 UTC ]
The Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives are supposed to -- according to their own statements -- absolutely revere the United States Constitution. They even opened their current congressional session by reading the whole text of the document aloud (or, at least, the non-embarrassing parts of it). So it's a little surprising that they appear not to understand one of the bedrock ideas enshrined within the Constitution -- how a bill becomes a law. House Republican leaders have announced they'll be voting on a bill this Friday (charmingly entitled the "Government Shutdown Prevention Act"). This bill reportedly contains a piece of legislative fantasy within it -- that the House of Representatives can declare something to be the "law of the land" without any input or action from either the Senate or President Obama.
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[ Posted Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 – 16:37 UTC ]
The low water mark is the Senate, this year, who has seen fit to only show up one-half of the weekdays available to it. They took an astonishing twenty-eight workdays off, in under three months' time. That is taking almost six weeks off, to put it another way.
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