Barack the Born-Again Deficit-Cutter Gets Predictable AP Kid-Glove Treatment
April 11, 2011 No CommentI sure hope that the Associated Press's Jim Kuhnhenn has been working out, especially in his upper body.
Continue reading …BREAKING NEWS : Due to technical issues Donald Trump’s private jet has crashed into the mid Atlantic Ocean. Divers claim that they are having trouble locating any remains… White House officials are baffled. …
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During the sixth inning of Saturday’s game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Colorado Rockies at PNC Park, a fan was beaten and tasered by police. Brian Warecki, Director of Communications for the Pirates, said in a statement that the fan was “using excessive foul language and disrupting other fans’ enjoyment of the game.” He also said the man threatened the PNC Park staff employees after he was asked to leave. The fan appeared to be unaffected by the tasers and it took two officers to detain him. Scroll down to watch the video. WATCH:
Continue reading …Senate Republicans Threatening To Make Harry Reid And Dems Go It Alone On Raising Debt Ceiling
April 11, 2011 No Comment
With many Republicans agreeing with Democrats that raising the debt ceiling is a simple necessity, some think the GOP is left with little negotiating leverage. But a little is not none: Senate Republicans could threaten to withhold support for raising it and force Democrats to pass it on a straight party line vote. One member of the Senate GOP leadership signaled this is the way the party might go. “I think we have more leverage on the debt ceiling,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told HuffPost Friday. “Because unless 51 Democrats want to vote to raise the debt ceiling and all the Republicans vote against it, they’re going to have to give us something in the way of a systemic reform.” The thinking is that in the current political environment, the most vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection would run for the hills when confronted with the idea of taking such a politically perilous vote, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will in the end need Republican support to pass it. Reid has the votes in his caucus to pass the legislation, but only if Republicans do not filibuster it (a filibuster requires 60 votes to be dispensed with). Yet the Senate minority has filibustered almost every major piece of legislation for the last several years, going back to when Democrats were in the minority. A Cornyn spokesman denied that the senator was talking about filibustering or not filibustering the debt ceiling legislation in order to hang the vote around the necks of Democrats. He pointed out that the senator was referring only to what Republicans are looking for in exchange for their support. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has reportedly been talking up the virtues of not filibustering, according to The New York Times. Cornyn’s remark appears to line up with that emerging potential strategy. Cornyn told HuffPost that Republicans hope to emerge from the debt ceiling showdown having gained three things: a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, passage of a spending cap bill co-sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and legislation putting into place some plan to deal with the nation’s debt and deficits. “Those would be pretty much the universe as far as I understand,” Cornyn said. The last component could come from a bipartisan group of lawmakers — the so-called “Gang of Six” — who are working on a bill that would be based on the recommendations from President Obama’s own fiscal commission last December. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) signaled in an interview that there are questions about whether the group –- Democratic Senators Mark Warner (Va.), Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.), and Republican Senators Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Mike Crapo (Idaho) –- will be able to hash out an agreement in time to attach it to a debt ceiling bill. “I think it will be interesting to see whether the gang of six can come up with a legislative proposal, and if they can that’s the likely place where that will be offered,” Portman said. When Bruce Jostens, the top lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was asked last week what he saw coming out of the debt ceiling fight, he emphasized budget process reforms and did not mention entitlement reforms as a way of reducing the debt. “Do I think we are going to raise the debt limit? Yeah, I think we are going to raise the debt limit,” Josten told reporters. “Do I think we are going to have a clean debt limit vote like I think the White House probably wants? No I don’t. I think they are going to have to probably accept some combination of budget process reforms, more spending cuts, other policy riders that restrain spending in certain areas — some combination of something along those lines.” All of this ignores what would happen in the House. Even if the debt ceiling increase were to pass through the Senate without any Republican votes, it would fail if the huge GOP majority in the House also voted against it.
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The House of Silk, written as tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle 81 years after his death, is narrated in first-person by Watson The answer, Watson, is elementary. The reason Sherlock Holmes’ latest adventure, The House of Silk, is only being published 81 years after the death of his creator Arthur Conan Doyle, and 106 years after his final story about the tenant of 221B Baker Street, is that the story was simply too shocking to reveal until now. The news in January that Anthony Horowitz – better known as a children’s author – had been commissioned to write a new Sherlock Holmes novel, was itself a literary sensation. The book, his publishers promise, is “stunning”, and the title has just been revealed for the first time. The book is set in 1890, but as written by Watson in a retirement home, a year after the death of Holmes. The story opens with a train robbery in Boston, and moves to the innocuous setting of Wimbledon – but, Holmes says, the tale was too monstrous, too appalling to reveal until now. “It is no exaggeration to say it could tear apart the very fabric of society”, he writes in the prologue. Horowitz is on a book tour in the US, but announced the title in a filmed interview, shown at a reception at the London Book Fair. The book is finished, and in a safe at his publishers, Orion. Jon Wood of Orion has read it – in one sitting – and obviously refused to reveal who dunnit, or any further hints about the plot. The 85,000-word book will be published in hardback on November 1, in a “very large” edition “I think it is going to be an absolute publishing sensation,” Wood said. “It has all the quality of the original, but with a much more modern pace and sensibility.” Horowitz said he had added very little to Holmes, having loved him since he first read the stories at the age of 16. The corpses he left across his scripts for television series such as Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War owed a lot to his early infatuation with the great consulting detective. “I have tried to be very, very careful. I really do admire these stories, and I would not want to take any liberties.” The author had time to take up the Meerschaum pipe as he is about to dispatch his awesomely successful teenage detective Alex Rider into the shadowy world of adulthood. Scorpio Rising, the ninth and final adventure in the series which has awed the book trade by having boys queuing outside bookshop doors on publication and signing dates, has just hit the shelves. Horowitz first revealed his own latest adventure, appropriately, in a speech in January to the Sherlock Holmes Society. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the pipe-smoking cocaine- injecting, easily bored detective, chronicled by his literal minded but devoted companion Dr Watson, were such a sensation in late Victorian England that when Doyle got bored and attempted to kill him off, dropping him into the Reichenbach Falls locked in battle with his deadly adversary Moriarty, he was forced by public demand to revive him. Despite innumerable adaptations and pastiches, and the great success of last year’s Sherlock in a contemporary BBC version, this is the first tine the Conan Doyle estate has authorised a new Sherlock Holmes novel. Until now even the title has been kept secret. Doyle’s last 13 stories were published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1905. The news that he has been down but still not out has mainly been received joyfully by both Holmes and Horowitz fans. On his website one wrote “I’m sure it’s going to be as kickass as all the rest of Anthony Horowitz’s books” – a concept which might have taken Holmes four pipes to get his head around. Crime fiction Arthur Conan Doyle Anthony Horowitz Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk
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Mittens is in! Shep Smith reminds his FOX audience that Mitt is a Mormon who implemented his own version of health care. Mitt Romney is running for President. Whooo. … You know Mitt Romney, he was up there in Massachusetts, he started the Massachusetts health care plan that everybody’s attacking him for now because the rest of the country has one so much like it. He’s had a hard time with that. He’s Mormon, so that’s going to be an issue, just like religion always gets in the way of something . Wow, I forgot Mitt was a Mormon. How awesome is he? Romney uses Youtube to show us how hip he is with all that newfangled stuff. Mitt Romney has thrown his hat in the ring with a YouTube video announcing the formation of an exploratory committee for a 2012 presidential bid. And he’s so fresh that he’s using an old John Kerry bus tour slogan. Politico also noted, via email from a Democrat, that Romney’s slogan, “Believe in America” was actually the name of John Kerry’s August 2004 bus tou r. Think Progress even posted a photo of the Kerry bus on Twitter. enlarge Credit: Think Progress Romney-Kerry same slogan RomneyCare turns five and that’s something the Tea Party can celebrate with the Dems. Five years ago tomorrow, Mitt Romney signed into law a health care reform package in Massachusetts that White House officials have credited as being an inspiration for President Obama’s health care law. It’s a date that Romney, who has distanced himself from the bill, is not likely to commemorate, but Democrats are celebrating for him. In Massachusetts, the state Democratic Party is holding a party Tuesday to mark the occasion, which will feature a “Thank You Mitt Romney” cake. Meanwhile, in neighboring New Hampshire, Democratic officials are urging supporters to sign e-mail petitions and post messages to Romney on Twitter to “thank him” for his leadership on health care.
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Click here to view this media Congressman Paul Ryan gave the Republican response to the President’s weekly address this weekend and I don’t have much to add that our own Nicole Belle didn’t already mention at C&L in her post on his Sunday show appearance on Meet the Press, but the Republican Party apparently wants us to take his budget proposal seriously enough that he was chosen to be their voice to respond to the President this week. So here we go with the same old “up is down, tax cuts create jobs, let’s destroy our social safety nets in order to save them and let’s send the have-mores some more money because god knows they all aren’t doing well enough already” business. Oh yeah — and the country is supposedly broke, unless you look at the hordes of cash the upper 1 percent are holding onto and not being taxed on. Ryan wants us all to be scared to death about this “crushing debt” we’re facing, but it’s funny he didn’t seem to have those same concerns when Bush was breaking the bank. Transcript via the LA Times : Hello. I’m Congressman Paul Ryan from Janesville, Wisconsin – and Chairman here at the House Budget Committee. It’s no secret our government has a spending problem –- and the problem has gotten so bad it’s threatening our future and hurting our nation’s ability to create jobs. Republicans made a pledge that we would work to change this if given the opportunity to lead. Since January, we’ve been urging President Obama to listen to the people and work with us to reduce spending. The president started this year by proposing a freeze that would make no cuts at all. But now bipartisan legislation is in sight to enact the largest spending cut in American history. This is good news for job creators in America –- but much more has to be done to put…. … our nation on a true path to prosperity. Earlier this week, the House Budget Committee advanced a new budget for the United States government that will move the debate in Washington from billions in spending cuts to trillions. We did so because it is unconscionable to leave the next generation with a crushing burden of debt and a nation in decline. Washington’s obsession with the next election has come at the expense of the next generation. We are calling this budget The Path to Prosperity, because it is more than just a budget. It is a commitment to honor the American legacy of leaving the next generation a more prosperous nation than the one we inherited. More prosperous — but only for that 1 percent. By removing the anchor of debt that weighs down our economy and advancing pro-growth tax reforms, this budget is a jobs budget. It sends signals to investors, entrepreneurs, and job creators that a brighter future is still possible – a future in which America is still an engine of growth that leads the world. Right now, that legacy is in grave danger. This nation is going deeper and deeper into debt -– and the spending choices we make today will determine the kind of lives our children enjoy tomorrow. The facts are these: Washington has not been telling you the truth about the magnitude of the problems we are facing. Unless we act soon, government spending on health and retirement programs will crowd out spending on everything else, including national security. It will literally take every cent of every federal tax dollar just to pay for these programs. The non-partisan experts have been clear about what this means: Each day that Congress fails to act, the government takes one step closer to breaking its promises to current retirees. Each year that policymakers kick this can down the road means trillions of dollars in empty promises are being made to future generations. If we stay on the current path, we are heading toward a debt-fueled economic crisis –- meaning massive tax increases, sudden cuts to vital programs, runaway inflation, or all three. Make no mistake: The prospect of a crisis is casting a shadow on economic activity in this country. Uncertainty is keeping job creators from hiring as fast as they should be. Businesses know that all this borrowing and spending today means higher taxes and lower incomes for their customers down the road. Economists agree: Advancing a credible solution to this crisis will begin to restore confidence and create better conditions for job-creation immediately. The President’s recent budget proposal is worse than just a commitment to this status quo. It would actually accelerate this country’s descent into a debt crisis. It would double the debt held by the public by the end of his term, and triple it in a decade from now. It would raise taxes by $1.5 trillion, even though the problem is that Washington spends too much, not that Americans are taxed too little. It would permanently enlarge the size of government by sending government spending as a share of the economy skyrocketing to levels that a healthy economy simply cannot sustain. And it offers no real reforms to save government health and retirement programs, and no leadership. Our budget is very different: Instead of locking in the spending spree of the last two years, our budget cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the President’s budget over the next ten years. This keeps government spending as a share of the economy consistent with the historical average of 20 percent, so that individuals and the economy can be free. Instead of letting deficits spiral out of control, our budget keeps borrowing in check and puts us on the path to balance. Instead of adding $13 trillion to the debt over the next decade and trillions more in the years to come, this Path to Prosperity lifts this crushing burden of debt that is threatening our economy and our children’s future. It is not too late to fix America’s problems. It is not too late to get our country back on track so our kids can also realize the American Dream. We can – and we must – preserve this nation’s exceptional promise, because that is exactly what previous generations of Americans worked so hard to do for us. It is time for officials in Washington to stop acting like politicians, and to start acting like leaders. We have a legacy to fulfill. It is time for all of us to get to work, put an end to the empty promises and advance a plan to prosperity.
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Much of Friday’s last-minute budget gridlock centered on policy disputes over funding for Planned Parenthood and environmental regulations. But another largely unnoticed provision at play in last week’s negotiations involved rules that would regulate billions of dollars of federal student loan and grant money allotted to college programs with a track record of poor student outcomes. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed on Saturday that the final deal will not include a measure that would have prevented the Obama administration from cracking down on certain schools. Last week, a bipartisan group of House members pushed for a rider in the spending bill that would block the Department of Education from implementing rules that would punish certain for-profit college and community college programs for saddling students with debts they cannot repay. Designed as a consumer protection measure, the Department of Education’s proposed “gainful employment” rules would limit federal student aid for programs with a track record of leaving students with high debt burdens. The for-profit college industry, which relies on such funds for the vast majority of its revenues, has viciously fought the regulations over the past year. “It is imperative that the final (budget bill) retain this important funding limitation,” lawmakers backing the rider, including House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.), wrote in a letter to House leaders earlier this week. “These regulations are a clear example of federal overreach into the affairs of American institutions of higher education,” On the other side of the debate, more than 40 civil rights and consumer advocacy groups urged Reid to block the rider from any budget compromise. Their letter to the Senate Majority Leader said the provision would prevent the Department of Education from doing what was needed “to protect students and taxpayers from the most toxic choices.” “The Department of Education’s proposed gainful employment regulation recognizes that some current career education programs are so toxic that they doom students to a lifetime of debt burden and waste millions of precious taxpayer dollars,” the letter read. The House voted on a similar amendment to block the Obama administration from implementing gainful employment rules in its February budget bill, a measure that received overwhelming support from Republicans and more than 50 Democrats. Gainful employment rules would apply to career-focused programs at both for-profit and non-profit colleges, but the for-profit college industry has mounted an unprecedented lobbying campaign against the regulations. As drafted, the rules would track students after they leave college and evaluate them in two ways: whether they are paying down the principal on their student loans and whether they have attained an income that allows them to manage debts. Far from sweeping, a draft version of the regulations would allow degree programs for-profit colleges and other vocational schools to remain fully eligible for federal aid money even if less than half of their students are repaying the principal on their loans. Some could remain eligible even if only a third of students are in repayment. Programs that fail to meet certain requirements could lose access to federal student loan and grant money — crucial revenues for the for-profit sector. Data released by the Department of Education earlier this year showed that a quarter of all students enrolled at for-profit schools defaulted on federal student loans within three years — more than double the rate of those who attend non-profit institutions. For-profit college students make up less than 15 percent of enrollment nationwide but comprise nearly half of all student loan default rates. The Department of Education has not yet released a final version of the gainful employment rules, but is expected to do so within months.
Continue reading …Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, both of Politico, wrote Sunday that Speaker John Boehner's line to his conservative critics should be: “You are winning, and winning decisively. So stop your whining.” While the victors of some specific political battles of late may be in dispute, they write, “the broader trajectory of politics, stretching back to the spring of 2009, is not. The Republican — and, yes, the tea party — agenda is not only ascendant, it’s driving the debate over reshaping government at every level.” Check out a larger experpt below the break, and give us your thoughts in the comments. Jubilant top Republicans told POLITICO in interviews that they plan to use the momentum from the budget fight to take a hard line with President Barack Obama in the fiscal fights of the months ahead. And the GOP leaders said they believe their new advantage in the national debate will lift the party’s presidential candidates — none of whom right now looks capable of beating Obama. “The debate is now on our side of the field,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said from Sioux Falls. “This is just the opening act. But these upcoming debates are not going to be about whether we’re going to reduce the cost and size of government, but how much. That’s very good ground for Republicans to fight on.” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a 2012 presidential hopeful, told us: “When you see [Democratic governors] Jerry Brown [of California] and you see Andrew Cuomo [of New York] wrestling with spending, and inevitably wrestling with the unions who elect them, you know you’re in a different era.” Obama himself seems to be responding to the GOP's push, with his senior adviser David Plouffe announcing Sunday that the president will deliver a major speech Wednesday laying out a more aggressive path for deficit reduction — including reform of entitlements, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. Messaging is all well and good – the GOP seems to have a clear advantage rhetorically – but is that translating into significant policy gains? How do you measure the success of the conservative agenda? Is in synonymous with Republican success?
Continue reading …According to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, President Obama had to be dragged “kicking and screaming to the table to cut spending,” he said on Fox News Sunday . Cantor says White House senior adviser David Plouffe is being dishonest in his claim that Obama was the one leading that discussion,…
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