Josh Holland has a nice succinct rundown on the possible roadblocks to the immigration reform effort. It's a little bit more complicated than it seems at first. It's hard to know where this is going to go. The President seems to be doing the usual thing of starting out on the center right before negotiations begin, but maybe it will work out this time. Rubio has adopted the Democratic attitude that the Republicans will get big points for making the attempt and the nation --- specifically Latinos, I'd imagine --- will blame the other side for the failure. I think maybe Marco's confused. It's either going to be the Republicans walking away from a deal because it doesn't offer up enough punitive measures, "enforcement", "border security" and offers a much too easy path to citizenship or Democrats walking away because it's too punitive and makes a path to citizenship too difficult.
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I hope everyone understands that when Paul Ryan said they were going to leave "entitlements" alone and the sequester would take place that it was a form of political trash talk before the negotiation, right? Nobody really believes that either side will allow defense cuts of that magnitude to take place. Nobody. And the domestic cuts would cause havoc too, so they aren't going to do that either. I'm sure there are a few Tea Partiers who would be fine with all that, but they no longer have the hold on the caucus John Boehner might have once wanted us to think they do.
But just because the looniest Tea Partiers aren't in charge doesn't mean the Republican majority in general is suddenly a nice bunch of Rockefeller Republicans who are eager to put all this ill will behind them and work with the Democrats to preserve the welfare state. There all nuts you know, even if they aren't all kamikazes.
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Chris Bowers caught the Very Serious Man of Integrity Paul Ryan in a slick little sleight of hand. Now it does sound as though Ryan is outright lying doesn't it? But he isn't exactly. In fact, both times he's actually just being cleverly misleading but in different ways, misdirecting the listener into thinking he's saying something different than he is. Today he wants the audience to think the president only says deficits are caused by health care spending because he wants to further expand government programs in order to deny people their health care benefits. (This is bizarre but seems to have some internal logic to the right wing brain.)
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Better than nothing, but still not much. The story of our time. I have always been skeptical of the idea that the Senate would truly reform the filibuster simply because the majority always knows their hold on the majority is tenuous and they might want to block something someday. (I can certainly imagine things I would want a Democratic minority to block.) Still, if the GOP filibuster abuse of the last decade isn't enough to force a change, I don't know what would. And it did, albeit a fairly small one. Baby steps.
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When it comes to beating back extremists, I'm all in favor of living to fight another day, so the idea of kicking the can down the road on some horrible debt deal never seems like the worst thing that could happen. But I can't figure out why everyone seems to believe that by extending the debt ceiling three months the House Republicans have been vanquished for all time. It doesn't sound as if the Republicans believe that.
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I’ve never understood why so many people think the Social Security actuaries have always been innumerate morons, but perhaps that’s just a result of the decades of propaganda about government workers. The fact is that from the very beginning the SSA accurately predicted the rise in life expectancy and population growth. The baby boom was [...]
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Glenn Thrush has an interesting analysis of President Obama’s strategy on gun control and it’s one with which I agree. This truly does seem to be a different approach than anything we saw from him in the first term:
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Krugman says that he gets phone calls: The White House insists that it is absolutely, positively not going to cave or indeed even negotiate over the debt ceiling — that it rejected the coin option as a gesture of strength, as a way to put the onus for avoiding default entirely on the GOP. Truth [...]
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It remains one of the strangest and saddest aspects of our current economic debates that nobody seems to care all that much about our still painfully high unemployment. And it's probably a lot higher than we know. Meanwhile, we're still on the austerity train determined to "fix" our problems by making them worse. I'm sure that's going to end well.
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Who knows if this is serious? But McConnell could very well end up with a Tea Party challenger. Remember now Senator Rand Paul's primary election night speech? Everyone says the Tea Party is dying. But it was never really alive. It was the wingnut zombie reanimated after the ignominious failure of their Dear Leader George W. Bush. They never really go away. And Kentucky is a place where they might just be able to get the job done. Rand Paul won his primary against McConnell's handpicked candidate.
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