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The Games of the XXXth Blame-Shift-iad Continue | by Jim Geraghty |
You know, once you spend some time away from the political realm, life is pretty nice.
By the time you get this e-mail, it’s possible everything involving the ongoing negotiations in Washington will have changed. Every few hours it sounds like there’s movement towards a deal to raise the debt ceiling, re-open the government, or both; then every few hours, everything’s gone to pot. You know how unpredictable this is? Neither Bob Costa nor Jonathan Strong know how this will end.
Here’s the gist of the potential deal du jour:
Reports indicate that the (not yet finalized) agreement would extend the debt limit until early February, while funding the government through mid-January at sequestration levels. The deal would also establish a bicameral conference committee on the budget, which would have to report back to Congress by December 13.
The deal is said to include a requirement that Obamacare enrollees verify their income in order prove their eligibility for health-care subsidies, something that was already mandated by the law as written, until the Obama administration decided to delay those requirements. The so-called reinsurance tax, a measure opposed by unions, may also be delayed as part of the agreement. Accounts vary as to whether a repeal or delay of the medical device tax is also still on the table.
So . . . we’ve gone through all this grief and aggravation to A) establish another supercommittee B) get the Obama administration to obey a law that they wrote C) maybe throw a bone to the unions and D) repeal the pacemaker tax. I feel like I could have gotten a better deal from this guy:
“And no one else has an individual-mandate delay, I promise you that!”
This morning, John Boehner and House Republicans decide whether to adopt this deal, alter it, or kill it and start over again:
Boehner will brief his colleagues at an all-important House conference meeting [Tuesday] morning. In deciding whether to spurn McConnell, a key issue for Boehner is whether he can get his conference to back something that’s sufficiently modest it’s seen as a plausible compromise by Democrats and the public.
“That is the challenge, is to figure out how to thread the needle between getting any 218 votes here that we can also get whatever it is closed to passing or being seen as reasonable on the other side of the Capitol,” Stivers says.
Timing may play an unexpectedly critical role. If the Senate begins proceeding on a debt-ceiling bill tomorrow, it could be as long as Saturday before it passes that chamber, given its procedural rules. In that time, during which the debt-ceiling deadline will come and go, Boehner could go on offense.
The Pitfalls of Judging a Booker by His Cover
Today is NOT Election Day in New Jersey; apparently the GOP sent out an erroneous Tweet Monday afternoon suggesting it was. Cue the cries of “voter suppression,” when it is in fact just New Jersey being New Jersey — it’s such a “special” special Senate election that it can’t even be held on a Tuesday.
In all likelihood, Cory Booker will win. One poll released Monday had Booker up 52 percent to 42 percent over Steve Lonegan; another one had him up 58 percent to 36 percent. Turnout should be pretty darn low.
Still, Cory Booker’s Senate campaign hasn’t been a cakewalk or a waltz. We’ve learned a police report contradicts key, dramatic details of his tale of a man dying in his arms; we’ve learned his tales of T-Bone are sketchy to the point of dubiousness; we’ve learned he violated his own law on vacant properties; we’ve learned the human props in the tales of his mayoral heroics don’t think he’s been a good mayor overall; we’ve learned he offers generic cut-and-paste responses to constituents . . . and that’s just Eliana Johnson’s work.
BookerFAIL takes the tale of the vacant property and puts together a devastating video on the “absentee landlord, absentee mayor”:
Lonegan’s closing argument has focused on the idea that Booker doesn’t actually live in the city.
In a press conference outside the Hawthorne Avenue residence where a Booker spokesman said the mayor has rented an apartment, Lonegan alleged that news stories and residents’ accounts indicate that Booker does not live in Newark.
“Who is Cory Booker?” Lonegan said. “Can you trust him? Where is he from? Where does he live? I propose that he doesn’t even live in Newark.”
A few weeks ago, Booker moved from the Hawthorne Avenue residence to a Longworth Street house that he owns, according to Griffis. His rent is paid through the end of the month, but he no longer lives on Hawthorne Avenue, Griffis said.
The Newark Police Department has rented a separate apartment in the Hawthorne Avenue house to use in its protection of the mayor, Police Director Samuel DeMaio said in a statement.
“There have been numerous threats on the mayor’s safety during the last seven years,” DeMaio said. “The mayor’s apartment on Hawthorne Avenue was located in a building with multiple units. The mayor rented a unit and the police department rented a separate unit to use in their protection of the mayor.”
Oh, and Booker regularly takes credit for massive charitable contributions that never actually happened:
Booker told the New York Timesin March that he “kept very little” of the millions of dollars in speaking fees he has raked in over the past several years. “After Uncle Sam takes his share and after I’ve given away hundreds and hundreds of thousands, I’ve kept very little of it, if any,” he said.
The Newark Star Ledger notes that Booker has earned $1.3 million on the speaking circuit since 1998, when he first took office, with the majority of that income coming in 2011 and 2012. According to Politico’s Maggie Haberman, however, Booker “gave about $150,000 total to charity over 14 years.”
That fact makes it tough to square the mayor’s claim that he has given away “hundreds and hundreds of thousands” of dollars of the money he’s made in speaking fees — after taxes. The only way for his claim to be true is if Booker indeed gave away several hundred thousands of dollars this year; that information will appear on his 2014 tax returns. Even that, though, would stretch the truth, as Booker claimed in March of this year — in the past tense — that he had already given away the money, presumably in years past.
As Eliana summed it up:
It’s astonishing that Booker is now 15 years into his political career, and, largely through anecdotes we are now coming to see are full of holes, has amassed dozens of high-profile backers in Silicon Valley and around the country who fell in love with his “story.” Thanks also in part to these emotional anecdotes, he is now and set to become the junior senator from New Jersey. Maybe one of these days a prominent national political reporter will ask him about what increasingly looks like his troubled relationship with the truth.
So if you know somebody in New Jersey . . . Give ‘em a call today. Remind that person Wednesday is Election Day, and offer a thought or two about the Cory Booker that doesn’t get featured on the late-night shows.
Dear God, It’s Even Worse Than We Thought!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — In the famous White House kitchen garden, tomatoes are rotting on the vine. Herbs have gone to seed. And the sweet potatoes — a favorite of President Barack Obama — have become worm food.
It’s another impact of the government shutdown, one that only the fox and the many squirrels that live on the White House grounds could love.
A foodie blog called Obamafoodarama that obsessively covers the White House “food ephemera” and the administration’s food policy has posted photos of the normally immaculate garden looking more like what most gardeners’ plots appear at this time of the year — overgrown.
“Due to the shutdown, garden maintenance has been reduced considerably and only being watered as needed,” a White House official confirmed, speaking on background.
First Lady Michelle Obama started the garden on the White House south lawn in 2009, the first time vegetables had been grown there since Eleanor Roosevelt’s “victory garden” during World War Two.
She uses the garden as a vehicle to talk about healthy eating and reducing childhood obesity. Some of the produce is used at the White House, while much is donated to a local soup kitchen.
The foodie blog, run by editor Eddie Gehman Kohan, said White House gardeners are allowed only to water the plots and cannot harvest the vegetables. White House staff who normally volunteer to pick the weeds are off on furlough, Gehman Kohan said.
“Pounds and pounds of ripe organic bounty have gone to waste,” she wrote.
“Weeds are springing up everywhere, and the vegetables that have already fallen off the vines are now mouldering on the ground,” she said.
ADDENDUM: A new ABC News/Washington Post poll: Fifty-four percent of the public now “strongly” disapprove of how Republicans are handling negotiations in the government shutdown; that number jumps to 74 percent when you throw in the less-than-strongly disapprove. Fewer than half of Republicans — 49 percent — approve of the way their party’s representatives in Congress are handling the budget talks.
By contrast, 53 percent disapprove of Obama’s work on the issue, essentially flat since the crisis came to a head and a broad 21 points lower than disapproval of the Republicans. Fewer, as well, strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance, 39 percent.
The Democrats in Congress, for their part, remain positioned between the two: Sixty-one percent disapprove of their handling of budget talks in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, unchanged from last week and up 5 points from the week before.
So the upside of this strategy was . . . ???
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Filed under: Miscellaneuos News 
Source: http://jericho777.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/the-games-of-the-xxxth-blame-shift-iad-continue-by-jim-geraghty/
