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Mr. Boehner may face just as much risk as Mr. Obama, if not more. He has promised his more conservative members that he will extract significant concessions from the Democrats before he agrees to an increase in the debt limit. A White House that was willing to play hardball could put him to the test, and perhaps cause a substantial loss of face.

[…]

If Mr. Obama is a good poker player, he’ll know not to disregard Mr. Boehner’s earlier rhetoric, which gave away the vulnerability of his hand. And he’ll recognize Mr. Boehner’s more recent and more confident rhetoric for what it is: the oldest “tell” in the poker book, a show of strength betraying the ultimate weakness of his position.

Nate Silver
Mr. Obama is most decidedly not a good poker player.
Source: The New York Times

Did We Secretly Elect McCain?

Softening the administration’s earlier insistence that Congress raise the so-called debt ceiling without conditions, officials now say they won’t rule out linking an increase of the borrowing cap with cuts aimed at reducing the deficit—even though they’d prefer to keep the issues separate.

Honestly, it’s getting hard to tell. Whoever leaked this circular firing squad horseshit should be out before lunch. That they’ll instead be promoted is why the administration fails.

Did We Secretly Elect McCain?

Rightward Lurch

And so it begins:

Obama will not blaze a fresh path when he delivers a much-anticipated speech Wednesday afternoon at George Washington University. Instead, he is expected to offer support for the commission’s work and a related effort underway in the Senate to develop a strategy for curbing borrowing. Obama will frame the approach as a responsible alternative to the 2012 plan unveiled last week by House Republicans, according to people briefed by the White House.

Just as we predicted a few days ago, your choices, the entire extent of the debate will be between a center-right proposal (Simpson-Bowles) and a far-right proposal (Ryan plan). Where do you think the Serious Person “sensible middle ground” will be in that fight? Left unsaid will be any discussion of the true driver of deficits: individual healthcare costs. Left unsaid will be: if we had individual health costs of any other Western democracy we’d be facing surpluses and not deficits. Limit rate of growth in healthcare and you fix everything we’re currently fighting over, and without doing it on the backs of the poorest.

It’s now down to just how much of Medicare we will eliminate (er: “privatize”) and what percent of older Americans still get access to it. Then, a couple of years down the road: fewer. In a few more years: gone, because it only serves the poor and they don’t vote. Legislative inertia is literally the only chance that program has for survival.

The old will kindly go die in the streets.

As Ezra Klein suggests, all economic conversations should begin (and end) with this graph. If we do nothing, the budget comes basically into balance:

But nothing is hard to do. This nothing, for instance, includes three crucial elements: (1) All the Bush tax cuts expire, as they’re currently scheduled to do; (2) The Medicare doc fix is either implemented or its repeal is paid for over the next 70 years; and (3) the Affordable Care Act is implemented, and all of its spending targets are met and all of its taxes are collected.

I’ll wager 1 million dollars that this topic or any discussion even remotely resembling it comes up exactly zero times in Obama’s Wednesday remarks.

It’s short, it’s simple, it’s understandable, and it’s true. All good reasons it won’t be used to bludgeon the GOP in the run-up to 2012.

I don’t think the [Ryan] plan goes too far. I think it’s disingenuous and fraudulent. And the reason I think that is that I have actually done the math.

Paul Krugman, responding to the “those who oppose it think it ‘goes too far’” nonsense the Serious People love to trot out when fellating Ryan and his plan.

Hell No It Doesn’t

Elliot Spitzer (4/6/11): Congressman, thank you so much for joining us tonight….Look, I want to begin with the question that goes to a simple notion of fairness. And here’s how I want to frame it for you. The top one percent of income earners in our nation get 25 percent of the income and control 40 percent of the wealth. Those numbers have gone through the roof over the last decade or two. And yet Paul Ryan’s budget plan imposes two-thirds of its burdens on the poor. Two-thirds! Right after we gave a big tax cut to the rich. Does that violate your sense of fairness in a very basic sense?
Todd Akin, R MO: Well, no.

Health care is another matter. That has to be taken very methodically because people’s lives are affected. Nobody’s life is affected by NPR. Nobody’s life is affected by Planned Parenthood. These are options.

Bill O’Reilly, apparently believing the notion that Planned Parenthood is merely the place one goes for on-demand partial birth abortions and the like.
Pop quiz: Number of federal dollars used by Planned Parenthood to fund abortion?
That would be ZERO. The Hyde amendment way back in 1976 made that illegal.
The right wing that increasingly makes up and already makes all important policy decisions for the GOP is after contraception. Always has been, always will be. In their world women are chattel who cannot and should not be allowed to make decisions about their own fertility, especially since all sex should be reproductive and within a “traditional” marriage. Anything else is a threat to the GOP approved sanctity of marriage and inevitably results in men marrying box turtles and the like.

Shutdown Number One

jasencomstock:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday morning that he and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, have agreed on a deal to cut about $38 billion from current spending levels, but added that Republican insistence on including a policy rider blocking federal funding for Planned Parenthood, is the only stumbling block.

“We agreed on a number last night,” Reid told reporters in the Senate Press Gallery. He said he is “really upset that this government is going to shut down” because of GOP efforts to limit access to abortion.

A spokesman for Boehner has challenged Reid’s account, saying that continuing differences over spending cuts, not the abortion rider, remains the problem.

On the wager: Planned Parenthood will be the Newt Gingrich bad seat on Air Force One of this shutdown. Simple and easy to understand, and it pushes most of sensible America’s “that’s just rank insanity” button.

Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)

jeffmiller:

lemkin:

Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document…

There is this strange notion that Ryan should not have proposed the plan he actually wanted, but that he was supposed to compromise before the Democrats even come to the table.  This is insane.  You don’t go to the car dealer and figure, “Well, I’d like to pay $22,000 for the Prius, but he’d probably like me to pay more, so I’ll start at $23,000.”  Ryan proposed the plan he wanted; the Democrats are now free to counter with any plan of their choosing, and maybe the sides will meet somewhere in the middle.

So what’s the problem here?  The problem is that Democrats don’t want to address the debt problem because it means they will either have to sacrifice programs they like or greatly increase taxes on the middle class.  There’s nothing fun about that choice, but Paul Ryan didn’t put us into the position where that choice has to be made.

Perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently clear: of course Ryan should swing for the fences. My frustration lies with the traditional Democratic impulse to start from the position of compromise in response to said fence-swinging proposal. They’ve know he was developing this plan, and the outlines of it, for weeks. In response, they’ve been working on marking up the deficit commission’s plan. My contention is that this is bad strategy unless you want a rightward shift in funding priorities.

But, I don’t consider returning to Clintonian tax rates “greatly increasing” taxes on anybody. Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Period. In a stroke, you’ve corrected at least half of the deficit issue. You can legitimately plan to make reasonable cuts and adjustments and but also just grow your way out of the rest of it, as the economy should be in much better shape by the time of that expiry.