Happy Birthday to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 47.
Some good stuff:
1. Ah, I think I'm (happily) obligated to link to anything that starts the way this one starts.
2. Greg Koger, who knows a thing or two about it, says that the Cruz speech was not a filibuster -- but there was a filibuster, which was " the refusal of senators to allow a a vote on whether or not it is a good idea to discuss the continuing resolution, which was the question before the Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday." As I've said, I agree...but given that it was Cruz who was delaying that vote, and Cruz giving the speech, I'm not going to be a stickler about not calling the speech a filibuster. Even though it wasn't.
3. Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy on Barack Obama's slow approval decline.
4. I like Kevin Drum's question for House Republicans.
5. Sarah Kliff, Sandhya Somashekhar, Lena H. Sun and Karen Tumulty do some street-level ACA reporting.
The fact that floored me in that Economist article is that Cruz said that the Republican Party should look at issues through a Rawlsian lens.
ReplyDeleteThis is just beyond flabbergasting on so many levels.
One is that if most people don't know what that means, because if they did, that would have made big news.
The other is that if people knew, his opponents could use it to destroy him during the primary.
And yet another is how on earth do you reconcile your rhetoric on Obamacare with approaching the issues through a Rawlsian lens. WTF?
I was thinking the same thing. It's so odd that I wonder if it's actually him writing it. It's almost like it was just a ploy to get "serious" people in the media to take him seriously so that when he went into full Tea Party mode it would take them longer to call him out. But even that's an odd strategy. So yeah, I'm just as flabbergasted.
DeleteI think what Cruz was driving at is that the American public is behind a "veil of ignorance" regarding Obamacare, and is thus susceptible to all sorts of scaremongering. If the veil parted, they'd know it was a good thing, just as the narrator in "Green Eggs and Ham" liked the titular dish after he tried it.
DeleteRe Item 1: I knew a guy named Iden who said his favorite words were, "You're right, Iden."
ReplyDeleteDrum's questions is silly, because the answer is so trivial. Why can't a House Republican answer like:
ReplyDeleteObama wants to raise the debt ceiling because he's a typical spendthrift liberal who never saw a federal program he didn't like, and wants the government to spend beyond its means.
When you know nothing about any of the facts relating to a topic, all questions are equally trivial.
DeleteI think there's something too subtle in Drum's argument. It's like e's trying to play a bit of a game, if Republicans can answer why Obama should take their deal on the debt limit, that means they have to acknowledge that it's worth raising the debt limit and reveal how flabbergastingly nuts they are to be playing chicken with it. I take his point, but his trick to get the reveal wouldn't work
DeleteThe trouble with Drum's question is the premise. The Republicans or Republican leadership knows that this isn't a reasonable starting point for a negotiation.
DeleteIt's probably a tactical move that would give representatives a good talking point to their constituents and it's also a proposal that goes for maximum cohesion within the Republican coalition.
JB, there's a problem with link No. 5.
ReplyDeleteThanks; fixed.
DeleteIf you want a different sort of article to read, I'm fairly sure JB could poke a few holes through this Aaron Blake article from The Fix: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/09/26/no-people-dont-understand-the-budget-but-the-polls-still-matter-a-lot/
ReplyDeleteCongrats on #1. Too bad only squishes read The Economist.
ReplyDelete