Paul Ryan: House GOP Will Negotiate With Senate On Government Funding Bill. WASHINGTON -- House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) acknowledged the obvious on Sunday: The resolution he and his colleagues passed Saturday morning to keep the government funded would not survive the Senate in its current form. But in gaming out how Congress will negotiate a continuing resolution before the current one runs out on March 4, the Wisconsin Republican provided some telling hints. GOP leadership, he said, would accept a short-term extension of funds to keep the government running while negotiations with the Senate on a long-term deal continued.
Those funds, however, could not be at the same level as the current continuing resolution; they'd have to contain cuts. "Well, our goal is to bring spending back down to pre-bailout, pre-stimulus spending levels, 2008 levels," Ryan said on CBS's "Face the Nation. " Ryan's remarks suggest that, even as the alarm on funding the government is set to go off, Congress is prepared to hit the proverbial snooze button.
Arianna Huffington: Debating the Two-Party System. Earlier this week, I spent two hours arguing with a very witty libertarian and an avuncular Israeli Rush Limbaugh fan about whether the two-party system is ruining America. No, it wasn't just another typical night around my dinner table. It was part of a debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared, held at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. I joined David Brooks in arguing for the proposition that the two-party system is making America ungovernable. Arguing against were Zev Chafets and P.J. O'Rourke. Before the debate, which will be shown next week on Bloomberg Television (starting Monday at 9pm), David and I huddled in the green room, plotting our strategy -- actually mostly making sure we weren't planning to say the same things.
We were soon ushered onto the stage in front of a great crowd. The debate itself made me nostalgic for my Cambridge Union days. I focused on all the evidence that the two-party system is failing us everywhere we look: Female Foreign Correspondents' Code Of Silence, Finally Broken. By Kim Barker, ProPublica Feb. 19, 2011, 4:39 p.mThis piece was co-published in the New York Times. Thousands of men blocked the road, surrounding the S.U.V. of the chief justice of Pakistan, a national hero for standing up to military rule. As a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, I knew I couldn't just watch from behind a car window. I had to get out there. So, wearing a black headscarf and a loose, long-sleeved red tunic over jeans, I waded through the crowd and started taking notes: on the men throwing rose petals, on the men shouting that they would die for the chief justice, on the men sacrificing a goat.
And then, almost predictably, someone grabbed my buttocks. At the time, in June 2007, I saw this as just one of the realities of covering the news in Pakistan. And really, I was lucky. I was hardly alone in keeping quiet. The CBS correspondent Lara Logan has broken that code of silence. Several commentators have suggested that Ms. There is an added benefit.
George Lakoff: What Conservatives Really Want. --Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011. The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy. The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on. Budget deficits are a ruse, as we've seen in Wisconsin, where the governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement. Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work, and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed.
The conservative worldview rejects all of that. The market itself is seen in this way. Is there hope? Oregon Congressman David Wu's Staffers Urged Him To Obtain Psychiatric Help: Report. PORTLAND, Ore. — Senior staffers of U.S. Rep. David Wu were so alarmed over the Oregon Democrat's erratic behavior just days before the November election that they demanded he enter a hospital for psychiatric treatment, a newspaper reported Friday evening. The Oregonian, citing interviews with a number of anonymous staff members, reported on its website that Wu was increasingly unpredictable on the campaign trial and in private last fall, and had several angry and loud outbursts and sometimes said "kooky" things to staff and potential voters and donors.
A similar report was carried on the Willamette Week newspaper's website on Friday. The fact that Wu was in the middle of a difficult re-election campaign from his Portland-area district made his behavior particularly worrisome to staff who organized a meeting with the congressman at his campaign headquarters on Oct. 30, with a psychiatrist joining by speaker phone. George Soros Responds To Glenn Beck, Fox News Attacks.
Liberal billionaire George Soros responded to Glenn Beck's frequent attacks on him during an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria that is set to air on this Sunday's episode of "Fareed Zakaria GPS. " Beck has repeatedly cast Soros as the "puppet master" and chief architect of a shadowy group of left-wing people and organizations who are determined to destroy the current geopolitical system and replace it with a "new world order. " Beck's statements about Soros' experiences during the Holocaust have proved so controversial that 400 rabbis signed a letter asking Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to "sanction" his host for making them.
Speaking about Beck, Soros told Zakaria, "I would be amused if people saw the joke in it," adding that he thinks Beck is "projecting" the views of Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, and who Soros accused of "telling the people some falsehoods and leading the government in the wrong direction. " Robert Reich: The Republican Strategy. The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class -- pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.
By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans want Americans to believe that we can no longer afford to do what we need to do as a nation. They hope to deflect attention from the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish. Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to shrink the pie even further with additional tax cuts for the rich -- making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent. The strategy has three parts. Wisconsin Protests Set Up Delicate Dance Between Obama And Labor. WASHINGTON -- The ongoing protests surrounding an anti-union measure in Wisconsin has placed the president and the Democratic Party in a yet another delicate dance with the labor community.
Demonstrations against a bill that would effectively end collective bargaining for many unions would, on the surface, seem like a political lay-up for a Democratic administration. Unions represent the base of the party. And a show of solidarity with those walking the streets of Madison would go a long way toward soothing the much-discussed tensions between unions and the White House. On Thursday evening, one top labor activist, speaking on the condition of anonymity (for fear of jinxing the administration's engagement), said he thought Wisconsin would be a "turning point" in bringing the two factions together. But for every two steps forward the president has taken, there is one step back. By Friday, it was time for clarification as the committee insisted that its role was "being exaggerated. " Wisconsin Protests: Labor Protesters Call On Obama To Join Them In Madison.
MADISON, WIS. -- President Obama has expressed more support for the protests over Gov. Scott Walker's (R) controversial budget proposal than perhaps any other national political figure, calling what he's doing an "assault on unions. " But protesters in Madison, filling up the Wisconsin state Capitol, would like to see him do more: Come out and join them. "I heard Obama went to Portland, Ore. today. I wish he would have stopped here," said George Nygaard, a resident of LaCrosse who came out to the Capitol on Friday. "We would probably have had 100,000 people here today if he would have. " Every single person The Huffington Post interviewed in the Capitol named Obama as their top choice to come out to the rallies. Karen and Lynn, two women who were taking a momentary break sitting on a staircase in the crowded Capitol, said they had come from Milwaukee to protest Walker's plan. "He owes it to us," added Kathie Free, a retired Milwaukee public school social worker.