The White House’s attempt on Tuesday to propose a new deal to spend more on creating jobs in exchange for an overhaul of business taxes quickly devolved into the type of partisan finger-pointing that shows why any agreement will be so difficult.

With fanfare Tuesday morning, the White House touted a new “grand bargain” that would sidestep disagreements and focus instead on a longtime Republican goal: a rewrite of the business tax code that lowered corporate rates.

The overhaul, officials said, would generate new federal revenues that could then be used to pay for President Obama’s priorities, including hiring workers to build roads, bridges and other infrastructure.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-wants-to-link-corporate-tax-reform-jobs-spending/2013/07/30/02fd652c-f918-11e2-b018-5b8251f0c56e_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpol


The GOP said Nooooooooooo!

Late Thursday night, the North Carolina state legislature approved a radical voter suppression bill on a party line vote. The measure, easily the most extreme anti-voter bill passed by any state since the Jim Crow Era, now heads to Republican Governor Pat McCrory for his signature. Court challenges, many of them, will most assuredly follow.


http://www.bradblog.com/?p=10156

When Mike Lee pledges to try to shut down the government unless President Obama knuckles under and defunds Obamacare entirely, it is not news—it is par for the course for the take-no-prisoners extremist senator from Utah. When the Senate Republicans' No. 2 and No. 3 leaders, John Cornyn and John Thune, sign on to the blackmail plan, it is news—of the most depressing variety.


http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/washington-inside-out/the-unprecedented-and-contemptible-attempts-to-sabotage-obamacare-20130724?mrefid=mostViewed

After airing President Obama's economic speech live for approximately eight minutes, Fox News cut away to commercial break, promising that interested parties could watch the remainder of his remarks on Fox Business Network.

When America Live returned from commercial, guest host Shannon Bream announced the newly given name of the royal baby and then launched into a segment attacking Obama's newest judicial nominee, Cornelia Pillard.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/24/fox-leaves-live-coverage-of-obamas-economic-spe/195034

GOP Propaganda at work!

House members pressing to rein in the N.S.A. vowed afterward that the outrage unleashed by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures would eventually put a brake on the agency’s activities. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and a longtime critic of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism efforts, said lawmakers would keep coming back with legislation to curtail the dragnets for “metadata,” whether through phone records or Internet surveillance.

At the very least, the section of the Patriot Act in question will be allowed to expire in 2015, he said. “It’s going to end — now or later,” Mr. Nadler said. “The only question is when and on what terms.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/us/politics/house-defeats-effort-to-rein-in-nsa-data-gathering.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130725&_r=0

Senator Mike Lee says Republicans must shut down the federal government and refuse to open it unless President Obama defunds his own health care reform law. That sounds completely insane, but (as I note in my story) Marco Rubio has endorsed the same position. According to Lee, “a corresponding effort is starting to be kicked off in the House.”


Snip............


Meanwhile, Steve Stockman is circulating a discharge petition in the House to force John Boehner to create a select committee to investigate Benghazi. Boehner has favored handling Benghazi, which is more of a conspiracy theory than an actual investigation, through numerous committees, muffling its impact while lending the investigations a sheen of normality. Conservatives want a single, select committee, no doubt run by the truest-believing conservatives, to run the hearings in the most high profile way, and in keeping with the base's certainty of the administration's guilt:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/today-in.html



Vote The Bums Out!

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are moving to gut many of President Obama’s top priorities with the sharpest spending cuts in a generation and a new push to hold government financing hostage unless the president’s signature health care law is stripped of money this fall.



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/us/politics/house-gop-sets-new-offensive-on-obama-goals.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130724&_r=0

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took a jab at Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday, appearing to be entertained by the possibility that McConnell may face a tea party favorite in 2014.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/22/harry-reid-mitch-mcconnell_n_3637155.html

It is the House, of course, where the real locus of the Republican guerrilla war has been located. The first clue that the Republican House would not settle for mere obstruction came when Republican leaders threatened in 2011 not to lift the debt ceiling unless Obama met unspecified demands to shrink the government. The debt ceiling is a formal authorization by Congress to pay existing debts, and voting for it has no effect other than preventing the global economic meltdown that would ensue if Congress somehow decided to let those debts default. Such votes had often been an occasion for the minority party to scold the president for his lack of fiscal responsibility, followed by a preordained vote. Nobody had ever used it before to obtain concessions. Obama naïvely thought he could turn the hostage demand into an ordinary budget negotiation—he would agree to cut spending, as Republicans demanded, if they accepted higher taxes. But as the deadline for the debt limit approached, House Republicans only jacked him up, extracting over a trillion dollars in spending cuts.


http://nymag.com/news/features/republican-congress-2013-7/index1.html

The evidence of this deliberate sabotage is everywhere. Record numbers of filibusters in the Senate. Time-wasting passage of bills in the House purposely deigned to fail (including not just the food stamp-free Farm Bill but 38 separate votes to overturn the Affordable Care Act). A ramped-up media circus that's focused not on pressing forward with any issue, but on pressing down on the whole idea of government action.

Snip ..........


If the signs of the fix are not clear enough, Republican sabotage is also delivered via an astounding level of self-proclaimed incompetence. This takes the form of GOP Congressmen and senators who ensure you that, despite every opportunity and dozens of staffers, they have not read the bills that cross their desks. Despite months in committees and weeks of floor debate, they will dismiss major bills as "passed in the middle of the night." Despite a preponderance of legal training, and despite the fact that it's their job they will also rush forward to tell you that they certainly don't understand all those big words and long sentences in the legislation before them. Why, how can you count on Congress to pass any of this stuff when it's just so, so ... wordy.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/21/1224717/-Washington-is-not-broken?showAll=yes