The Commentariat -- Sept. 30, 2013

NEW. Paul Kane, et al., of the Washington Post: "The Senate rejected House amendments to a short-term spending bill Monday, killing a provision that would delay President Obama's health-care law.... The 54 to 46 party-line vote made good on a vow by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to reject a funding bill approved by the House early Sunday because it would delay Obama's signature 2010 health-care law for one year and repeal a tax on medical devices." ...

... NEW. Burgess Everett & Manu Raju of Politico: "Faced with a politically damaging government shutdown at midnight, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is gauging whether there is enough support to pass a measure to keep the government afloat for one more week." ...

... NEW. President Obama, today:

... NEW. Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times: "Stock markets fell worldwide on Monday as political disagreements in Washington made a shutdown on Monday night increasingly likely." ...

... Hey, Mark Halperin said on "Morning Joe" that there's no chance for a clean CR. Since Halperin is wrong on everything, maybe there's hope. ...

... Kidnappers Signal They May Accept Reduced Ransom. Brian Knowlton & Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "House Republican leaders said on Sunday that they still believed a government shutdown beginning on Tuesday could be averted if Democrats would accept at least some of their demands to scale back President Obama's health care law." ...

... Jonathan Strong of the National Review: "House GOP whip Kevin McCarthy said the House will send a third government-funding bill with 'a few other options' if the Democratic-controlled Senate rejects the bill passed in the House last night, as expected."...

... Manu Raju & Burgess Everett of Politico: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been the most ardent proponent of President Barack Obama taking a hard line with House Republicans in the latest fiscal crisis engulfing Washington. And so far, Reid is getting his way. When the president considered sitting down with the four congressional leaders in the White House ahead of the deadline to avert a government shutdown, Reid privately urged Obama to call off the meeting.... Reid believed that it would amount to nothing more than a photo-op that would give the false impression that a serious negotiation was occurring, even warning he wouldn't attend such a session. Obama scrapped it." ...

... Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller: "Speaker of the House John Boehner accused Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats of 'breathtaking arrogance' for intentionally not convening a Sunday session to deal with compromise legislation to stop a government shutdown." ...

... Jake Sherman & John Bresnahan of Politico: "As of late Sunday, there were no negotiations occurring between [House Speaker John] Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Obama. The Senate wasn't even in session, and House GOP leaders weren't holding emergency discussions internally. Both sides seem prepared to let the government shutdown happen and then squabble over who is to blame. The House will reconvene Monday at 10 a.m., but Republicans will just wait. The Senate is scheduled to return Monday afternoon, and Reid says Senate Democrats will move quickly then to reject two House amendments to the government funding bill. That would leave just hours before a government shutdown." ...

... Evidently that seems fair to the Editors of the Washington Post, who win the Both-Sides-Do-It Raspberry: Speaker "Boehner, his counterpart in the Senate, Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), minority leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the president. Both sides are inordinately concerned with making sure that, if catastrophe comes, the other side takes the political hit. In truth, none of their reputations stands to benefit." Congratulations, you yahoos, for effectively endorsing the notion that refusing to fund legally-established social programs is a legitimate "bargaining chip." ...

... CW: The Post editors should read their own blogger Greg Sargent, who explains to the ignorant, "... both sides agree that a government shutdown should be avoided. Asking for only some of the undermining of Obamacare you want in exchange for doing what you agree must happen for the good of the country, rather than all of it, is not a concession and doesn't demonstrate a willingness to compromise. After all, what Republicans want is to fund the government at sequester levels (which is already a win for them; Republicans themselves have described the sequester as a 'victory'), and to delay or block parts of Obamacare on top of that. In the 'compromise' scenario Republicans are insisting on, then, only one side -- Democrats -- would be making concessions, and Republicans wouldn't be giving up anything. Folks inclined to blame 'both sides' for what's happening here need to reckon with this basic imbalance." ...

... Burgess Everett: "About 20 House Republicans gathered on the steps of the United States Senate on Sunday afternoon ... demanding that the Senate come back in session, accusing the Democratic controlled chamber of being 'lazy' and Majority Leader Harry Reid of taking his ball and going home rather than negotiating with GOP leadership over the weekend." ...

... Dylan Stableford of Yahoo News: "With a possible government shutdown looming, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz tried to place the blame on squarely on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for refusing to compromise on the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care law." ...

... BUT. I'm prepared to vote for a clean resolution tomorrow. It's time to govern. I don't intend to support a fool's errand at this point. -- Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.)

AND. I disagree with the strategy of linking Obamacare with the continuing functioning of government-a strategy that cannot possibly work. -- Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) ...

... Brigid Schulte & Justin Jouvenal of the Washington Post: "The Washington region ... could lose an estimated $200 million a day and could see more than 700,000 jobs take a financial hit if the federal government shuts down Monday night.... And that's not counting the blow to tourism, one of the region's economic mainstays, if the Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo, Civil War battlefields and other federally funded attractions are shuttered...."

... Paul Krugman: "This may be the way the world ends -- not with a bang but with a temper tantrum.... This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves." ...

... Fiscal Conservatives, My Ass. Tara Culp-Ressler of Think Progress rounds up some of the costs to the economy (& for consumers) that would result from the GOP "compromise" of delaying implementation of the ACA for a year. ...

... Andy Borowitz: "In a special Sunday radio address, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) delivered a health tip to the American people, advising them to delay getting cancer for a year." CW: if I didn't say so last week, I meant to: people will die if House Republicans get their way. ...

... Andrew Cohen of the Atlantic: "If rogue Republicans do not relent over the budget impasse by October 1, whatever pandemonium happens next will largely be governed by a federal statute you likely have never heard of: the Antideficiency Act." Very interesting. Thanks to contributor Barbarossa for the link. ...

** Impeached if He Does, Damned if He Doesn't. Henry Aaron (no, not that Henry Aaron) of the Brookings Institution in the New York Times: "Failure to raise the debt will force the president to break a law -- the only question is which one.... If President Obama spends what the law orders him to spend and collects the taxes Congress has authorized him to collect, then he must borrow more than Congress has authorized him to borrow. If the debt ceiling is not raised, he will have to violate one of these constitutional imperatives.... In 2011..., Professors Neil H. Buchanan and Michael C. Dorf, who parsed the arguments in the Columbia Law Review in 2012, concluded that all options were bad, but that disregarding the debt ceiling was least bad from a legal standpoint. I agree.... If Congress leaves the debt ceiling at a level inconsistent with duly enacted spending and tax laws, the president has no choice but to ignore it." ...

     ... CW: Maybe the Orange Man is cagier than we thought. As Aaron points out, if President Obama takes his (Aaron's) advice -- which I think is excellent advice -- the House could impeach Obama, though the Senate would not convict him. This would give those Tea Party grandstanders exactly what they want; a number of them have already said they wanted to impeach Obama: they just haven't been able to find a law he's broken. Poor things are impeachers in search of an impeachable offense. Obama's ignoring the debt ceiling could be just the ticket. The downside for Republicans: the public has no taste for impeachment. Even though President Clinton's behavior actually was scandalous, impeachment made Clinton more -- not less -- popular. I doubt that impeachment would be better the second time around. ...

     ... Buchanan & Dorf, BTW, read the Constitution exactly as I do (something I mentioned last week) -- that the President has an obligation to pay bills incurred under the aegis of Congressional laws as part of his Constitutional mandate to "take care that the Laws be faithfully executed." ...

... Conservative & former Bushie David Frum in the Daily Beast: "... it's hard to see any positive outcome emerging for Republicans from this confrontation. Yet the party is charging forward anyway. Why? The short answer is a breakdown in the party's ability to govern itself. It can't think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss. "'

... Steve M. of NMMNB: "... even if Republicans get all the blame for what's about to happen, and plummet in the polls, it doesn't matter: the political establishment will desperately cast about for some 'new' GOP, at least until the stench of the shutdown/default moment has lifted. Mainstream journalists will develop a fascination with Chris Christie (he's not a Washington Republican!) or Jeb Bush (he's so reasonable!) or Peter King (he doesn't like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, and he didn't vote for Bill Clinton's impeachment!) They'll do anything not to admit that that the Republican Party is rotten to the core." Steve makes his case with a short history lesson on the Short Life of Major GOP Screw-Ups. ...

... Zeke Miller of Time: "Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the once esteemed Heritage Foundation, has been working day and night for years to bring about just the crisis now gripping DC.... Heritage's willingness to take aim at its own party has irked more mainstream Republicans." ...

... David Rogers of Politico blames it all on -- Paul Ryan. Ryan's so-called balanced budget for FY 2014 was a winger's wet dream that didn't add up. It "held out the promise of repealing Obamacare but got to balance only by keeping hundreds of billions in added revenues and Medicare savings in the Affordable Care Act." There were other problems -- even for fiscal conservatives -- in the fine print: to achive a pretense of balance required drastic cuts to programs that teabaggers favored. Ryan "is too smart not to have seen the holes in his budget plan. And once the Senate followed with its own resolution, he failed to follow up by aggressively pursuing a conference with Democrats." CW: When, or when, will the Village People get over the notion that Paul Ryan is a brilliant numbers guy? Rogers is perhaps the best news analyst Politico has, yet he can't see through the smoke-&-mirror scams of the Vice Presidential Second Runner-Up.

Vice President Joe Biden in the Des Moines Register on the Affordable Care Act & explaining some of its provisions. ...

... Emery Dalesio of the AP: "With new online health insurance exchanges set to launch Tuesday, consumers in many Southern and Plains states will have to look harder for information on how the marketplaces work than their counterparts elsewhere. In Republican-led states that oppose the federal Affordable Care Act, the strategy has ranged from largely ignoring the health overhaul to encouraging residents not to sign up and even making it harder for nonprofit organizations to provide information about the exchanges." ...

... Robert Pear of the New York Times: "The Obama administration plans on Monday to announce scores of new health insurance options to be offered to consumers around the country by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and the United States Office of Personnel Management, the agency that arranges health benefits for federal employees.... The options are part of a multistate insurance program that Congress authorized in 2010 to increase options for consumers shopping in the online insurance markets scheduled to open on Tuesday. Congress conceived multistate plans as an alternative to a pure government-run insurance program -- the 'public option.' ..."

Bill Keller joins the ranks of pundits who try to equate Tea Party anarchists with 1960s anti-war radicals. Not exactly original thinking; political scientists often drawn the left-right continuum not as a straight line but as a circle. At least Keller has the sense to note some of the differences: the conservatives' "mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance."

** Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The Justice Department is expected to sue North Carolina on Monday over its restrictive new voting law, further escalating the Obama administration's efforts to restore a stronger federal role in protecting minority voters after the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, according to a person familiar with the department's plans."

Eric Schmitt & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "As the nation's spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August, [first reported by McClatchy News,] has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.... American counterterrorism officials say they believe the disclosure about the Qaeda plot has had a significant impact because it was a specific event that signaled to terrorists that a main communication network that the group's leaders were using was being monitored."

Felix Salmon of Reuters: "I don't know which producer at CNBC had the genius idea of asking Alex Pareene on to discuss Jamie Dimon with Dimon's biggest cheerleaders, but the result was truly great television" (read Salmon's commentary, too):

Getting a Jump-Start on Starving the Kiddies. Kevin Murphy of Reuters: "As Congress and the White House debate proposed cuts in the federal food stamps program, Kansas and Oklahoma are going ahead with reductions that could leave thousands of people without subsidies for food if they do not find work, or sign up for job training. The two states will require healthy adults through the age of 49 with no dependents to work at least 20 hours per week, or be in job training, in order to be eligible for food stamps."

Local News

Jeff Spross of Think Progress: Anita Perry, who is married to Gov. Goodhair, twice during a brief interview, referred to abortion as "a woman's right." She said (somewhat inarticulately) that she herself wouldn't choose to have an abortion, but that "If they want to do that, that is their decision. They have to live with that decision.... It is not something that I would say for them." CW: Anita Perry is a nurse & the daughter & granddaughter of doctors.

Lieutenant Governors Race

Washington Post Editors: "... the lieutenant governor [of Virginia] does have one important task: preside over the state Senate and cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie. At the moment, Democrats and Republicans are evenly split in Virginia's Senate; each party holds 20 seats.... E.W. Jackson, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia..., is an embarrassment to the Republican Party, which nominated him in a sparsely attended party convention based on little more than stirring oratory.... The Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor is Democratic state Sen. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist. In contrast to Mr. Jackson, Mr. Northam, a fiscal conservative who represents a district encompassing parts of Hampton Roads and the Eastern Shore, is a calm, collected fellow, well respected by members of both parties."

News Ledes

New York Times: "Two senior Marine Corps generals [-- Maj. Gen. Charles M. Gurganus & Maj. Gen. Gregg A. Sturdevant --] have been ordered to take early retirement after being found responsible for errors in judgment and failure to provide adequate security at a base in southwestern Afghanistan that was the scene of a deadly -- and humiliating -- insurgent attack last year that killed two Marines and destroyed six Harrier attack jets.

BBC News: "The Pope said in July that he would canonise his two predecessors, after approving a second miracle attributed to John Paul. Polish John Paul, the first non-Italian pope for more than 400 years, led the Catholic Church from 1978-2005. Pope John was pontiff from 1958-1963, calling the Second Vatican Council that transformed the Church. The decision to canonise the two at the same time appears designed to unify Catholics...."

The Commentariat -- Sept. 29, 2013

Stupid Party Tricks, Ctd.

Chris Moody of, appropriately enough, Yahoo News: "The House approved a spending bill early Sunday morning that would fund the government through Dec. 15, but tacked on amendments that would delay ... Obamacare for one year and repeal the medical device tax, a move that sets up a showdown with Senate Democrats and increases the probability of a government shutdown Tuesday. The Obamacare delay amendment passed 231-192, and the vote on the medical device tax, which would help cover the costs of Obamacare, was 248-174. The House also unanimously passed a bill to fund the military in the event of a shutdown." ...

... John Bresnahan & Jake Sherman of Politico: "Republicans moved onto the House floor Saturday evening to attempt to pass a bill that funds the government for three months, delays Obamacare for one and permanently repeals a tax on medical devices. The House Republican Conference appeared, for once, unified behind the measure, and was expected to vote late into Saturday night. House Republicans also intend to advance a bill to pay U.S. troops in the case of a government shutdown." ...

... Lisa Desjardins of CNN: "House Republicans have added a measure aimed at limiting contraceptive coverage to the spending bill coming up for a vote Saturday night...." CW: Hell, why not? All you federal workers or furlough can just stay home & make babies. ...

     ... Scott Lemieux in Lawyers, Guns & Money: Never waste a crisis for neglecting to punish women!.... I remember when the hot proposition among centrist pundits was a 'Grand Bargain' in which pro-choicers would agree that abortion was gross and should be made arbitrarily less accessible to poor women in exchange for greater access to contraception. In addition to the first part being a terrible idea, the crucial flaw in the plan has always been that most actually existing American anti-choicers care about regulating female sexuality, not protecting fetal life.... And don't call it a 'conscience clause.' It's a 'denial of healthcare people are legally entitled to' clause and an 'imposing one's religious beliefs on others' clause.'"

... Paul Kane, et al., of the Washington Post: "House Republican leaders proposed a new plan to the GOP rank-and-file Saturday afternoon: Make a new gesture of defiance toward President Obama's health-care law, even if it increases the chances of a government shutdown Monday night. Their plan calls for amendments to a bill designed to keep the government open for a few more weeks. The changes would include a one-year delay in the health-care law, which is set to take effect next month. The GOP plan would also repeal, permanently, a medical-device tax included in the law. The advantage of that plan -- for Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and his team -- is political. After being criticized by GOP hard-liners for not doing enough to undermine the health-care law, Boehner has taken a far more aggressive position. Instead of seeking to take away some of the money to implement Obamacare, their new plan would push back the whole thing." ...

... AP: "The White House says President Barack Obama would veto House Republican legislation that would delay much of the president's health care overhaul for a year and cancel a tax on medical devices." CW: Read the "Statement by the Press Secretary." It is really tough. We should be delighted. ...

By pandering to the Tea Party minority and trying to delay the benefits of health care reform for millions of seniors and families, House Republicans are now actively pushing for a completely unnecessary government shutdown. -- Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee

This is a warmup act to the debt ceiling. The inability to get a clean [short-term budget] out of the House -- something I believe the Republican leadership actually wants -- should dispel any lingering doubts about who's in control over there. -- Jared Bernstein, former Obama administration economist

Mr. President, we are at one of the most dangerous points in our history right now. Every bit as dangerous as the break-up of the Union before the Civil War. -- Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), on the Senate floor Friday

... Burgess Everett & Manu Raju of Politico: "Senate Democrats will reject the House government funding bill on the eve of a shutdown, seeking to pressure House Republicans to approve their plan to keep government running past Tuesday. 'We are not discussing extensions. The only way out of this is for the House to pass our clean CR [continuing resolution],' a senior Senate Democratic aide said. 'A one-year delay will not pass the Senate and the House knows it,' added a second Democratic aide." ...

... As the Washington Post report (linked above) states, "The GOP plan would also repeal, permanently, a medical-device tax included in the law." In case you're wondering what that's all about, Lee Fang of the Nation has the skinny on that. Let's be fair to teabaggers: they aren't just foaming-at-the-mouth ideologues; sometimes they can be cute little lobbyists' puppets, too.

... This must be Ezra Klein's philosophy:

      ... BECAUSE Klein sees Boehner's plan to shut down the government as good news: "Boehner's original plan was to pass a clean bill to fund the government and then attach the one-year delay of Obamacare to the debt-ceiling bill. It was a strategy that would minimize the chances of a shutdown but maximize the chances of a default.... But that strategy failed. Boehner's members refused to wait for the debt ceiling.... Moving the one-year delay of Obamacare to the CR maximizes the chances of a shutdown but makes a default at least somewhat less likely." CW: We'll see. The obvious solution is to bring bills to the floor that can pass with Democratic & some Republican support. That may be Boehner's Hail Mary on the debt ceiling bill. ...

CW: Read this, Ezra, & let us know if you think these teabaggers can be chastened:

The whole room [said], 'Let's vote!' I said, like 9/11, 'Let's roll! -- Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), likening himself and his fellow teabagger saboteurs to Todd Beamer & the other heroes of Flight 93, who lost their lives in Pennsylvania but prevented hijackers from crashing their plane into a Washington, D.C. building on 9/11 ...

... Molly Ball of the Atlantic: "Optimistic commentators think closure could keep the country from breaching the debt ceiling. But there's no reason a few stubborn House members can't provoke both." Remember, "Earlier this week, Boehner sought to rally his caucus around a proposal to raise the debt ceiling while enacting a laundry list of unrelated Republican agenda items. Though liberals mocked this as an absurdity, the hard-core minority of House Republicans regarded it as too much of a concession." ...

... Steve M. of NMMNB: " Why does [Boehner's] desire to cling to his speakership supersede the needs of the country? If he genuinely thinks the crazy caucus is leading the country to a cataclysm, why shouldn't he sacrifice his damn speakership and do what's patriotic, suspending the Hastert 'rule' (which is just self-imposed and isn't a rule at all) and getting a continuing resolution and debt ceiling increase passed with Democratic and sane Republican votes? What does he lose if he's deposed, besides power -- which, as is obvious by now, is not something he has much of? ... There's something pathological about the craven, desperate way that members of Congress -- people with so many options -- cling to their seats. The rest of us are regularly told that we simply can't expect to hold the same job for life -- the real world just doesn't work that way anymore. Our elected officials just don't live in our world." ...

Ted Cruz, Megalomaniac. Jack Balkin in the Atlantic: Ted Cruz "is not a terrorist or a bomb thrower. He is a Leninist. He wants to sow discord among his erstwhile allies so that he can seize control.... Cruz wants to take over the Republican Party.... That is why Cruz is attacking his fellow Republicans for being weak-kneed and insufficiently devoted to the conservative cause.... In some sense this is a repeat of the conservative movement's playbook from 1964 on: Push moderates out of the Republican Party and make it a wholly owned subsidiary of the conservative movement." ...

... Ha Ha. Naureen Khan of Al Jazeera: "During his 21+-hour floor speech, Ted Cruz cited 22-year-old Rutgers student John Connelly as an example of someone who has struggled because of President Obama's policies. But Connelly "describes his politics as 'left of most of the people in the Democratic Party on social and economic issues.' He thinks a single-payer system would be preferable to the Affordable Care Act but appreciates the provisions of the law that have helped him out already. His father's union-provided health insurance still covers him, thanks to the provision of the ACA that allows children to stay on their parents' plan until the age of 26.... 'Maybe []Cruz should've spent less time reading Dr. Seuss and more time looking into the policies that he's talking about,. Connelly said." Thanks to Barbarossa for the link.

Thomas Bishop of Media Matters: "Fox News' misleading attacks on President Obama's health care law reached new heights in the week preceding the opening of insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act Fox figures also pressured Republican politicians to defund or repeal the law, even at the expense of shutting down the federal government." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link.

"Use It or Lose It." David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: "All week, while Congress fought over next year's budget, federal workers were immersed in a separate frantic drama. They were trying to spend the rest of this year's budget before it is too late. The reason for their haste is a system set up by Congress that ... requires agencies to spend all their allotted funds by Sept. 30."

James Risen of the New York Times & Laura Poitras: " Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials. The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans' networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden...." ...

... Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The Senate Intelligence Committee appears to be moving toward swift passage of a bill that would 'change but preserve' the once-secret National Security Agency program that is keeping logs of every American's phone calls, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the panel, said Thursday." ...

... Maureen Dowd on the (false) testimony of "Emperor" Keith Alexander, the NSA chief.

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "District court judges are not generally known as flamethrowers, but some seem to be losing patience with the banks.... Judges who take a more aggressive stance against the banks in such cases are doing what they can to hold these institutions accountable. It may not seem like a lot, but it is progress."

Michael Luo & Mike McIntire of the New York Times: "Children shot accidentally -- usually by other children -- are collateral casualties of the accessibility of guns in America, their deaths all the more devastating for being eminently preventable.... And there are far more of these innocent victims than official records show." The NRA's "lobbying arm recently posted on its Web site a claim that adult criminals who mishandle firearms -- as opposed to law-abiding gun owners -- are responsible for most fatal accidents involving children. But The Times's review found that a vast majority of cases revolved around children's access to firearms, with the shooting either self-inflicted or done by another child."

Andrew Cohen of the Atlantic: "What a sham trial in Louisiana says about our criminal justice system."

News Ledes

New York Times: Marcella "Hazan, the chain-smoking, determined former biology scholar who reluctantly moved to America and went on to teach a nation to cook Italian food, died Sunday at her home in Longboat Key, Fla. She was 89."

New York Times: "Dozens of gunmen attacked an agricultural college in northeastern Nigeria late Saturday and early Sunday, killing more than 40 students, local officials said. The attackers were thought to belong to the extremist group Boko Haram."

AP: "Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi appeared to backpedal on Sunday in his strategy aimed at collapsing Italy's fragile coalition government and triggering early elections, after some key supporters chafed at his order to quit the Cabinet. Berlusconi had demanded those resignations in a show of solidarity ahead of a Senate vote to strip him of his seat because of his tax-fraud conviction and prison sentence."

AFP: "Iran is willing to discuss limits in the level to which it enriches uranium but will never suspend the process altogether, the deputy foreign minister said in comments reported Sunday." ...

... ABC News: "In an exclusive interview this morning on 'This Week,' Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif condemned the Holocaust as a 'heinous crime' and a 'genocide,' dismissing as a poor translation the appearance of the word 'myth' about the Holocaust on the Iranian Supreme Leader's English website."

New York Times: Vice Adm. Timothy M. Giardina, "who is second in command at the United States Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear war-fighting forces for the military, has been suspended amid an investigation into his possible involvement in illegal gambling, officials said on Saturday." Washington Post story here, via Barbarossa.

The Plot Thickens --

-- Or -- How Twitter Saved the World

In December or January, I wrote that the only way House Speaker John Boehner would ever get meaningful legislation through the House was to cooperate with House Democrats. He knows that & has resorted to the tactic some five times, most significantly in the "fiscal cliff" hoohah & in appropriating funds for Hurricane Sandy relief. A majority of Republicans opposed these bills, & they passed when most Democrats and only 30 or 40 Republicans voted for them. If we are to avoid a government shutdown next week and a federal debt default a few weeks hence, Boehner will have to rely on Democrats again.

As several contributors have pointed out here, defying his Tea Party caucus will cost Boehner his job.

But maybe not. This humorous tweet from Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon

inspired me to suggest, also in jest, that maybe Democrats could realize Demand 7. If Boehner riled his Chaos Caucus, they could try to unseat him, a move that would split House Republicans, leaving Democrats with enough votes to put Pelosi on top. However, if Wikipedia is trustworthy, the House has almost always chosen its speaker by majority vote, only once -- in the 19th century -- resorting to accepting a candidate who attained only a plurality.

But there is a more plausible scenario along these same lines. It goes like this. We know Boehner is trying to figure out how to simultaneously (a) keep his job & (b) avoid national and international catastrophe.

Besides actually giving a damn about the country, he is infuriated not just by teabagger actions but also by teabagger attitude. Tweets like this push him over the edge.

Boehner meets with Nancy Pelosi, & the two of them agree on an acceptable continuing resolution and on a "clean" debt ceiling bill. The bills pass the House with Democrats & a few dozen Republicans voting in favor, a la the "fiscal cliff" votes.

As a result, the Teabaggers revolt & attempt to oust Boehner. Quite a few Republicans will support Boehner, but not enough to give him a majority -- unless he can find some votes someplace else.

Hmm. Boehner goes back to Pelosi (it's possible they had this discussion in their first hypothetical meeting), and the two forge an agreement. Pelosi guarantees Boehner enough Democratic votes to beat back the Tea Party insurgency. Boehner agrees to ditch the "Hastert Rule" -- that is, the "rule" that he will only bring legislation to the floor that a majority of Republicans support. He further agrees to specifics on some pending legislation: like bringing up an omnibus immigration bill that includes a path to citizenship (see Seitz-Wald). A budget resolution that ends sequestration. Oh, SNAP. A farm bill that restores/increases the food stamps program. (You forgot that one, Alex.) Maybe replace a few of the more militant committee heads (buh-bye, Darrell Issa).

The Boehner-Pelosi agreement remains secret except to a few top dogs. The clueless teabaggers mount their no-confidence coup. At the last minute, Pelosi urges the Democratic caucus to vote for Boehner. Most Democrats & some Republicans vote for Boehner. He wins the day. The teabaggers are not only blindsided; this new House dynamic completely neutralizes them. They have no power.

Yes, this scenario also will leave Boehner as a very weak speaker, dependent upon the other party for passage of every bill. It assumes Boehner would rather be a weak speaker than an ex-speaker. In order to get enough Republicans to vote for the bills that come up under this scenario, the bills will necessarily be more conservative than we would like. But some progress is better than no progress at all.

Mind you, I'm not predicting this is what will happen. But you can bet such a series of events has crossed Boehner's mind. And Pelosi's. It is not entirely implausible. And there will by joy in all the land (except maybe in some pockets of "real America").