Friday opinion and... wait - is that snow?
Paul Krugman:
These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.
Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that "we have billions in surplus"? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years.
And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting — the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending — has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere.
Matt Bai:
The first senator elected directly to the presidency in 48 years (and only the third ever), Mr. Obama designed the most Congressionally centered White House in modern history. His West Wing is dominated by former Congressional aides, led by a vice president who served for 35 years in the Senate and, until recently, anyway, a chief of staff plucked from the House leadership.
That relentless focus on Congressional relations helped Mr. Obama pass a series of major initiatives in his first half-term. But it also had the effect of embroiling Mr. Obama in the arcane details of legislative negotiations — wooing moderate Republicans over a deal on Medicaid reimbursement formulas, for instance — when he might have been better served making a sustained case for his agenda to a jittery public.
Now Mr. Obama seems inclined to turn his attention outward, toward the rest of the country. Mr. Daley might not know his way around all the labyrinthine passages of the Capitol, but he brings a campaign mind-set to the administration. He directed the successful White House effort to win approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and later ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign, fighting to the last hanging chad.
NY Times:
The White House has ordered the Pentagon to squeeze almost all growth from its spending over the next five years, which will require eventually shrinking the Army and Marine Corps and seeking controversial increases in the fees paid by for retired, working-age veterans for their health insurance, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday.
We're talking deficit reduction ($78 billion), but not without controversy.
The Hill:
Democrats who are nervous about reelection are increasingly ready to consider scrapping the new healthcare law’s provision that forces people to buy health insurance or pay a fine.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), one of President Obama’s closest allies in the Senate, on Wednesday said she would consider scrapping the controversial mandate in favor of a "viable" alternative.
Democrats are always nervous. And they're always ready to tell the nearest reporter, as if that makes their problems go away. Hint: it never works.
WaPo: What the Republicans left out of their Constitution-reading stunt.
Left out, from Article 1, Section 2: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
NY Times:
A day after the demotion of the Emergency Medical Services chief, two New York City sanitation supervisors were reassigned on Thursday for their performance in the blizzard last week. The mayor vowed that the moves were "not the last word on the subject" and that the city was ready for the snow forecast for Friday.
Rumors that Gov. Christie was on the way to the Bahamas could not be confirmed.
NY Times makes a big deal of John Hickenlooper's loveable eccentricity and missed the point that he ran against an insane Republican.
Many Coloradans outside the Denver area don’t yet have a full sense of this side of Hickenlooper, because his campaign for governor didn’t subject him to particularly intense scrutiny. The most fearsome of his potential Republican rivals lost his primary after being accused of plagiarism, and the two conservatives who remained in the race squabbled largely with each other.
Two conservatives "squabbled"? The Republican nominee, Dan Maes, is a few cards short of a full deck.
And what did Maes do to deserve such treatment, after his stirring come-from-behind victory over establishment hack Scott McInnis? Well, for one, he argued last week that a Denver bike-sharing program is part of a "well-disguised" U.N. plot to take away our sovereignty.
Tancredo's merely an anti-immigrant birther.
Referring to the comments, former GOP congressman and anti-immigrant crusader Tom Tancredo told a Tea Party audience, "If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don’t we just send him back?"