During this fiscal cliff fight, the Obama team has only \drawn two lines in the sand. The first was on raising the tax rate for people making over $250,000 a year.  The other was refusing to allow raising the debt ceiling to be used for political gain. On both of these demands Obama has already [...]

To try to deal with the incredibly idiotic debt ceiling issue the Obama administration has put forward the so called “McConnell Plan.” It is a complicated Rude Goldberg procedure that would effectively allow the President to raise the debt ceiling while also letting Congress make mostly meaningless votes against it. Since the idea was originally [...]

President Obama’s top pick for Secretary of State was Susan Rice. Many Republicans have been throwing a hissy fit about what she said on a Sunday talk show and now Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration. It is possible these two things are unrelated, but it definitely appears to many that Obama again folded [...]

By simply being intransigent, Obama could get much of what he claims to want without giving anything to the Republicans in return. What Obama “gives up” should only be weighed against what he couldn’t have gotten eventually. Things like accepting a tax increase on the wealthy or raising the debt ceiling should not even be counted as a real concession by Republicans because they would be forced to accept those anyway.

When caught up in the height of the deficit hysteria during the debt ceiling fight Congress voted for a set of very stupid across the board cuts known as sequestration. Since Democrats and Republicans couldn’t reach a deal at the time, they thought a great idea was to create a really bad law no one [...]

Given that the United States debt is denominated in US dollars and our government can technically print as many US dollars as it needs, we should never default on our debt. The only way we could truly default would be if Congress, in an incredible act of stupidity, decided to vote to default and overrode [...]

It is conventional wisdom never to negotiate for hostages, because such bargaining only makes hostage taking worthwhile. If there were no value available from hostage taking, people would have little reason to try taking hostages. If you do pay for a hostage, it signals to your adversaries that hostage taking is a great idea and [...]

If so many people are saying you got beaten that you actually feel the need to start publicly declaring you didn’t cave, that means you caved. From the White House’s absurd attempt to defend the debt ceiling deal with lies: Myth: President Obama caved. Fact: President Obama laid out key priorities that had to be [...]

The White House has put out a truly disgraceful “myth and facts” post at it’s blog, about the debt ceiling deal, which flatly lies to the American people. From the White House website post: Myth: The joint committee — the so-called “super committee” — makes it easier for Congress to cut the programs we care about. [...]

Quinnipiac released their Florida poll numbers on the President and the debt ceiling bill, and it does not bode well for his 2012 chances in the swing state. His approval among Independents went from 42% last Wednesday through Sunday to 33% from Monday through Tuesday, while disapproval shot up 52% to 61%. When asked to describe how they feel about the deal, more Independents said they were “angry” (23%) than either Republicans or Democrats.

In order to contextualize the bind that this puts Obama in, it’s worth recounting what I’ve been told about how the deal went down.