Michael Bennet gets caught in a moment of rare honesty with an open mike in the Senate: “It’s all rigged. The whole conversation is rigged. The fact that we don’t get to a discussion before the break about what we’re going to do in the lame duck. It’s just rigged.” Of course it is.  They [...]

Nancy Pelosi dug her heels in last night and told her caucus that the President wants no extension of the Bush tax cuts beyond the $250,000 threshold. She’s also signaled that she’ll put it up for a vote on the suspension calendar, which means Republicans can’t make amendments or the motion to recommit. But it also means she’ll have to get 290 votes in order to pass it, and there’s no way she can bring enough Republicans on board to do that.

So it’s a purely symbolic vote that will fail. But she’s asking members to take it anyway, because she says that’s what the President wants.

One of my strongest hopes is that everyone in the media, especially on the left, can simply stop pretending the new health reform law is some great progressive victory. It is not. It is a conservative, pro-corporate piece of legislation. From the CBS News: Obama: Well, partly because I couldn’t get the kind of cooperation [...]

Leno gets a dig in at Jim Clyburn and his fellow members of Congress who see no problem with shoveling billions into bankrupt banks, and taking it out of the pockets of senior citizens (2:27): “Congress wants to vote to raise the retirement age to 70….They plan to vote to not let Americans retire until [...]

Billy House and Humberto Sanchez at the National Journal report that Judd Gregg, Kent Conrad and other members of the Catfood Commission are salivating over the chance to push through “historic changes” to Social Security and Medicare in a lame duck Congress, when many members will not have to face electoral repercussions for their votes. [...]

Many people are still trying to figure out what exactly Congress voted to do last week when they passed their fake budget. Kagro and Dave Dayen go back and forth here, here and here. But one thing is for certain: if procedural experts are still trying untangle what happened, there is no way 215 members [...]

It is good to see Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is vigorously calling for an end to the filibuster. From Ryan Grim at Huffington Post: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has some advice for her Senate counterparts: Try majority rule for a change. Pelosi, in an interview with the Huffington Post, called for an end [...]

I don’t know about you, but I am just tickled pink that Nancy Pelosi punted on passing a budget and handed responsibility for cutting the deficit by 3% of GDP to the fucking Republican CEO of Honeywell. Jamie Dimon as unaccountable oligarch whipping boy was getting old. Watching one of the world’s biggest defense contractors [...]

Alice Rivlin is the chief wonk appointed by President Obama to the debt commission, and has long supported cutting Social Security benefits as a way to address the country’s financial woes. Alex Lawson caught up with Rivlin and asked her about her plans right after his famous interview with Alan Simpson when the commission met [...]

Not a surprise really that upon passage of the health care bill, Max Baucus would openly thank Liz Fowler, the former Wellpoint VP, for writing it: Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, there are a flood of emotions going through all of us today as we pass this reconciliation bill which improves upon the bill the President [...]