-Yesterday, President Obama hinted that he might use executive power to avert a debt ceiling related default. “One thing I will not compromise over is whether or not Congress should pay the tab for a bill they’ve already racked up,” he said, raising questions about the trillion dollar coin and 14th amendment solutions.

-In a rare public appearance, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad addressed supporters at the Damascus Opera House today. He proposed a resolution to Syria’s civil war in the form of a new constitution and a new cabinet. According to The New York Times, the embattled Assad “offered no new acknowledgment of the gains by the rebels fighting against him, the excesses of his government or the aspirations of the Syrian people. Mr. Assad also ruled out talks with the armed opposition and pointedly ignored its central demand that he step down, instead using much of a nearly hourlong speech to justify his harsh military crackdown.”

-The Times also profiled CIA waterboarding whistleblower and soon to be federal inmate John Kiriakou yesterday. Kiriakou, who pleaded guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, distanced himself from making value judgments about post 9/11 torture, but said we should be “having a national debate over whether we should be waterboarding.” Scott Shane, the author whose prior interviews with Kiriakou were cited by federal prosecutors in their case against the former spy, also points out that stories about Deuce Martinez, the so-called covert operative that Kiriakou was accused of outing, “were far from secret.”

-The Nation’s John Nichols put forth the idea that Paul Ryan and every other House member that voted against Superstorm Sandy aid shirked their duty to uphold the Constitution. Nichols writes that “one of the few clearly defined responsibilities of any House member, is ‘to provide for the general Welfare.’ They swear an oath to do so. And, barely hours into the new Congress, Ryan and his compatriots rejected that oath and a fundamental premise of the Constitution it supports.”

-Hockey fans out there (full disclosure: Let’s Go Caps!) will be pleased to know that the NHL looks set to return, after a labor dispute cancelled almost half the season. A tentative agreement has been reached months after the widely reviled owners locked out the players’ association (I apologize for including this in the morning’s round-up. I am overjoyed).

Evening Reads:

-Bernie Sanders told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz that he’s ready to do battle with President Obama as Republicans threaten to engineer a government default in February’s debt ceiling negotiations. Sanders said that the White House is all too eager to offer welfare state downsizing in talks with the GOP. “We’ve got to make the president and Republicans and any Democrats that want to cut Social Security an offer they can`t refuse, and that is tens of millions of people have got to make it very clear to Congress — Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit,” the only socialist in Congress said.

-In his upcoming memoir, Stanley McChrystal accepts some responsibility for disparaging the Obama administration in front of Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings. “Regardless of how I judged the story for fairness or accuracy, responsibility was mine,” McChrystal said, according to the AP. “By nature I tended to trust people and was typically open and transparent. … But such transparency would go astray when others saw us out of context or when I gave trust to those few who were unworthy of it.” The Pentagon has questioned the veracity of the article, but Rolling Stones has stood by Hastings, saying the piece is “accurate in every detail.”

-According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (hat tip: POLITICO’s Charles Mahtesian), there will be ten legislators in the 113th Congress who said they “didn’t belong to any particular faith, didn’t know or refused to disclose their religion.” While this is a marked rise in the number of likely irreligious Congresspeople since the 96th Congress was polled - not a single Congressperson or Senator claimed to eschew religious affiliation then - Capitol Hill still has a long way to go before the God (or lack thereof) Gap is closed. According to Pew’s study, “About one-in-five U.S. adults describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’ - a group sometimes collectively called the ‘nones.’ But only one member of the new Congress, Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), is religiously unaffiliated, according to information gathered by CQ Roll Call.”

-While protests against sexual assault in India have garnered significant media attention, a less noticed demonstration took place in Ohio today to shed light on rape culture in the United States. The protesters gathered in Steubenville, a small town that played host to a horrific gang rape involving high schoolers. Roughly 1,000 people turned out to share painful stories of sexual violence and to denounce law enforcement for allegedly protecting members of the high school’s football team suspected of raping the 16 year old victim. Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla, who has turned down the opportunity to wrest the investigation from the town’s police department, said that the two boys already charged in connection with the rape would be the only ones to be indicted.

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Steubenville is in West Virginia.

Accountants, lawyers and other number crunching nerds are combing through the Fiscal Cliff deal to see what 2013 tax payments might look like.

The New York Times has already declared that post-Cliff tax rates might be “the most progressive since 1979.”

[The deal] raises the tax rate to 39.6 percent from 35 percent on income above $400,000 for individuals, and $450,000 for couples. The rate on dividends and capital gains for those same taxpayers was bumped up 5 percentage points, to 20 percent. Congress also reinstated limits on the amount households with more than $300,000 in income can deduct. On top of that, two new surcharges — a 3.8 percent tax on investment income and a 0.9 percent tax on regular income — hit those same wealthy households.

As a result of the taxes added in both the deal and the 2010 health care law, which came into effect this year, taxpayers with $1 million in income and up will pay on average $168,000 more in taxes. Millionaires’ share of the overall federal tax burden will climb to 23 percent from 20 percent.

Whether or not the Times is right about the historical significance of the rates - talented accountants are trained to sniff out loopholes like bloodhounds - both right and left will undoubtedly trumpet their views on progressive taxation as a result of the higher marginal rates caused by the deal.

The right will - somewhat ironically - be championing a French Hollywood star to tell a cautionary tale about the supposed dangers of left wing fiscal policy. On Thursday, French actor Gerard Depardieu flew to Russia to receive citizenship there - his passport was presented to him by none other than Vladimir Putin himself. France’s socialist president Francois Hollande is currently trying to implement a tax of 75 percent on income over a million Euros. This has, apparently, left Depardieu un peu furieux, and he has decided to defect to Russia, where income is taxed at a flat rate of 13 percent.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that he and Uncle Vova enjoy a close personal relationship - no small thing to be buddies with a leader of a notoriously corrupt country when you are considering moving there.

But when it comes to so-called tax flight, Depardieu’s “depart, adieu” (sorry) appears to be the exception rather than the rule - at least according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

On average, just 1.7 percent of U.S. residents moved from one state to another per year between 2001 and 2010, and only about 30 percent of those born in the United States change their state of residence over the course of their entire lifetime. And when people do relocate, a large body of scholarly evidence shows that they do so primarily for new jobs, cheaper housing, or a better climate. A person’s age, education, marital status, and a host of other factors also affect decisions about moving.

The CBPP also cited “perhaps the most carefully designed study to date” on tax migration in New Jersey. That report concluded that there was a massive gain in the Garden State’s tax revenue after it raised marginal rates on the rich in 2004, and that the outflow of taxpayers was minimal:

At most, the authors estimated, 70 tax filers earning more than $500,000 might have left New Jersey between 2004 and 2007 because of the tax increase, costing the state an estimated $16.4 million in tax revenue. The revenue gain from the tax increase over those years was an estimated $3.77 billion, meaning that out-migration — if there was any at all — reduced the estimated revenue gain from the tax increase by a mere 0.4 percent.

This makes sense. While some might be encouraged to pack up and leave because of a tax increase, it would be a very difficult conversation for most people to have: “Kids, say goodbye to all your friends, teachers and classmates. Mommy and daddy don’t want to pay more taxes on their millionth dollar.”

Detractors of the CBPP study have tried to discredit it by crying hypocrisy over its recognition that some people move because of higher taxes. But the existence of tax motivated migration is not the issue here. The CBPP, despite the unfortunately misleading title of its report (“Tax Flight is a Myth), is simply trying to point out that net migration due to higher marginal taxation is largely negligible, and that it won’t come close to canceling out the windfall state coffers enjoy as a result of demanding that richer people pay more.

It’s worth keeping that in mind the next time a prominent right wing blowhard threatens to move to Dubai if he or she doesn’t get the Bush tax rates back.

Just hours after Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper offered specific proposals on gun control in an interview with CBS’ Denver affiliate, gun violence claimed more lives in Aurora — the town that played host to James Holmes’ movie theater massacre in July.

According to the AP:

Four people, including an armed suspect, died after an hours-long police standoff Saturday at a Colorado townhome, authorities said.

Police Sgt. Cassidee Carlson said a SWAT team was called after gunshots were heard at the Aurora, Colo., home at about 3 a.m. Investigators said three victims, all of them adults, appeared to have been killed before officers arrived.

Carlson said the suspect shot at officers at about 8:15 a.m. and was killed during a gunfight about 45 minutes later when police entered the home. It remained unclear if officers shot the suspect or if he shot himself.

If more murder-by-firearm in this symbolic Denver suburb doesn’t add to Hicknelooper’s newfound post-Sandy Hook determination to pass gun control, perhaps news analysis in today’s New York Times will. Elisabeth Rosenthal drew on her experience in Latin America to debunk the N.R.A.’s shambolic “only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns” industry shilling:

Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

“A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia.”

As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration revealed proposals to reform the country’s food safety regulations, floating rule changes that would affect food manufacturers and fruit and vegetable producers.

The initiatives would cost $1.4 billion to implement, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and would take years to be finalized. This could give Congress time to undermine the initiative — an imaginable scenario, considering that most Republicans and conservative Democrats tend to view regulation and any sort of non-military spending as Satanic.

But corporate food manufacturers and agribusiness might not encourage Congress to oppose the proposed rule changes, perhaps knowing that food borne illnesses spread by cost-cutting firms and farms could end up being rather expensive to an industry in which consumer confidence is of paramount importance.

According to The Washington Post:

Food industry groups welcomed the proposals, saying they provided some clarity but stopped short of endorsing them outright. They said many growers and processors already adhere to high standards. Groups such as the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Produce Marketing Association said they would continue to work with the FDA to shape the rules in the months ahead.

But political drama enthusiasts need not despair: there is another campaign that could lead to a more divisive regulatory issue at the FDA.

A petition on Change.org with over 200,000 signatures has called on soda manufacturers to stop using brominated vegetable oil (BVO), “an emulsifier used to spread the fruit and coloring elements evenly,” according to Richard Schiffman, writing for The Guardian.

“The vegetable oil part might make it seem harmless, but the bromination turns the oil into a potentially toxic chemical that is banned in foods in the European Union and Japan,” he pointed out.

Schiffman also noted that:

…in high doses BVO is neurotoxic and can lead [sic] reproductive and behavioral problems, at least in rats. Since no long-term human trials have been conducted, we don’t know the effects of ingesting BVO in soda, especially in high amounts.

This insight doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in BVO, either:

“BVO accumulates in the heart, liver and fat tissue,” according to Dr John Spangler, a professor of family and community medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical. “New studies are warranted to update the old studies, especially given that the patterns of soft drink consumption have changed so dramatically over the past three decades.”

The soda industry contends that the oil isn’t harmful in small doses. And the FDA agrees.

But activists might be able to force the agency to reconsider the issue. Schiffman wrote that the FDA - which currently allows 15 parts per million of BVO - “appears to have had some doubts of its own when it issued an ‘interim’ ruling in 1977 to allow the substance, pending further studies to establish its safety. Those in-depth studies were never conducted.”

The agency told The New York Times in December that it lacked the resources, considering it did not consider the matter to be a priority.

If the agency’s priorities do change, it will be interesting to see how now oft-maligned soft drink manufacturers react — and whether or not their friends on Capitol Hill can carry their sugary BVO tainted carbonated water for them.

Here are some noteworthy non Fiscal Cliff (you’re welcome) related articles:

-President Obama said on Thursday that he would attempt to sidestep whistleblower protection provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013. The stipulations would extend safeguards to federal contractors who report waste, fraud and abuse. The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly reported that Claire McCaskill, a prominent champion of the provisions, wasn’t even made aware of the White House’s objections prior to the President’s signing statement.

-The Independent reported that Shell Oil’s failed attempt to move an offshore oil rig from Alaska to Seattle was part of an effort to exploit a tax loophole. Had the move gone off without a hitch, Shell would have saved up to $7 million in taxes, according to a local Alaskan official. The rig ran aground off the Alaskan coast on New Year’s Eve. It hasn’t yet spilled any fuel.

-According to The Washington Post, a forthcoming Frontline documentary about former Washington DC public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee sheds light on a scandal that raised questions about the efficacy of her reforms. The documentary contains an interview with Adell Cothorne, a former principal at a school where teachers tampered with high stakes standardized tests to appear more capable according to metrics championed by Rhee. Cothorne said that city officials investigating the matter never even spoke to her, theorizing that “they didn’t want to hear what I had to say.”

The New York Times has profiled the modest lifestyle of Uruguay’s President, Jose Mujica, who “shunned the opulent Suarez y Reyes presidential mansion, with its staff of 42, remaining instead in the home where he and his wife have lived for years, on a plot of land where they grow chrysanthemums for sale in local markets.” The Times paints Mujica’s lifestyle as sort of a humdrum radicalism: “We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated,” he said. A former guerrilla who spent over ten years in solitary, Mujica has overseen a government that has legalized marijuana and same-sex marriage, extended reproductive health rights and has encouraged investment in renewable energy.

The first week of 2013 doesn’t exactly feel like it’s ushering in any fresh start in Washington, now does it? Maybe next week will be better, but don’t hold your breath. Here are some final items for the day:

* Harry Reid is privately saying he won’t raise any separation-of-powers concerns if Obama chooses to bypass Congress on debt limit.

* Mini-relief bill for Sandy victims passes House, with 67 Republicans voting against it; Senate passes it on voice vote.

* Word is Chuck Hagel will be nominated for Defense Secretary next week. Expect objections from left and right.

* At Ten Miles Square, Keith Humphreys mulls the under-reported decline in the U.S. incarceration rate.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer notes that 529 college savings plans mostly benefit relatively affluent families; cost to feds could fund 288,000 Pell Grants.

And in non-political news:

* Mock NFL draft at Sporting News has West Virginia’s Geno Smith going first; 6 of ten top players from SEC.

Sam Knight will be at the blogging controls this weekend.

Since Sunday is the Feast of the Epiphany, here’s the relevant portion of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, as performed by the Windsbacher Knabenchor and Munich Bachsolisten in 1991.

Selah.

As we look down the barrel of another pointless debt ceiling crisis, several folks have managed to push a rather improbable-sounding option for sidestepping the ceiling through a legal loophole. It involves a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Dylan Matthews has the history, featuring Mike Castle, Matt Yglesias has the specific statute language and a Rooseveltian precedent, and Paul Krugman explains it thus:

The peculiar exception is that clause allowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins in any denomination it chooses. Of course this was intended as a way to issue commemorative coins and stuff, not as a fiscal measure; but at least as I understand it, the letter of the law would allow Treasury to stamp out a platinum coin, say it’s worth a trillion dollars, and deposit it at the Fed — thereby avoiding the need to issue debt.

This seems to set something twisting in the guts of some folks, sending them into paroxysms of incredulity. Kevin Drum is relatively reasonable arguing that it would be illegal, though Yale law professor Jack Balkin and a former head of the US Mint disagree.

On the other hand, Heidi Moore’s eyes roll so far back in her head they come back around, like some archly dismissive slot machine:

This is an elegant solution - if you are a cartoon villain given to sitting in a vast underground bunker and innovating plans for world domination while petting a white cat. It makes less sense for real mortals. In fact, it has all the aspects of a group of well-financed mad scientists plotting to create a giant slingshot to avert an asteroid hurtling towards the earth.

Well, debate over! In seriousness, her piece has a couple bald inaccuracies; this one in particular:

The mint could, on the direction of Treasury, just make a platinum-finished coin that bears the face value of $1tn, but that would just create a nonsensical level of inflation in the value of the US dollar.

I tire of pointing this out, but there is no such thing as immaculate inflation. Let’s remember where we stand. The federal government is currently spending more than they take in revenue. The amount of spending is determined by congressional appropriations, signed into law by the president. The executive is thus legally obligated to spend at the levels specified for the various agencies. Now Congress is threatening to not allow the government to borrow the money they already legally obliged him to spend, creating an economic cataclysm in the process.

All the coin option is doing is creating additional spending capacity through legal trickery. It would have the same effect on inflation that borrowing the money would; in fact, it’s identical in the end to just borrowing more. As Krugman points out:

In reality, to pursue the thought further, the coin really would be as much a Federal debt as the T-bills the Fed owns, since eventually Treasury would want to buy it back. So this is all a gimmick — but since the debt ceiling itself is crazy, allowing Congress to tell the president to spend money then tell him that he can’t raise the money he’s supposed to spend, there’s a pretty good case for using whatever gimmicks come to hand.

From my seat the platinum option looks like a plainly legal and reasonable option. I’m no lawyer, of course, and I’d listen to counterarguments. But what really chafes my strap is the snidely dismissive tone of Moore and company. They are abusing the sphere of deviance, in a way which reminds me very strongly of how journalists treated marijuana legalization a decade ago.

It’s striking especially that Moore doesn’t treat the people threatening to hold the US economy hostage to extract unrelated policy concessions with the same disdain she shows for the people trying to cook up a workaround. I agree, minting trillion dollar coins sounds silly. But hitting the debt ceiling would be deadly serious, and doing silly-sounding things is a small price to pay for avoiding pointless economic crisis.

Josh Barro has an actually reasonable solution dealing with all these problems at a stroke:

If Republicans start issuing a list of demands that must be met before they will raise the debt ceiling, Obama should simply say that he will issue platinum coins as necessary to pay government bills if he cannot borrow. But, to avoid causing long-term inflation expectations to skyrocket, he should pledge that he will have the Treasury issue enough bonds to buy back all the newly issued currency as soon as it is allowed to do so.

And then he should offer to sign a bill revoking his authority to issue platinum coins — so long as that bill also abolishes the debt ceiling. The executive branch will give up its unwarranted power to print if the legislative branch will give up its unwarranted restriction on borrowing to cover already appropriated obligations.

Probably the biggest obstacle to the platinum solution is the incredulity it inspires—I’ve yet to see a counterargument that doesn’t lean very heavily on simple disbelief. If Moore can come up with legal rationales against it, I’m all ears, but the snide tone is only strengthening the hand of the economic kidnappers.

@ryanlcooper

As I hope my sarcastic reference to rape apologists in the last post reflected, rape is among the ugliest phenomena of our species, and not something to be rationalized or made light of. The recent gang rape incident in New Delhi has appropriately spurred a lot of outrage, and some important reflection, as with a E.J. Graff column at TAP that after a long and eloquent discussion of “rape culture” brings it all home:

I can only hope that the response to the attack in India includes outrage at congressional Republicans’ astounding refusal to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), one of the most effective tools to help prevent such violence, which the Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie has already told you about. In its past 18 years, it has funded tremendously useful projects ranging from a stalking help line to statistical research to law-enforcement training in responding to intimate-partner violence. According to the National Organization for Women’s reading of Bureau of Justice statistics, in the first 15 years after VAWA was originally passed, intimate-partner violence homicides dropped by 53 percent, and female homicides dropped 43 percent. While of course that cannot all be attributed to VAWA—homicide deaths in general have fallen during that period, for a myriad of reasons—VAWA has been an important tool in training, educating, funding, and helping to enforce new norms. If this were called “domestic terrorism,” far more of the nation’s budget would be dedicated to end it. You’d think that their November loss at the ballot would’ve educated Republicans about the fact that women actually vote. But some people learn very, very slowly.

The eternal problem of the relative dearth of women in the Libertarian Movement is a classic Friday Afternoon topic: it’s not my problem, so I’m not in danger of getting emotional about it, and it’s likely to produce unintentional hilarity—sort of like a discussion among the characters of The Big Bang Theory (other than Leonard, I suppose) about why women find them tedious.

I’ll avoid the easy temptation of snark here, and won’t answer that libertarianism is highly consistent with male adolescent fantasies, or that it may be an obstacle that the most prominent woman associated with American Libertarianism (not that she’d be happy about that!) was a professed anti-feminist and rape enthusiast.

But some of the explanations and prescriptions for remediation from within libertarian ranks aren’t much more flattering to The Movement. Julie Borowski, a videographer who goes by the handle of TokenLibertarianGirl, has posted a jeremiad that, well, sort of suggests women aren’t libertarians because they are superficial and sex-crazed (albeit because they’ve been brainwashed by the “feminist propaganda” of checkout-line magazines).

This approach to the subject attracted an unhappy post from Steve Horwitz and Sarah Skwire at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, a brave outpost of non-orthodoxy, suggesting that, well: “There aren’t more female libertarians because libertarians say things exactly like this.”

Telling women that they aren’t libertarians because they are too stupid to choose something better for themselves isn’t great advertising for liberty. Claiming that women are passive, easily programmed, and incapable of critical interaction with political and cultural ideas is simply wrong—as centuries of history of women fighting against the state and decades of critiques from the left and the right of women’s magazines and popular culture have shown….

We are convinced that if a bright college-aged woman considering libertarianism saw this video, she’d think “I don’t want to be part of that movement if that’s what libertarians think women are like. And Borowski is one of the women! I can only imagine what libertarian men think…”

Seems a lot of the men think Borowski is right:

Videos like this are yet another “No Girls Allowed” sign on the treehouse of the libertarian movement and the nodding heads and “likes” by libertarians on Facebook and YouTube just add a few exclamation points and a larger font to that sign.

I gotta say, of all the self-appointed tasks in American political discourse, making libertarianism a gender-balanced movement strikes me as one of the most Sisyphean. It would require someone with the grit and charisma of a Howard Roark.

D’oh!

Alarms are going up all over the progressive commentariat about the early signs of Beltway complacency—particularly in the MSM—about Republicans threats to wreak holy havoc on the economy by taking the debt limit hostage to their spending demands (more for the Pentagon, less for everything else).

TNR’s Alec MacGillis, quoting WaPo’s Greg Sargent extensively, lays out the complaint most efficiently:

It is striking to what degree the Washington establishment has come to normalize Republican hostage-taking of the debt limit, to see it as a predictable and almost natural element of the political landscape. Greg Sargent argues convincingly why this is a problem, noting that the debt ceiling must be raised to pay for past spending, and should not be used as a chip in negotiating future budgets: “In the current context, conservatives and Republicans who hold out against a debt limit hike are, in practical terms, only threatening the full faith and credit of the United States — and threatening to damage the economy — in order to get what they want. Any accounts that don’t convey this with total clarity — and convey the sense that this is a normal negotiation — are essentially misleading people. It’s that simple.”

What bears stating even more strongly, though, is how far we’ve come from 2011, when the Washington establishment viewed the Republicans’ threat of credit default as as the utterly brazen and unprecedented step that it was. Even those who supported the gambit recognized it as a newly deployed weapon.

I agree with all that, and with MacGillis’ assessment of early media coverage of the debt limit fight as just another episode of the usual partisan follies.

But there is a deeper problem that makes adequate media treatment of GOP posturing very difficult: an inability to grasp and explain the underlying radicalism of conservative doctrine on federal domestic spending. Exhibit One, of course, was the frequent refusal to understand the fundamental change in the role of the federal government that was the object of the Ryan Budget, particularly its first iteration. And rarely did major MSM writers and gabbers bother to suggest that immediate implementation of the Ryan Budget via the budget reconciliation process would have been the predictable result of an election where Romney won and Republicans won control of the Senate.

But Exhibit Two, and far more relevant today, is the baseline for conservative positioning on the debt limit, the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, signed by Mitt Romney himself in 2011 and championed by the powerful House Study Committee, to which 165 Republicans in the 112th Congress belonged (there’s no updated list for the 113d, but there’s no reason to think the RSC has lost its grip on the House GOP Caucus).

I’ve gone through this a number of times over the last two years, but will once again post the basics of the CCB proposal:

1. Cut - We must make discretionary and mandatory spending reductions that would cut the deficit in half next year.

2. Cap - We need statutory, enforceable caps to align federal spending with average revenues at 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with automatic spending reductions if the caps are breached.

3. Balance - We must send to the states a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) with strong protections against federal tax increases and a Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) that aligns spending with average revenues as described above.

And the whole idea of this proposal (and the specific subject of the CCB Pledge) is to make any vote for a debt limit increase strictly contingent on all three planks of the proposal, which means a radical and permanent reduction in federal spending, far beyond anything contemplated in the Ryan Budget.

read more »

Expected this to be an incredibly slow news day, but we’re actually ahead of schedule on posting. Here are some mid-day treats:

* Club for Growth makes vote for Sandy funding a “key vote”—e.g., bait for primary opponents.

* Speaking of primaries: NRSC will return to pre-2010 practice of regular intervention to avoid toxic nominees.

* Number of states with approved health care exchanges under Obamacare up to 20.

* New York Times editorial argues Al Jazeera should be given a chance to show independence from its Qatar government owners before cable and satellite operators ban Current, which AJ just bought.

* Dave Weigel reviews the slapdash and botched right-wing effort to purge Boehner.

And in non-political news:

* 30-second network ad during Super Bowl will cost $4 million this year, up a half-mil from 2012.

Back after some chores.

David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, who has been obsessively following late returns, provisional ballot rulings, and other adjustments, has issued his final tally of the 2012 presidential election popular vote: Obama 65,899,557 (51.06%), Romney 60,931,959 (47.21%).

Obama’s 3.85% margin is a bit above half of his 2008 margin (7.2%), and well above George W. Bush’s 2.4% margin in 2004. And get this: Obama has now twice posted a higher percentage of the popular vote than any Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon Johnson.

Since Republican operatives and pundits spent a goodly part of the election cycle suggesting this would be a replay of 1980, it should be noted that Obama squeaked past Carter’s percentage of the vote that year by more than 10 points. His numbers were pretty close to Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 (actually exceeding St. Ronald’s 50.7%), but I don’t think that’s what GOPers had in mind in raising the analogy.

So according to Sam Baker of The Hill, House GOPers paused briefly from their 24-7 campaign to insist the president and congressional Democrats propose cuts in entitlement benefits if they want the debt limit to be increased any time soon in order to throw a big monkey-wrench into the one existing effort to hold down Medicare costs:

House Republicans signaled Thursday they will not follow rules in President Obama’s healthcare law that were designed to speed Medicare cuts through Congress.

The House is set to vote Thursday afternoon on rules for the 113th Congress. The rules package says the House won’t comply with fast-track procedures for the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a controversial cost-cutting board Republicans have long resisted.

The rules package signals that Republicans might not bring up Medicare cuts recommended by the IPAB — blocking part of a politically controversial law, and resisting Medicare spending cuts.

The rules could be challenged in court, because they seek to override a law that Congress passed, but unless that happens, the House can likely abide by the rules it adopts Thursday.

Amazing, but not that surprising. Having medagogued the IPAB—which Sarah Palin notoriously labeled a “death panel”—and the health care cost savings it was charged with securing not just by Obamacare but by earlier Republican legislation, it figures House Republicans would make this the first step to obstruct implementation of ACA, despite the massive hypocrisy involved.

What’s really maddening is that IPAB—following the overall thrust of Obamacare—is designed to secure savings not just for Medicare but for the entire health care system by encouraging better medicine, not reductions in health coverage for seniors. It seems Republicans are only interested in health care cost containment measures or “entitlement reform” if it comes at the expense of beneficiaries.

I know the White House is probably touchy about IPAB given its phony reputation as a heath care rationer, but they need to raise holy hell about this, and yes, go to court to stop it. We will never get hold of health care costs at any level if we continue to pretend the only choices are an endless cost spiral or constantly reduced benefits.