Welcome to your Monday open thread. I’ve just arrived back at home so I’m about to catch up on my sleep. Sleeping on the red-eye didn’t make me feel very rested.
You know it’s true. Republicans want the energy and money of the teabaggers but want them to sit down and shut up. Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck got caught on tape dissing the birthers:
Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Ken Buck called Tea Partyers questioning the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate “dumba—s” to a Democratic operative recording his comments without his permission.
On an audio tape obtained by The Denver Post, Buck was caught muttering “will you tell those dumba—s at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera?” outside a June 11 event in Crowley.
Buck then started laughing as he walked into the event with the Democratic tracker.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked, rhetorically.
Oopsie!
It looks like the Republican tax cut/deficit hypocrisy may become an issue for the elections. The Bush tax cuts are expiring at the end of year (if you remember, the Republicans passed them through reconciliation which means they have to expire so as not to add to the deficit). Now Republicans want to continue the tax cuts even though they’re responsible for 60% of the deficit which Republicans claim to care so much about.
The NYT noted over the weekend that the issue will “move to the top of the agenda when lawmakers return to Washington in September from their summer recess, just as the midterm campaign gets under way in earnest.”
Negotiations are expected to start in the Senate, where it is hardest for Democrats to advance legislation because of Republican filibusters. But some Democrats say a fallback plan would be to have their larger majority in the House approve a continuation of the lower rates just for the middle class right before the election, almost daring Republicans to oppose them.
In that case, Democrats say, Republicans who opposed the bill would be blocking a tax cut for more than 95 percent of Americans to defend tax cuts for a relatively few wealthy households.
Every time Republicans complain, the same answer should come to mind — it was their idea for the cuts to expire. Maybe if the GOP hadn’t left a $1.3 trillion deficit for Democrats to clean up, it’d be easier to talk about keeping more of the tax breaks Republicans love so much.
I’m sure Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and other conservaDems will find a way to screw things up.