Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Yes, that means that the days will start to get longer! The bad news – it will still be winter for a while. How many of you stayed up to watch the eclipse? I tried but it was completely cloudy here. I couldn’t even see the full moon.
It is now looking like there are enough votes in the Senate to approve the new START Treaty with Russia. If you remember, several Senators threatened to kill the treaty because they were mad about the DADT repeal. Yes, they are that immature.
The Senate moved closer on Monday to approving a new arms control treaty with Russia over the opposition of Republican leaders as lawmakers worked on a side deal to assure skeptics that the arms pact would not inhibit American plans to build missile defense systems.
A Republican senator announced that he would vote for the treaty and two others said they were leaning toward it after a closed-door session on classified aspects of the pact. At the same time, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, produced separate legislation that could reassure fellow Republicans worried about the treaty’s impact on missile defense.
By the end of another tumultuous day, treaty backers said they could count more than the two-thirds majority required for approval in votes that could begin as early as Tuesday.
We won’t really know until all the votes are in but this looks like another win for Obama and the mighty duck Congress.
60 Minutes ran a one-sided fluff piece about Chris Christie on Sunday, representing him as a principled budget hawk and state workers as the bad guys.
In 2,600 words about state deficits, you won’t find the phrase “tax cuts.” Instead, CBS adopts the Republican framing that deficits are all about spending — frequently with loaded phrasing like “gold-plated retirement and health care packages.” And throughout the report, CBS allows Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, to launch attacks on unions and make unsupported claims about budget problems, all without ever challenging his assertions and without including substantive disagreement from Christie critics.
CBS quotes Christie declaring: “We have a benefit problem. … It’s not an income problem from the state. It’s a benefit problem. And so we gotta change those benefits.” No contrary view is included.
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You’d never know from CBS’ report that a big part of the reason that “Christie and his predecessors” failed to make required contributions to the pension fund is that they decided to use the money for tax cuts instead. (Like I said, the CBS report takes the GOP-friendly stance that deficits are all about spending, not revenue.)
Christie has stopped a tunnel project that would have provided jobs to New Jerseyans as well as helped with massive traffic backups. He’s just like previous governors, stealing from pensions to pay for tax cuts for his buddies. I really don’t get the Chris Christie love at all. He puts up You Tube clips of himself bullying constituents and Republicans love it. I guess they love it when the powerful stick it to the powerless.