National

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today.

The Senate’s top Republican signaled Tuesday that he will seek to extract concessions from Democrats in exchange for lifting the nation’s debt limit in 2014, potentially foreshadowing a grueling fiscal fight during an election year.

The Governor is about to show us whose side he is on? The rich or the poor.

Gov. Jack Markell, who will present a new budget to the General Assembly next month, will not have a significant boost in new tax revenue to cover mandatory cost increases in health care and education, according to new revenue estimates out Monday.[...] “Even though revenues ultimately are still going to be up from last year, they’re not going to be up enough to cover the automatic growth in Medicaid and the automatic growth in schools,” said Rep. Melanie George Smith, D-Bear, co-chair of the budget writing Joint FinanceCommittee. “That’s the real issue.”

Senate Minority Leader Gary Simpson offers the standard Republican prescription for anything involving fiscal matters: tax cuts and more tax cuts. Even though history has shown all tax cuts do is raise the budget deficit, something the Governor and the General Assembly is trying to close. I assume Mr. Markell will not go down the tax cut course, for if he does, he should just join the Republican Party right now. But what I do seem him doing is trying to cut spending on social services to avoid in any way raising a dime in taxes on his friends in the corporate world.

Here is Carney's statement on the recently passed budget. I can't figure out if mentioning deficit reduction as a top priority TWICE in such a short statement is done out of stupidity or cynicism.

Francis' oppressive tolerance and totalitarian love for humanity - and the way it delivers roundhouse kick after roundhouse kick to the hypocrisy of American "Christians" is endlessly entertaining to me. I daresay, if he had been the Pope when George Bush concocted a pretext to bomb the shit out of Iraq simply because he had a hard on to bomb Iraq - this Pope might have had a few words to say about it.

Sure there will be some nutbags. And I can't imagine that Charles Lammot DuPont Copeland would be incompetent enough to let this come to pass, but so far nobody is whispering legitimate names into the ear of the Dean of Delaware political bloggers.

In the age of the perpetual campaign, Delaware looks like the place that politics forgot. ... So far it is nothing but a free ride at the top of the ballot for Chris Coons, John Carney and Beau Biden on the Democrats' 2014 statewide ticket, not a Republican opponent or a primary challenger in sight.