good looks like there may be an adult in that party after all, but I doubt it.

Stop chasing shadows. short term deal is totally irresponsible, McConnell. what kind of message are these goons sending with this? it's all about jobs, jobs and jobs. this dept ceiling is simply a misplaced priority. create jobs, let's make more payrolls, increase taxes where necessary so we can raise revenue. Dems are simply lackluster in this debate.

Finally - A little consideration for the country and it's future... If McConnell can gather the energy to give something positive back to the country he has been molesting and raping it would serve him well... Self Centered son of a ******! VOTE HIM AND ALL REPUBLICANS OUT!

OK if the republicans can give a little in an effort to deal with the problems why can't the President.****VOTE HIM AND ALL DEMOCRATS OUT!

For even a short term debt ceiling deal, the Republican leadership should recieve something huge in return. How about no more golf or exotic vacations for the next 18 months. That would save a few billion.

I say just let us default. With the report released earlier with the amount of millionaires in congress, I want to see how they react when the markets go belly up. Of course we could not default but stop paying seniors/disabled folks all those "entitlements" and see how well the voters like that just to make sure those "with" are not punished. Yeah, be strong, stand up and maintain the "NO Raising the limit!". Now that we are about down to the actual deadline, I'll suspect a few more folks (either republican or democrat) will come around and decide that the limit will need to be raised. I'm just curious to see how strong both sides are on the "will or will not" cut things from the budget before they do change their mind and raise it.

I listened to Mitch on one of the Sunday shows yesterday. It was fun to see the shift in taling points about unemployement suddenly go from 'need to cut taxes' to 'need less regulation', now that the Repubs know no one is buying the tax break nonsense after 10 years....

Good ol' Mitch McConnell. Can this guy be honest about ANYthing?

McCain has lost all credit-ability in the Hispanic culture resulting from his continued flip-flopping on issues directly effecting the populace of Arizona. He has become more of a loser than before he lost to President Obama. McCain's stature and content has waned to the point that he should not run for re-election in the future because of his continued flip-flopping.

What happened to pay as you go? No money no wars ? No money close 745 bases world wide ..No money no retirement for the millionaire congress/senate members ..No money default on the loans from China ...you know dam well they wouldn't think twice if the shoe was on the other foot ...No money.. stop policing the world ! No money legalize every drug and tax the hell of of it....no money end all the crusades ! You never win any anyway ... This BS about ending the wars to quickly is just that ..it falls apart anyway the min you leave .......Why not right now and save the money !

The problem with America is the old politicians ...the war mongers the conquerors... They never would have come here..... had we NOT gone there !

Isn't just like McConnell, under Bush he pases the DEBT Limit no problem many times

But under Obama it just can't happen without killing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid

No tax increases, but more tax cuts for the Rich and Big Oil , Big Business, Koch Brothers, Dick Army , Carl Rove

McConnell brought and paid for by the Rich, Koch Brothers

McCain

Has lost all credibility,

Time for him to go

I just love the term "raising revenues" instead of what it actually is raising taxes. Since raising taxes alone has no hope of ever covering the budget deficit or reducing our national debt, this whole debt circus has little to no chance of succeeding. Plain and simple our Washington elite are addicted to spending. Without an ironclad balanced budget amendment, Washington budget talks will be nothing more then smoke and mirrors while the country continues on a path toward bankruptcy. Once the country is bankrupt, the first order of business will need to be wiping all politicians perks and benefits from the balance sheets. They are the ones that got the country into this mess, so they have no business collecting so much as a dime when the country fails financially.

mconnell , the 90 year old , remember what he said when President Obama was elected , something about his only agenda the next 4 years is to get him out of office , thus party of no , all this man sees is BLACK !!!!

I notice all the articles about one Republican disagreeing with another Republican candidate. But they all have one major campaign point on their agenda, to make Obama a one term President. I don't see any articles about Democrats expressing dissatisfaction with Obama. The large amount of Democratic congressmen who joined in the law suit against the Obama administration action in Libya or people like John Stewart who say they think Obama has done a poor job. Where are all of those articles.

Yes McConnell , like many others in their caucus, is a racist who would rather see this country fail than to help an African American president combat the problems facing this country. He, like cry baby Boehner and clueless Cantor, know full well the consequences if they go through with their grandstanding on the debt limit. Their corporate contributions will dry up.

When a Republican was in office John Boehner and Mitch McConnell voted without hesitation to pass raising the Debt ceiling even stating that they hope this passed unanimously.

Years the Republicans voted to raise the Debt Ceiling Bush signed into law

2002 350 Billion in tax cut to big business and 450 Billion increase

2003 450 Billion in tax cuts to Big Business and 900 Billion increase

2004 600 Billion in tax Cuts to Big business and 800 Billion Increase

2006 670 Billion in Tax cuts to Bug Business and 781 Billion Increase

2007 700 Billion tax cuts for Big Business and 850 Billion Increase

2008 450 Billion tax Cuts to Big Business and

Total 3.2 Trillion to Big Business $4 Trillion Debt Ceilng increases under Bush

Total 7.2 Trillion in the Red for the next president coming in 2009.

Republicans voted to raise the Debt Ceiling every time it was brought up while a republican was in office and I goggle there response then it was Boehner and McConnell who said “there should not be any politics come into play when it comes to a increase in our national debt we need to pass this to continue to operate”. Also Mike Pence of Indiana in 2002 said it as a necessity to raise the National debt. Bush a republican was in office then but now the same Mike Pence now says he will not vote to raise the Debt ceiling without cuts to programs in healthcare and Medicare and all of which no cuts for defense or ending the Wars. Now Republicans and Tea Party think it’s a Great idea to play politics while a Democrat is in office.

Dirty Politics

From the New Yorker’s now-famous profile of the Kochs:

In 1997, another Senate investigation began looking into what a minority report called “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing the amount or source,” in order to evade campaign-finance laws. A shell corporation, Triad Management, had paid more than three million dollars for attack ads in twenty-six House races and three Senate races.

This is just scratching the surface. Triad was formed by Carolyn Malenick, the chief fundraiser for Oliver North’s failed Senate bid. (North, of course, was the former Marine Lt. Colonel indicted during the Iran-Contra scandal.) According to the FEC, Malenick and Triad Management Services exceeded the annual campaign contribution limit and illegally accepted corporate campaign contributions during the 1996 election cycle. While “the seriousness of the above violations… authorizes a civil penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Malenick ended up with a fine of $5,000, paid in fifty monthly installments of $100.

The scheme worked like this. Corporations and individual donors gave money to Triad. Triad, in turn, launched a series of advertisements undermining candidates they opposed. As a contemporaneous New York Times article described it:

In Mr. Brownback’s 1996 Senate race, a last-minute $400,000 television advertising blitz was paid for by Triad donors. These advertisements appeared in the closing weeks of the election and attacked his Democratic opponent as an out-of-state liberal.

Besides raising money from conservative donors and funneling it to Republican candidates, Triad also raised money for two affiliated nonprofit groups that ran advertisements attacking Democratic candidates. Such groups have been criticized as thinly disguised fronts for partisan political activities, purporting to be issue oriented but often supporting individual candidates and their campaigns.

PBS’ Frontline did a series on the issues Triad’s political work raised (the site for it includes the aforementioned ads). As part of the series, host Bill Moyers interviewed Elizabeth Stein, who acted as counsel during the Senate’s investigation into the matter. (Moyer’s questions are italicized below.)

Okay, so you have Triad, which is a for-profit organization, whose purpose is to influence elections, and it has two arms that are shells, in a sense, that are its airwings, its air force. It runs television ads against candidates, right?

Right.

It gets its money from something called the —

The Economic Education Trust. It went out, we think and hired political consultants, planned an issue ad campaign in key districts that were important to whoever was running the trust, and spent between $1 and $3 million dollars doing that.

And what was its relationship to Triad?

As near as we can tell, the Economic Education Trust basically shopped for organizations to run money through in an effort to keep its existence hidden. So its relationship to Triad is essentially — it went shopping for organizations, and Triad was one that it found.

And who gives that money to the Economic Education Trust?

What the report says and what the evidence the committee developed suggests is that the Economic Education Trust is funded by Koch Oil, which is possibly the second largest privately held company in the country.

Is Koch the primary supplier of money for Triad?

It certainly gave the most money for the advertising that Triad did in 1996.

$1.3 million - more than half of Triad’s advertising budget - came from Economic Education Trust, a Twin Falls, Idaho, company that investigators believed was controlled by the Kochs. In 1998, the Congressional Record quoted the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the matter:

Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Wichita, Kan.-based Koch, declined to comment on whether the Kochs or their money were involved. Democrats on the committee sent Charles Koch a letter this month asking to speak with him about their inquiry, but he failed to respond, according to investigators.

In time, that direct connection to the Kochs was revealed. Again, the New Yorker:

The brothers were suspected of having secretly paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states where Koch Industries did business. In Kansas, where Triad Management was especially active, the funds may have played a decisive role in four of six federal races. The Kochs, when asked by reporters if they had given the money, refused to comment. In 1998, however, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in the scheme. Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, described the scandal as “historic. Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout”—a front operation—“in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.”

One of the beneficiaries of Triad’s illegal largesse was Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles. Nickles was one of the “four influential senators” who attempted to undermine Chris Tucker’s testimony in the oil theft case. During those hearings, on the day following the most damning testimony about Koch, Nickles appeared at the Committee hearing to clarify that the media was overreporting the value of what was stolen from Native American well owners. “The only thing I’m concerned about,” he said, “is headlines that Oklahoma Indians are losing $12 million a year, or $3 million a year - whatever that chart would be - if it is really that they would be losing one eighth of that…”

The original grand jury investigation against Koch that stemmed from this hearing was ultimately dismissed. A 1996 BusinessWeek article theorizes why:

Nickles sponsored Timothy D. Leonard, an old friend of Nickles, for the post of U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma City, a job Leonard assumed in October, 1989. When the Senate committee probing the oil-theft charges was referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Oklahoma City, which convened a rare special grand jury, Leonard took over the case.

Initially, questions were raised in the U.S. attorney’s office abo

President Barack Obama and his aides are considering a temporary cut in the Social Security payroll tax — this time on the employers’ side. The potential new tax break would be on top of a $111 billion cut in workers’ payroll taxes that took effect in January.

It's a reminder that despite Republicans’ portrayal of him as someone determined to raise taxes, Obama has a solid record as a tax cutter since taking office.

The lame-duck deal with congressional Republicans which he agreed to and signed into law last December cuts taxes by $374 billion this year and by nearly $900 billion over 10 years.

And some of the provisions in that law benefit the wealthy — like extending until the end of 2012 the low tax rates on dividends and capital gains signed into law by George W. Bush.

1. Other political news of note

AP

Archive of Palin emails online at msnbc.com

Updated 10 minutes ago 6/11/2011 1:06:42 AM +00:00 A free, searchable, online archive of emails from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is available through msnbc.com. Bill Dedman reports.

1. Obama's tax cutting in face of GOP criticism
2. Palin vs. the GOP establishment
3. Never-Ending Discussion: The week in review
4. NJ: Rick Perry's moment to step in 2012 field?

Of course, it wasn’t Obama’s preference to extend the current income tax rates, with a 35 percent top rate, on upper-income people. He had to agree to do that in order to get any deal at all in December.

Video: Pa. congressman proposes penny tax debt plan (on this page)

Other provisions in that tax deal benefit people who live from paycheck to paycheck — for example, an increase in the size of the child tax credit for low-income workers.

Stimulus included tax cut
The 2009 stimulus, which Republicans love to deride, was in fact a significant tax cutting bill. There were more than $300 billion in tax breaks, preferences, and credits in that legislation — including the Making Work Pay Credit which was essentially a big tax cut for workers earning less than $75,000 and couples making less than $150,000 a year.

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And even though Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal, unveiled last February, won’t be enacted into law, it stands as an official statement of what he wants to do: increase taxes for those making above $250,000, and enact major tax cuts for many people below that level.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said in its analysis, “Relative to current law, the entire package of (Obama FY 2012) proposals would reduce taxes in 2013 for about three-quarters of all households and raise taxes for about 6 percent … On average, taxes would drop an average of nearly $1,700 in 2013.”

Obama has come some distance from where he started in his first budget blueprint in 2009, when he proposed a new $80 billion-a-year greenhouse gas permit system that would operate like a tax. That idea died in the Senate last year.

'Taxes have been lowered'
“In practice, taxes have been lowered during the president’s term, and part of that has been at his behest, because the 2009 stimulus tax cuts were something he wanted,” said Roberton Williams, a tax expert at the nonpartisan Urban Institute in Washington.

Last December’s tax bill “was a compromise deal, but in any case, he wanted to cut taxes below what they would have been this year, he just would have been cutting them for 98 percent of the population, instead of 100 percent of the population,” Williams said.

Republicans, of course, will be quick to remind voters that Obama has signed some significant tax increases, especially those contained in last year’s health care overhaul. Most notably among them: a $210 billion increase over seven years in Medicare taxes on high-income people.

But with the exception of relatively trivial items like the tax on indoor tanning (worth $200 million this year — practically pocket change considering the $3.7 trillion federal budget), and small revenue raisers like a tax on pharmaceutical firms (which will net $2 billion this year), most increases in the overhaul will not take effect until 2013 at the earliest.

The penalty on people who choose to go without insurance doesn’t take effect until 2014. And the tax on high-cost “Cadillac" health plans isn’t scheduled to take effect until 2018.

Mostly — but not always — Obama has been true to his stated belief: try to raise taxes on upper-income people and cut taxes for the middle class and those below.

While that doesn’t fit the view of most budget hawks — including those on the president’s own deficit reduction commission — that almost everyone will need to pay higher taxes in order to avert a debt crisis, it is his record.

I still remember seeing the idiots cheering down Health care reform with signs "Keep your hands off my Medicare". Well Republicans have yet again shown there rear-ends to the American public and what they think about us by just going with a Plan to do what the people thought Democrats were going to with the passage of Health care. What I can tell you is republicans care nothing for any American making less then 1 million a year and the more you make the more they care about you because they want your donations to stay in power and that's all that matters to them bedsides giving every scrap they can scrap from the middle class and poor and Hand deliver it to the Rich.

Where are all those same crazy people in those crowds caring those signs about Keeping there hands off my Medicare now? Guess they cashed there Koch checks and are living high on the hog. If we don't make Republicans pay by voting them out and the Tea party out we are Doomed to watch all we worked for bleed for and paid be tricked out from underneath us. We need to Recall Republicans with Democrat's and Independents and raise Taxes on the Rich for the first time since 2001 When We had a Huge Surplus from the Clinton years and use the revenue from the extra income directly to pay off the National Debt while also making sensible reductions in Spending to encourage the economy to keep producing jobs. As the National debt falls the Businesses and Banks can lend money more freely like back in Clinton's time in office and we will have Jobs all over again.

We have Tried the Republican/Bush way with the same same rate and more cuts for the rich the last 12 years and it doesn't Work never has. Trickle down is only the person who makes the most taking a leak on those below. Recall the Republicans Quit Blaming Middle Class and poor and replace those Republicans with Democrats and independents that will reduce the spending as the President stated without killing us in the Middle and poorer classes.

WashPost-ABC Poll: Don't Change Medicare, Medicaid

Americans strongly oppose plans to change Medicare and Medicaid that House Republicans have put forward as a way to bring the national debt under control, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows. Among other remedies advanced, only President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy enjoys solid support.

The GOP plan, which House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin put together, calls for major changes in Medicare and Medicaid. Obama’s plan does not call for restructuring but acknowledges future savings are needed. The poll found that 78 percent oppose cutting spending on Medicare and 69 percent oppose cuts to Medicaid, the Post reported.

Obama’s call to raise taxes on those with income over $250,000 garnered the support of 72 percent, with majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans approving. Almost 60 percent disapprove of the president’s handling of the budget, but 64 percent disapprove of the way congressional Republicans are handling it, the Post reported.

On the question of who has a stronger leadership role in Washington, congressional Republicans lead Obama 45 to 40 percent. However, Obama holds a double-digit advantage among independents when it comes to protecting the middle class, the Post reported 75 to 25.

Partisan biased and financed attacks on only Democrats I see people like the Koch brothers will stop at nothing to try and take the heat off the real issues like the Republicans and Tea party Voting to end Medicare, SS and Medicaid and give huge Cut in taxes to the richest ten percent while creating revenue issue in paying bills all the while they are cutting education and any programs that help protect our way of Life. I bet this is being financed by the Koch Brothers or just another spin off of them. Hopefully somone will hack the house and go after republicans who are paying call girls but stay in the house and have no one calling for resignations on there side. Vitter...... I know they will come up with alot more dirt of the republicans sie then they could ever hope in a million years on the Democrat side.

Noe there is a republican senator that the press hardly even touched that robbed a place and was caught red handed and let see how much attention he gets from the news and how many republicans call for him to resign his post in the senate.

What the hell is with the short term bull @!$%#, this will be the third time

Raise it and get it done......

So? Where are the JOBS the GOP ran on during the last election cycle?