Senate Republicans are ready to consider a nomination to the consumer bureau just as soon as it's abolished. Congress, unhappy with the government structure laid out by the founders, has a better idea. And a reader with the handle BarackObama44 keeps getting banned from The Huffington Post comment section for starting flame wars over the Emancipation Proclamation. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Monday, July 18th, 2011:
SYMBOLIC TEA PARTY VOTE IN HOUSE TOMORROW - The House will take up the Tea Party-backed "Cut, Cap and Balance" plan on Tuesday, a proposal that many Republicans are touting as the one, true and only conservative solution to reining in federal spending. The bill's approach is three-pronged: It seeks substantial spending cuts, statutory spending caps and a constitutional amendment that would require the government to balance its books each year. President Barack Obama has already promised to veto the bill if it lands on his desk. Following the House vote, the Senate is expected to take up the bill later in the week, where it'll fail. The cuts they're calling for aren't serious. As David Rogers wrote yesterday, Ronald Reagan wouldn't even back this sucker. "I'd say there's less than a 50% chance of actually getting an agreement," budget expert Stan Collender told Reuters Insider. "I think that we're underestimating -- maybe grossly underestimating -- the ability of the Tea Party to stop anything from happening in the House." Sell!
DEBT CEILING FORECAST: Senate Dems are eying an end-of-the-week consideration of the McConnell-Reid Plan B bill with some touches to make House Republicans feel even more special than they already are. The plan would create a new 12-member body of lawmakers -- Super Congress? -- that would craft legislation that would be given an up-or-down, fast-track vote in both chambers. Genius! Why didn't the founders think of that? [HuffPost] Buy!
So the GOP has "Cut, Cap and Balance;" Jay Carney today dubbed it "Duck, Dodge and Dismantle; Dan Pfeiffer later said it "enshrines into the Constitution the Ryan plan on steroids." And Sen. Tom Coburn unveiled a $9 trillion deficit reduction plan called BACK IN BLACK. And we're days from the administration's July 22nd deadline. Sell!
Eliot Nelson and Arthur Delaney are out this week. Apologies for what you're reading
WARREN OUT, CORDRAY IN (?) AT CFPB - Elizabeth Warren, whose Senate seat is currently being held by Scott Brown, is stepping down, to be replaced by her senior aide Rich Cordray. The nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a five-time champ on Jeopardy! in the '80s, Obama noted today in his announcement, starting speculation that Republicans may pose questions in the form of answers at his confirmation hearing. To prep Cordray, here's one for him to take a stab at: For $200, this parliamentary device is used by a minority of senators to obstruct the will of the majority.
OBAMA CAN'T STOP REFRESHING HUFFPOST, GETTING ANGRY - The Obama campaign released a video this weekend and the upshot is that the president thinks we're really, really mean to him. "If you read the Huffington Post," he tells a small group of students, "you'd think that I was some right-wing tool of Wall Street." And then a bit later: "Abraham Lincoln. Here's a guy who didn't believe in slavery, but his first priority was keeping the union. I've got a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in my office, and if you read through it, most of the document is those states and areas where emancipation doesn't apply because those folks are allied with the union so they can keep their slaves. Here's a wartime President making a compromise around the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced, because he understood that his job was to win the war and maintain the union. Can you imagine how the Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. 'Lincoln Sells Out Slaves.'"
We searched "Lincoln Sells Out Slaves" in HuffPost's archives and, in Obama's defense, turned up this piece from late December 1862: [THE ACTUAL SCREEN GRAB]
LINCOLN SELLS OUT SLAVES - WASHINGTON -- President Abraham Lincoln intends to issue a proclamation emancipating slaves in states rebelling against the Union on Tuesday, senior administration officials tell the Huffington Post. The proclamation, said sources who'd been briefed on its contents, will not apply to slaves in certain states and counties that the president has determined are not in rebellion, a sop to pro-slavery interests at peace with the Union. Abolitionist congressional Republicans also took their party's president to task, questioning why Lincoln would free slaves in territories the Union does not control, but leave them enslaved in areas where Lincoln could, in fact, free them. "The president caved," a Senate Republican leadership aide told HuffPost.
OBAMA 2011: From Obama's lecture: "One of the challenges of this generation is, I think, to understand that the nature of our democracy and the nature of our politics is to marry principle to a political process. That means you don’t get a 100% of what you want. You don’t get it if you are the majority; you don’t get it if you are in the minority."
OBAMA 2008: Remember this? "We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes we can." Or, maybe not!
Our favorite bank lobbyist, Floyd Stoner, is leaving the American Bankers Association at the end of this year.
Don't be bashful: Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to huffposthill@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill
O'KEEFE TARGETING MEDICAID - James O'Keefe has taken his creative editing skills and goofy costumes to a Medicaid office near you to try to prove that he can find a low-level bureaucrat who will break the rules. [YouTube]
COMPLETE NON-SEQUITUR: Dick Durbin is pushing language that would make it harder for states to privatize assets and leave taxpayers with the tab.
FOLEY FROWNER: Hope and Nazry Mustakim, who were married last July, want to open a group home for teens struggling with drugs, abuse and neglect. But first they must get Nazry out of immigrant detention, where the legal immigrant has been held since March after the government removed his green card based on a 2005 drug charge. "It's really bleak. It's depressing. I drove up and I had the best attitude about it, but when I saw him through the glass -- I never expected to see my husband there," Hope said. [HuffPost's Elise Foley]
BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR - Sleeping cat, much like HuffPost Hill, does not like to be disturbed. [http://huff.to/rcMILc]
The reporter who blew the whistle on the phone hacking scandal has been found dead. Where were you on Sunday night, ALEC???
GOHMERT: OBAMA'S BIRTHDAY PARTY CURIOUSLY ONE DAY AFTER DEBT CEILING DEADLINE Rep. Louie Gohmert, who thinks terrorists come to the U.S. to have babies that will blow us up in two decades, said Obama probably set the date for raising the debt ceiling to make his birthday party that much cooler. "And I can’t help but be a little bit cynical here. Because we find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over. And lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so he can have this massive, the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration. [...] Isn’t that amazing? The timing of this?" [[Think Progress]
CANTOR OPERATING OUTSIDE USUAL POLICY COMFORT ZONE OF RENAMING POST OFFICES: The House Majority Leader’s legislative resume is as substantive as a Daily Caller exclusive (see: this). Of the 40 bills he has sponsored in his congressional career only two have successfully passed: one designated a U.S Postal Service in Richmond the "Tom Bliley Post Office Building,” another re-designed the nickel. Who better to march us through the fire of financial Armageddon? [HuffPost’s Sam Stein]
RELATED: People better move fast to get their gold .... and, if you’re like us, bath salts.
HOUSE DEMS BACK CARRIED INTEREST - Dem Reps. Jared Polis and Mike Quigley are asking the White House to back off hedge funds, carried interest and other rich people. Our favorite Paranoid, Self-Loathing GOP Lobbyist is loving it, alternating between referring to himself in the first and third persons. "PSLGOPL is going to assume that the radicalized, marginalized Democrat isn’t Polis or Quigley, but you never can be sure. I have all kinds of thoughts on Democrats backing carried interest, but I’d love to hear the marginal Dem explain it," he said. [Ben Smith] Sorry, PSLGOPL! Our Dem didn't get back to us in time.
Shallots can be key to a good salad dressing.
COMFORT FOOD
- Forget Mila Kunis. Sergeant asks Betty White to the Marine Ball. [http://bit.ly/qgfY3V]
- Vintage ads are lying to you. [http://bit.ly/p64xrr]
- Tumblr that shows the final image of various films, so you don't have to watch them. [http://bit.ly/pUiith]
- Color footage of Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb. [http://bit.ly/nlV2vf]
- Baby smiles -- sort of -- on command. [http://huff.to/pozyJX]
- Steel your ears! Pop “star”/running YouTube joke Rebecca Black’s new single has dropped [http://bit.ly/mPgGoI]
TWITTERAMA
@lucia_graves: Gonna be? RT @Lawrence: @irisgrim Iris, you're gonna be a star.
@radleybalko: I blame gay marriage. RT @MarieSDiamond: Michele Bachmann being kissed by a lama. bit.ly/ocTVyw
@brianbeutler: BREAKING: Senate to remain in quorum call through the weekends until debt limit bill is passed.
@davidfrum: My Twitter account was hacked at almost exact instant I was running past Dow Jones bldg on Hudson River path. Coincidence?
ON TAP
TONIGHT
7 p.m. Christian Parenti reads from his new book, Tropic of Chaos, on the rise of global violence already resulting from climate change. :( [Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue Northwest]
TOMORROW
8 a.m. : Dick Lugar inadvertently gives his Tea Party challenger fresh ammo to use against him when he raises money at a breakfast hosted by former Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Cohen. [500 8th St, NW]
11:45 a.m. Bob Corker, who believes "fossil fuels are a bridge to the future!" finally gets his thank you present, in the form of an "Oil and Gas Industry" Lunch at Johnny's Half Shell. [400 North Capitol Street NW #175]
5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.: Apparently, fun won't be the only thing missing from the NRSC Women's Leadership Council Reception. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Lisa Murkowksi are MIA, too. Ayotte, Collins, and Snowe are listed as hosts on the invitation. KBH and Murkowski? Not so much. Odds are the Texan lawmaker has officially retired from boring cocktail parties, while Murkoswksi may still be a little sore about that whole "backing her opponent" business. Attendees, please let us know if you spot them. [425 2nd Street NE]
6 p.m.: Kelly Ayotte is going to need a five-hour energy shot tonight. A mere 30 minutes into ladies night at the NRSC, Ayotte scoots over to Bistro Cacao for another wicked cool NRSC-hosted fundraiser. This time, she's the sole beneficiary. [320 Massachusetts Ave, NE]
6 p.m.: David Vitter passes the tin cup at Finemondo Restaurant, where the chicken parm costs $23. According to a recent Yelp review of the restaurant, the "sausage was tough and tasted on the verge of being spoiled." That's right. The sausage. [1319 F Street NW]
7 p.m.: Potentially still full from his lunch with the oil industry, Bob Corker schleps back to Johnny's Half Shell for a "Real Estate Dinner." A former real estate exec whose company once sold protected wetlands to Wal-Mart, Corker should feel right at home. [400 North Capitol Street NW #175]
7:05 p.m.: Finally, a Democrat takes advantage of Tuesday's excellent fundraising weather. Dutch Ruppersberger wants you to come watch the Orioles lose to the Boston Red Sox. Cheap tickets = $9. Ruppersberger tix = $750. Sorta sad either way. [333 West Camden Street, Baltimore, Md.]
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