Remember "Repeal and Replace?"

According to a piece in Politico, House Republicans may be losing their taste for repealing the Affordable Care Act (my emphasis):

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), above, one of the House’s most ardent supporters of repealing or defunding the law at all costs, says it has become more difficult to get the attention of House leaders.

“I can’t get any traction,” he said of his effort to repeal or defund the law. “You can’t create something in this Congress unless leadership approves it.”

He questioned whether Republican leaders are willing to repeal the whole law if it means also repealing some of its popular provisions.

“There’s a little bit of an undercurrent that I pick up among well-positioned people in this Congress who think there could be some redeeming qualities of Obamacare,” pointing to statements Republican leadership have made in support of a handful of the law’s policies, such as banning insurers from denying patients because of preexisting conditions or allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance through age 26.

The Republican Party...

...may no longer be a normal party, according to David Brooks. He writes in the Times this morning (my emphasis):

Over the past few years, [the GOP] has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative. The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
 
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.
 
But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.
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If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

The song of the...

...day.

The Glenbrook North Spartans...

...have a running back named Grant Rushing.

Larry Summers was asked recently...

...to describe President Obama's economic philosophy (my emphasis):

I think he's a deeply pragmatic economic thinker. He recognizes that the key to any society is the success of its middle class. He's focused on improving opportunities for the middle class. He wants to look at experience around the world and see what works best and pursue that. He's neither an ideologue who believes in untrammeled free markets nor an ideologue who believes that everything is best done by government. But I would describe his economic philosophy as supremely pragmatic. And I think it was a successful philosophy. There was a very real chance of depression in the winter of 2009. And that was avoided. It didn't have to be avoided, but much like the nuclear, the Cuban Missile Crisis where it's not that anything great happened in October of 1962, but disaster was avoided. In the same way the policy package that the president put forward was successful in preventing the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression.

Here's a nasty-looking graph...

...(especially on the Friday before a long weekend) from Ezra Klein's blog. I'll save you the trouble of inspecting it closely by going straight to the moral of the story:

The single most important fact about our projected deficits is that if Congress does nothing, they go away.

Rick Perry, another...

...evangelical Republican governor from Texas, is considering a run for the White House.

What could possibly go wrong?