Paul M. Jones

"We're going to read this document," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said Monday, referring to the debt ceiling agreement reached Sunday night. "We're going to understand it before we vote for it."

Lee, who helped rush the 2,000-page Affordable Care Act through the House before nearly anyone had a chance to read it, promised to pore over the 74-page Budget Control Act in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to stop trillions of dollars in federal spending cuts.

Last year, after the passage of Obamacare, Republicans running for the House included in their "Pledge to America" a promise to allow the public sufficient time to read bills before lawmakers voted on them. "We will give all representatives and citizens at least three days to read the bill before a vote," the pledge said.

Then came the debt bill, which was finished Sunday evening and released to the public Monday morning. In their race to finish work Monday night, well before the Treasury Department's midnight Tuesday default deadline, Republicans ended up violating their own read-the-bill pledge.

via Dems eat Satan sandwich, GOP looks to next course | Byron York | Politics | Washington Examiner.

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

Biden’s office declined to comment about what the vice president said inside the closed-door session.

Earlier in the day, Biden told Senate Democrats that Republican leaders have “guns to their heads” in trying to negotiate deals.

via Biden: Tea partiers like 'terrorists' - Jonathan Allen and John Bresnahan - POLITICO.com.

In America, vast pools of money in politics give the business community enormous power to influence elections. That's bad. But the alternative, apparently, is to get the money out and instead give media moguls enormous power to influence elections. Pick your poison.

via Theories of the British Press - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

Seriously: best PHP blog around today. Queries inside queries | CSI: PHP.

In which Ms. McArdle makes points similar to the ones I made here. She concludes with this very good ending paragraph:

The failure to think specifically applies to taxation, incidentally.  I know a very large number of east coast progressives who are outraged when they suddenly discover that middle-class ol' them, who doesn't even have enough money to repair the cracks in the ceiling after property taxes and school bills and one not-very-nice vacation to Nova Scotia, are technically "the rich" for the purpose of assessing taxes.  They, too, are not thinking specifically about where the money is.  They're just thinking it would be nice for Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates to have less stuff, while people living in housing projects have more.  But there, as with cuts to the nebulous cloud of "spending", the math doesn't work.  If you want to raise more tax revenues, stop thinking about corporate jets and the carried interest, and start thinking about eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction for all earners, and allowing the AMT to kick in on the upper end of "middle class" incomes.  In other words, start thinking about taxing New York Times reporters, not a very small class of rich people.

Emphasis mine. If you want to increase revenues, then *everyone* is going to have to pay more in taxes, especially the middle class and the poor, until we get rid of a trillions in spending. Another alternative is to start moving toward the Fair Tax which *everyone* has to pay.

Via Getting Specific on Spending - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

On this day in 1969, Apolo 11 landed on the moon..

[T]he bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart -- because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.

via Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun.

Why have driver’s licenses at all? ... Does the licensing process really do much to weed out bad or irresponsible drivers? Enough to justify the expense and irritation of the DMV? After all, if you drive badly or drunk, the DMV doesn’t have to pay out any damages for licensing you.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » DRIVER’S LICENSE REVOKED because facial-recognition system thought he looked like someone else. H….

The drug war inevitably leads to corruption in the forces recruited to fight it.  It erodes civil liberties.  It diverts law enforcement resources from other tasks.  In a society which believes that lap dancers in strip bars are exercising their constitutionally protected right of free expression and that virtually any government interference in the termination of unborn life is an obscene and inexcusable violation of the right to privacy, it is hard to find good reasons why government should have the right to tell us what chemicals to put in our bloodstreams.

via An Unhappy Ending To The Drug War? | Via Meadia.

The only thing about an ounce of pot that puts your kids in danger is what the government will do to you if it finds out you have it.

via Drugs The Drug War Ruins Antoher Family | The Agitator.