The draft executive order that would force any corporation doing business with the federal government to disclose its political donations is this close to being held back, I’d gather. It’s become a large political headache for the White House, and if there’s one thing they hate, it’s political headaches. Republicans took the rare step of threatening a subpoena for OMB Director Jack Lew and Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients to testify at a Darrell Issa-led House Oversight Committee hearing on the proposal, before the White House agreed to allow OMB Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy Daniel Gordon to testify.

While I think that immigration reform groups are generally appreciative of having their message delivered in a high-profile way, they aren’t likely to wait while concrete steps could be taken by the Administration right now to improve the lives and standing of undocumented immigrants.

This is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” if it ever was. Rather, as the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote, we have a government “of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%.”

John Boehner’s demands on raising the debt limit, an action he has already pledged to take both publicly and privately on numerous occasions, are clearly ridiculous. They also have nothing to do with reducing debt, because the rigid stance against tax increases means that under his plan the budget would add $5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. The goal is to cut spending enough to pay for lower taxes for the rich, and that’s pretty much it.

So, it’s perhaps not worth pointing out that Boehner’s economic claims are ahistorical and fallacious. But Bloomberg does it anyway.

An overwhelming majority–59 percent–of the American people think that with Osama bin Laden dead, it is time to bring our troops home from our nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan.

Republicans may cling to this belief that they still want to muck around with Medicare, but it’s not going to happen. For one, their partners in an entire house of Congress don’t want to touch the thing. I suppose they can give means testing a shot, but privatization isn’t happening.

So for any big changes in the safety net, there’s Medicaid. . . .

Attention media: since Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are running as the True Devout Catholics of the Republican Party, could you please ask them what their response is to this Papal decree?

With all three candidates financially viable, how will the race shake out? The presence of Davis makes it harder to claim that this is a referendum on Medicare privatization. However, I do think you can say what Josh Kraushaar says, that this has refocused attention on the actual desires of Republicans, which are broadly unpopular.

Is Steny really suggesting that Congressmen are not aware of who their donors are, are not intimately familiar with how much they’re raking in from contractors?

Yesterday, news broke that the “substantial” withdrawal in July 2011 in Afghanistan consisted of maybe 5,000 troops now and another 5,000 by the end of the year. That’s about 10% of the active US military force in Afghanistan, not including thousands of contractors and 30,000 coalition troops from other countries and like. The word “maybe” is crucial here; NBC News quotes senior Administration officials saying that the next month will determine the extent of the withdrawal, and others saying it would be foolhardy to draw down in the middle of “fighting season” in Afghanistan (is there any other kind). So even this clearly inadequate force removal won’t happen, if the military leadership in the Pentagon has anything to say about it.