The Senate vote for cloture on the Reid bill is scheduled for 1am on Sunday morning. The House will vote on the Reid bill at 2:30 today, prior to the Senate vote. It will be on the suspension calendar which means that it can have no amendments and would need 2/3 vote to pass.

Forty-three Republicans have signed a letter to Harry Reid saying they will not vote for his plan tonight to increase the debt limit. This dooms passage because of the de facto supermajority requirement needed to move legislation in the United States Senate, something that Democrats could have legislated out of existence at the beginning of the Congressional session.

Amanda Little makes the case that the road to our new energy future runs not through Washington, DC but through the prairies of west Texas, where wind energy can be cheaply harvested, and the South Bronx, where activists like Majora Carter are leading a new environmental movement based on protecting public health. The great energy debate will be settled not with a single headline-making event, Little argues, but gradually as dropping clean energy prices first converge with rising dirty energy prices, then leave them in the dust.

The Senate vote for cloture on the Reid bill is scheduled for 1am on Sunday morning. The House will vote on the Reid bill at 2:30 today, prior to the Senate vote. It will be on the suspension calendar which means that it can have no amendments and would need 2/3 vote to pass.

As we await the resolution of the Great American Stick-Up, the unfortunate bit of information that came out yesterday turned the entire talk in Washington into an open farce, as if it wasn’t already. The new revisions from the Bureau of Economic Analysis on GDP from 2007 to present reveal several things. First, the economy sank into a near-depression as a result of the financial crisis, with output plunging much further than initially expected. Second, the economy never truly recovered. The stimulus package returned it to a kind of equilibrium, but that has mostly all dissipated by now. What is left is an demand gap – a gap that idles able bodies and reduces potential economic output.

Now I do have to ask how many folks remember the response of Speaker of the House Boehner way back in February when it was pointed out to him that cutting jobs could hurt the economy:

“So be it.”

You really should be careful of what you ask for Mr Speaker.

The Senate vote for cloture on the Reid bill is scheduled for 1am on Sunday morning. The House will vote on the Reid bill at 2:30 today, prior to the Senate vote. It will be on the suspension calendar which means that it can have no amendments and would need 2/3 vote to pass.

If you’re hardy, stay up until 1am ET tonight and watch the US Senate take a vote on a debt limit plan. The plan will retain most of the structure of what Harry Reid has put forward in recent days – a full $2.4 trillion increase in the debt limit, along with near-term spending cuts in the form of a cap on discretionary spending for around $1 trillion, war savings and assorted mandatory spending cuts for another $1.2 trillion, and the enactment of a joint committee on deficit reduction (what we’ve been calling Catfood Commission II) armed with the authority to recommend future deficit solutions, which will get an up or down vote in both houses of Congress without amendment or filibuster.

Almost every month, as the calendar winds down, I start getting calls in my office on the phone or in person from people who have more month than money. “Pastor, I’ve run out of money for food, and don’t get paid until the first of next month. I’ve got two kids, and need some help.” The specifics of the conversation vary, but the underlying substance does not.

Now, though, I’ve been hearing a different item tacked on at the end: “Pastor, you follow the news out of DC pretty well. Am I going to get my Social Security check next week?”

Making matters worse, DC seems hell-bent on budget cuts, right at the time the economy needs government spending more than ever. For the folks coming into my office lately, this is more than a mistake. It’s a disaster.

I seriously cannot believe I am again writing a post with one eye on the wire, still waiting for a conclusion to the debt-ceiling debacle, looking for real news to read, instead of just thrice re-boiled tea leaves. But here I am—here we are—sweating out a crisis that is as malicious as it is manufactured, knowing that when a “resolution” comes, no matter which version/option/compromise we get, it will be both terrible and impermanent.