The discussions over pairing an increase in the debt limit with austerity budgeting took a turn into the stratosphere this morning, with a series of articles detailing President Obama’s offer, to be presented to Congressional leaders today, of a broader deficit reduction plan than previously discussed, with major cuts to all areas of government and a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. This is the grand bargain, the “something big” deal that the President has clearly favored since perhaps before he entered office, when he set up a fiscal responsibility summit and invited Pete Peterson to keynote it.

Live blogging of the House Oversight Committee Hearing on Cybersecruity. Rep. Darrel Issa being himself. Can you say “Viper”?

The Washington Post has a story tonight, citing Democratic sources familiar with Obama’s views, that the President will propose a massive $4 trillion spending cut over the next decade that includes significant cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

After running across some resources again recently, I thought it would be a good idea to put some posts together that showed the background of many of the common facts I discuss. In this first post, I wanted to show the relationship between greenhouse gases, radiative forcing and temperatures. In doing, I will use graphics from the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report Technical Summary.

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor at the UK Guardian are reporting that the widely heralded 2010 announcement of a British government official inquiry into UK torture is facing a boycott by British human rights and attorney groups. The reason is undue secrecy. The handwriting was on the wall for some time on this sham inquiry, but the British human rights and lawyer groups kept fighting to make something real out of it.

Minnesota’s government shut down takes only a few hours to devolve into a ‘Minnesota Nice’ version of Beyond Thunderdome

Peter Karp and Sue Foley — Treat Me Right.

Over at that cesspit of morality, Townhall, Armstrong “Integrity” Williams identifies a Desperate National Crisis. These are questionable times in our country’s heralded history. The current Congress remains grid locked on nearly every issue of the day, unable to move even basic legislation regarding public safety, transportation, even the Post Office. Meanwhile, a president elected [...]

The other staggering moment from the President’s Twitter townhall came when he was actually asked a question about housing, which sets the townhall apart from practically every White House briefing over the past two years. Obama probably has a sense that the housing market is an undercovered topic, and nobody really understands the extent of the damage perpetrated by the mortgage industry. So he launched into his set remarks about how the Administration has a variety of programs to help unlucky or underwater homeowners, and that while they have been successful, they haven’t been enough.

As we’ve noted a couple times at EW, I will be hosting Glenn Carle to discuss his book, The Interrogator, at Saturday’s FDL Book Salon. As you no doubt know, his book describes his interrogation of what was described as a high level al Qaeda figure (the detainee wasn’t) and his objections to the government’s use of dislocation and other torture methods with him.