House Speaker John Boehner announced his party’s year-end legislation that would extend the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance benefits and a patch to prevent a 27% cut in Medicare reimbursement to doctors. The legislation also includes poison pills which the President already vowed to reject, designed as sweeteners to get conservative members on board.

Mark Udall’s amendment to strip out indefinite detention provisions from the defense authorization bill failed today, and the bill will likely pass the Senate with the provisions intact. This sets up a possible, but not certain, Obama veto.

President Obama promised to veto any Congressional attempt to undo the trigger of spending cuts from the Super Committee’s failure. But he’s left unclear how Congress can be induced to renew unemployment benefits or other stimulus measures.

Palestine submitted their petition to the United Nations Security Council for membership as a state today, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas delivered a rousing speech before the General Assembly in support of the measure. So what happens next?

President Obama is scheduled to speak this morning at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, to spell out his debt reduction plan. Some details from Obama’s plan to “go big” on the Super Committee are out, and it’s an opening bid that is far less pre-compromised than we’ve come to expect.

On September 23, one week from tomorrow, the Palestinian Authority will lead an effort to be recognized as an independent state at the United Nations. With serious peace talks stalled for years and with the Palestinians having little alternatives or leverage to force a return to negotiations, they decided that going to the UN was the best course of action. And while the US can veto the effort at the Security Council, a General Assembly petition for “observer status” is more likely to succeed.

This month, the Palestinian Authority plans to go to the United Nations and petition for statehood, against the wishes of the Israelis and the United States. It’s not entirely clear what form this statehood petition will take. The Palestinians could ask for full UN membership, which would go through the UN Security Council, or they could seek “Observer Status,” basically a first step toward eventual statehood, which would be subject to a vote at the General Assembly. The big difference here is that five Security Council states have veto power, and the US has already vowed to use it with respect to the Palestinian statehood push. So Mahmoud Abbas, who is leading the effort, may avoid the Security Council

I’ve been trying to remind people throughout the run-up to the Obama jobs proposal that it would also presage a deficit proposal, to “pay for” whatever spending is in the jobs proposal. We now have a topline number for the jobs plan: $300 billion, half from tax cuts and 2/3 from the extension of current law (Maybe this is why nobody thinks it will work). So will there be $300 billion in cuts in some fashion to “pay for” the spending over time? No, it’ll be much higher than that.

Now, I cannot name for you one single solitary member of Congress who lost his or her seat because they voted to increase the debt limit. So McConnell may consider this tactically brilliant, but Democrats would be fine to call his bluff. What’s more, it would keep alive the many charges they could level at Republicans in 2012, like voting to end Medicare. The way I think it’s structured, you wouldn’t even necessarily need the aforementioned Tester and Nelson and McCaskill and Manchin to vote to uphold the Presidential veto; you’d just need 34 Democrats.

The House plans to vote on its anti-abortion bill, HR 3, this week, which would effectively end all insurance coverage of abortion-related services. The White House has threatened to veto the bill.

The Administration didn’t mention the most egregious part of the bill, though they captured most of it. Because of an outcry earlier in the year, House Republicans changed the language that would alter the definition of rape to only include so-called “forcible rape,” in an effort to limit the rape exemptions in the law where abortions are allowed.