Quick Hits Headlines

Stories to Watch: 7/12/11

More coffee. More coffee. Now here’s the news…


Mitch McConnell offers a peculiarly roundabout scheme to get a debt ceiling vote through the Senate; the Senate votes againstraising the debt ceiling, Obama vetoes the bill, the Senate tries to override the veto (guaranteed to fail), and Obama gets his increase.

Why the circuitous method? It’s all about saving Republican asses. McConnell knows that any default will be blamed on the GOP, yet Republicans can’t vote to raise the limit without freaking out the ‘baggers and — maybe — losing votes to even crazier third-party candidates next time around. This way, Republicans get to vote against raising the debt limit — twice — along with a few Democrats providing a sham “bipartisanship.”

Then President Obama gets to face “He vetoed a bipartisan effort to control runaway Washington spending” ads in the reelection cycle. I doubt even the Compromiser in Chief will fall for this one.

But it does show just how desperate Republican leadership is getting; McConnell wants Obama to unpaint him out of a corner.

Ron Paul won’t run for reelection. Let the rampage of unbridled socialism begin.


For a guy who’s supposedly so terrible, Barack Obama’s White House remains curiously unrocked by scandal. The guy’s been a freakin’ Boy Scout so far. Apparently, this is enough to arouse the suspicion of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who seemsbound and determined to solve the scandal deficit.


In case you were wondering; yes, Alan Grayson is still awesome.


This is weird. The head of the Republican Senatorial Committee, John Cornyn, has picked Carly Fiorina to be the vice chair of his organization. What’s so weird about that? Fiorina lost to Sen. Barbara Boxer by 10 points in 2010 and the NRSC’s job is to elect Republican senators. That should work out great.


Finally, Google may have further distanced itself from their old motto “don’t be evil” by cutting off Iranian users from using the new Google Plus social networking site. An error page tells Iranian users they’re trying to access the site from a “forbidden country.” Social media was a big part of the uprising of the Iranian people and Google’s apparently helping to make sure that Ahmadinejad has no further problems on that front.