If there's a default, there will be a lot of finger-pointing, but most of the blame should fall on Republican leadership in the House. TPM's Josh Marshall equated the negotiations between the House, Senate, and administration to a game of chicken, except one of the cars has no driver. No one knows if Republicans have the votes to pass Boehner's, Reid's, or anyone's plan.

Everyone assumes that this is because a large number of congressional Republicans cannot be trusted to raise the debt ceiling. They're even on the record saying things to that effect. But Boehner's inability to control his caucus is his fault.

One of the key dynamics of American politics over the last couple of years is the way Republican animosity toward Barack Obama is manifest in policy. Namely, whatever the president is for, they are passionately against. This applies even to formerly Republican ideas, like a cap-and-trade plan for reducing carbon emissions and an individual health-insurance mandate. This is showing up again in the debt-ceiling debate. For instance, Harry Reid's latest plan essentially gives the GOP everything it has asked for: huge budget cuts and no tax increases, in exchange for raising the ceiling. But they reject it out of hand, because it's a Democratic plan that Obama has spoken of favorably. As maddening as it is, this actually points our way out of the crisis.

The New York Times had this chart on display as part of a Sunday opinion column on the source of the federal budget deficit:

At $1.44 trillion to $5.07 trillion – a difference of $3.63 trillion – President Obama’s policies have been far less expensive than that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. By and large, our large deficits owe most of their existence to policies pursued by President Bush – his tax cuts on middle- and high-income earners, and his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• Yannis Palaiologos asks whether the latest EU plan will save the Eurozone debt crisis.
• David Dayen explains how the Gang of Six has made the debt-ceiling negotiations even more complicated.
• David Callahan argues that Obama should be talking more about defense spending cuts.

When Barack Obama took office, I wrote a column speculating on whether he would dial back the rather sectarian approach the Bush administration took to dealing with government funding of religious organizations. I got mixed views from the representatives of secular organizations I spoke to; some were cautiously optimistic, but others thought little would change.

While who hosts which show on cable news is probably of only marginal import to you, something just happened at MSNBC that is actually interesting. Cenk Uygur, who had been hosting the network's 6 pm slot on a trial basis for the last few months, got shown the door, and Al Sharpton will be taking over. But Uygur did something really unusual in this situation. Instead of issuing a brief statement about how thankful he was to have the opportunity, he went on The Young Turks, his radio/web video show, and gave a long explanation of what happened: