There is a brief respite today after the flurry of White House summits between President Obama and leaders from Congress. The two sides spent the week negotiating a way to bridge the impasse on raising the debt ceiling that, if not resolved by Aug 2, threatens to permanently alter the United State's credit standing. Obama went before reporters this morning for his second press conference of the week.

Michael Shear reports for The New York Times that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has become the new Democratic boogeyman on the debt-ceiling negotiations. This makes sense:Cantor has been the loudest voice against revenue increases in a debt deal. His hard opposition to any new revenues was responsible for trashing both the negotiations led by Vice President Joe Biden as well as the “grand bargain” proposed by President Obama.

Jesse Washington has a new piece exploring the uneven impact of the recession on the black middle class, with some really startling information on just how profoundly black homeowners have been impacted, noting that, “In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents.” That's in part because black people were disproportionately likely to have their wealth tied up in their homes, and so were particularly devastated by the foreclosure crisis.

Over on the homepage, Jason Mark has an article on how the transportation bill reauthorization could finally be an opportunity for progressives in Congress to begin tackling climate change. "Transportation accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation’s oil use and about 25 percent of its carbon-dioxide emissions," Jason writes. Shifting funds in the transportation bill away from highway construction and redirecting it toward mass transit might not immediately solve the country's emissions problem, but it would at least give consumers greater options to lower their carbon footprint.

President Barack Obama marked a dramatic change in the war in Afghanistan in a major speech Wednesday night. In broad strokes, he laid out the framework for how to wind down the war: by declaring victory and transitioning control to the Afghans in the context of an Afghan-led political reconciliation with the insurgency. "We are meeting our goals," he declared, and -- in a surprising twist -- endorsed a political reconciliation with the Taliban for the first time.

However, what President Obama did not say in his speech is almost as significant as what he did say.

I've found over the years that one of the principal challenges of opinion writing -- in addition to consistently having original things to say -- is being conscious enough of your own biases that you can make a strong case for your side that might possibly be persuasive to those who don't already agree with you. You can get a certain amount of mileage out of creative name-calling and assuming the worst motives in your opponents, but that route is ultimately limiting. As I've tried to be more thoughtful about my own writing, the more bored I've gotten with a certain kind of partisanship, the kind that dominates talk radio, for instance.