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- The House and Senate passed Barack Obama's 2010 budget last night without a single Republican vote, leading House Minority Whip Eric Cantor -- who The Wall Street Journal believes has Democrats quaking in their boots -- to remark, "The American public understands something must be askew if every single Republican votes against something." Indeed, what's "askew" is that Cantor believes Democrats are overreacting to an economic crisis that is increasingly coming to resemble an economic depression.
- The budget heads next to conference, where the House and Senate versions will be reconciled. Tim says there's good reason to believe that the watering-down of the estate tax -- which astonishingly passed with majority support yesterday -- will be stripped from the final version of the bill, and both Marc Ambinder and Jonathan Cohn have it on good authority that reconciliation will be re-inserted in order to pass health care and education reform.
- Both Ann and Scott have covered the good news out of Iowa today, but what's palpable is the sense that conservatives don't even seem to be trying any more to mount a convincing argument as to why this will reignite the culture wars. I all but physically yawn when I read the words "judicial activism" or "usurping the will of the voters" these days.
- Spencer Ackerman notes that the supposedly tough-on-lobbyists-and-contractors defense budget is being unveiled on Monday, and wonders whether the secrecy surrounding it actually conceals a sharp departure from previous defense spending priorities.
- Me, yesterday: "House Republicans are so insistent on deliberately misrepresenting scientific research -- even when the mendacity has been identified and explained -- that they would make official the position that they're right and mister smarty-pants MIT scientist is wrong." John Boehner, today: "An MIT professor has questions about the $3,100 figure but his letter makes assumptions that are factually inaccurate. Moreover, he claims “government rebates to consumers” must be factored in. But we all know that Democrats have no intention of using a cap-and-trade system to deliver rebates to consumers; they want the tax revenue to fund more government spending."
- In describing the new neocon think tank Foreign Policy Initiative I joked that "I liked it better when neocons didn't hide their intentions behind generic foreign policy boilerplate and openly advocated for regime change through military force and seizing our 'unipolar moment.'" But it turns out that neocons are deliberately being banal and supportive of the president's policies in order to claw their way back to respectability.
- Remainders: Building upon my comment the other day that Michele Bachmann's global currency amendment cosponsors (34 and counting!) provides a nice cheat-sheet for the top cranks in the House, Brendan Nyhan has put together an even more compact and cross-indexed list of the "congressional myth caucus"; Chris Dodd officially has competition for next year; opponents of EFCA take a new tack; Wired accuses Obama of selling out to the RIAA; progressive advocacy groups aren't interested in taking the pressure off "moderate" Dems; and Michael Scherer sees Obama breaking from past presidents in describing America's role in the world.
--Mori Dinauer
