House Speaker John Boehner told NBC News there “is no easy way to stop the budget cuts — known as the ‘sequester’ – that began taking effect Friday night, and voiced uncertainty over how Washington can solve the overall fiscal problems that have consumed the nation’s politics for more than two years.”
Said Boehner: “I don’t think anyone quite understands how it gets resolved.”
Mitt Romney told Fox News that “his heart said he was going to win the presidency, but when early results came in on election night, he knew it was not to be.”
“Romney says the loss hit hard and was emotional. Ann Romney says she cried.”
“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.”
— Celeste Greig, president of the California Republican Assembly, quoted by Bay Area News Group, after saying former Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) should have apologized for his rape remarks last year.
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President Obama “is taking the most specific steps of his administration in an attempt to ensure the election of a Democratic-controlled Congress in two years,” the Washington Post reports.
“Obama, fresh off his November reelection, began almost at once executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president. He is doing so by trying to articulate for the American electorate his own feelings — an exasperation with an opposition party that blocks even the most politically popular elements of his agenda.”
The Cloakroom: By holding firm on the sequester, the GOP leaves President Obama with a very risky strategy.
Fox News took research and graphics directly from a National Republican Campaign Committee press release without disclosing their origin in order to attack President Obama’s “sequester priorities,” Media Matters reports.
Connecticut state Rep. Ernest Hewett (D) refused to resign after making a lewd remark to a teenage girl at a legislative hearing and denied he has a problem with women, the Hartford Courant reports.
Said Hewett: “I purposely will not have female interns. My intern now is a male. I want to keep it like that. I’ve had female interns in the past that sit in my office all day. I thought it was totally weird and I didn’t want another. As a matter of fact, I went four, maybe six years without having an intern at all because of stuff like that. I have a male intern, the last two I’ve had were male.”
He added: “I don’t get to choose. That’s why I was so leery about staying away from interns. I don’t know what they’re going to give me. They may give me a female, but I don’t want a female intern. That may sound sexist but I really don’t. That way that keeps me good and that keeps everybody else good.”
“At the voting rights argument in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts tore into Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, grilling him on his knowledge of voting statistics,” NPR reports.
“The point the chief justice was trying to make was that Massachusetts, which is not covered by the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, has a far worse record in black voter registration and turnout than Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5 of the act.”
“But a close look at census statistics indicates the chief justice was wrong, or at least that he did not look at the totality of the numbers.”
The only thing President Obama can do now is wait, Politico reports.
“Obama’s decision Friday to remove the threat of a government shutdown in late March as a leverage point in the standoff means that the sequester will remain in place for weeks — if not months, or longer. He set into a motion a risky strategy that rests entirely on the slim chance that Republicans do an about-face on tax hikes after a public outcry.”
John Avlon: “It is a dangerous game. While polls show Americans more likely to blame Republicans for the obstructive gridlock than the president, if the economy turns south and chaos continues to reign supreme, ultimately people will blame the president. There are no doubt some conservative strategists counseling a hard-line betting on this outcome with an eye toward the 2014 and 2016 elections.”
Idaho will likely return a hilltop mansion to a deceased billionaire’s family “in a tentative agreement over the would-be governor’s residence-turned-money pit that remained vacant even as maintenance costs skyrocketed,” the AP reports.
A new McLaughlin poll conducted for Bill Bolling shows that he’s way behind in a three-way race for Virginia governor.
Terry McAuliffe (D) is just ahead of Ken Cuccinelli, 38% to 37%, with Bolling at just 15%.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said again that she currently has no plans to run for president in 2016, The Hill reports.
Said Rice: “I learned that running for office really wasn’t in my DNA when I helped George W. Bush run in 1999. We’d go to maybe five campaign events in a day..and at the end of the day, he was raring to go and I was raring to go to bed. And I thought, ‘Maybe this just isn’t for me.”
She added: “But I do miss the people that I worked with in Washington. I don’t miss anything else about being in Washington.”
CBS News reports the national debt increased by more than $6 trillion since President Obama took office.
During the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, the debt grew by $4.9 trillion.
“President Obama’s public shaming of congressional Republicans to act on a range of issues may be winning at the polls — but it risks alienating the people needed to reach bipartisan compromise,” The Hill reports.
“While Obama has made a strategic calculation that he needs to marshal public support to push through his agenda, centrist Republicans warn the president and his allies could go too far with partisan events and campaign-style ads targeting GOP lawmakers.”
Just as the Obama administration filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a new Field Poll finds that support for same-sex marriage in the state has increased drastically since the ban was passed.
Key findings: 61% say they support same-sex marriage, with just 32% were against. The ban passes in 2008 by a 52% to 48% margin.
Ashley Judd (D) gave a closely-watched speech in Washington, D.C. today as she mulls a U.S. Senate bid in Kentucky.
Republicans have already cut clips that they see as damaging, including one where the actress describes where she spends the winter.
In an upcoming documentary about the legacy of Dick Cheney, Foreign Policy notes the former vice president lashes out at Condoleezza Rice for overriding his recommendation to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007.
Said Cheney: “I thought [destroying the reactor] would reassert the kind of authority and influence we had back in ’03 when we took down Saddam Hussein and eliminated Iraq as a potential source of WMD. Condi was on the wrong side of all those issues so we had significant issues.”
“In his 2011 memoir In My Time, Cheney called the former diplomat ‘naive’ for her attempts to negotiate with North Korea and said she once ‘tearfully admitted’ her mistakes to him in his office.”
The Tyler Morning Telegraph reports that a Texas school district employee accidentally was shot during a district-sponsored concealed handgun license class.
The class was part of an effort to permit teachers to carry firearms on campuses.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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