Debt Crisis

This is going to get worse before it gets better. The House GOP was NOT supposed to be in this position, and now we enter a period of real danger. Boehner has to go back to the drawing board on a new bill, and Harry Reid will be fully entitled to stop it.

But he won't. Instead, he'll amend the bill with tax hikes (probably mostly symbolic) and send it back to the House, where Boehner is going to have to take his own poison pill by passing the bill with democratic support. The GOP will be depowered, Obama will get his way while staying out of the way, and then Democrats will own the debt problem and the resulting cuts, which Republicans won't be able to protest over because THEY weren't able to get their own act together.

But the long game matters more, and I don't have confidence in anything but this: the GOP is now composed of four interests: Neocons, Business leaders, Social Cons, and Libertarians, and things between them aren't going to get any prettier. Democrats have got to grow a spine and start behaving with some pragmatism.