Tight race in California, but upset not expected
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 12th, 2011 4:35 am by HL
Tight race in California, but upset not expected
Republicans are no longer feeling enthusiastic about Tuesday special election in California’s 36th district, an overwhelmingly blue seat that — briefly — appeared to be up for grabs.
In recent weeks, there were reports that Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn (D) was in real danger of losing to businessman Craig Huey (R) in the special election to replace former Rep. Jane Harman (D). Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi warned that the seat was not safe.
But despite publicly saying the race remains competitive, Republicans are privately acknowledging that they would be hugely surprised to win this seat.
Gun dealers will have to report multiple sales of semiautomatic rifle
The Obama administration implemented its most aggressive and controversial gun measure to date Monday when it ordered dealers in four Southwestern states to report multiple sales of semiautomatic rifles to the federal firearms bureau.
The rule, which had been opposed by the National Rifle Association and many members of Congress, takes effect immediately and is meant to stem gunrunning to violent Mexican drug gangs. It requires about 8,500 dealers operating in the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to alert authorities when a person buys within five days two or more semiautomatic rifles greater than .22 caliber with detachable magazines.
‘Flexibility’ may help states meet key part of health-care law
Faced with the possibility that many states may not be ready to meet a crucial requirement of the federal health-care law passed last year, the Obama administration has proposed rules redefining what “ready” means.
To boot, officials did just that in a setting designed to win over that most politically sought-after of groups: small-business owners.
The health-care law set a deadline of Jan. 1, 2013, by which federal officials must decide whether each state will be capable of getting its insurance marketplaces — also known as “exchanges” and the backbone of the new system — up and running by 2014. If a state doesn’t make the grade, the law directs the federal government to step in with its own version.
The Bush tax cuts were not supposed to last forever. Alan Greenspan, whose oracular endorsement was perhaps the single most decisive event in their passage, made it very clear that they were a temporary solution to a temporary surplus. “Recent data significantly raise the probability that sufficient resources will be available to undertake both debt reduction and surplus-lowering policy initiatives,” Greenspan said in 2001.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t so clear. But everyone knew what he meant. And, broadly speaking, they agreed. We had a big surplus. It was time to do something with it. Brad DeLong, a former Clinton administration official and an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, didn’t want to see the surplus spent on tax cuts. He wanted to see it spent on public investments. “Nevertheless,” he wrote in 2001, “it is hard to disagree with Greenspan’s position that — if our future economic growth is as bright as appears likely— it will be time by the middle of this decade to do something to drastically cut the government’s surpluses.”
