What’s Wrong with Panetta?
Leslie Gelb: “Something’s amiss with Leon Panetta. He is a very smart and very careful guy who is making one startling verbal slip after another, everything from chalking up the Iraq War, inexplicably and incorrectly, to al Qaeda’s presence in that country, to saying, again mistakenly, that there would be 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2014… This isn’t the guy who’s watched and balanced his words for more than four decades in politics.”
Budget Hero
Think you might do better than President Obama and congressional leaders in picking what government spending to cut or taxes to raise? Try your hand with the new and improved version of Budget Hero, from the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Top Murdoch Executive Resigns
Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, has resigned, the BBC reports.
Her departure follows days of growing pressure to step down as the phone hacking crisis grew.
New York Times: “With the pace and fury of a hurricane, the scandal has spread in less than two weeks even though questions about the news-gathering techniques employed by News International had been under largely ineffective scrutiny by the police and Parliament for years… Once the scandal spread beyond Mr. Murdoch’s British outpost, major investors in the much bigger parent company, News Corporation, began questioning what was going on.”
Deal Reached to End Minnesota Shutdown
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) has negotiated a “framework” for a budget deal with the Republican leaders of the state House and Senate that could end the Minnesota government shutdown after a special session of the legislature set to begin next week, reports the Duluth News Tribune.
“In a way, each had lost a political friend: Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton gave up his long-held demand that the richest Minnesotans pay higher taxes; Republican House Speaker Kurt Zellers and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch gave up their party’s strongly held stance of keeping state spending to no more than $34 billion in the next two years… Dayton said he would accept a offer Republican legislators made on June 30, the day before state government shut down. But he tacked three of his own requirements onto the proposal: All policy issues would be stripped from budget bills, a GOP plan to cut the state work force 15 percent would disappear and the Legislature must approve at least $500 million in public works construction… Koch and Zellers said they accepted Dayton’s proposal, but altered it. They did not say what changed.”
Politico: “There are national implications from the deal: if congressional Republicans draw the lesson from this imbroglio that the president might buckle on the debt ceiling debate if they stand as firm as the Minnesota GOP did for the last two weeks, the likelihood of default increases.”
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