(Source: newyorker.com)

A fundamental fact of modern political life is that the only way to advance a coherent agenda in Washington is through partisan dominance…

The boring fact of our system is that congressional math is the best predictor of a President’s success. This idea is not nearly as sexy as the notion that great Presidents are great because they twist arms in backrooms and inspire the American people to rise up and force Congress to bend to their will. But even the Presidents who are remembered for their relentless congressional lobbying and socializing were more often than not successful for more mundane reasons—like arithmetic.

In today’s Daily Comment, Ryan Lizza writes about the limits of President Obama’s power in the wake of the failed sequester deal: http://nyr.kr/XT5vgj

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP.

In today’s Daily Comment, Adam Gopnik writes about the sequester’s free market utopians: “… to impoverish us in the blind pursuit of an abstract philosophical point about the absolute virtues of the private seems a little crazy. Even a philosopher might find that an awfully steep price to pay.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YH8v0K

(Source: newyorker.com)

Throwing a sequester shindig this weekend? Of course you are! But if you want to be the host or hostess with the mostest, be sure your guests are able to drown their frustration in our democracy with these tasty drinks. It’ll make for a night you can’t ever remember (not that you would really want to).

Gin Fizzle

3 ounces gin
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon lime juice
club soda

Pour club soda into a cocktail shaker and leave it out on the counter for a few hours before your party begins, allowing its optimistic bubbles plenty of time to encounter bureaucratic inertia and lose all their energy as final hour draws ever nearer. Once the deadline has passed the party begins, add the remaining ingredients to your flat soda and shake vigorously. It won’t jolt any life back into the drink, but at least the gin will go down easier.

Shouts & Murmurs - Click-through to see Caitlin Kelly’s four other recipes for sequester-watching cocktails: http://nyr.kr/13tBV87

(Source: newyorker.com)

The Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain proposal was not necessarily an ideal compromise (plenty of people on both the right and the left disliked it), but at least it would have given us a single, comprehensive solution to our fiscal issues rather than the serial brinksmanship and dysfunction that we have now. 

Listen to the full recording of Ryan Lizza interviewing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor about his leading role in the death of the 2011 Grand Bargain deal: http://nyr.kr/Y2ONKB 

“What we have now is a government where the notion of solving the problem seems to be secondary to a lot of people in Congress,” George Packer says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. “That’s our political life these days: going from one near-death experience to the next.”

The next such brush with fiscal mortality on the schedule is, of course, the sequester. On March 1st, a series of severe cuts to the federal budget will go into effect if Congress can’t pass a suitable deficit-reduction plan. Packer joins James Surowiecki and host Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast to discuss the long line of short-sighted policy decisions that have emerged from Congress over the past few years, the lack of action on significant issues like inequality and growth, and what has been happening to Americans as a result. Listen to the podcast, and click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/W6L846

(Source: newyorker.com / The New Yorker)