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Obama: Won’t Negotiate ‘With a Gun At My Head’

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Photo Credit: APBy Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan, Burgess Everett and Jonathan Allen.

President Barack Obama told House Democrats on Wednesday that he would negotiate with Republicans but “not with a gun at my head,” according to one lawmaker who attended a caucus-wide meeting at the White House.

As he has before, Obama said he was open to short-term agreements to open the government and raise the debt ceiling if that’s what it took to help Republicans out of what he described as a political box, the lawmaker said.

After the meeting, House Democratic leaders suggested that they would accept short-term deals on both matters.

“All we want is a short-term CR because we think the number is unacceptable,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, using shorthand for a continuing resolution that would fund the government for as little as a few weeks at current levels.

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Photo Credit: CHARLES DHARAPAK/APObama Apologizes for Shutdown – but Says it’s Other Guy’s Fault

By Anita Kumar and William Douglas.

President Barack Obama apologized to the American people Tuesday for the bitter fiscal impasse that’s shut down parts of the federal government, but he continued to blame Republicans for it.

“I know the American people are tired of it,” Obama said at a White House news conference. “I apologize that you have to go through this stuff every three months, it seems like. And Lord knows I’m tired of it.”

The president again urged Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass bills immediately to reopen the government and increase the nation’s borrowing limit, even while continuing to call them irresponsible hostage takers.

An hour later, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, scolded Obama for his remarks, saying the president must negotiate before they pass the bills.

Boehner said Congress and the White House had negotiated on government funding and the debt limit dozens of times over the years, resulting in “significant policy changes that would in fact reduce spending and put us on a saner fiscal path.”

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Obama Seen as Chicken Little on Default

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Photo Credit: IshronaA growing number of economists and politicians say President Obama is just factually wrong when he claims the United States is risking default by not raising the debt celing.

They also say Obama is mistaken in claiming that failure to raise the debt ceiling would be a disaster, or as he put it, “insane, catastrophic, chaos.”

One famous economist even goes so far as to portray the president’s dire warnings as outright dangerous and irresponsible. CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow accused the president of threatening “to pull the whole system down for (his) own gain.”

No default

Obama has repeatedly insisted that not raising the debt ceiling would mean the United States could not pay the bills it has already accumulated – the payments Congress has already authorized – and would result in a default.

Not true, wrote Jeffrey Dorfman in Forbes. The University of Georgia economics professor explained, “Reaching the debt ceiling does not mean that the government will default on the outstanding government debt. In fact, the U.S. Constitution forbids defaulting on the debt (14th Amendment, Section 4), so the government is not allowed to default even if it wanted to.”

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Obama’s Negative Polling Worse than Clinton’s in 1995 Shutdown

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Gallup released a poll last week showing President Barack Obama’s negative polling among Americans during the current government shutdown is substantially worse in comparison to the numbers the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had during his administration’s shutdown in 1995.

According to Gallup:

A majority of Americans, 57%, say they now view President Obama more negatively as a result of the shutdown, while 28% see him more positively. By contrast, during the December 1995 shutdown, 49% of Americans viewed Clinton more negatively and 35% more positively. Clinton’s overall approval rating would tumble to 42% by the end of the 1995-96 shutdown, but rebounded later in 1996.

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James Woods: ‘I Don’t Expect to Work Again’ in Hollywood

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe actor has been critical of Democrats and the president and presumes his political opinions will cost him jobs.

After repeatedly criticizing President Barack Obama, actor James Woods suggested in a tweet late Tuesday that his politics may cost him work in Hollywood.

Woods has been critical of Obama before but in the past few days seems particularly incensed at the president’s handling of the partial government shutdown. He tweeted, for example: “This President is a true abomination. To have barricaded the WW2 vets, but allow illegal aliens privilege…” The tweet linked to a USA Today article.

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Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) Confronts Obama About Failure to Support House Funding Bill

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Photo Credit: IntangibleArtsDel. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) had what some colleagues called “a heated exchange” and what she described as “a conversation” with President Obama during a White House meeting Wednesday afternoon regarding the District’s budget constraints as a result of the partial government shutdown.

Norton attended the meeting in the White House East Room with nearly 200 House Democrats and was one of a handful given the opportunity to ask the president a question. When she was called upon, Norton pressed Obama to support a House-passed bill that would permit the District to use its locally raised tax funds to maintain operations until Dec. 15.

Democrats, including Obama, have held fast in opposition to such piecemeal funding bills, saying Republicans must come to a deal to fund the entire government, not just favored segments.

Making her point, Norton spoke over the president and refused to yield the microphone, according to a lawmaker who attended the event. The lawmaker described Norton as “strident,” “self-absorbed” and “parochial” in her exchange with Obama.

But Obama held firm to his belief that Republicans should work to reopen the entire federal government and not pass stand-alone spending measures, said the lawmaker, who asked not to be identified in o

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Obama: ‘I’m Not Budging’

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller President Barack Obama tried Tuesday to sway the public’s jaundiced view of the budget crisis with a mishmash of economic threats, campaign-style attacks on Republicans, repeated offers of budget talks and numerous promises to reject any compromise.

“I’m not budging when it comes to the full faith and credit of the United States…I think people understand that,” Obama told reporters in the White House’s press office.

The threat came shortly after he suggested he’d be willing to accept a budget deal that would require the GOP to abandon its Obamacare reforms in exchange for subsequent chats with him about ways to improve the effectiveness of his health-sector takeover.

During the hour-long press conference and speaking in a low, calm voice, Obama slammed the GOP as deadbeats and extremists, as kidnappers, as unserious and insincere. He portrayed them as opposed to health care and as threatening to drop a “nuclear bomb” on the nation’s economy, while repeatedly also praising himself as willing to compromise and negotiate.

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Boehner Dismisses Obama’s Call for Republicans ‘Unconditional Surrender’

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Photo Credit: Fox News ScreenshotHouse Speaker John Boehner dismissed President Obama’s position on the fiscal crisis as “not sustainable” Tuesday, only hours after Obama held a non-press conference to say he was willing to compromise but not negotiate.

“What the president said today was, if there’s unconditional surrender by Republicans, he’ll sit down and talk with us. That’s not the way our government works,” Boehner said.

The speaker said he wants conversations about spending cuts to start “now,” not “next week” or “next month.”

It’s unclear how Republicans will navigate Obama’s stance going forward, with the country in week two of the partial government shutdown. Their demand is that they get some concessions — like spending cuts — in exchange for passing a spending bill and raising the debt ceiling.

Boehner’s appeal on Tuesday was for Democrats to simply come to the negotiating table.

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Republicans Didn’t Sabotage Health Exchanges, Obama Did

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Photo Credit: Ken James/BloombergFor the first week that the federal health-care exchanges were running … well, crawling … the Obama administration claimed that no one could get through because of overwhelming pent-up demand. Essentially it spent a week arguing that no one could have predicted that, in a country of 300 million people, 2.4 percent of those people might stop by sometime in the first seven days to check out the administration’s signature legislative achievement.

We can now dismiss that theory, because the administration has: “Six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government acknowledged for the first time Sunday it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for coverage.”

Presumably, it would not have given that interview if its efforts to fix the systems had been successful this weekend. The Hill reports that the system will go offline again late tonight for more repairs.

So prepare yourself for the next theory: This is the fault of Republicans. Had Republicans created state exchanges as they were supposed to, agreed to the Medicaid expansion and provided more funding, the reasoning goes, everything would be going swimmingly.

I blame the Republicans for a lot of things, from their support for atrocious farm policies to the counterproductive showdown theater that is: 1. Wreaking havoc on everything from government data websites to the Smithsonian; 2. Not saving any money, because we just agreed to pay furloughed workers; 3. Not noticeably advancing the cause of repealing Obamacare; and 4. Grinding down the public’s opinion of the Republican Party from a stump to a hole.

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Senate Democrats Plan Maneuver to Allow Obama to Raise Debt Ceiling

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Photo Credit: abangbay @ MalaysiaSenate Democrats say they’ll advance a bill giving President Obama the authority to raise the debt ceiling unless two-thirds of Congress disapproves, according to a Senate Democratic aide.

The issue of increasing the borrowing limit and avoiding an unprecedented default is fast becoming a central focus in Washington — and comes as ordinary Americans say they’re deeply dismayed with the week-old government shutdown, and are finding blame with both Republicans and Democrats.

“It looks like there is more than enough blame to go around and both parties are being hurt by the shutdown,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.

An initial test vote on the proposal, described by the aide on condition of anonymity, could occur as soon as Oct. 11, just six days before federal borrowing authority is set to expire.

Democrats have been pressing for a one-year increase in the nation’s $16.7 trillion debt ceiling without any of the spending cuts of policy changes Republicans are demanding.

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Wall Street Shrugs off President, Focuses on Congress

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Photo Credit: APWhen it comes to worrying over a possible debt default, Wall Street is brushing off President Barack Obama’s warnings and focusing its attention instead on Congress.

Investors say they currently view the words and deeds of Congress as having more power to move markets because the president is not viewed as being intimately involved in the ongoing fiscal negotiations — more of a spectator in chief as the House and Senate fight over how to break their impasse.

“The financial markets seem to believe at this point it’s really in the hands of the House and the Senate,” said Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist with Deutsche Bank. “In other words, I think the market’s focused more on what might be happening between [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid and [Speaker] John Boehner than the president.”

This dynamic was on display in recent days as Wall Street tried to parse Washington’s jawboning.

Last week, Obama cautioned that Wall Street should be seriously worried that Congress may fail to raise the debt ceiling, saying in an interview with CNBC that markets “should be concerned” and that “this time it’s different.”

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