americans are going to have to pay higher taxes. leader boehner essentially says no, that s a nonstarter. is all this just posturing and both have an idea where compromise is going to lie? i think they re trying to posture. but i think right now, president obama has the upper hand. i mean he s just won re-election. he s basically telling people, look, the american people elected me, because they want a stronger middle class. they want me to push what i have been pushing, which is for a stronger middle class. so i think he has the upper hand. and republicans kind of know this right now. ed, you know, last year s grand bargain between boehner and the president, that fell through. reportedly because of the tea party types in the gop. so why should we believe that has changed when the tea party wagged the gop majority dog, so to speak? you know, i spent a lot of time in the last few weeks talking to members of congress, and the people that were running against them, and in the discus
other where they could both claim a win here. closing loopholes, personal loopholes, corporate loopholes, that would raise taxes on some of the wealthy without shifting the rate necessarily. now, i don t know how some of the democrats are going to accept that. but there seems to be some signals that even the speaker has said loopholes. and the president is open to that as well. so i would watch that as an area of compromise. and i also think your point to whether it s 250,000, maybe raising it to 500,000 is also an area where i think the two sides could come together. so last year s grand bargain there between speaker boehner and the president, that fell through reportedly because of the tea party types in the gop that essentially held speaker boehner hostage. what should we believe about the situation that s changed? i mean, will the tea party tail wag the gop majority dog so to speak? i don t think it s going to be an easy win for speaker
numbers dying, the government would not survive. the system would not survive. it s a profoundly dysfunctional system. they re patriotic. they don t want to survive. very, very few. the ones who agree with us and don t give a rip about ahmadinejad and the mullahs. but if but if they are in a system that they re getting trapped, all the hopes of change because of the religious constitution which lets the minority tail wag the majority dog on the things that the rest of the world cares most about.