Common Ground on Cutting Retirement?

• By Charles S. Clark
• February 22, 2013
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As President Obama and GOP leaders continue their Alphonse and Gaston routine for avoiding action to head off sequestration, at least one area of potential agreement has come into focus.

A White House blog post on Thursday emphasized that Obama’s proposal for the long-discussed “grand bargain” is “still on the table” for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to take up. In addition to revenue hikes, the 10-year, $1.8 trillion deficit reduction plan includes $200 billion “non-health mandatory savings.”

Among those cuts is $35 billion through “reforming federal retirement programs.”

Just the day before, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., had proposed “updating the federal employee retirement system to more closely track with the private sector,” to save $21 billion.

No matter how the stalemate is eventually resolved, it would seem, changes are in store for retirement benefits.

Jose Canseco Does Not Like the Sequester

• By Tom Shoop
• February 21, 2013
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Ex-baseball star (and enthusiastic steroids user) Jose Canseco has public opinions about a lot of things, but until recently, federal fiscal policy hasn't been among them. But last night, Canseco (ar at least the verified Twitter account of Canseco) waded into the Washington scene.

First, he apparently accepted BuzzFeed's invitation to attend the White House Correspondents Association dinner in April. The event  is always a giant schmooze-fest in which news organizations have taken to one-upping each other in attracting celebrity guests. Canseco has some folks in particular he'd like to meet: the people responsible for the ticking time bomb known as sequestration.

In a tweet at BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski, he said he "wouldn't miss" the dinner, and had a request of his hosts for the evening:  "point out some super committee members so I can kick their ass for this damn sequester."

Conan O'Brien Wants to Talk About Your Pension

• By Tom Shoop
• February 20, 2013
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The White House Correspondents Association announced Wednesday that Conan O'Brien would be the speaker at its annual dinner in April. 

The late-night funnyman is clearly excited about the gig, but perhaps not for the reason you might think -- at least judging from the tweet he sent out after the news was made public.

"I'm honored to host the WH Correspondents dinner," O'Brien tweeted. "Get ready for 2 minutes of jokes, then 40 minutes on public employee pension reform."

Boehner Hits Spending on Free Cellphones, Video Games

• By Charles S. Clark
• February 20, 2013
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House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, got unusually specific Wednesday morning about spending cuts he’s demanding in any fiscal deal to avert the looming sequestration.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Boehner pinned blame for the budget stalemate solely on President Obama, saying the chief executive “invented the `sequester’ in the summer of 2011 to avoid facing up to America’s spending problem.”

And he said the almost-was “grand bargain” between himself and Obama “fell apart at the last minute when the president demanded an extra $400 billion in new revenues—50 percent more than we had shaken hands on the day before.”

But what seemed newsiest about the essay was Boehner’s vague mention of three examples of wasteful programs ripe for cutting. “No one should be talking about raising taxes,” the speaker wrote, “when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cellphones, and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines.”

Which Party is More Extreme?

• By Charles S. Clark
• February 20, 2013
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Longtime political diagnostician Norman Ornstein on Tuesday was goofing on possible titles for the coming third installment of a series of books on what he and co-author Thomas Mann view as our dysfunctional Congress. 

Having already published volumes titled The Broken Branch and It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Ornstein told an Urban Institute panel on “What Went Wrong in Washington” that he might call his next book Run for Your Lives, or perhaps, to create a sure-fire best-seller, 535 Shades of Gray. 

Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, likened the state of political play to a football game. Traditionally, he said, both parties line up around their 45-yard line, but now you’ve got the Democrats, who’re protecting spending for entitlement programs, somewhere around their 25-yard line, and the Republicans, increasingly hostile to all things governmental, “somewhere behind their own goalposts.” 

Rudolph Penner, the former Congressional Budget Office director who shared the panel with Ornstein, raised the bidding by asserting that since the 2012 election, “It’s gotten even worse than it looked when the book was named It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” But he placed a bit more blame on Democrats ...