Word: consensus
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...billionaire Ross Perot spent a good part of his fortune making deficits into a political issue. In response, Washington focused for a few years on getting rid of the shortfall. With a lot of help from the late-1990s tech boom, it succeeded. As already noted, this deficit-fighting consensus disintegrated in the early Bush years. This time around, China joined Japan as a big buyer of Treasuries, interest rates stayed low, and the economy chugged along...
...even if comity rules, there are plenty of hurdles preventing Shelby, Dodd and the Treasury from coming together on a consensus bill. Dodd, facing a tough re-election battle in Connecticut, needs to please his base with a left-leaning bill, while staffers say Shelby has issues with the shape of the bill so far. The Senator doesn't like the Administration's proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, though he's willing to support enhanced protections of some sort. But he is firmly against an Administration proposal to let the Federal Reserve designate which financial institutions qualify as most important...
...time by negotiating in bad faith. It makes little sense to attempt to bargain with senators so far the right, as opposed to centrists like Snowe as was done during the debate over the stimulus package passed earlier in his term. Obama would be better served to seek consensus with more moderate Republicans like Snowe and her colleague from Maine, Senator Susan Collins. Another admirable aspect of the bill is the promise that it will not add to the deficit, but rather be funded by eliminating superfluous expenses in existing programs. Obama even proposed the idea of mandating spending cuts...
...Health care is hard," may be the Obama Administration's catchphrase of the moment, but it's a cakewalk compared with the challenge facing Obama on Iran. Under pressure to turn up the heat on the Iranians - from European allies, Israel and bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill - Obama had demanded that the Islamic Republic respond by September to a Western offer to resume negotiations or else face escalating sanctions...
...With so many foreign powers meddling in the country's perennially sectarian struggle for control, Lebanon functions as a kind of political barometer of the Middle East. And that's why the news Thursday, Sept. 10, that Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri had given up trying to form a consensus government three months after his ruling coalition won the country's parliamentary elections is a sign of a more general unease in the region: Lebanon's political crisis - and the broader Middle East cold war of which it is an expression - is far from over...