Thursday Morning Political Mix

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A statue of George Washington, in the U.S. Capitol's Rotunda.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Good morning, fellow political junkies.Today finds the Senate in continued debate aimed at reaching a legislative agreement that keeps the federal government open into the new fiscal year which starts Oct. 1.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a growing mood among congressional Republicans to test President Obama's resolve to not negotiate over raising the debt ceiling in a few weeks.

Here are some politically-connected items or themes that caught my eye this morning.

• Trying to buy more time before a federal government shutdown that could happen October 1 without a budget deal, some lawmakers are raising the prospect of a one-week spending bill, writes The Hill's Alexander Bolton. One downside is it would force the crisis over how to keep the government open one week closer to the crisis over raising the debt ceiling which the Obama administration now says must be accomplished by mid-October. .
• Republicans are coalescing around an idea to shift the Obamacare fight to the debt-ceiling debate, while Democrats, for their part, are united in their position that Republican attempts to link conditions to raising the same debt ceiling are a non-starter, report Manu Raju, Jake Sherman and Ginger Gibson of Politico.
• Sen. Ted Cruz may have won over many grassroots conservatives with his 21-hour anti-Obamacare Senate talkathon, but many of his Republican colleagues view him as selfish, divisive and counterproductive, and that's only for starters, writes Jeremy Peters in the New York Times. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Times' cartoonist columnist David Horsey has a fairly withering Cruz commentary.
• Former president George H.W. Bush served as the official witness at the wedding of two long-time friends in Maine where same-sex marriage was legalized in December, as my NPR colleague Mark Memmott reports.
• Lawmakers are seeking to extend a visa program for Iraqi interpreters, perhaps adding it to the continuing resolution to keep the government operating into the new fiscal year, reports The Hill's Jeremy Herb. That brought to mind a recent story by NPR's Quil Lawrence on the plight of the Afghan translator whose U.S. visa was delayed despite the best efforts of a U.S. soldier who owes him his life.
• Alan Simpson, the wise-cracking former Republican senator from Wyoming, is known for speaking his mind. Lynne Cheney, wife of former vice president Dick Cheney, apparently isn't a fan. Simpson says she told him to "shut up" at a Cody social event, reports Laura Hancock of Wyoming's Star Tribune.
• Staying on the wild-west theme, the Center for Public Integrity's Michael Beckel provides a good reminder that not all is as it seems in the sometimes untamed frontier of online political fundraising. His "Hucksters for Hillary" report shows how easy it is for someone to misuse a famous politician's name to try to raise money from the public without any apparent link to the politician's campaign.
• So that happened. Comedian Dan Nainan allegedly punched journalist Josh Rogin in the face, twice, in an apparent response to Rogin's tweeted negative review of Nainan's stand-up routine at a Washington D.C. charity event. Rogin tweeted about the alleged attack in real (presumably painful) time and Huffpo threw together a short post.

Wednesday Morning Political Mix — Sept. 25, 2013

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Sen. Ted Cruz, worked a rare Senate overnight shift as he kept up a lengthy diatribe against Obamacare (with many digressions.)

Evan Vucci/AP

It's Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013, which puts us five days away from a possible federal-government shutdown that would begin Oct. 1 if Congress fails to pass a stop-gap spending bill.

So the drama in the Senate over the spending bill leads the day's interesting political items and features Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. At this writing, Cruz was in the last gasps of an anti-Obamacare talkathon. That's where we start:

• If you got a good night's sleep, you have at least that over Sen. Cruz. He spoke through the night on the Senate floor as he maintained an anti-Obamacare marathon floor speech (technically not a filibuster since he wasn't delaying a Senate vote on a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government from shutting down next week.) Grasping for rhetorical filler at times, he even worked in Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" though somehow failed to get around to Tupac Shakur's "All Eyez On Me."
• Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican known for his bluntness, called Cruz "a fraud," reports The New York Times's Jim Dwyer. King accused the senator of misleading many Republican voters into believing the Affordable Care Act could be de-funded if only other Republicans would support the Texan. King has presidential ambitions, as does, presumably Cruz.
• Congressional Democrats see opportunity for political gains in what they see as Republican overreach in risking a government shutdown next week over Obamacare, Zachary A. Goldfarb writes in the Washington Post. Not only is Democratic confidence that it's likelier they will hold on to the Senate increasing, some are even suggesting Republicans are unwittingly setting the table for Democrats to retake the House — which almost no Congress watcher thinks will happen.
• The battle royal of ten candidates to succeed Thomas Menino as Boston's next mayor was whittled down to two contenders writes Jim O'Sullivan and Patrick D. Rosso of the Boston Globe. Facing each other in a runoff in November will be Massachusetts state representative Martin Walsh (18.47 percent) and city councilor John Connolly (17.22 percent), who topped the field. Coming in third was C. Charlotte Golar (13.77 percent) who had hoped to become Boston's first woman and African American mayor.
• A runoff in a Republican primary for Alabama's 1st Congressional District seat, a race our Adam Wollner paid attention to here at "It's All Politics" — in which a hatred of Obamacare has been an animating force — will pit mainstream conservative Bradley Byrne against Tea Party conservative Dean Young. Young also is the preferred candidate of the religious conservatives, writes George Talbot of the Alabama Media Group.
• The hunters become the hunted, sort of, in California where paparazzi who take pictures not just of celebrities but of the children of the rich and famous will now be guilty of a misdemeanor for their snaps of the kids. Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law that makes such photos illegal, writes Patrick McGreevy and Melanie Mason in the Los Angeles Times. Celebrities had lobbied for the law.

The Morning Political Mix: Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2013

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Yes, we know this is the Capitol Hill Peace Monument. But it seems a handy symbol for the partisan spending showdown in Washington.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

A brief and abstract chronicle of some of Tuesday's more interesting political stories, the kinds of stories that might get people who like politics talking around a water cooler, if people still did that sort of thing.

Conventional wisdom in Washington is that the Republican brand stands to take a politically painful hit with voters if there's a government shutdown since that's what happened in the 1990s. Some conservative Republicans beg to differ, writes Alexandra Jaffe in The Hill. Are these people whistling past the graveyard? Maybe.

Three House Republican leaders of the past told National Journal's Jill Lawrence that the House's current leaders have it far tougher than they did, though they gave varying reasons why. Former Speaker Dennis Hastert isn't as sanguine as the aforementioned conservatives interviewed by The Hill. If House Republicans achieve little that resembles governing, "we're going to lose our majority," he says. He should know; It happened to him in 2006.

A New York magazine profile of Hillary Clinton by writer Joe Hagan, the former secretary of state comes off as working hard to portray herself as temporarily above the partisan fray as the jockeying for 2016 roils around her. The image the piece brings to mind is of a political swan, all grace above the water's surface but paddling furiously beneath it.

If Democrat Terry McAuliffe goes on to win the Virginia race for governor, it will be largely on the votes of women who now prefer him by 24 percentage points according to a new poll over Republican Ken Cuccinelli, the state's current lieutenant governor. (A poll in May found them tied for women.) Cuccinelli's conservative abortion views and the McAuliffe campaign's efforts to paint Cuccinelli as a three-star general in the so-called Republican "war on women" have apparently taken a heavy toll on the Republican.

With Obamacare set to start enrolling individuals next week, Politico's Jennifer Haberkorn and Carrie Budoff Brown remind us that the program falls significantly short of its creators' hopes when President Obama signed it into law in 2010. Large employers were given a year's delay before they must provide insurance and dozens of states have refused to set up exchanges, for instance.

Former President George Bush defends President Obama from critics who accuse the present Oval Office occupant of spending too much time golfing. "I know the pressures of the job. To be able to get outside and play golf with some of your pals is important for the president. It does give you an outlet," the former president told a Golf Channel interviewer. Now, watch this drive.