Comment on Inside the White House's debt ceiling strategy

Michael Tomasky: “Kamala Harris was really good Tuesday night—really, really good. She accomplished everything she needed to accomplish. She sliced and diced him. She dangled bait and he leapt at the hook. But as good as she was, Trump was more bad than Harris was good. Or maybe he was bad because she was good: That is to say, she wrong-footed him time after time after time in ways that President Joe Biden did not, throwing him off his game, staring him down, speaking directly to him, challenging him, saying ‘you’ and pointing right at him.

“The claim that car dealer and Republican U. S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno held an MBA from the University of Michigan has appeared in both a car dealership application and in a short biography of Moreno when he joined the board of the Cleveland Foundation,” Ohio Capital Journal reports. “However, a spokeswoman for the university on Monday said all Moreno has is a bachelor’s degree in business that was awarded in 1989.”

National Review: “If you’re obsessing over how bad, how in the tank for Kamala Harris, the two ABC news moderators were, it’s because you don’t want to come to grips with the brute fact that Donald Trump was a disaster last night. He was unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make, and led into self-absorbed rabbit-holes — claims that he won the 2020 election, the size of his rallies, whether ‘migrants’ are eating stolen pets — that diverted him from opportunity after opportunity to expose Harris as a radical leftist now pretending to be a pragmatic centrist who suddenly loves her some guns.” “Trump had one job: stay on message about Harris’s dizzying renunciations of her positions — so inexplicable that Harris has dribbled them out through nameless campaign sources rather than addressed them in her own voice…” “Trump couldn’t do it.

David Graham: “Here’s the background, for those not immersed in the conservative internet. For the past few days, allies of Trump have, without offering a shred of evidence, spread reports about Haitian immigrants in the central-Ohio town of Springfield eating pet cats. The town has seen thousands of new arrivals from the stricken Caribbean nation; authorities there say they’ve helped revitalize the local economy.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) scrapped plans for a Wednesday vote on the Republican party’s stopgap funding plan, as its chances of passage sank in recent days amid opposition from defense hawks and hardline conservatives, The Hill reports. Politico: “Unless they can find adjustments to placate detractors, there’s an increasing likelihood that House Republicans will wind up saddled with a three-month stopgap spending bill backed by Democrats and the White House, free of any divisive policy add-ons.”

“Until Tuesday, Donald Trump spent much of the campaign running as an insurgent,” Politico reports. “But in one night, Kamala Harris changed all that. After weeks of intense scrutiny on her own policy pivots over the years, the vice president deftly shifted the focus of the campaign to a referendum on Trump’s presidency.” “As the candidates left the debate stage, the momentum Harris had generated after first replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee seemed to be cresting again.