Today, The March Honored
Presidents Obama, Clinton and Carter to speak today for 50th anniversary of March on Washington beginning at 11:30 AM ET.
Obama previews speech on Tom Joyner Show: "When it comes to the economy, when it comes to inequality, when it comes to wealth, when it comes to the challenges that inner cities experience, he would say that we have not made as much progress as the civil and social progress that we've made, and that it's not enough just to have a black president..."
MLK III looks ahead, in W. Post oped: "The date of the ’63 march, Aug. 28, was chosen to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the brutal slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till. The ensuing outcry helped to awaken a new era of protest against racial injustice. A half-century later, however, African American youth still have good reason to fear racially motivated violence ... The theme for the 1963 March on Washington, 'For Jobs and Freedom,' resonates a half-century later: Unacceptably high rates of joblessness are pervasive ..."
President Obama speaking more on race in second term, notes NYT: "Freed from most of the urgent crises he inherited, and the imperative of winning re-election, he at times seems liberated to give voice to causes that have animated his time in public life ... In the days after his re-election, aides said that Mr. Obama told them he wanted to overhaul criminal justice policies that have disproportionately affected young African-American men. He also said he wanted to focus more on income inequality, and he used his Inaugural Address to pledge to fight what he saw as restrictions on voting rights."
W. Post's Harold Meyerson connects today's remembrance and tomorrow's fast-food worker strikes: "The march 50 years ago was, after all, a march 'For Jobs and Freedom,' and its focus was every bit as economic as it was juridical and social. Even more directly, one of the demands highlighted by the march’s leaders and organizers was to raise the federal minimum wage — then $1.15 an hour — to $2. According to Sylvia Allegretto and Steven Pitts of the Economic Policy Institute, that comes out to $13.39 today. (This week, fast-food workers will march seeking an hourly wage of $15.)"
WH Firm On Debt Limit
Treasury Sec Lew rules out negotiating over the debt limit, in NYT interview: "We are not going to be negotiating over the debt limit. Congress has already authorized funding, committed us to make expenditures ... We are a country that pays our bills. It’s not as if we get to go back and undo the commitments we made. These are old bills that have to be paid. It is part of the rock-solid stability of the United States that we always pay our bills. Congress has the job to raise the borrowing authority to make that possible, just as Congress has the authority to authorize the expenditures in the first place."
New debt limit date squeezes Boehner. W. Post's Alex Seitz-Wald: "...House leaders have been trying to talk their members into claiming victory on sequestration cuts and abandoning the effort to defund the health care law. But assuming that won’t appease them (and it won’t), GOP aides have floated using the debt ceiling, instead of the government shutdown, as the bargaining chip. An aide to Eric Cantor told Reuters yesterday that the debt limit provides a good “leverage point” to try to force action on Obamacare. Swapping the debt ceiling hostage for the government shutdown hostage, while even more dangerous, had the benefit of buying GOP leaders some time — or at least it did until the debt limit deadline got moved up."
Michigan Republicans agree to expand Medicaid under ObamaCare. TPM: "Michigan joins a handful of other red states that have signed onto this key piece of Obamacare, which grants Medicaid eligibility to people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Arizona and North Dakota are two other uniformly Republican states that agreed to the expansion; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also endorsed an expansion proposal from his Democratic-controlled state legislature ... Proposals in Ohio and Virginia are very much alive and could be approved before Jan. 1, 2014, when the expansion goes into effect. There is a substantial impetus for those states to get expansion passed as soon as possible: the ACA requires the federal government to cover 100 percent of the costs from 2014 to 2016."
Summers Rumored To Be Top Choice
CNBC reports Summers has inside track to Fed nom: "A source from Team Obama told CNBC that Larry Summers will likely be named chairman of the Federal Reserve in a few weeks though he is 'still being vetted' so it might take a little longer. It's largely come down to a two-horse race between Summers, a former Treasury secretary, and Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen for the next Fed chief."
W. Post's Ezra Klein adds: "If Summers doesn’t get the job it won’t be because the White House doesn’t want to choose him. It’ll be because they’re worried he won’t clear the Senate."
