President Obama will address the nation on the debt ceiling and budget cut issues tonight at 9:00 pm ET. If you're not by a TV, you can watch live here.

For Bachelorette fans, nothing to worry about. Show honcho Mike Fleiss tweets:

Good news! Tonite's show will be shown in it's entirety. You won't miss a single minute.

Good thing, because who wants to miss the Fantasy Dates in Fiji with JP, Ben and Constantine, even though we know from spoilers who goes home?

Back to Obama: Here's a pre-speech thread, all related topics welcome.

While Speaker John Boehner rolled out a debt ceiling proposal, it's not clear that he has the votes in the House to pass it. Here's the proposal:

House Republican leaders pushed for a vote Wednesday on a two-step plan that would allow the federal debt limit to immediately be raised by about $1 trillion and tie a second increase next year to the ability of a new joint Congressional committee to produce more deficit reduction.

Boehner's the Speaker, why do they need to "push for a vote?" Here's the more interesting question to me, does Boehner have the votes to pass it? I saw Cantor was with him, but did Cantor bring the Tea Party votes? (Not Bachmann for sure.) I assume Dems will vote en masse against it.

Speaking for me only

Colorado gets its first IKEA store Wednesday, and people began lining up at 9 am this morning. They will camp outside to be one of the first 38 people in line to get a $399 sofa free. Why 38? It's the 38th IKEA store in the U.S. The next hundred get an armchair.

The 415,000 square foot Swedish home furnishing store is south of Denver, in Centennial. The public is told to expect traffic delays on I-25 near the store for days after opening. 40,000 people a day are expected to visit the store during opening weekend.

Is this an amusement park or a store? Apparently, both. The best bargain may be the 99 cent breakfast of bacon and eggs, served every day.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Open Thread.

This road was paved by the hopeless and the hungry
This road was paved by the winds of change
Walking beside the guilty and the innocent
How will you raise your hand when they call your name?

We weren't born to follow
Come on and get up off your knees
When life is a bitter pill to swallow
You've got to stand up for what you believe

This is not the time for giving up or giving in. This is not the time to capitulate to Republicans. This is the time to do the right thing by the people you took an oath to represent. Spare us your later apologies, they will fall on deaf ears.

One thing our politicians don't seem to take into account is that the average voter (and I include myself in this group) has no idea about the financial big picture because we don't understand it. We only understand when it gets personal....when they threaten to cut something we expected to get (like social security or Medicare), when our health insurance premiums become obscene or when the Government makes us pay for something we had no voice in and opposed (like a few wars, here and there.) The result may be that we take our frustrations out on incumbents in 2012. All of them. Too bad for them, but they all deserve it.

We may not understand the spin and fancy words that the Government and journalists use, but when the numbers are listed by themselves, all in one place, the picture is becoming clear: Our Government is robbing us blind.

In 2001, our debt was $5.3 trillion. It's now $14.3 trillion. What did we do with the $9 trillion we borrowed in the last ten years and who lent it to us? [More...]

What a depressing day of news, between the budget cuts, Norway and the deplorable media interviews by the accuser in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

Time for something else: Breaking Bad, Big Brother and the Next Food Network Star. See you all tomorrow.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Excellent statement by William Taylor and Ben Brafman in response to the outrageous interviews the accuser's lawyer in the Dominque Strauss-Kahn case has drummed up for her. (The Newsweek interview took place over three hours in her lawyer's office.)

Ms. Diallo is the first accuser in history to conduct a media campaign to persuade a prosecutor to pursue charges against a person from whom she wants money. Her lawyers and public relations consultants have orchestrated an unprecedented number of media events and rallies to bring pressure on the prosecutors in this case after she had to admit her extraordinary efforts to mislead them. Her lawyers know that her claim for money suffers a fatal blow when the criminal charges are dismissed, as they must be.

This conduct by lawyers is unprofessional and it violates fundamental rules of professional conduct for lawyers. Its obvious purpose is to inflame public opinion against a defendant in a pending criminal case. The fact is, however, that the number of rallies, press conferences, and media events they have orchestrated is exceeded only by the number of lies and misstatements she has made to law enforcement, friends, medical professionals and reporters. It is time for this unseemly circus to stop.

As I said in the earlier post, a motion to restrict the accuser and her lawyers' extra-judicial comments is needed immediately. And the District Attorney should seriously consider dropping the charges altogether after this blatant attempt to poison the potential jury pool. [More..]

Update: Newsweek has an interview The Maid's Tale, with the DSK accuser, Nafissatou Diallo.

Time for a gag order immediately in the Dominque Strauss-Kahn case. The hotel maid accusing him is going public, embarking on a media tour, starting with ABC News: GMA on Monday and Nightline on Tuesday.

In an exclusive television interview, ABC News' Robin Roberts speaks with the hotel employee who alleges she was sexually assaulted by former International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

For the first time viewers will hear, in her own words, her version of the events that allegedly took place at the Sofitel Hotel in New York in May. ...The interview airs on Tuesday, July 26 on "Nightline."

ABC shows a picture of the accuser, but still doesn't mention her name? How absurd. I hope Ben Brafman is spending today drafting a Motion to Ban Extra-Judicial Comments by Trial Participants. This case needs an order like the one entered in the Kobe Bryant case: [More...]

It's really distressing not to hear our Democratic President point out that social security and Medicare are not government welfare programs. The Government forcibly took our money with a promise we would get it back after we reached retirement age. And retirement age shouldn't be the age we need to move to assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Millions of us have paid these taxes for forty plus years. Obama should flat out refuse to shift the goalposts. Raising the eligibility age by two years will force those of us without employer paid insurance to stick with our private plans at a cost of $1,000 a month or more during that period. Even those who responsibly planned for retirement didn't count on another $20,000 in private health care premiums foisted on them at the last minute (And yes, three years before reaching 65 is the last minute considering most people are having trouble paying their existing bills and can't just decide to put aside another $12,000 a year.) [More...]

Not sure what this is supposed to mean - Boehner Says GOP Prepared to Act Alone on Debt Deal. How can the GOP act alone? At the least, Harry Reid has to do something and so does President Obama. Boehner says "�I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own.� And do what? Pass a clean debt ceilng bill? Obviously no. They already passed Cap, Cut and Something Or Other. Are they gonna repass it?

Not sure what Boehner is talking about.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias points us to this post from Erick Erickson of Red State (Disclosure: I had frequent personal interactions with Erickson in the past and in my experience, on a personal level, Erickson was a nice, decent guy. The public Erickson is of course, another matter):

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That�s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

(Emphasis supplied.) In that post, Erickson is writing about the Oslo terrorist attack. I for one don't see the terrorist attack as representative of Christianity. And I don't believe we need to look to Christianity to try and understand the Oslo terrorist attack. Similarly, terrorism in the name of Islam is not, in my view, informed by the religion of Islam (I'm not expert in Islam so I certainly could be wrong.) More . . .

Jeff Sachs at Huffpo:

[A]t every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class.
...Obama could have cut hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that has been wasted on America's disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, but here too it's been all bait and switch. Obama is either afraid to stand up to the Pentagon or is part of the same neoconservative outlook as his predecessor. The real cause hardly matters since the outcome is the same: America is more militarily engaged under Obama than even under Bush.

[More...]

I don't care whether the debt ceiling lift is temporary or permanent. I care that I have paid into a system my entire adult life knowing I would get Medicare at 65 and social security at 66. Republicans want to steal the money I've already paid in and put it somewhere else, making me wait another two years for Medicare. And raise my taxes at the same time.

If President Obama backs raising the age of medicare, which won't save the Government money in the long run due to the huge numbers of 65 and 66 year olds who will shift to Medicaid and who will break the backs of small businesses providing health care to elderly workers -- and which will force middle class elderly workers who don't have employer paid health care to pay premiums of ten thousand dollars a year or more for two more years, with huge deductibles and out of pocket costs, he doesn't deserve a second term as Democratic President. Let him run as as Republican or go home to Chicago. He will have sold us out.

Bump and Update: Here are suspect Anders Behring Breivik 's online postings in English. He "rants against multi-culturalism." BBC News has this profile of him. More from The Telegraph here.

Norwegian police describe him as a "right-wing Christian fundamentalist." It's still unclear if he acted alone.

According to police, Breivik has been charged and confessed. The death toll is close to 100. [More...]