• Jamelle Bouie explains why Obama is going to win in 2012.
• Patrick Caldwell argues that space exploration has value beyond just getting to Mars.
• Robert Kuttner writes that the debt crisis in Europe is reaching the point of no return.
• Paul Waldman celebrates Marshall McLuhan's 100th birthday by explaining how his work is relevant to modern media.

When 62 percent percent of Americans agree that the Republican Party should compromise on budget negotiations, it’s obvious that President Obama is winning the politics of the debt-ceiling negotiations. On the other hand, when 47 percent of Americans say that spending cuts will create jobs – as they did in the most recent Washington Post/ABC News survey – it’s clear that Obama is losing the larger ideological battle over the role of government.

In fact, since March, 6 percent more respondents say that cuts to federal spending would do more to create jobs than cut them. Worse, this result is consistent with other polls; according to the most recent Gallup survey on deficit reduction, 50 percent of Americans would prefer to reduce the deficit with spending cuts, compared to the 32 percent who would like to see an equal mix, and the 11 percent who would prefer deficit reduction with tax increases.

In a sense, we’re watching history repeat itself. Like his predecessor Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is willing to shift rightward for the sake of short-term political gain. But even if he comes away from this with higher approval ratings, it will be at the cost of the broader liberal project.

In my column today, I note that today would be Marshall McLuhan's 100th birthday. I found this fantastic clip from a 1960s Canadian Broadcasting Company program, in which a couple of guys right out of Mad Men (including one wearing a tie so skinny it must have been constructed by miniaturization engineers at the University of Toronto) talk about the transition from the "age of the book" to our current, hyper-mediated age, then interview McLuhan. It has a remarkably high-minded tone, one you'd have trouble finding on television today:

And, on a lighter note, here's the classic clip of McLuhan's appearance in "Annie Hall." As Woody Allen says, "Boy, if life were only like this."

I once joked that the logical extension of Twitter was a service called Blurter, where all posts were limited to one character. Sure, you could see what someone has to say via their Twitter feed, but wouldn't it be quicker to get Lady Gaga's message, "U"? Both concise and intriguing. Now, Farhad Manjoo suggests something radical: What if Twitter doubled their character limit? The 140-character limit came from the pre-smartphone era, when the service's creators thought people would all be using it by sending SMS messages, which were limited to 160 characters. But that's no longer true:

Although I expect blistering attacks from Twitter fans, I suspect that if Twitter did expand the character limit, people would quickly become acolytes. More and more, I see people resorting to hacks to get around Twitter's limit—they split their tweets up into multivolume epics, they use services like TwitLonger to add heft, or they direct people to posts on Facebook, Quora, and now Google+. Expanding beyond 140 would make these tricks unnecessary, allowing more conversation and interaction to take place within Twitter's friendly confines. It would also make the site far more pleasant to use—I'm getting sick of racking my brain for shorter words every time I want to ask a straightforward question.

Proponents of Twitter's limit argue that I should feel frustrated when I tweet. The classic defense of the 140-character perimeter is that, as with a haiku or sonnet, a rigid form inspires creativity. I don't buy it. For one thing, that argument positions Twitter as more high-minded than it really is, or needs to be. Obviously, we aren't all poets, and we shouldn't have to be to use a mainstream social network. Rather than poetry, Twitter's limit seems to encourage sloppiness and sound bites. You can't fit a complicated argument in 140 characters, but it's the perfect size to squeeze in ad-hominem attacks, to misdirect, or to shrug off people who challenge you.

There's no reason why Twitter's original form has to be sacrosanct. That's why constitutions allow for amendments. As Manjoo explains, the creators thought it would be mostly used for status messages ("Having eggs for breakfast"), which I personally find to be the least interesting and useful thing one can tweet, and which are less and less important. If the original rationale for 140 characters is no longer relevant, Twitter can make a decision that some other number is better. They're right that it wouldn't work if it was unlimited, but at 200 or 280 characters, it might allow for two whole sentences, which is often superior to one.

I suppose one could argue that it would be like building a new lane onto a highway -- it seems spacious at first, but before you know it, more cars have come and things are just as crowded. Likewise, a 280-character limit might begin to feel similarly constrained. But why not give it a shot?

One of the things we often hear is that government is best when it's closest to the people. Your local city government is going to be more responsive than your state government, which in return will be more responsive than the feds in Washington. This may be true in some ways, but it's also true that state and local government can be more corrupt and more dysfunctional, in part because there's less scrutiny. And also, on a local level, it's often not hard to get elected, which means your elected officials can be flat-out nuts:

Be careful before starting a Boy Scout troop in Gould, Ark. Or a Harry Potter fan club. Or a baseball team.

The City Council adopted an ordinance last week making it illegal to form any kind of group without its permission.

That is a clear violation of the Constitution, legal scholars agree. But it is also a sign of just how nasty politics has gotten in Gould, a farming town of 1,100 some 70 miles southeast of Little Rock, where members of the Council have struggled with a local political group that seeks to influence how the town is governed. The mayor, Earnest Nash Jr., also happens to be a member of the political group, the Gould Citizens Advisory Council...

Last week, the Council overrode the mayor's veto of two other controversial measures. One required that the citizens advisory council cease to exist. The other made it illegal for the mayor to meet with "any organization in any location" either "inside or outside Gould city limits" without the Council’s permission.

The advisory council, which calls itself a nonpartisan group that educates voters and raises money for public causes, says it will continue its work. But the Council, in one ordinance, accused the group of "causing confusion and discourse among the citizens" by harshly criticizing local officials at public meetings.

As a result, the City Council said, "No new organizations shall be allowed to exist in the City of Gould without approval from a majority of the City Council."

Well, it's hard to blame them. If somebody is out there causing discourse, what are you supposed to do? Just let them spread it all over town?

After months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Six” has released its plan for long-term debt reduction. The proposal is in line with previous recommendations from the Simpson-Bowles Commission. It includes $500 billion in discretionary spending cuts, cuts to Medicare (which can include an increase in the eligibility age) and unspecified Social Security reform. It also contains revenue increases, broad-based tax reform, and discretionary spending caps with a trigger that will kick in by 2015 if deficit reduction isn’t on track. The plan assumes that the Bush tax cuts for higher-income earners will expire. On the whole, it saves $3.7 trillion, which is close to the $4 trillion the administration's “grand bargain” of two weeks ago would have saved. Given their reaction to Simpson-Bowles earlier this year, liberals won’t love the proposal, but it’s not the worst possible outcome.

President Obama called the Gang of Six proposal “broadly consistent” with his deficit-reduction goal, and Senate Republicans haven’t dismissed it out of hand. But the real challenge is convincing House Republicans to pass any bill with tax increases, much less $1 trillion worth of them. John Boehner and Eric Cantor already rejected the other grand bargain because of their fundamental opposition to tax increases, and there’s no indication that they would accept it a second time around.

House Republicans have doubled down on their opposition to new revenue; yesterday, they passed the “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan, which would slash spending, cap it at 18 percent of GDP, and pass a balanced budget amendment. The vote was an obvious stunt -- the Senate votes today, and no one expects it to find a majority -- but it signals the GOP’s core opposition to any plan that provides additional revenue. This is to say nothing of the GOP’s growing belief that debt default would be a good thing.

In other words, it’s not enough that the Gang of Six has support from a large number of senators and the president of the United States; if this plan is to pass, they’ll need to convince House Republicans of its necessity. So far, that looks like a fool’s errand.

While I hesitate to complain about standard-issue candidate hyperbole, I just can't help myself on this one. Here's Michele Bachmann's latest Iowa campaign ad:

"I have the will and I have the courage to see this through." And by "see this through," she means, "vote against whatever debt ceiling deal the people in Congress who do the actual work come up with." Here's the thing about courage: It actually requires you to put something at risk. Courage implies danger. A politician can be courageous when she, for instance, takes a stand on principle that she knows will increase the chances she'll be voted out of office. The only danger here is to the American economy, not to Michele Bachmann's fortunes. What would be courageous is for her to support increasing the debt ceiling, since that would get her supporters mad.

But for some reason, we expect candidates to embody every admirable human virtue. The campaign narrative a candidate weaves almost inevitably shows them as having been tested by adversity or the cowardice of others around them, at which point they rose up and stood strong for freedom and justice, despite the slings and arrows aimed their way. Every once in a while a candidate has a legitimate story of courage, but most of the time they're making a courageous mountain out of a pedestrian molehill.

We also want our candidates to be extraordinary, better than those around them, and when you've been a backbench member of the House for four years, you don't get a lot of opportunities to rise above all others and demonstrate your unique character. Which is why legislator candidates always characterize the mundane activities of their jobs -- holding hearings, writing legislation, voting for things -- as acts of uncommon heroism. But you'll notice something about people who are actually courageous: They tend to be pretty modest about it. Of course, modesty and running for office don't mix.

The news that Aaron Swartz, a technologist and activist involved in the early days of Reddit and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, has been indicted in Boston for allegedly breaking into an MIT wiring closet and downloading in excess of four million academic journal articles from JSTOR while a student at, wait for it, Harvard's Center for Ethics, brings to mind a profile of information activist Carl Malamud that ran in TAP just about a year ago:

Malamud is certainly willing to provoke but prefers to be sure the law is on his side. In response to his call to open [the federal court record archive] PACER, a young activist, entrepreneur, and programmer named Aaron Swartz used a bit of code and a trial program at his local library to download nearly 20 million pages of files, which caught the attention of the FBI. Malamud ended up in an interrogation room with two armed agents. “Unlike my good friend Aaron Swartz and others who are willing to stick it to the man,” Malamud says, “I look very carefully at what we’re doing to see if it’s legal or not.”

There's much we don't know about Swartz's case; he's only been indicted today. But the situation serves to highlight something that seems true about information activism in recent years. What with the Obama administration trumpeting the merits of the federal information cache Data.gov, the transparency group the Sunlight Foundation regularly testifying on Capitol Hill, and Malamud becoming an accepted part of the Washington orbit (his campaign for Public Printer got him support on Capitol Hill), it's easy to forget that there's something at all controversial or oppositional about accessing information, or that some people really, really want data to be free -- and others don't. Open data has been mainstreamed. Whatever hacker-culture roots the free information movement might have are subsumed by the idea that simply everyone agrees that data is meant to be free, and the struggle is over the mechanics of freeing it. That's never really been true, as Swartz's case makes plain.

As Washington fights about which benefits to cut for low-income families, the Heritage Foundation throws an assist by arguing – in typical conservative fashion – that poor people can’t be poor if they own consumer electronics and air conditioning:

[I]f poverty means lacking nutritious food, adequate warm housing, and clothing for a family, relatively few of the more than 30 million people identified as being “in poverty” by the Census Bureau could be characterized as poor.[2] While material hardship definitely exists in the United States, it is restricted in scope and severity. The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines. […]

In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

These things only qualify as “luxuries” if you assume a world where the poor are poor because of bad choices, and if you believe that poverty demands destitution (i.e. poor people aren’t allowed to feel pleasure). If you’re not starving in the streets, then as far as Heritage is concerned, you’re not really poor. Of course, in the world as it exists, poverty is most often the result of systemic factors – poor educational opportunities, depressed economies, institutionalized discrimination – and events that are beyond the control of most people: medical emergencies, job losses, and the various collection of difficulties that come with not having money.

Even if that weren’t the case, however, it’s still true that poverty is more than simple material deprivation. Adam Smith explains this best in The Wealth of Nations:

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.

Even when poverty is a matter of relative deprivation, it’s still poverty, since a large part of poverty is navigating the shame of being poor. That a low-income parent springs for nice clothing for his child doesn’t mean that he’s irresponsible; it means that he wants his child to avoid the shame that comes with having poor-quality clothes. Likewise, a poor family might not need an XBox, but owning one allows them to avoid feelings of inadequacy when confronted with guests who aren’t poor.

Jonathan Bernstein assesses GOP strategy, with a great baseball story:

The GOP practice, for the last twenty years or so, has been to play the "game" of politics in part by looking through the rule book for strategies that go beyond the norms of politics but are allowed under the literal reading of the rules. Examples include mid-decade redistricting, the recall of a California governor for no particular reason, and impeaching Bill Clinton. And, most notably, filibusters in the Senate as a routine measure. The idea is that in a normal, healthy, political system there's always going to be some gap between the written Constitutional and statutory rules on the one hand, and norms and practices on the other. A clever political party can gain occasional short-term advantages through exploiting that difference. Hmmm...19th century baseball: I seem to recall a story that someone (perhaps King Kelly?) was sitting on the bench when a pop foul came near him. Springing into action, he announced "Kelly in at catcher for Smith" and caught the ball for an out, pointing out after the fact to the umpire that nowhere in the rules did it say that substitutions couldn't take place in mid-play.

This audacity gap in American politics can be traced back as far as you like. But in its most recent incarnation, it dates to the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida. Again and again, Republicans looked at prevailing norms and realized that there was no cost to violating them. It's true, they might have said, that nobody in this country has ever decided to organize a small riot to intimidate election officials and shut down vote-counting that might not go our way. But what's to stop us? It's true, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court might have said, that no Court has ever issued as blatantly partisan a decision as the one in Bush v. Gore, going so far as to write that "our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities," lest any future appellant try to hold them to their atrocious reasoning. But what's to stop us? It's true, Karl Rove might have said, that firing U.S. attorneys if they refuse to turn their offices into arms of the Republican National Committee might never have been done before. But what's to stop us?

Again and again, the answer to the question "What's to stop us?" turned out to be "Nothing."

The key is that whatever outrage that might be mustered against procedural gimmickry is absolutely lost on most Americans -- they just think it's a bunch of people bickering in Washington. And it should be noticed that President Obama helps this along, by frequently arguing that the problem in a particular situation is that "Washington" can't get its act together. His impulse to be above the fray is such that he can barely utter the word "Republican," which is just fine by Republicans.

In any case, as Kevin Drum points out, right now, in a basement office on the Hill, someone is trying to find the next loophole that no one ever thought of exploiting to subvert the norms that allow business to be done. "What's the next Capitol Hill norm that some bright young up-and-comer will figure out is just a norm — one that only naive schoolboys need to pay attention to? Beats me. But whatever it is, Republicans will find it." Democrats don't do the same thing not necessarily because they're better people but because they have a different view of what the costs are. Democrats tend to get freaked out by a tongue-lashing from The Washington Post editorial page over some bit of procedural bad sportsmanship, while Republicans not only don't care; they realize that no one else in the country does, either.

• Paul Starr explains the twisted psychology behind the Balanced Budget Amendment.
• Gabriel Arana asks why it took an undercover investigation to bring to light Bachmann's anti-gay views.
• Anna Clark looks to the future of American women's soccer after the World Cup.

Bill Clinton offered his take Tuesday for how he would solve the debt ceiling: Oder the Treasury to keep issuing debt under the 14th Amendment, which states: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." Some have interpreted this Civil War-era language to mean the debt ceiling is unconstitutional, and that it is within Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's power to continue issuing debt to cover the funds Congress has already appropriated.

President Obama has dismissed the idea so far. Clinton, however, thinks it is clearly within constitutional bounds and said he would evoke the 14th Amendment justification “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me.” That pronouncement comes on the heels of a suggestion from Moody's -- who has threatened to downgrade the U.S.'s triple-A status if no deal is struck by August 2 -- that the government should eliminate the debt ceiling entirely. Annie Lowrey asked the living former Treasury secretaries what they thought, and a plurality believe the debt ceiling is an unneeded law. Dylan Matthews argues that utilizing the 14th Amendment is both sound policy and politics:

This is very, very good policy. Denmark is the only other country with a comparable setup, and other developed countries seem to get on fine without it … But it’d also be smart politics for Obama to insist on full elimination of the debt ceiling, rather than a temporary increase. The current setup means that every year he needs the House GOP to sign on to both a budget and/or continuing resolution AND an increase in the debt ceiling. That means two occasions every year where John Boehner has leverage to demand policy changes.

Eliminating the debt ceiling is certainly the best policy. It would keep the U.S.'s credit rating in good standing, without imposing the drastic cuts currently on the table. Sharp cuts in the government spending would be devastating as the unemployment crisis persists and the economy limps into recovery.

However, taking Clinton's advice would be politically disastrous for Obama at the moment. With the spotlight focused on the negotiations, Republicans would paint the president as the one who left the negotiation table when serious progress at reducing the deficit was at hand.

In the scenario where Obama gets tough and ignores the debt ceiling, it is unclear who, if anyone, would have grounds to challenge that decision in court. Instead, Republicans would surely begin impeachment proceedings in the House. That may further solidify Republicans' place as the extremes in the current political climate, but it would also provide them with a platform to tarnish Obama before the 2012 race.

Obama should certainly use the 14th Amendment if the current gridlock continues and no deal is in place by August 2. The risk of impeachment hearings is worth protecting the U.S.'s credit rating. But at this point, the ideal solution is for Obama to strike an accord with congressional Republicans (with the cuts scheduled down the road for once the economy has recovered), move past this immediate debate, then reject the debt ceiling during a calmer period before our nation's standing is once again put at risk.

Feeling like you haven't been disappointed by a Democrat in too long? Well let me help you with that. One of the suggestions that has been floated as part of a deal to reduce the deficit is the elimination of the "carried interest" loophole. It works like this: If you're a hedge-fund manager, you make your money by taking 20 percent of the profits of the fund you manage. This can be a lot of money -- hedge-fund king John Paulson made over $5 billion last year. But unlike the little people, hedge-fund managers don't pay federal income taxes on that income. It's considered "carried interest" and taxed as capital gains, which means Paulson would pay only a 15 percent marginal rate on his income. That's why, as Warren Buffett is fond of pointing out, he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

And the other day, we learn from Ben Smith, two Democrats in the House -- Jared Polis and Mike Quigley -- sent a letter to President Obama begging him not to close the carried-interest loophole. "Such a tax increase," they wrote, "would not only damage our already fragile economic recovery, but it would also cripple the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that makes our country so strong." Indeed: If hedge fund managers paid the same tax rate on their income as people who get paid wages, how could our country's spirit of innovation survive?

I don't know anything about Quigley, so I'll restrict my remarks to Polis. Elected in 2008, he's a member of the Progressive Caucus and known as a left-winger. He wants to end federal marijuana prohibition. He represents Boulder. He's gay. He's also really rich -- on the order of a couple hundred million dollars in net worth (dot-com money) -- but as Robert Frank described him in 2007, "Rather than using government as a tool to cut taxes and boost his personal fortune, he's using his personal fortune as a tool to change government. The changes he seeks are aimed at lifting up the underclass, rather than providing further support for the overclass. Or at least that's the way he puts it on the campaign trail."

I'm sure that on most economic issues, Polis is going to side with the little guy. But obviously not always. So you could argue that he demonstrates the way the scale in the Democratic Party is tipped toward social liberalism and away from economic liberalism. It isn't just the presence of across-the-board conservatives like Ben Nelson in the party that forms this picture, it's also the presence of people like Polis, for whom social issues are non-negotiable, but who might also take time from their day to stand up for the interests of oppressed hedge fund managers.

And this isn't going to change anyone's view that Polis is a liberal. He would no longer be described that way if he came out in favor of restrictions on abortion, but a dance over to the Republican side on taxes isn't going to bear on the way people think about him ideologically. I'm sure if someone asked Polis, "Why should a plumber or a teacher or a factory worker pay a higher tax rate on their income than a hedge fund manager pays on his?", his answer would make you think you were listening to a conservative Republican talking. But the fact that he's still considered not just liberal but very liberal tells you a lot.