Focus of shutdown negotiations shifts to Senate

WASHINGTON (AP) — The focus of efforts to end the government shutdown and prevent a U.S. default shifted to the Senate on Saturday, where leaders were in talks aimed at resolving the twin stalemates.

Word of the negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the top Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, emerged as the Senate, as expected, rejected a Democratic effort to raise the government's borrowing limit through next year.

Republicans objected because they want the extension to be accompanied by spending cuts.

The spotlight turned to the Senate as the partial shutdown reached its 12th day. It also came with the calendar edging closer to Oct. 17, when administration officials have said the government will deplete its ability to borrow money, risking a first-time federal default that could jolt the world economy.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told fellow Republicans earlier Saturday that his talks with President Barack Obama had stalled.

"The Senate needs to hold tough," Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said Boehner told House GOP lawmakers. "The president now isn't negotiating with us."

GOP senators said the talks between Reid and McConnell had started Friday. That was confirmed by Senate Democratic aides.

Saturday's Senate vote derailing the Democrats' debt-limit measure was a near party-line 53-45 in favor of the bill. That fell seven short of the 60 required to overcome Republican objections to considering the measure.

"The only thing that's happening right now is Sen. Reid and Sen. McConnell are talking. And I view that as progress," said the second-ranking Republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas.

House conservatives said Obama was to blame for the talks with their chamber running aground.

"Perhaps he sees this as the best opportunity for him to win the House in 2014," said Rep. John Fleming, R-La. "It's very clear to us he does not now, and never had, any intentions of negotiating."

"It doesn't have to be this way. It's not supposed to be this way," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. "Manufacturing crises to extract massive concessions isn't how our democracy works, and we have to stop it. Politics is a battle of ideas, but you advance those ideas through elections and legislation — not extortion."

A bipartisan group of senators, closely watched by Senate leaders, is polishing a plan aimed at reaching compromise with Obama.

An emerging proposal by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and others would pair a six-month plan to keep the government open with an increase in the government's borrowing limit through January.

Obama has turned away a House plan to link the reopening of the government — and a companion measure to temporarily increase the government's borrowing cap — to concessions on the budget.

In the face of disastrous opinion polls, GOP leaders have signaled they will make sure the debt limit is increased with minimal damage to the financial markets. But they're still seeking concessions as a condition for reopening the government.

Obama met Senate Republicans on Friday and heard a pitch from Collins on raising the debt limit until the end of January, reopening the government and cutting the health care law at its periphery.

The plan also would strengthen income verification for people receiving subsidies through the health care law and set up a broader set of budget talks.

The Collins proposal would delay for two years a medical-device tax that helps finance the health care law, and it would subject millions of individuals eligible for subsidies to purchase health insurance under the program to stronger income verification.

Collins said Obama said the proposal "was constructive, but I don't want to give the impression that he endorsed it."

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram and David Espo contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/focus-shutdown-negotiations-shifts-senate-150302289--politics.html
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Out Of Lahiri's Muddy 'Lowland,' An Ambitious Story Soars

Geography is destiny in Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel, The Lowland. Her title refers to a marshy stretch of land between two ponds in a Calcutta neighborhood where two very close brothers grow up. In monsoon season, the marsh floods and the ponds combine; in summer, the floodwater evaporates. You don't need your decoder ring to figure out that the two ponds symbolize the two brothers — at times separate; at other times inseparable. But there's still more meaning lurking in this rich landscape. Lahiri's narrator goes on to tell us: "Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain."

For most of Lahiri's novel, we're stuck in the mud with the cautious older brother whose name is Subhash. Consequently, there's a quality of stillness to The Lowland that, especially in its opening sections, almost verges on the stagnant — or would, were it not for Lahiri's always surprising language and plotting. The Lowland is something of a departure for Lahiri, whose other work often explores the struggles of Indian immigrant families. The Lowland, instead, opens in Calcutta in the 1950s and '60s, and keeps returning there even as the main story moves ahead in time.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies.

Marco Delogu/Courtesy of Knopf

Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies.

Marco Delogu/Courtesy of Knopf

As a college student in the late '60s, Subhash's younger, more daredevil brother, Udayan, becomes involved in the Maoist "Naxalite" political movement, set on bettering the living conditions of India's poor through violent uprising. Subhash, in contrast, dutifully dedicates himself to personal, rather than collective, improvement: He earns a scholarship to study science in America and moves to Rhode Island. For a couple of lonely years in a student boarding house, he learns to live without the voices of his family. But when Udayan is executed by the police in that very same marsh between the ponds, Subhash races back to Calcutta. He goes to comfort his parents; but, as it turns out, he also rescues his murdered brother's pregnant wife, Gauri, from her own diminished future as a widowed (and unwelcome) daughter-in-law.

The Lowland is buoyantly ambitious in both its story (I've only summarized the first quarter of the novel here) and its form. Subhash, his parents, Gauri and the daughter she eventually bears are all reticent people — at one point, Subhash thinks of them as "a family of solitaries" — so it's necessary for our narrator to constantly eavesdrop on their various thoughts and relay them to us. For instance, Subhash proposes to Gauri by stressing the practicalities of their union: He woos her by saying in America she could pursue her studies in philosophy. But his unspoken words are those of a lovesick poet: "[Subhash] had tried to deny the attraction he felt for Gauri. But it was like the light of the fireflies that swam up to the house at night, random points that surrounded him, that glowed and then receded without a trail." Hastily enough, the two do wind up marrying and raising Gauri's daughter in America, but the memory of Udayan — his fierce politics and his terrible death — has corrosive aftereffects.

The Lowland is a novel about the rashness of youth, as well as the hesitation and regret that can make a long life not worth living. Toward the end of The Lowland, a metaphorical monsoon finally hits, rousing Subhash out of his lifelong timidity, that mud hiding place Lahiri describes in her lyrical opening. Part of the beauty of this novel is that it's far from a foregone conclusion whether this hard rain will give Subhash new life, or drown him.

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