The Caucus: Obama Picks Energy Executive for Commerce Post

2:43 p.m. | Updated President Obama named a California utility and energy executive, John E. Bryson, as his second secretary of commerce at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, ending a search for an executive to add a business outlook to his economic team.

Mr. Bryson was chairman and chief executive of Edison International, parent company of Southern California Edison and Edison Mission Group, for nearly two decades until 2008. If confirmed by the Senate, which could be held up for unrelated reasons, he would replace Gary Locke, a former governor of Washington who is Mr. Obama?s choice to be ambassador to China now that Jon M. Huntsman Jr. has left to weigh a Republican presidential candidacy.

?John is going to be an important part of my economic team, promoting American business and American products across the globe,? Mr. Obama said in a short appearance in the White House dining room. ?By working with companies here at home, and representing America?s interests abroad, I?m confident that he?s going to help us meet the goal that I set of doubling our nation?s exports.?

Senate confirmation of Mr. Bryson could hinge, however, on Mr. Obama and Senate Republicans ending a standoff over pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. Senate Republicans in March wrote Mr. Obama that they would block any nominee for Commerce secretary unless he submitted all three trade agreements to the Senate for ratification. While the administration had indicated it was prepared to submit the agreements, having negotiated changes from the agreements concluded in the Bush administration, it subsequently joined with Congressional Democrats to demand that Capitol Hill also pass legislation extending a trade-adjustment assistance program benefiting workers who lose jobs when companies move operations overseas. Republicans oppose the legislation.

Asked about the hurdle on Tuesday, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, reiterated the administration?s demand for maintaining the aid to displaced workers, and added, ?It would be folly to hold up a nomination so important as the commerce secretary for any reason, and we look forward to Senate confirmation.?

According to his biography released by the White House, Mr. Bryson is also a director of several major corporations, including Boeing, Walt Disney and Coda Automotive, and is a senior adviser to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. He is chairman of the board of BrightSource Energy, the Public Policy Institute of California and the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California Board of Overseers. He also serves as co-chairman of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Mr. Obama, with Mr. Locke and Mr. Bryson standing at his side on Tuesday, noted Mr. Bryson ?has been a fierce proponent of alternative energy.?

?In the years ahead, a key to achieving our export goal will be promoting clean energy in America. It?s how we?ll reduce our dependence on foreign oil,? Mr. Obama said . ?And that?s how we?ll encourage new businesses and jobs to take root on our shores. John understands this better than virtually anybody.?

Mr. Bryson is a trustee of the California Institute of Technology, a director of the California Endowment and the W. M. Keck Foundation, and serves on the advisory board of Deutsche Bank Americas. Previously Mr. Bryson served on educational, energy and environmental boards, including as a trustee of Stanford University, a member of a United Nations advisory group on energy and climate change, and head of California?s Public Utilities Commission and its State Water Resources Control Board. Early in his career, Mr. Bryson was a founder of the national environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Among those Mr. Obama was said to be interested in for the commerce job was Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google.

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OCZ unveils RevoDrive 3 and RevoDrive Hybrid

As rumored last week, OCZ has unveiled its latest RevoDrive at Computex today. Packing dual SandForce SF-2281 controllers (the same chip in the Vertex 3), the RevoDrive 3 touts read and write speeds of up to 900MB/s and 700MB/s, with up to 120,000 IOPS on 4KB random writes. If that isn't quick enough for you, a second version called the RevoDrive 3 X2 doubles the SF-2281 count to achieve 1.5GB/s reads, 1.2GB/s writes, and 200,000 IOPS 4KB transfers.

Both PCIe x4 drives should be available in capacities ranging from 120GB to 960GB with MSRPs starting at $699 ($5.82/GB). If correct, that's pricier than the previous generation. The 240GB RevoDrive X2 retailed for $680 when we reviewed it last December. Besides speed improvements, OCZ has tweaked the third-gen RevoDrive's SandForce and onboard RAID controllers to support TRIM -- a functionality that generally isn't available RAID-enabled SSDs.

Alongside the customary performance refresh, OCZ has officially entered the hybrid storage market. The company's RevoDrive Hybrid effectively straps a 2.5-inch hard drive to the side of the RevoDrive 3. As we've seen with Seagate's Momentus XT and Intel's Smart Response Technology, the RevoDrive Hybrid relies on a mechanical drive for storage and uses flash memory for caching purposes. This is accomplished with Dataplex software from Nvelo.

According to TechReport, Nvelo claims its technology outperforms the solution Intel offers with its Z68 chipset, but we'll reserve final judgment until independent benchmarks surface. Sustained transfers supposedly peak at 575MB/s reads and 500MB/s writes with 30,000 IOPS on 4GB random writes. The RevoDrive Hybrid will be available in July from $350 with configurations including a 60GB SSD and 500GB HDD combo, as well as a 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD.

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On Our Desk - Mionix Propus 380

As you can imagine, we get lots of natty little bits and pieces sent into the bit-tech offices. Annoyingly, though, much of it is just a little too small or a little too silly to write about in a full page review. As a result, I?m trying to resurrect the On Our Desk series of articles that we used to cover all these little bits of gadgetry.

So without further ado I?ll tell you about the Mionix Propus 380 mouse mat, on which my CM Storm Inferno has been happily sitting for the last few days.

The first feature that grabbed me about the Propus 380 is that it looks good. It was actually its unusual shape and sleek, unfussy design that prompted me to pick it out from the pile of gaming mouse mats we?ve got sitting in the labs in the first place; it certainly looks like it means business.

On Our Desk - Mionix Propus 380

Once out of the packaging, I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality on show. The edges of the Propus 380 are very precisely cut, with no rough edges in sight. The upper tracking surface is also very firmly bonded to the rubber base of the mat; it certainly doesn't feel like the Propus 380 would suffer from the kind of delaminating or edge-peeling you may have seen on older mouse mats.

The surface of the mat is made from extremely fine-grained plastic, results in some very quick mouse movements. In fact, I was actually able to move my mouse almost too quickly compared to the cloth covered mat that the Propus 380 replaced, with very little drag or friction between the mouse and mat. Once I was used to it, though, the lack of friction meant that my mouse movement felt very precise, and that fatigue was less of a problem during long gaming sessions.

Measuring 380 x 260mm, the mat is wider than it is tall, but this means there?s plenty of room for large sweeping movements if you run your mouse with low sensitivity. If you don?t need all that width, though, then you can rotate the mat through 90 degrees. What's more, in this orientation, the indents in the upper and lower edge of the mat help it to butt up nearly with your keyboard.

On Our Desk - Mionix Propus 380

If you?re into your LAN gaming, then the fact that the Propus 380 doesn?t roll up could be an issue. It does have a degree of bend in it, but it'll crease if you push it too far. For most people, though, this is unlikely to be a problem, and it also means the edges of the mat won?t curl with time.

Of course, a gaming orientated mouse mat is a luxury; most decent mice these days will track quite happily without any mouse mat at all. The Propus 380 is a great piece of kit, though. It feels well made, and has a surface that provides very smooth and quick tracking for a laser mouse. At £17 it couldn?t be called cheap, but at least you feel like you?re getting £17 worth of kit; it?ll definitely be staying on my desk for the foreseeable future.

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Political Memo: Surprise Victory in New York Invigorates Democrats Looking to 2012

?The New York race confirmed what I thought citizens would feel about Medicare,? said Mr. Pace, who is expecting to soon begin a campaign to oust Representative Scott Tipton, a freshman Republican, in southwestern Colorado. ?People are very hesitant to end Medicare as we know it.?

In the aftermath of the New York victory, which hinged on a Republican plan to reshape the health care program for older Americans, members of both parties and independent analysts now predict a more competitive race next year for control of the House, with expanded opportunities for Democrats to reclaim seats they lost in the Republican wave of 2010.

?No one believes that 2012 will be the same type of election for Republicans with the wind at our back,? said Tom Reynolds, a former New York congressman who ran the Republican Party?s House campaign effort in 2004 and 2006. ?Neither will it be ?08 or ?06 with the wind in our face. Republican office holders will have to go out and explain what the problem is and what they are trying to do to fix it.?

Buoyed by the New York surprise and bolstered by the prospect of a larger and friendlier electorate in a year when President Obama will be running, House Democrats say they can argue credibly that they are poised to cut into the Republican majority, though they were careful not to predict a takeover, which would require a gain of 24 seats.

?Democrats can win the House back in 2012,? said Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ?I?m not saying we will ? yet.?

As the case of Mr. Pace and other experienced contenders who are entering races in districts in Illinois, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere shows, the victory in New York can help prospective candidates make their run-or-not decision while opening the wallets of contributors uncertain about giving if there was no hope of party gain.

?It is a sign of the pendulum swinging back the other way,? said Brad Schneider, an Illinois businessman who announced last Wednesday that he would be among the Democrats running in a Republican-held district in the suburbs north of Chicago.

But Republicans remain confident that they can protect their hold on the House, suggesting that Democrats are exaggerating the meaning of the outcome in the New York race. ?The hubris on their side is ever-expanding,? said Guy Harrison, executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

And major questions still surround the 2012 House landscape, since new Congressional district lines have not been completed in most states, including such crucial battlegrounds as California, Florida, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Republicans control the redistricting power in most of the states, giving them the potential to erect a firewall against substantial Democratic gains.

?The redistricting process provides a degree of protection for House Republicans against any potential losses,? said Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, the pro-Republican group that spent $690,000 in the unsuccessful effort to hold on to the House seat in New York?s 26th Congressional District.

One exception is Illinois, where a new proposed map gives significant advantages to Democrats in efforts to knock off Republicans.

But the victory in New York was galvanizing for Democrats, and for now at least has given them confidence that they can use Medicare to press their broader case that Republicans are going too far in their drive to cut spending and reduce the reach of government while continuing to provide tax breaks for the wealthy. Democrats intend to seize on that issue, which could help them recapture older voters, who rallied to Republicans in the last election.

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Sony Sets Its Sights on Augmented Reality

Sony has demonstrated a new augmented reality system called Smart AR that can be built into the company's future gaming devices.

Augmented reality involves mapping virtual objects onto a view of the real world, usually as seen through the screen of a smart phone. The technology has so far been used to create a handful of dazzling smart-phone apps, but has yet to take off in a big way. However, many believe that mobile gaming could prove to be an ideal platform for the technology. With Smart AR, certain real-world objects could become part of a game when viewed through a device such as the PlayStation Portable. This could allow game characters to appear on a tabletop, perhaps, or to respond to the movement of real objects.

Unlike many augmented reality systems, Smart AR does not use satellite tracking or special markers to figure out where to overlay a virtual object. Instead, it uses object recognition. This means it works where GPS signals are poor or nonexistent, for example, indoors. The markerless system is more difficult to pull off, but it allows many more everyday objects to be used.

"Prototypes of Sony Computer Entertainment's next-generation of portable entertainment systems will be integrated with this technology," says Takayuki Yoshigahara, deputy general manager of Sony's Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory in Tokyo. "SCE is also considering adopting this technology for its software development kit in the future." This would allow games developers to add augmented reality features in the games made for Sony consoles.

Sony has dabbled with the technology before, using two-dimensional barcodes known as CyberCodes as markers for tracking objects.

According to Yoshigahara, Smart AR identifies objects using an approach known as local feature extraction, which means it tries to identify salient parts of the object within the image. The system also tracks the object's movement, and works out its orientation. This is necessary in order to know how the virtual data should be positioned in relation to the object.

Smart AR also builds a rough 3-D map of a room. This is achieved by measuring disparities between different snapshots taken from slightly different perspectives as the camera moves. This allows virtual objects to interact with the environment.

Tobias Hollerer, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says Sony's technology combines several areas of research. "If they do anything new, it is in tracking the entire room," he says.

Edward Rostens, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and cocreator of an augmented reality system for the iPhone, called Popcode, says getting several different techniques to work together using the limited processing power of a handheld device would be impressive.

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The Caucus: Obama to Pick Energy Executive for Commerce Post

President Obama will name a California utility and energy executive, John E. Bryson, as his second secretary of commerce at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, ending a search for an executive to add a business outlook to his economic team.

Mr. Bryson was chairman and chief executive of Edison International, parent company of Southern California Edison and Edison Mission Group, for nearly two decades until 2008. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Gary Locke, a former governor of Washington who is Mr. Obama?s choice to be ambassador to China now that Jon M. Huntsman Jr. has left to weigh a Republican presidential candidacy.

?I am pleased to nominate John Bryson to be our nation?s secretary of commerce, as he understands what it takes for America to succeed in a 21st century global economy,? Mr. Obama said in a statement. ?John will be an important part of my economic team, working with the business community, fostering growth and helping open up new markets abroad to promote jobs and opportunities here at home.?

According to his biography released by the White House, Mr. Bryson is also a director of several major corporations, including Boeing, Walt Disney and Coda Automotive, and is a senior adviser to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. He is chairman of the board of BrightSource Energy, the Public Policy Institute of California and the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California Board of Overseers. He also serves as co-chairman of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

He is a trustee of the California Institute of Technology, a director of the California Endowment and the W. M. Keck Foundation, and serves on the advisory board of Deutsche Bank Americas. Previously Mr. Bryson served on educational, energy and environmental boards, including as a trustee of Stanford University, a member of a United Nations advisory group on energy and climate change, and head of California?s Public Utilities Commission and its State Water Resources Control Board. Early in his career, Mr. Bryson was a founder of the national environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Among those Mr. Obama was said to be interested in for the commerce job was Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google.

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Activision unveils 'Call of Duty Elite' subscription service

Late last year rumors emerged suggesting that Activision might implement a subscription model for Call of Duty online multiplayer. Although the company was quick to tell customers it would "never, ever charge" for multiplayer, it didn't outright deny the possibility of a premium service tier for extra content and features not found on the retail game disc. And that's just what the company has revealed today, under the moniker Call of Duty Elite.

Launching in beta this summer, the new service will work with the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as well as future installments of the combat-simulation game. Activision says it hasn't yet figured out how much to charge for the service, but it has been suggested the price will be below $7.99. Players will get to access a sample set of features for free, such as the ability to join interest groups and team up with like-minded players for online battles, while those who pay the monthly fee get additional features including access to map packs and other perks.

Besides the usual leaderboards and other statistics, Call of Duty Elite will also provide users with tools to analyze their performance within the game, keeping track of which weapons have been most successful for them in killing enemies, or showing a blueprint of a level with heat map information about where they killed and got killed. Additionally, users will be able to log into the service on Apple's iOS portable devices and Activision says that an Android app is on the way.

The company will likely continue offering map packs and other digital content for one-time charges, but as rumored months ago, the move will give Activision Blizzard an additional way to capitalize on its millions of Call of Duty players. More details are expected to emerge next week at E3.

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In Showdown Over Debt Ceiling, Neither Party Is Blinking

Given that all Republicans and more than a few Democrats oppose any debt-limit increase that is not accompanied by some commitment to future fiscal restraint, the measure is doomed to fail. And for all the talk of economic crisis should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling by August, the financial markets are likely to yawn at this vote ? if only because Republican leaders have privately assured Wall Street executives that this is a show intended to make the point to Mr. Obama that an increase cannot pass absent his agreement to rein in domestic programs.

?Wall Street is in on the joke,? said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But beyond this week, Wall Street has reason to be nervous as Congress nears the actual deadline on Aug. 2 to raise the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling, said people in both parties and in finance, some of whom asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue.

Investors have grown accustomed to partisan games of chicken that always end with the needed increase in the government?s borrowing authority. But this showdown, many say, is riskier because of the strongly held antispending, antitax views of the many freshman House Republicans combined with the fragility of the economic recovery.

?The people who are more politically savvy realize this may not be the normal brinkmanship,? said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Nor, he added, is this standoff like the fight a few months ago over the current year?s spending, which ended with a late-night deal shortly before the government would have shut down.

?The thing that people are missing is that in shutting down the government you can go to the 11th-and-a-half hour, and the consequences of not doing it, while significant, are not economy-threatening,? Mr. Warner said. ?You can?t go to the 11th-and-a-half hour on the debt limit. You don?t know what?s going to spook the bond markets.? 

The chief wild card is the House Republican majority, which was elected last November after a campaign defined more than in any year since 1992 by voters? antipathy toward budget deficits. More than a third are newcomers who reinforced the ranks of Tea Party sympathizers already in Congress. More numerous than the insurgents elected in the conservative waves of 1980 and 1994, many freshman Republicans have no experience in public office and consider themselves citizen-legislators who entered government to shrink it regardless of the political costs.

?The faction in the Republican Party that takes a more moderate view is so much in the minority right now,? said Joseph E. Kasputys, founder of IHS Global Insight and an official in the Nixon and Ford administrations. ?The people who have been sent to Washington most recently are bringing a strong message from the Republicans more to the right that really want something done about government spending.? 

Many House Republicans have said publicly that they either do not believe the government will default or that they do not fear it. Many embrace a proposal of Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a first-year Republican from Pennsylvania, for the Treasury to pay bondholders with incoming tax revenues and delay other government payments pending a resolution. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and many on Wall Street call the idea unworkable. 

Also, many Republicans have made comments indicating that they do not understand or do not care that an increase in the debt limit is needed not only for new spending but also to cover Social Security checks, troops? pay and myriad other agreed-to purposes, as well as for payments to creditors holding Treasury bonds.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans are concerned that raising the debt limit would lead to new spending and debt than are concerned that not raising the limit would spur a government default and hurt the economy, 48 percent compared with 35 percent; among Republicans, the gap is 60 percent to 25 percent.

Another difference from recent decades, when the parties several times agreed to bipartisan budget-cutting deals to raise the debt limit, is the scale of spending cuts that Republicans are demanding as the price of support ? up to $2 trillion in savings over a decade.

For Republicans and Democrats to agree this summer on such a far-reaching deficit-reduction plan is a hurdle that is all the higher given how far apart the parties are. Republicans oppose any new taxes while Democrats say a balanced package must include higher revenues.

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Computex 2011 Predictions

Computex is one of the most important times of the year for PC hardware ? whether you?re a manufacturer or enthusiastic follower, the Taiwanese tech show is the place to be to see the best and brightest.

After all, Computex is where the netbook craze took off after Asus showed its EeePC 701 back in 2007, and it?s typically where we first see all the tech that?ll we be buying in the September rush and that?ll appear in our Christmas stockings.

We?ve already seen some news from Taiwan, but we thought we?d put together a few predictions before the show starts in earnest and see how they come out. We?ve only listed the companies that we?re fairly sure will announce something note-worthy or interesting here, but feel free to add your own predictions about your favourite (or least favourite) manufacturers in the comments thread.

AMD
All the major motherboard manufacturers will have Socket AM3+ boards, whether they?re based around the new 990FX chipset or the older 890FX one. Socket AM3+ boards are compatible with Socket AM3 CPUs and the forthcoming Socket AM3+ CPUs, but not any new APUs from AMD ? the integrated graphics unit of an APU will require a completely new type of socket.

We expect the graphics front to be calm from both sides, as TSMC is still working on the desired 28nm manufacturing process. As the Radeon HD 7000-series is rumoured for production in May we might see something GPU-shaped, but we doubt we?ll be able to share that if we do.

Intel
There?s a slight chance we might see some more of LGA2011, the successor to LGA1366. Intel has form in this area, with the Intel booth at previous Computex shows featuring a wall?o?motherboards with a few next-gen examples. Typically we?ll ask a booth attendant what these previously unseen boards, only to be told that he or she didn?t know and couldn?t possibly say, but that we?re welcome to take pictures and speculate. The teases.

Nvidia
With the all-quiet on the graphics front, we expect Nvidia to be pushing Tegra 2. We saw the First Tegra 2 smartphone at CES earlier this year, and we might see a Tegra 3 quad-core device, but it?ll be a demo unit or a concept.

Asus
We?re expecting a pretty strong show from Asus, who is holding an entire press conference for its Republic of Gamer sub-brand. Stay tuned for revelations from that one. Asus typically has some mental-looking motherboards and graphics cards at tech shows, plus some funky concept designs for devices ? most of which wouldn?t look out of place in a high-budget sci-fi film ? and some sleek laptops and netbooks.

What won't happen
We don't expect to see any news on GDDR6 - next-gen graphics cards will have a similar amount of memory bandwidth to this generation. We also don't expect to hear anything about DDR4 (or another new type of desktop memory), though Intel might surprise us on that front with LGA2011.

We also don't expect to see much news from Indilinx, despite OCZ buying it - the next round of the SSD fight will be between Marvell and SandForce.

While Intel might well show LGA2011, we doubt Ivy Bridge will present - those looking for a 3D Tri-gate transistor teaser will have to be patient.

Do you think we've called it right? Let us know in the forum!

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In Showdown Over Debt Ceiling, Neither Party Is Blinking

Given that all Republicans and more than a few Democrats oppose any debt-limit increase that is not accompanied by some commitment to future fiscal restraint, the measure is doomed to fail. And for all the talk of economic crisis should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling by August, the financial markets are likely to yawn at this vote ? if only because Republican leaders have privately assured Wall Street executives that this is a show intended to make the point to Mr. Obama that an increase cannot pass absent his agreement to rein in domestic programs.

?Wall Street is in on the joke,? said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But beyond this week, Wall Street has reason to be nervous as Congress nears the actual deadline on Aug. 2 to raise the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling, said people in both parties and in finance, some of whom asked not to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue.

Investors have grown accustomed to partisan games of chicken that always end with the needed increase in the government?s borrowing authority. But this showdown, many say, is riskier because of the strongly held antispending, antitax views of the many freshman House Republicans combined with the fragility of the economic recovery.

?The people who are more politically savvy realize this may not be the normal brinkmanship,? said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Nor, he added, is this standoff like the fight a few months ago over the current year?s spending, which ended with a late-night deal shortly before the government would have shut down.

?The thing that people are missing is that in shutting down the government you can go to the 11th-and-a-half hour, and the consequences of not doing it, while significant, are not economy-threatening,? Mr. Warner said. ?You can?t go to the 11th-and-a-half hour on the debt limit. You don?t know what?s going to spook the bond markets.? 

The chief wild card is the House Republican majority, which was elected last November after a campaign defined more than in any year since 1992 by voters? antipathy toward budget deficits. More than a third are newcomers who reinforced the ranks of Tea Party sympathizers already in Congress. More numerous than the insurgents elected in the conservative waves of 1980 and 1994, many freshman Republicans have no experience in public office and consider themselves citizen-legislators who entered government to shrink it regardless of the political costs.

?The faction in the Republican Party that takes a more moderate view is so much in the minority right now,? said Joseph E. Kasputys, founder of IHS Global Insight and an official in the Nixon and Ford administrations. ?The people who have been sent to Washington most recently are bringing a strong message from the Republicans more to the right that really want something done about government spending.? 

Many House Republicans have said publicly that they either do not believe the government will default or that they do not fear it. Many embrace a proposal of Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a first-year Republican from Pennsylvania, for the Treasury to pay bondholders with incoming tax revenues and delay other government payments pending a resolution. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and many on Wall Street call the idea unworkable. 

Also, many Republicans have made comments indicating that they do not understand or do not care that an increase in the debt limit is needed not only for new spending but also to cover Social Security checks, troops? pay and myriad other agreed-to purposes, as well as for payments to creditors holding Treasury bonds.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans are concerned that raising the debt limit would lead to new spending and debt than are concerned that not raising the limit would spur a government default and hurt the economy, 48 percent compared with 35 percent; among Republicans, the gap is 60 percent to 25 percent.

Another difference from recent decades, when the parties several times agreed to bipartisan budget-cutting deals to raise the debt limit, is the scale of spending cuts that Republicans are demanding as the price of support ? up to $2 trillion in savings over a decade.

For Republicans and Democrats to agree this summer on such a far-reaching deficit-reduction plan is a hurdle that is all the higher given how far apart the parties are. Republicans oppose any new taxes while Democrats say a balanced package must include higher revenues.

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