Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s petition for a bipartisan solution to the government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis is “dopey-yo” Daniel Gross writes in a column for The Daily Beast.
“The debt-ceiling brinksmanship and government shutdown are pure Republican enterprises,” Gross alleges, continuing in a lighter vein that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee “identify with the Tea Party, not the Coffee Party.”
The National Association of Realtors likes to say it backs candidates that support the “Realtor Party” — which in practice means incumbent Democrats and Republicans with a track record of standing behind government subsidies for homeownership and other real estate-friendly policies.
Like Schultz, NAR President Gary Thomas took a bipartisan approach Thursday in pleading with lawmakers to resolve the crisis. In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Thomas warned that a failure to resolve the crisis could be “disastrous” for the nation’s economy and “catastrophic” for the housing recovery, but refrained from placing blame on either party or recommending a specific course of action.
In a similar vein, Century 21 Real Estate is floating a tongue-in-cheek idea to end the impasse: Have President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner literally meet in the middle — at a Century 21 listing in Sunnyvale, Calif., the midway point between Obama’s birthplace of Honolulu and Boehner’s hometown of Reading, Ohio.
The National Retail Federation this week urged House Republicans to relent, and pass both a continuing resolution to provide for funding of the federal government into the next fiscal year and a measure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, echoing similar statements from business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
“Sunnyvale Summit,” a satirical video posted by Century 21 on YouTube.com.
