Tomorrow I will begin a Budget Committee markup of a long-term budget for the nation. As my Chairman's Mark, I will lay down the bipartisan Fiscal Commission plan, also known as the Bowles-Simpson plan. It is a plan which I believe represents the best blueprint from which to build a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement that can ultimately be adopted.

What I am proposing is not partisan. I am trying to break from the `business as usual' practice that has gone on for too long. I am hoping that my Senate colleagues will stand with me to do what is right for the country. That's really the only way we can get something done. That might not happen this week, but it will have to happen.

To be clear, we already have a budget in place for this year and next. The Budget Control Act passed last summer provided the spending limits and enforcement measures for the budget for 2012 and 2013. It is the law of the land. What we do not have is agreement on a long-term budget plan. That is what we must now work to achieve.

David Dayen:

The Chairmen's final Bowles-Simpson report still relied on 67% of its solutions from spending cuts and 33% from revenue increases (and that's really the most charitable reading of their final report). It would include cuts to Medicare and an increase in the retirement age. In addition, tax rates would be lowered, flattened and made more regressive than in the Clinton years. And on the area where everyone agrees is the only one you need to worry about relative to any long-term deficit, health care, they play a game. They basically write, "just limit spending growth to GDP +1% every year by... just do it." It's known as a magic asterisk. If budgeting were this easy, you could eliminate the entire deficit tomorrow by simply saying "eliminate the deficit."

Conrad endorsed this proposal when it was first announced back in 2010, so this is no surprise. What is surprising is that the Senate Democrats are allowing Conrad to introduce Bowles-Simpson, with all of the above inside it, as the default markup baseline for the Budget Committee.

It's clear that Conrad craves a bipartisan agreement on the budget. He acknowledges that Bowles-Simpson is "not perfect" but that it's a "middleground, consensus solution to the country's fiscal imbalance." He will work off that plan and try to build support from both sides of the aisle.

Even if we already have a budget for this year and next, attaching "default markup baseline" to "Bowles-Simpson Commission report" is not a good thing - because we all know that Democrats never get the baseline to move left, only right.  And we know that Obama himself is quite enamored of the Commission's ideas.

So:

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I just hope the team shows up.  These are uncomfortable days to be a sox fan.  I'm still p*ssed about what happened with Francona, maybe he had to go but not like that, and the recent shenanigans don't make me feel much better about it.

Also, Go Bruins!  

Under her tutelage, Ms. Summitt's Lady Volunteers won eight national championships, 16 regular-season Southeastern Conference championships, 16 SEC tournament titles, and reached the Final Four 18 times. The Tennessee women lost in the regional final this season to eventual national champion Baylor.

An even more impressive statistic should be noted, especially on the heels of all five Kentucky starters bolting John Calipari's NCAA champion Wildcats yesterday for the NBA draft before their junior years. Since Coach Summit first took the reins at Knoxville in 1974, every single Lady Vol player who has completed her eligibility at Tennessee has subsequently graduated with her bachelor's degree.

Like Coach John Wooden at UCLA, we will not see the likes of Pat Summit again in the college coaching ranks in our lifetimes, male of female. She deserves a shout-out as she begins a new chapter in her life.

I'll always remember her fondly, holding up her then five-year-old son Ross -- who currently plays for the Tennessee men, and hopes to follow in his mother's footsteps as a basketball coach -- to help her cut down the nets after the Lady Vols won the 1996 NCAA championship.

Melo has been especially ridiculous lately...utterly unstoppable.  The Celtics knew it and were too quick to double-team, giving the sharpest shooter in the league the space to do damage and delight the crowd with many a discount double check.  As Clyde would say, dishing and swishing!

Now its really sinking in that I'm never gonna see him play ever again...never gonna see that pure joy radiating off of his face on that stage again.

"Randy Levine, president of the New York Yankees, donated the maximum $2,500 to the Massachusetts Republican's re-election campaign last month, according to newly released campaign finance records."

More from the article:

"It's one thing to be bipartisan, Senator, but this is taking it a little too far. There's no compromising in baseball."

"Levine is the embodiment of everything we hate about the Yankees. He's described as arrogant and brash, and is the chief henchman of the Steinbrenner family, according to reports. Oh yeah, one of his chief goals every year is to destroy the Red Sox"

"What's next, a Derek Jeter endorsement?"