Republicans have abandoned their proposals to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but will the White House concede before it has to?
Yet another gang has been convened.
Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden met with his own "gang of six" -- including Eric Cantor, the Republicans' House majority leader, and Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee -- to kick off talks on how to raise the debt ceiling. The meeting came the same day Republicans retreated from critical pieces of their budget plan, with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp announcing that he was abandoning the proposal to privatize Medicare and gut Medicaid.
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
