…the world’s best soccer players can’t go down to the National Mall and kick a ball around.

Barcelona plays Manchester United at FedEx field on Saturday in a friendly rematch of last May’s UEFA Champions League final, which Barcelona won 3–1.

A couple of days ago I blasted President Obama for, in repugnant tradition, using “education” as a political weapon, invoking it to scare Americans into demanding increased taxes for “the rich.” House Speaker John Boehner, thankfully, did not abuse education similarly in his rebuttal. But his proposal for raising the debt ceiling illustrates just how weak the GOP’s commitment is to returning the federal government to its constitutional — and affordable — size. And I say this not because of the relative puniness of his proposed cuts, but what the proposal would do in education, the only area it specifically targets: increase funding for Pell Grants.

Now, I know what many people will say to this: Pell is a de facto entitlement; it has a big shortfall; and Boehner’s bill would offset the Pell increase by eliminating federal student loan repayment incentives and grad student interest subsidies. And do you just hate education, McCluskey, or poor people?

On the first points, yes to all of those, and the CBO even projects that over ten years Boehner’s bill would achieve some savings from his student-aid moves. But ten years is a long time, during which a lot of things — especially spending increases — could happen. And the seemingly forgotten fact of the matter is that we have a $14.3 trillion debt and are sooner or later going to need big, tough cuts. And though Pell Grants sound so nice — they give poor kids money to go to college! — they should be eliminated for several reasons well beyond frightening fiscal reality:

1. They are unconstitutional: None of the Federal government’s enumerated — and only — powers say anything about paying for college.
2. They are inflationary: Maybe Pell Grants, because they target low-income students better than federal loans and tax-based aid, aren’t the biggest drivers of tuition inflation, but research suggests they are a driver, especially at private institutions. There is also good reason to believe that schools target their own aid dollars to other, better-off students when they can use taxpayer dough for low-income ones.
3. They take money from real human beings — taxpayers — to make others rich: Okay, maybe not rich, but as higher ed advocates will quickly tell you, on average a person with a college degree will make roughly $1 million more over her lifetime than someone without one. There’s a lot of play in that number, but the point is generally correct: A degree helps to significantly increase earnings. How, then — even absent a mind-blowingly colossal debt — can we justify taking money from taxpayers, many of whom did not go to college, and just giving it away to others so that they can get a lot wealthier? At the very least Pell should be made into a federally backed loan program — recipients should at least have to return taxpayers’ “investment” — which Boehner could have put into his bill.

Republicans might not be as quick as Democrats to rattle education-tipped missiles, but they’re fully committed to keeping them in their arsenal.

The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy (and not entirely unflattering) feature on James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas. Here’s what the profile says about Project Veritas’s ongoing string of Medicaid-fraud sting videos:

It isn’t exactly a secret that some Medicaid money winds up in unqualified hands, but it was surprising to see how willingly minor officials turned a blind eye and, in some cases, even offered advice on how to game the system.

Actually, it’s not just minor officials. And when one understands Medicaid, it’s not surprising either.

On NPR this morning, I heard White House chief of staff Bill Daley say, “The president cannot usurp the power that’s in the Congress.” What a relief! Also, this:

I don’t think the American people would find it appropriate for the president of the United States to defy the laws of the nation and its Constitution, without their belief that that president should be impeached. And this president isn’t going to do anything against the Constitution, against the laws of the United States of America.

So if the president were to defy, say, the War Powers Resolution by ridiculously redefining “hostilities,” or if he were to defy the Constitution by signing a law that claims for Congress a power the Constitution does not grant (say, ObamaCare), we should impeach him. Got it.

On the front page of today’s Washington Post, above the fold, a news story begins:

If nothing else, the crisis over the debt ceiling is reminding the country of the astonishing reach of the federal spigot, encapsulated by a figure that President Obama tossed out recently: The government sends out “70 million checks” every month.

Reporter Alec MacGillis went on to note that the president underestimated:

The figures used by Obama and Geithner were, if anything, too low. They relied on Treasury Department figures from June that include Social Security (56 million checks that month), veterans benefits (4.5 million checks), and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors (1.8 million checks).

But those numbers do not include reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors (100 million claims in June), and electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps.

Nor do they include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and, on average, pays nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel expense claims per month.

However, we should remember that

The mind-boggling number challenges a common critique of the federal government as a creaky apparatus where tax dollars are lost in the bureaucratic cracks. From the vantage point of the 70 million or 80 million checks, the government is a finely tuned machine that brings in revenue and disperses it back out across the country.

Whew. For a minute there I was worried.

I’m still trying to figure out what I think about the debt-limit fight.

As a policy matter, I want to cut the federal government’s claim on the people’s economic resources by much more than 40 percent. (Dear critics, please note that it’s no kind of objection to say that cuts of that magnitude would cause vulnerable people pain. The alternatives — higher taxes or a Greek-style debt crisis — would also cause vulnerable people pain. In my estimation, they would cause more pain to greater numbers of vulnerable people.)

Where I get queasy is when people make credible arguments that not raising the debt limit would result in such a political backlash that it would compromise efforts to cut federal spending.

Which is why I found this exchange yesterday between NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly and Mara Liasson so fascinating:

KELLY: [C]an you even say at this point, who seems to be winning this fight after all these weeks?

LIASSON: Well, on substance you’d have to say the Republicans. Each time that they’ve laid down the demand, they’ve prevailed. First, when the president wanted a clean debt ceiling bill, they said no. They said it had to be linked to spending cuts, they won on that. Then they wanted dollar for dollar cuts for the amount they were raising the debt ceiling by. They got that. Now, in this latest iteration, they’re demand that the bills contain no revenues, that seems to be prevailing, neither the Reid Plan or The Boehner Plan has any revenues. But, Republicans have paid a big price for this in the polls. Their numbers are much worse than the president on these issues. The president, on the other hand, seems to be winning the argument, but maybe not the debate. The polls show that the American people prefer his approach, his balanced approach that include tax hikes on the wealthy, but that doesn’t seem to be giving him any leverage with Republicans in Washington.

KELLY: Yeah, I mean, as you say, the President Obama said last night, Americans are fed up. Are our voters going to hold one side more responsible than other, do you think? And weve only got a few more seconds left.

LIASSON: Well, polls show that more people would blame the Republicans if there’s s a default, but I think that may be misleading. Republicans might get the blame, but it I think the president will be punished because he needed the deal the most. If there’s a downgrade of U.S. government credit rating, which seems likelier than ever now, the damage to the economy will be damage, politically, to him.

Nobody knows for sure whom the public will blame if people suffer, just as nobody knows when the House Republicans will run out of leverage.

It seems, though, that the House GOP has been tremendously successful at changing the terms of this debate over the federal budget. That’s something I haven’t seen acknowledged by those — of all political stripes — who say that the House Republicans are nuts. I’m interested to hear what others think about Liasson’s perspective.

A front-page story in today’s Washington Post reports that al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self, and finds that there is even talk among senior defense and intelligence officials of the organization’s imminent demise.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta declared during a recent visit to Afghanistan that “we’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” The comment was dismissed by skeptics as an attempt to energize troops while defending the administration’s decision to wind down a decade-old war.

But senior U.S. officials from the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center and other agencies have expressed similar views in classified intelligence reports and closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill, officials said.

“There is a swagger within the community right now for good reason,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee.

“Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is nowhere near defeat,” Chambliss said, referring to the Yemen-based affiliate. “But when it comes to al-Qaeda [core leadership in Pakistan], we have made the kind of strides that we need to make to be in a position of thinking we can win.”

It is unfortunate that this story is filed in the “news” category. Al Qaeda has been on the ropes for some time. It is, at best, “a fragmented and unmanageable movement.” But if senior officials are willing to speak so publicly about our recent gains, it may signal something significant.

As many have noted, one of AQ’s goals (and the goal of many other terrorist organizations) is to induce a counterproductive and self-injurious overreaction on the part of its target audience or government. The best approach, though it is difficult to achieve in practice, is to avoid terrorizing ourselves. If, many years from now, historians conclude that AQ was never as threatening as we made it out to be, they may deem the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on homeland security post‑9/​11, and the trillions more spent on wars that were once believed connected to the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT), to have been an enormous waste of resources. We will be seen as having played into Osama bin Laden’s “bleed and bankruptcy” strategy. Alternatively, in-depth analysis may find certain low-visibility (and likely low-cost) policies to have been particularly effective at degrading the organization’s capabilities, and ultimately foiling bin Laden’s ridiculously grandiose schemes for world domination.

For now, U.S. officials continue to issue advisories of a danger from al Qaeda. The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that a State Department global travel warning urged Americans to “take precaution and maintain vigilance about terrorist threats, demonstrations and the possibility of violence against U.S. citizens.” If Secretary of Defense Panetta is feeling confident, the folks in Foggy Bottom appear not to have received the memo. This policy disconnect–with some officials believing we are safer while others warn of impending danger–may be caused by bureaucratic inertia, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, or merely an elaborate scheme to deflect blame in the unlikely event that an attack occurs at some later date. 

For now, while we should cheer al Qaeda’s rapidly diminishing hold on our collective psyche, we still seem a long ways from that place Sen. John Kerry spoke of during the 2004 presidential campaign: 

”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”

”As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”