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On the fifth day, the President threatened the debt negotiators with detention. The debt ceiling negotiations picked up again on Thursday with another meeting at the White House that didn't bring any major progress. Negotiators met for over an hour but nothing came of it. The president said that negotiators had to hammer out the framework for a deal "in the next 36 hours or lawmakers will have to return to the negotiating table this weekend," reports Manu Raju for Politico. The president is effectively threatening to keep everyone for detention on Saturday. Does this mean Obama is now angling himself to be Richard Vernon, the principal from The Breakfast Club?
The talks on Thursday were "cordial" according to Michael Memoli at the Los Angeles Times, which comes as quite a turnaround after the week's increasingly saucy affairs. The new-found civility of the meeting might have been caused by the relative silence of Eric Cantor. He must have known that when you mess with the bull, you get the horns.
NBC's Luke Russert and Vaughn Ververs reported Cantor and John Boehner were showing a "united front" going into the meeting, where Boehner said he was happy to have Cantor "in the foxhole" with him. He also said anyone who has questions about Cantor's contributions "can keep them to themselves." Something changed apparently, because at the meeting the outspoken GOP youngster remained almost totally silent according to a Democratic aide who spoke to Talking Points Memo about the meeting.