Our leaders have done it! The Senate has approved a package of tax hikes, in order to keep our country from tumbling over the “fiscal cliff.” The vote to approve the bill was 89-8. Let’s all bask in that warm bipartisan glow!
The deal was brokered by negotiations between Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republicans. We should all take comfort that such intellectual titans were doing the heavy lifting on this crucial matter! Aren’t you relieved that brainy, detail-oriented statesmen like Biden and Senate leaders scrupulously evaluated the wording of the new taxes and their potential economic impact and the loopholes that inevitably must have been part of the deal? There is every reason to be confident that this carefully considered legislation will not produce any unintended consequences. After all, the Senate proudly calls itself “The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.” I bet they deliberated on this bill for a few minutes, and maybe even longer! Oh, and Harry Reid is in favor of it. What more do we need to know?
There’s lots of new taxes in this proposal: increased estate taxes, increased capital gains taxes, and increased income taxes for those people who, purely through dumb luck and undeserved good fortune, make more than $400,000 a year. What’s important, though, is that the draconian spending cuts that everyone wanted to avoid would be delayed for two months under this proposal. Thank God! That will allow the President, the Senate, and the House even more time to really roll up their sleeves and come up with meaningful spending cuts that wouldn’t be ruinous. Once the tax increases take effect, of course, our leaders will be eager to make tough spending decisions that will incur the ire of government workers and the special interest groups that are invested in the continuation of every federal program, no matter how ill-conceived, bloated, or unsuccessful that program might be. Maybe, after two months of thoughtful analysis, our leaders also might decide that what they should really do is impose more taxes on us, and further shore up the revenue side of the budget. And we can be sure, too, that our leaders won’t wait until the last minute to take action. Long before the two-month extension period expires, our leaders will have agreed upon well-reasoned spending reductions and program cuts and “revenue enhancements” that will delight every American.
Of course, this well-crafted Senate proposal still needs to be approved by the House of Representatives. With this kind of quality legislation pending, though, why would any member of the House of Representatives vote “no”?
I say a pox on all their houses. By that I mean the White House and both Houses of Congress; I mean the President and Congress, Republican and Democrat, “progressives,” liberals, conservatives, and “tea partiers.” Congratulations to you all! You’ve maneuvered us into a situation where tax increases and spending limits that were consciously designed to be so foolish and draconian that they would force a compromise look like they might actually take effect unless a lame duck Congress and a disengaged President strike some poorly thought out, last-minute deal that the American public has no opportunity to consider or voice an opinion on — just like the deal that got us into this stupid “fiscal cliff” predicament in the first place. Your little plan about a “supercommittee” to reach a grand compromise failed, you frittered away the intervening months raising money from your pet interest groups and electioneering without doing anything to make meaningful progress on the tax policy changes and spending reductions that every conscious American knows must occur to avoid enormous impending debt problems, and now you are frantically trying to avoid the imminent, painful consequences of your years of stupid politicking, indolence, and irresponsibility.
What’s sad about this is that the President and the Republican and Democratic leadership probably all think they’ve got the other guys just where they want them; they likely think the opposing side is bound to knuckle under today and give them a huge, last-minute victory. Here’s some news for you all: we shouldn’t be governing through a process that sees us lurching endlessly from crisis to crisis. Your failures to do things like propose, debate, and pass meaningful budgets, hold hearings on spending, tax and budget proposals that allow citizens to comment and thoughtful changes to be evaluated, and engage in the standard activities of government as our Constitution contemplates reflects badly on you all. Even if an eleventh-hour deal is reached and everyone declares they won, you’ve achieved no victory. The American people have come to realize that, unfortunately, we have no real political leaders — just political hacks, buck-passers, and pipsqueaks who don’t have the sense or courage to put the interests of the country ahead of their personal political interests and the narrow perspectives of the pressure groups that contribute to their campaigns.
Democrats kept control of the U.S. Senate, while Republicans kept control of the House of Representatives. In short, the United States is in for more divided government. After two consecutive “wave” elections, the message of this election seems to be to maintain the status quo.
Normally a Senate race is a big deal, but this year I’m not hearing anyone talk about the Brown-Mandel contest — and I work in an office where many people, from both parties, are very interested in politics. The candidates have had three debates, but only one was broadcast on TV and I don’t know anyone who watched it. I’m sure that all of the debates were fully covered in the daily newspapers, but Kish and I don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper any longer, and I haven’t seen any coverage of the debates when I’ve visited state news websites. As a result, I assume that not much happened — no gaffes, no knee-buckling zingers, and probably not much of in the way of any kind of news.
As the story from The Hill linked above shows, the Obama Administration’s story about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi remains vague and unfocused; 
Sherrod Brown
It’s an election that will present some sharp contrasts of liberal versus conservative and experience versus youth. With Republicans trying to regain control of the Senate, the race has attracted enormous attention and buckets of money from outside the state, which means we’re already seeing lots of negative ads about both candidates. The early polls show Brown in the lead.
The bill is a response of sorts to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which struck down limits on independent spending by corporations and unions. Senator Brown’s most recent email, sent Saturday afternoon, says that such special interest money is having a “distorting effect” on elections and that the “flood” of money is “is threatening to wash away the voice of America’s middle class.” (Of course, because we don’t know the identity of the donors to these groups, we obviously don’t know for sure whether those donors are members of the middle class or not.) Not surprisingly, Senator Brown views all of this through the lens of his own experience; if you read his emails, they all discuss, in great detail, how much groups opposing his reelection are spending on that race.
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign must not employ a public relations person. If it does, she isn’t very good at her job — because the story of Warren’s alleged Cherokee ancestry has become a never-ending story in Warren’s campaign for election to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. Every day, seemingly, there is some new revelation that puts Warren on the defensive, interferes with her intended “message,” and distracts from the issues she thinks are important.
I 
I don’t blame Indiana voters for giving the 80-year-old Lugar the boot. He has served in the Senate for 36 years — six terms in all — which means he has been in the Senate since Jimmy Carter was President and I was in college. Can anyone identify any great legislative accomplishments or extraordinary statesmanlike achievements by Lugar during that 36-year period? I’d say he has served long enough.
I’ll write more about the race as we get closer to the election. For now, I’ll just say that I’m mystified by the tactics of the Brown campaign. I get their e-mails constantly, and they all are about money. How much money Mandel is raising, how much money “special interests” are contributing to support Mandel’s candidacy, how many TV ads have been purchased as a result of the money contributed to the Mandel campaign, and how much money the Brown campaign needs to make up for the cash landslide that is tumbling into Ohio.
I don’t think you can assess the performance of a Congress by simply counting how many new laws were enacted. Quality, not quantity, should be the measuring rod. Yet even by that measure, our Congress has been a colossal failure. Last year saw the United States lose its AAA credit rating and rack up enormous deficits that are adding to our already staggering national debt. How did our legislative leaders respond? They created an ad hoc “supercommittee” that allowed them to punt on the issue, the “supercommittee” couldn’t reach agreement, and as a result another year slid by without anything meaningful being done to address our headlong rush to fiscal ruin.
In 2011, a surprising number of Senators announced they would not run for re-election. The last was Senator Ben Nelson — the Nebraska Senator who was criticized, here and elsewhere, for shabby politicking in connection with the passage of the “health care reform” legislation. In all, 
Meanwhile, what’s happening in the Senate? Nothing
It’s like an old fan dance, where the flashing fans of the dancer seek to tantalize while hiding what lies beneath. The Senate has contributed the ill-defined “Gang of Six” proposal. The House Republicans passed “cut, cap, and balance.” President Obama continues to insist on a “balanced approach.” Everybody uses every opportunity to trumpet that everybody else is behaving abominably and making outrageous proposals. And the latest report is that the 
The wealth in Congress knows no party-line boundaries; Republicans and Democrats alike are doing well. According to the reports, the 
