Congress on plan to wreck nation: not our fault

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 2 Comments
Boehner Reid

This picture has been consistently described as a hug.

My favorite part of the slow news period between Christmas and the New Year is the Times’s daily countdown to fiscal armageddon. This morning, Harry Reid pretty much told us all to buy canned food. According to the Times, he spent much of his day on the Senate floor “excoriating” House Republicans for their refusal to consider a bill extending the Bush tax cuts on households that make less than $250,000 a year. Thus excoriated, the House stayed home. We are going over that cliff. Having imposed a future penalty no one wanted in order to force itself to come to agreement, Congress has argued its way into penalization. The legislative branch of the US government is like an addict who flushes his drugs down the toilet and then drowns.

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Jim DeMint resigns from Senate

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments

“I swear—absolutely no reason at all.”

Tea Party icon and borderline fictional character Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate this morning, announcing that he would become the new head of the Heritage Foundation. South Carolina governor Nikki Haley will appoint his replacement, and the balance of votes in the Senate is not likely to change. The balance of weirdness, however, is badly shaken. In an unusually conservative GOP, DeMint was extremely conservative. Earlier this week, he attacked John Boehner’s compromise proposal in the fiscal cliff standoff—which most analysts agreed offered too little revenue to stand a chance at acceptance—for raising revenues too much. Then he resigned.

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Is Sheldon Adelson creeped out by Sheldon Adelson?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment

See, black people are Ray Charles like this, but white people are Ray Charles like…

One of the many terrible disadvantages rich people face in this country is that we are all so happy to see them denied something they want. Mitt Romney triggered that psychological mechanism every time he mentioned the cars-to-people ratio of his household or owning an Olympic horse, and it cost him an election. Either that or his policies only benefited a small percentage of the electorate at the expense of everyone else—who can say? The point is that class warfare is alive and well in this country, and the pressure of anti-rich person groupthink is so great that even Sheldon Adelson told the Wall Street Journal he regards himself as kind of gross.

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SCOTUS: Maybe we’ll talk about gay marriage Friday

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 6 Comments

Gay

You know it’s a surprise when the Reuters headline contains the phrase “takes no action”: the Supreme Court issed an orders list today that made no mention of the several pending appeals challenging the Defense of Marriage Act. Instead, the Supremes relisted those cases for further consideration on Friday. In the awkward Christmas dinner that is America’s highest court, gay marriage is your cousin who brought his “roommate” from New York. Sonia Sotomayor is your cool aunt, and the other eight members are your grandpa. They know what’s going on, probably, and their main priority is that no one talks about it.

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So are we going over that cliff?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment

Now that the election is over, those of us who try to discern the future via myopic readings of news events—as opposed to via objective analysis of quantitative data, like a jerk—have to find something new to conjecture about. Fortunately, by which I mean to our grave misfortune, there’s that fiscal cliff. If Congress does not reach a deficit-reduction agreement by the end of the month, it will trigger massive automatic cuts to domestic and military spending that coincide with the expiration of temporary tax cuts to wreck our economy. Or Congress can decide that won’t happen, since they’re the ones who put the sequester in place to begin with, but we’re going to pretend that’s not an option. They need to make a deal. What that deal might look like has gotten a little clearer, maybe, depending on how you read this.

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