More on sequestration, yawn...

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who never fails to remind me of an elderly Foghorn Leghorn, has been crowing for a couple of days now.  Like a lot of other roosters, he doesn't restrict his crowing to the early morning hours, but keeps up the noise all day long.

Most recently, he's been going on about how how the sequester is no big deal, because it's just a tiny slice of the federal budget.  Yes, too bad it's kind of haphazard, but what the hell.  Budget's gotta be cut, ya know!

Personally, I don't at all mind the cuts to Defense although I feel sympathy for the people who might lose their jobs with defense contractors if the sequester goes on long enough.  The Department of Defense (they really should go back to calling it the Department of War) enters into contracts that typically last for years, and no existing contracts will be cancelled — not even for the most useless weapons systems the military doesn't even want.

Foghorn Leghorn is right in that we probably can survive the sequester, although it will further slow economic growth and prolong what for many people feels a hell of a lot like a depression.  The main hope I see for easing the gridlock in Washington is, believe it or not, Karl Rove.  Rove has mounted a new campaign to push Tea Party wack jobs out of the Republican Party, and replace them with ordinary conservatives.

We'll see how successful he is in 2014.

The Day After

Jill Stein will not be our president any time soon, but I'm still more than a little pleased this morning.  Obamacare will survive.  Flawed as it is, it's better than nothing, and if a few states decide to offer public options it may grow into something much better.

Elizabeth Warren defeated Scott Brown in Massachusetts, so in January ordinary people will have a real voice in the Senate, and I will have a crush on a sitting Senator.  Bernie Sanders blew away the competition, despite major expenditure of PAC money against him.

Speaking of PAC money, I'm especially pleased that Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, Linda McMahon, and all the mysterious rich people who are behind Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS threw away hundreds of millions of dollars to accomplish virtually nothing.  Things remain pretty much as they were, most likely including political gridlock.  Crossroads GPS couldn't even manage to oust my local Congressman in a tightly contested race, despite a spate of truly hideous attack ads.

Will we go over the fiscal cliff?  I guess we have to wait and see.  I'm pretty sure, though, that Obama will be somewhat less inclined to "compromise" than he may have been in his first term — and since the lame duck Congress will not be much different from the incoming Congress, we may get an early deal.