In six days, the continuing resolution to fund the government runs out. To avoid a government shutdown, the House and Senate will have to agree on some stopgap measure to allow the government to continue to run. Yet all the talk in Washington is over a completely separate budget process, the Super Committee deliberations, which must come to a resolution by November 23.

Leaks from the Super Committee show how Democrats and Republicans are proposing to meet their debt reduction goals. The Republicans propose a minimum of tax increases versus spending cuts, and even those increases are misleading, since they’re using different baselines.

Regardless of the strategy pursued by the White House and Democratic Congressional leadership, here’s what’s going to happen: there will be no jobs bills because of GOP obstruction, and Republicans will bring the country to the verge of a government shutdown. Again.

How facilitating tax cheating counts as a jobs measure is beyond me, but whatever the case, the bill and its offset go to the Senate. A 3% withholding bill got 57 votes in the Senate last week, with a different offset that just reduces expenditures across the board. That was before the Administration came out in favor of the bills, however. So surely, something incorporating 3% withholding is likely to pass Congress.

Congress’ job approval rating had been hovering in the low single digits for months, but it managed to drop to only 9 percent in the newest CBS News/New York Time poll. An overwhelming 84 percent of Americans don’t approve of the job Congress is currently doing.

Undemocratic extra-legislative body comprised of Republicans and Democrats evenly divided is incapable of getting anything accomplished…just like the actual legislative body.

Huzzah!

Two new national polls both find that Congress’ job approval rating has reached a new historic low. Americans want Congress to fix the unemployment problem and the economy, but Congress is fixated on deficit hysteria. No wonder more people want to “occupy” public squares and demand change

Democrats have tweaked the pay-for on the American Jobs Act, making it a straight surtax on millionaires, rather than the other pay-fors on itemized deductions and closing the carried interest loophole. In other words, they altered a tax on the rich and turned it into another tax on the rich with a better slogan next to it.

When I first sat down in Sen. Jeff Merkley’s Washington office and asked about the #OccupyWallStreet protests, he immediately said, “Portland’s starting on Thursday!” I asked him if he’d go down to a protest? “It’s worth exploring. . . .The system is broken.”

I guess I’ve been remiss in writing about the American Jobs Act (AJA), but then I haven’t written anything about Libyan admission into the United Nations, either, which is a policy I’m sure somebody somewhere agrees with, but which also isn’t going to happen.