Politico’s VanDeAllen team have a exclusive inside must-credit-Politico rundown of the fiscal cliff talks that merely recycles known information and makes a bunch of guesses.

I guess worker-led revolts are catching. After a successful set of Black Friday protests at Walmart stores nationwide, New York City will see walkouts at dozens of fast-food restaurants today, part of a more explicit effort to unionize the sector with the slogan Fast Food Forward.

Today everyone is supposed to be optimistic about avoiding the fiscal slope. Considering the potential consequences of that avoidance, I’m not sure “optimistic” is the right word.

I just want to add on to what Dean Baker says here. It’s not just that the people trying to hype the fiscal cliff as a scary, terrifying prospect shouldn’t be trusted given their track record. It’s that the short-term impact, say one month, of expiring measures really does approach zero.

The White House released to the Washington Postwhat amounts to an opening bid for fiscal slope/grand bargain talks. It turns out that this is actually just what was in the President’s proposed 2013 budget. But since it does add up to $4 trillion over 10 years, and since everyone’s getting serious about negotiations, we can take a closer look at it.

Chuck Schumer, obviously running point for Senate Democrats on fiscal slope negotiations, claims that a chastened GOP will be willing to deal. But the only party who has made any concessions on a deal has been Chuck Schumer, floating an extension of current tax rates for upper-income earners, accompanying a limit on deductions.

The Romney campaign responded to Ryan Grim, who dug this up, by saying that “Gov. Romney wants to ensure states, who are the first responders and are in the best position to aid impacted individuals and communities, have the resources and assistance they need to cope with natural disasters.” But that requires a federal response, or else you have the death spiral I previously described, where emergency response must get paid for by taking money out of other areas of the state budget. That’s if primary Romney doesn’t get his greatest wish, to privatize disaster response.

A day after we hear about the disposition matrix, the drone wars and the militarization of the CIA, along comes Scott Shane to pose a question to all the same people who say we can’t afford to leave a legacy of debt to our children and grandchildren: uh, how do you plan to pay for all that?

I know there’s a lot of outside pressure on Congress to reach a wide-reaching agreement in the lame duck session on taxes, federal spending and social insurance programs, one that will trade the expiring tax and spending measures for the long-awaited “balanced solution.” The truth is that nothing’s going to happen in the lame duck. That’s the meaning of Barack Obama’s pledge to veto anything in that lame duck that doesn’t allow tax cuts on the top marginal rates to expire. It doesn’t mean that January 1 represents the end of the discussion, however; it represents the beginning.

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, upholding lower-court rulings that found the law, which discriminates against the marriage rights of gays and lesbians, unconstitutional. The author of the opinion, Dennis Jacobs, is a very conservative George H.W. Bush appointee. But even he had to acknowledge the nature of the case, ruling that discrimination of LGBT individuals deserves heightened scrutiny, and that therefore a federal law which discriminates against them must be treated skeptically.