If the president issues a public veto threat in order to keep a major promise, that has popular support, the President is almost always going to win in the end.

I can feel my greens shooting already.

This is one step along the road to the Norquistian dream of endless low taxes, starving the government of revenue, and the necessary reaction to that of cutting services.

And one-third of American workers (the lowest-paid third, but still!) will see right away that we’ve been lied to by President Obama and the GOPs with whom he made this deal. Why aren’t Democratic Congresspersons making a bigger deal about this?

A surprising start to the tax cut debate in the House; the leadership had to pull the bill from the floor before voting began. By all indications, they did not have enough votes to move forward on the rule. This is more like a temporary setback than a collapse of the tax cut deal, but we’ll keep monitoring it.

The Senate as expected passed the tax cut deal by a 81-19 vote. The bill moves to the House, and all expectations are it will pass there as well.

The only part of this tax cut package that is overwhelmingly popular is the unemployment insurance extension. That thing the President got from the Republicans in exchange for agreeing to all the unpopular stuff. The thing the GOP needs to pass anyway, but don’t want to take shit from their base over. Thankfully Obama has freed them from that responsibility.

Our long-term deficit problem is due basically to the incredibly high cost of health care if we fixed that we won’t have a long term deficit problem. The reason our health care costs so much is that Congress allows providers to engage in practices that rip off the public and the government. A great example is “pay for delay.” The government currently allows drug makers to directly pay other companies not to compete with them. Legislative efforts to put an end to this monopolistic practice appear dead according to the Hill.

The President has to cope with a deeply corrupt Senate. Here’s my suggestion.

President Obama seems remarkably proud of himself for the many “concessions” he won from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as part of their deal to extend all the Bush tax cuts for two years. Yet, it seems almost all of the “concessions” Obama claims to have won were ideas actually promoted by Republicans. The amount of money allocated for things Obama wanted that didn’t have bipartisan support is much smaller.