While Chambliss is talking about same-sex marriage, this basic line could easily be adapted to explain almost every other major position of the Republican Party. Chambliss isn’t unemployed, so he is not going to need unemployment insurance. Chambliss can’t get pregnant, so he doesn’t need the right to choose. Chambliss makes more than minimum wage, so he doesn’t need minimum wage laws. Chambliss is not an Iraqi, so the war will not hurt him.

Clarence Saxby Chambliss has announced, or confided in Georgia’s governor who has announced it for him, that he will retire after two terms in the US Senate. Which is, in itself, reason for celebration, notwithstanding Chambliss’s possible GOP successors.

Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss (R) will not seek another term. Instead of running again in 2014 Chambliss has decided to retire according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The big story I’m supposed to chase today concerns Republican legislative figures distancing themselves from the Grover Norquist pledge, opening the door a crack to increases in tax revenue. This is really a Washington process story about lobbying power rather than a legitimate policy evolution, however.

There are riots in Greece precisely because they have engaged in long-term austerity measures, the equivalent of, I don’t know, cutting $4-5 trillion from the budget over ten years. In particular, the Greek rioters object to raising the retirement age, an exact parallel for the potential grand bargain measure of raising the Medicare eligibility age.

Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss are the two Senators most hopeful of replacing Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson should they ever die or meet a poor person and get a spark of empathy. Warner and Chambliss are charter members of the Gang of Six, now a Gang of Eight, who are hard at work on a grand bargain for the lame duck session. And they are appealing to their core constituency to help make that a reality: Wall Street.

Yesterday, John Boehner appeared to wave a white flag on talks aimed at resolving the fiscal cliff. Harry Reid reacted to that with disappointment, saying that there’s still time for a deficit reduction deal. But the real endgame – at least for the lame duck session – is coming into focus, with one of those “gang of” eight groups trying to negotiate a six month deal.

Right now, opposition to PATRIOT excesses is still mostly a Democratic issue (though Rand Paul definitely took the leadership role Russ Feingold would have had in the past). Until more Republicans join Paul, Heller, and Lee in opposing PATRIOT, it’ll remain on the books, particularly so long as we have a Democratic President whom Democratic Senators are happy to have wielding such power.

Hilariously, Warner and Chambliss, who want to bring forward a plan that cuts the budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years, just both voted for a tax cut bill that, if the Bush tax rates are continued into perpetuity… add $4 trillion to the budget over the next ten years. This is why I thought that the tax cut deal had to be looked at as a whole. You could have basically eliminated the need for this Warner-Chambliss clown show simply by doing nothing.

Summing up how ‘Murica works, in vulgar form.