So apparently, the phrase of the week from Republicans is “Class Warfare!” as a response to President Obama’s proposal for a new Millionaire’s Minimum Tax. Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham both used the phrase yesterday on the Bobble head shows.

Last night, it didn’t look as if the Senate would be able to get the clean extension of both the FAA authorization and the surface transportation authorization before a deadline of today. Tom Coburn was holding up the bill in a fruitless crusade against bike paths. It’s a long story.

The attempt to meet looming deadlines and avoid shutdowns of part (or all) of the government resembles the aftermath of a car wreck right now. It’s unclear whether the Senate can move the broken-down vehicles off the road in time to let the traffic move through.

The threat to Medicare is very real and pressing. Over the past several months more and more political forces in Washington have being slowly lining up behind a campaign to raise the Medicare eligibility age.

This most recent effort really got started when Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) put forward a bill to raise the Medicare retirement age in late May.

Compared to laying siege to government, hurting millions, and putting the economy at risk, it’s only a minor irritant, I suppose, one of the dozens of little misrepresentations that we are so used to hearing from the right wing that we just shrug our shoulders and wait for something new. But the fact the media almost never pushes back suggests that letting it slide is a mistake. And it’s just fractions!

These so-called deficit hawks just couldn’t imagine an agreement without their wise counsel, so they bigfooted into the debate. In the process, they blew up the only two solutions on the table at the time, and added this alternative that produced a panoply of opinions about how to move forward. It gave everyone something to hide behind, so they could say “I support a deficit plan, but they won’t bring the one I like up for a vote.” It’s the first rule of negotiation: you don’t throw in a whole new plan at the end of the process.

Just about the only specific piece of the Gang of Six proposal, as explained well by Rep. Peter DeFazio in the video, is the move to chained CPI, a benefit cut for Social Security, veteran’s benefits and any program with a cost of living adjustment, along with a regressive tax cut. So that should give you a flavor for the biases of the Gang of Six, and where their proposal is headed.

The Gang of 6 announces they have reached a deal, and the President is praising it.

If we work together as a community, maybe we can get some criminal prosecutions for the crimes that caused the Great Crash. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Recently, I’ve begun to worry that our politics have degraded in to the world’s most depressing chutzpah contest, with each politician competing to outdo the last by whining about a self-created problem in the most outrageous, fractionally baseless and/or entirely cynical manner possible. It looks like Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has decided to prove my concerns correct with his campaign’s absurd attempt to label him as a Washington “outsider.”