National

Diogenes wandered the streets of Athens with a lamp in search of an honest man. Similarly, John Carney seems to have devoted his tenure in the House to searching out a rational Republican. He feels that the Delaware electorate is really looking for a guy with he tenacity to keep searching for rationality among Republicans in spite of everything we know about the Lunatic Party. Well, you can knock me over with a feather because a rational Republican may have just emerged.

If the GOP's Leader, Grover Norquist, is right - taxes will reset to the pre-Bush tax cuts rates. Republicans talking about possible deals are full of it according to Norquist. Why? because they are imagining deals in which $1.00 of tax increases is matched by $10.00 in cuts to Medicaid.

Only in the US Congress is the notion of raising taxes on the wealthy controversial. And similarly, only in Congress is the idea of raising the Medicare age looked at as a good idea.

The proposal to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 annually — one of President Obama's central campaign pitches — continues to be popular among a large majority of Americans, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll out Wednesday. Sixty percent of those surveyed support the proposal, compared with just 37 percent who are opposed. The debate over raising taxes on the high-income earners was one of the defining issues of the 2012 campaign, although polls have consistently shown broad support for the proposal backed by Obama and the Democrats. Meanwhile, an even larger portion of Americans — 67 percent — are opposed to raising the age for Medicare coverage from 65 to 67. via TPM

In case you haven't noticed, we are in a period of downtime right now. As a politics-focused blog, any time right after a huge election is necessary a down time, whether you win or lose. We all just let out a giant relieved exhale, and collapsed to whatever couch or chair that was nearby. And now we are busy with the holidays and work, etc., etc. So we are slowly easing back into reading and writing political stories again. One of the regular posts I put up at Daily Kos back in the olden days of the Internets was a demographic poll called "the Roll Call." It was meant to find out more about the fellow readers and bloggers at Daily Kos: where they were from, how old they were, etc., etc. It became one of the more popular regular features because people like finding where like-minded people live, especially when we are talking about a national blog. I would like to try it here, but it might be problematic considering 1) we are a small state, 2) a lot of us have already met one another at various DL and Democratic Party functions. So in the comments, if you are willing, list where you are from originally (i.e. born and raised) and where you live now, and your age and sex (i.e. gender, not if you have it, because that's TMI).

It finally looks like Harry Reid has been convinced to rein in the principal form of GOP obstruction in the Senate -- the filibuster.  And it doesn't look like he'll eliminate it -- but reform it so that it takes some committed work to block the Senate's work.  Apparently some of the rules revisions are still being thought out, but so far, the rules would change as follows:

I am new to this AMC series 'The Walking Dead', but I've noticed a leitmotif. There seems to be an element of ongoing tension between people who have completely written off the zombies as non-human, and the people who continue to think (in spite of all the evidence) that zombies must retain some bit of humanity. Exactly the type of tension that arises among Democrats. Some of whom see reality as it is, and know that Republicans have become ideological zombies, totally bereft of humanity. Others of whom would like to continue to pretend that there must be some humanity somewhere under the ideological zombie flesh.

Back story: Mike Castle was this moderate Congressman from Delaware until George W. Bush was elected. Then Castle had to pretend to be moderate while voting for every bit of George Bush's lunatic agenda. That (the pretending to be moderate) pissed off a bunch of easily pissed off people in his lunatic political party. I lay that bit of the story out in Castle's political obituary running in this month's 'Delaware Today' magazine:

Back in August, Governor Markell signed three pieces of legislation designed to update the state's campaign finance regulations.  These new regulations are required to be implemented by  December 31, 2012.  As part of the process, the new regulations were posted in November 1, and  Public Hearings are set for Thursday, November 29, 2012:

You may have heard of this group back in late October, when a group of 80+ CEOs signed a letter to Washington that asks Congress work out a deficit-reduction deal that calls for both increases revenues and cuts spending. This letter (and the launch of this group) had enough of the optics of bipartisanship that Senator Chris Coons rushed out with a statement that endorsed this "balanced approach" to deficit reduction. You can see something of these optics in the Statement of Principles that these CEOs published: