[A combination of tax increase and spending cuts] is common sense which I hear from pretty much everyone who hasn’t come under the spell of Grover Norquist. Unfortunately, it’s a spell that’s been cast on almost every Republican in the Congress as well as Gov. Romney.
... When writing about a balanced approach to fiscal policy, one that involves both spending cuts and new revenues, it should be noted that Congress and the President have actually already cut $1.5 trillion ($1.7t including interest savings) in discretionary spending, not including war costs, over the next decade.
That’s 70% of the Simpson-Bowles discretionary spending cuts! Without that point, I suspect many readers will think we need to start with spending cuts and then we’ll talk taxes. In fact, Grover himself is cited in the piece as follows:
“When bipartisan deals are struck promising to cut spending and raise taxes, the spending cuts don’t materialize but the tax hikes do.”
But Grover–dude!–a big start on the spending cuts has already materialized…so it’s tax revenue time, right? Grover?…anyone…?So Romney will win based on lying about both himself and President Obama; people too dumb or disinterested to figure it out will have bought the falsehoods at both ends. Heck, if Barack Obama were the president Mitt Romney and teabaggRs say he's been, I'd vote against him, too. That that version of him is a different from reality as debate-Mitt is from pre-debate Mitt makes no difference. The truth-defense shield around teabaggers and those that love them has been too carefully crafted for too long for anything but Foxorovian bullshit to penetrate it.
I guess the best we can hope for at this point is for Ds to keep the Senate; or, if they lose it, that they'd take a lesson from Rs and do what they've done to every D proposal. That kind of unified opposition would be uncharacteristic; but it'd be fun to see what Mitch McConnell would say of it. Suddenly his views on filibuster would change like Mitt Romney's on everything.
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