 Paint By Dumbers
Weekends near the end of the year are rarely slow and boring for most people in the world, and this past weekend was seemingly no different than most.
Some Americans - including President Obama and his family - held a moment of silence for those who died in Newtown, Connecticut, even as some sympathetic thoughts went to the victims of the latest school shooting in Colorado. South Africans buried the man they think of as the modern father of their nation, Nelson Mandela. Meanwhile, violence continued to rage in Syria, while the Great Pyramids of Egypt fell under a blanket of snow for the first time in 112 years. A strong progressive woman also won re-election for President in a landslide in Chile, much like New York City's progressive mayor-elect Bill De Blasio won his election in the U.S. earlier this year.
In other words, the worldwide situation over the weekend was relatively normal, and mostly boring, though still kinda screwed up.
Nowhere is this twisted but normal state more obvious than in Washington, DC. That's where the Senate took an unexpected break this weekend, before wrapping up its work for the year. Unless the Republican extremists in the Senate dump their party - and the rest of the world - into a fiscal hole by voting down the crappy two-year Ryan/Murray budget that the House finally passed at the end of last week, things in Washington, DC should get fairly quiet by about Wednesday of this week.
Of course, the fact that the Tea Partiers could paint themselves, and the entire world, into a disastrous financial corner is still a very real possibility. That's according to Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, who did the Senate math in front of the whole world on CBS' 'Face The Nation' on Sunday morning. Sadly, he's right...
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