Looking for 26 Republicans with Balls

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi intends to force a tax cut vote for people earning less than $250k/year by filing a discharge petition.  This measure extending the Bush tax cuts to 98% of the country was passed by the Senate this summer.  A discharge petition is a parliamentary maneuver to allow a vote on legislation when the House Speaker will not permit it to get to the floor for a vote.  As the Washington Post reports , though, this is "rarely used successfully".  It requires 218 votes to pass and the House Democrats number 192.  So they need 26 Republicans to break ranks.  Do you think there are 26 such creatures on the GOP side of the aisle? 

I'm not going to hold my breath.   We are talking about a political party that is funded by corporate and business interests and is the happy home to folks with some of the most bizarre positions and beliefs on the planet.  Birthers, climate change and evolution deniers, gun nuts, self-proclaimed "patriots", and on and on - we've seen it for years.  And it doesn't look like things are getting any better as far as rationality goes.  In a recent poll of GOP members:

• 49% believe ACORN, a grass roots community organization that was disbanded in 2010, helped President Obama steal the 2012 election.  (This from the party that tried to suppress Democratic votes with a fervor not seen since the days of Jim Crow and poll taxes.)
• 25% want to secede because Obama was re-elected.  (As of now seven states - Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas - have reached the 25,000 mark which will require a response from the President.  I don't know, maybe we should let Texas secede and take its 38 electoral votes with it.  This would guarantee that Republicans would never win a national election again.)

As for our self-imposed, so-called "fiscal cliff", if anything is more disturbing than the Republicans' desperate attempts to maintain tax breaks for the wealthiest in the country, it is the attention being given to maintaining that most bloated part of our budget - military expenditures.  A co-chair of the supercommittee created by the Budget Control Act, Washington Senator Democrat Patty Murray expressed concerns that "the most vulnerable groups depending on domestic programs may get lost in the shuffle” during the deficit negotiations...It’s very concerning to me that so much of the focus in D.C. and across the country has been on the other half of sequestration -- the defense cuts.” 

I'll close with more pathetic news from the Right.  Today 38 Republican Senators blocked the US signing of the UN Disability Treaty - a treaty based on our own Americans with Disabilities Act and already ratified by 126 countries.   As the Boston Globe reports "supporters fell five votes short of the 66 needed for ratification of the international pact known as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — hailed by advocates as a human rights effort to transform how nations across the world treat those with long-term physical, mental, and intellectual impairments, particularly children who face a future of bleakness because of their disabilities."

Another Link
The Nation "A Wake Up Call on Housing and Homelessness" - on possible impacts of the debt negotiations