The payroll tax and the Keystone pipeline

Payroll tax:  Mitch McConnell wants to call Obama's bluff

"Earlier this week, the number two Republican in the Senate, Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), said that there would be no further negotiation regarding the payroll tax cut, and that  the bill that comes from the House -- which includes Keystone -- is the one the Senate must pass.

"The package that comes from the House is it," Kyl said. McConnell declined to  specifically say whether he agreed with Kyl.

McConnell said that a "significant number of Democrats" both in the Senate and House support the package Obama has promised to veto."

Can you believe the gall of these bastards?

Once again, the Republicans simply have to play politics. As has been widely described, they are getting squeezed on the payroll tax issue.  Let it lapse, and it's their fault that the average Americans get a tax increase.  After all, this is the party that defined letting temporary tax cuts lapse and the tax brackets go back to where they were (which is what has to happen for the disastrous W Bush-era tax cuts) as a tax increase.  Dolts.  But by that logic, letting the payroll tax lapse is a tax increase, and we know the GOP can't abide a tax increase.  Oh yeah, and letting the payroll tax cut lapse could also hurt the economy by impacting average American buying power.

They're also getting squeezed because the way proposed to pay for the payroll tax cut extension is a small little increase on millionaires.  But that can't happen because a) it's a tax increase, and b) it's on the 1% or so of the people that the GOP is protecting at all costs so that they can keep every little bit of their millions.

This is intolerable.   (For the GOP, that is.)

Faced with intolerability, the GOP has decided to punish the President, and human society in general, by trying to force the President to sign a fast-track for  the Keystone pollution-importing, climate-damaging tar sands oil pipeline.  They want to make the President veto it, so that they can claim that the President isn't interested in creating jobs (even if they are unsustainable jobs in the climate-damaging energy industry) and that he was the one that blocked the payroll tax cut extension, rather than their holier-than-thou selves.   [Oh yeah, and they also want to roll back pollution regulations and make a few spending cuts while they're at it.]

Because this is utterly bodacious politicking, we can see through all the holes in this tactic.  For once it would be frigging refreshing if the GOP would do something for the good of the country rather than try to twist every possible situation into something that might possible make it harder for Obama to get reelected.  If they really wanted to gain friends in the independent middle class (and that represents a lot of voters), tax the millionaires, pass the extension, and see what happens.  I'll bet, except for the Tea Party howlin' Jims, that this would actually go down well politically on a lot of fronts. But don't tell that to the lame old men in the Senate and the House who  claim to have been elected for the good of the American people.

Because they're only in it for themselves.  And their millionaire cronies.