The big fight this election season hasn't really dawned yet. And all the issues in the past will likely pale in comparison to the big fight that's just ahead of us. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (to his credit) set up this fight, right before the midterm election's homestretch. The big fight this year is going to be over extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent of American workers, and to the top three percent of American small businesses. On the other side are, respectively, ninety-eight percent of American workers, and ninety-seven percent of American small businesses. Not bad odds, even for Democrats.

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The answer, as with all things Tea Party, is (once again): "it's hard to be sure." We won't really know until after the midterm elections, and at that point so much "spin" will be on the airwaves one might (if one grew up in Kansas, for the sake of argument) be excused the immediate impulse to run for the tornado shelter in the backyard. In other words, even after the elections, the answer is going to depend on who is doing the answering.

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August in Washington means the beginning of the official "silly season" of politics. This is because Congress takes the whole month off, and political news stories become rather thin on the ground. Intrepid political reporters, wishing to be on vacation themselves, get lazy and start going crazy over non-stories hyped into political wildfires seemingly overnight -- over the silliest of subjects. But these fun and games have not quite yet begun, because the Senate wrapped up work this week, and a few legal decisions of great moment were in the news.

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Whoops! Looks like the first thing that's been going on is that the region now has a new nickname -- the "DMV" -- amongst the hipster set (note: I fully understand that that use of "hipster" automatically disqualifies me from judging what is cool and what is not among today's youth). This moniker comes from the hip-hop music scene, and it stands for "District (of Columbia), Maryland, and Virginia."

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The next few weeks could turn out to be the most important politically in the remainder of this year. Because this may be the last chance Congress has of passing any big or contentious legislation, before politics consumes everything (even more than at the current time). This is due to a combination of factors, but mostly boils down to the congressional calendar and the midterm election season.

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But this blade cuts both ways. If Republicans are going to stop a bill to extend unemployment which costs less than $40 billion, then how can they turn around and advocate extending the Bush tax cuts on the rich which would cost almost seven hundred billion dollars and still say with a straight face that they're some sort of "deficit hawks"?

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My biggest problem with both Obama's speech and Emanuel's interview is that neither one of them truly seems to understand that an election is underway. The word "Republican" is not uttered once by President Obama. Rahm only uses the word four times, and only two of those are really drawing distinctions between what Democrats want to do, and what Republicans want to do (or, more to the point, not to do). And neither one of them uses the word "Democrat" (or "Democrats" or "Democratic") once.

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I have to apologize right away for that headline. But it is hard to resist the urge to use the "what have you been smoking?" joke when discussing California Attorney General Jerry Brown's recent comments on marijuana, since Brown is talking such patent nonsense.

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The Tea Party movement could possibly be generalized as a group of people who are proud of (and sometimes revel in) being impossible to generalize. This, of course, doesn't stop the media from trying. In today's sad state of American journalism, everything's got to have a simplistic narrative that fits within a 15-second soundbite, at the very maximum. Nuances and subtleties are out. Strong statements beginning with phrases like: "The Tea Partiers are..." (or "...believe...", or "....as a group...") are what is in. But even given this reduction in critical thinking, what's amazing is how wrong the media has gotten the Tea Partiers (or, at the least, a goodly portion of them).

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The Wall Street reform bill, now christened Dodd-Frank, is entering its final stretch this week. The House/Senate conference committee is finishing up work on the bill, and the goal is to get it through both houses of Congress and on the president's desk by July Fourth. A quick look at a calendar shows that this is a very tight schedule. To complicate matters, the death of Senator Robert Byrd now means the Democrats are short a vote they had been counting on. Which means they need some Republicans to vote with them, or the bill won't survive the inevitable filibuster attempt.

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