Well, the weather outside is not exactly frightful (it's a nice day where I live), but watching the politics of the week was certainly "so delightful." So many blowhards, so little time! "Let them blow, let them blow, let them blow!"

Ahem. Sorry, just trying to get in the holiday mood and all.

Where to begin? Let's see, Obama's job approval polling is not completely through the roof, but it certainly has scraped the ceiling. The Associated Press just released a new poll that has Obama at 57 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval -- a job approval level the president hasn't seen since Osama Bin Laden's death. Added to today's unemployment rate dropping to the lowest point since Obama has held office, and you've got to believe that the folks in the White House have plenty to celebrate this holiday season.

Adding to the delight is the spectacle of the Republican Party having what seems to be a collective ideological nervous breakdown, which has mostly been gloriously public. I wrote about this in a more serious vein earlier in the week, but it's hard to keep up with events, these days. John Boehner seems to be in a cage match with the Tea Partiers in the House, and Boehner's already won a few rounds by kicking out some committee members who wouldn't support him in the clinch of negotiations. The number of Republicans fleeing the Church of Norquist seems to be growing into a flood, but keep in mind blathering on a cable television show is one thing -- actually voting for compromise on taxes is quite another. So we'll see how that all plays out, in the coming weeks. Over in the Senate, a Tea Party leader decided to take the money and run, and Mitch McConnell actually filibustered himself in public. Aren't there laws against that sort of thing? Heh.

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The job of pundit, every so often, lends itself to delusions of grandeur. It goes with the territory. Which is why my immediate thought, upon hearing of the abrupt resignation of the Tea Party's leader in the Senate, was: "Wow, I guess the column I posted yesterday on the inherent hypocrisies in the current Republican Party's positions just blew his mind."

Of course, such egotistical outbursts usually subside quickly, and when sanity returned, I realized that Senator Jim DeMint is quite likely not a regular reader of these columns. I mean, realistically speaking, I just don't think he's a fan or anything.

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While the entire political punditry world is caught up in yet another horserace -- this time around, the "who's up/who's down on the fiscal cliff talks" debate -- something astounding is happening within the ranks of the Republican Party. Because major tenets of the party's faith seem to be crumbling. The bedrock ideology of the party is revealing itself, in multiple ways, of having been built on sand all along. These are all rather polite ways of calling the Republicans enormous hypocrites, I realize. But when the shoe fits, the shoe fits, so I offer no apologies for doing so.

There are, of course, core hypocrisies... and then there are campaign promises which nobody really believed anyway. Take, for instance, the fact that Republicans just spent an entire campaign season ripping into Democrats for "cutting Medicare by $750 billion" only to immediately demand deep and significant cuts in Medicare after the election. That's the sort of garden-variety hypocrisy America expects from Republicans, during an election season. But we're going to give them a pass for such things, because everybody says things they later regret out on the campaign trail. We can afford to set this hypocrisy aside because there are so many other deep fissures in Republican dogma right now. Medicare hypocrisy (guess that "Mediscaring" was right, eh, GOP?) is small potatoes, ideologically, right now. Republicans have always been against Medicare, so it really isn't going to change their hymn book after the campaign promises are long forgotten, to put it another way. There are bigger fish to fry, here.

Republican orthodoxy has said, since Reagan's time, that tax cuts solve everything. The reason we are now at the fiscal cliff is that this is not correct. It's just flat-out wrong. Tax cuts do not "pay for themselves." If they did, then we wouldn't even be discussing not extending the Bush tax cuts, because the federal government would be so awash in money right now that it would be laughable to do so. This is not, to put it mildly, the situation we find ourselves in. The Bush tax cuts did not in fact pay for themselves, China paid for them.

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[Program Note: Instead of our regular article today, we are going to attempt to shamelessly beg for money from you. Just thought I'd warn everyone up front. And, as always, there will be kittens! This is a cheap and completely transparent attempt to fog your mind with saccharine cuteness in an attempt to make you send in some of your hard-earned cash before you wake up and realize what you've done. Kidding aside, though, we have big news to offer if this year's pledge drive is successful, so you'll want to read about that, below.]

Yes, it's that time of year again, folks!

'Tis the season when kittens show how helpful they can be, by joining in the tree-decorating fun. This can involve kittens disappearing into the tree itself, and after much shaking of branches, popping their furry heads out, halfway up the trunk. Kittens are the most helpful creatures, aren't they?

Which is why we traditionally let them help out every year, when we kick off our annual 2012 Holiday Pledge Drive. Unlike some other blog sites (or PBS, for that matter), we limit these pledge drives to once a year, because we do understand how downright annoying they can be. What started off, for us, as a plea to help fund a trip to Obama's first inauguration has now become our own holiday classic. With kittens, of course...

Stare deep into that kitten's eyes. Doesn't he seem to be saying: "Why oh why haven't you sent in your CW.com donation this year yet?" By way of comparison, here's a kitten who has just sent in his generous donation, because he knows Santa is watching. Mrowr!

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Obama Triumphant

Before we get to all the polling and charting fun, we've got to say that it's a relief not to have to explain the difference between these columns -- which measure Obama's job approval numbers -- and the "horserace" of the presidential election campaigns (or "which candidate are you going to vote for?"). This, of course, is due to Obama's spectacular re-election, where he held Mitt Romney to (snicker) 47 percent of the popular vote. O, the irony! O, the poetic justice! Heh.

Electioneering aside, this also leaves us to ponder the fact that this column series will not go gently into that good night come January, but instead will continue for the next four years. Which leads to certain questions: Should the second term be handled separately, or smushed all into one chart? Is there anything annoying about the charts as they stand (is there room for improvement, in other words)? The dividing line between presidential terms seems the perfect time to make any adjustments, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to make them in the comments. I'm open to ideas, folks.

With that housekeeping out of the way, let's have a look at Obama's job approval numbers during the month he got re-elected, starting with the big chart.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

November, 2012

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Before his second term has even begun, are we seeing "Obama 2.0" in action? This is the question swirling around right now in the inside-the-Beltway punditocracy, and it's a refreshing one to contemplate: has President Barack Obama finally learned his lesson that his old method of legislative negotiation simply was not working? Has he, to put it another way, grown some backbone?

We'll see, we'll see. But so far, the signs certainly do seem to be positive. Obama, immediately after the election, proposed a fiscal-cliff-avoidance plan to the Republicans. They ignored it. For the past two weeks, negotiations have been taking place between Boehner and Obama (and all the other minor players). Tim Geithner went to Capitol Hill with a plan yesterday. To the utter astonishment of the Republicans, it was essentially the same plan originally proposed -- even with a few more "poison pill" additions.

Obama, as the chattering classes will tell you, is "done negotiating with himself." That's a pretty good phrase, because it accurately describes how these negotiations have taken place over Obama's first term. This time, the White House seems to be saying, that isn't going to happen.

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That title is an old cliché, referring to (coincidentally enough) election returns being reported on the night of the ballot-counting. I'm using it to introduce a rather unusual column today.

I don't believe I've ever done something like this before, but I got the following as an email from a regular here at CW.com who has been absent of late. I've been meaning to post it as a comment, but I've been having problems posting comments of late as well (don't even get me started on my computer problems right now...). But I thought it needed passing along, and I didn't have anything profound to write about today, so I thought I'd share this with everyone. I realize it's a few weeks late (which is what made me think of elections), but I asked and received permission to share it from Chris1962, so better late than never. Our thoughts are with her and everyone else dealing with the storm cleanup from Sandy.

-- Chris Weigant

I survived Frankenstorm!

I have property on an island out by the Rockaways, which is where I went to sit out the storm, not expecting to get water in the house. But I ended up getting 16" straight through. (I was one of the lucky ones. I had had this house lifted 7 feet about a decade ago. Most of my neighbors, with houses closer to the ground, got water right up to their ceilings.)

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Lest F.D.R. rise up from his grave and begin to haunt me, allow me to begin by putting that headline in the proper context. Correct capitalization should really be "the new deal" -- so as to not cause confusion with historical references. The words are capitalized above merely because they are in a title, and for no other reason.

By this point, even "scare quotes" are not necessary for talking about the upcoming fiscal cliff. The term has been repetitively bandied about in the media world so thoroughly that it is (at least for the time being) self-evident. However, what is lacking from the inside-the-Beltway crowd is some sort of snappy moniker for the (lower-case!) new deal that Congress and President Obama are now working towards. Whether the deal eventually happens or not, it's time to give it a name. I'm going to begin using a rather mundane name for this deal, in the hopes that it goes viral: the "Grand Bargain II" or (for those with an itchy Twitter finger) "GB2." The original "Grand Bargain," a year and a half ago, did not actually happen between John Boehner and the president but it got named all the same, so I think it'll be fine to just recycle it. But I do not write today merely to speak of political branding. Just wanted to get it out of the way so I have something to use for the rest of this article, that's all.

Instead of focusing on whether a GB2 deal will be struck between Obama and the House Republicans, or even when such a deal might be finalized, I think far too few pundits are focusing on what the deal might contain. So I thought I'd peer into my cracked and foggy crystal ball and make an attempt at predicting which way the GB2 chips are going to fall. Please note, though, that I'm not endorsing (or condemning, for that matter) any of the following outcomes, I'm just attempting to read the political language emanating from the principal negotiators involved and draw some likely conclusions of what is likely going to be in such a deal. With that caveat firmly in place, here's how I see things working out.

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This is going to be a short article today, because I am back to experiencing computer problems once again. Oh joy!

For the next two weeks or more, the political subject in the spotlight is going to be the negotiations over the "fiscal cliff" and the budget and taxes. I'll be returning to this subject again, no doubt, but I had to begin by scratching my head over the main Republican bargaining position on raising taxes. Because -- even by Republican logic -- it doesn't seem to make much sense.

President Obama's position is clear, since it is the one he campaigned upon: eliminate the Bush tax cuts for anyone making over $250,000 a year, but retain them for those making less. I should mention that the whole fiscal cliff thing has many more facets and details, but I'm zeroing in solely on the tax portion of it today. So, Obama comes to the table demanding higher tax rates on the wealthy.

Republicans, on the other hand, are demanding that tax rates stay the same for everyone, even the wealthy, and that they'll consider "raising revenues" by getting rid of "loopholes" and limiting "deductions."

Without getting into numbers, let's assume for the sake of argument that Republicans will put on the table an equal amount to what Obama is proposing. This is where Republican logic begins to break down.

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While in a post-turkey daze this past holiday weekend, I believe I've come up with the perfect answer to one of the key political dilemmas Congress is facing right now, as we all race towards the lip of the "fiscal cliff" -- Congress needs a legislative time warp.

By this, I do not mean I expect Congress will suddenly exceed the speed of light (pause for riotous audience laughter...), but instead that Congress needs to do more of a Rocky Horror type of "Time Warp" -- an absurdist dance step which seems rather bizarre and pointless to the uninitiated, but which could be a fun way out of a twist in the plot line. As the song says: "Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll."

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