The countdown to the fiscal cliff continues with rumblings from both sides, but with little real progress apparent.

The President claims a mandate (thanks to his re-election) and continues to insist that we must ask the wealthy to pay a little more.  Uh, yeah, not so fast.

The Speaker of the House and his party claim their own mandate thanks to their own re-election and they insist that we MUST not raise taxes on anyone given the precarious position the economy is in.  Most especially not raises on small business owners, the engine that drives the economy.

And yet I encounter people like my daughter that wanted to give Obama a second term and believe that his path and direction must be right for the country.  Uh, yeah, sure.  That direction we've been headed in for the last 4 years, stagnant and rotten as it seems to smell, yeah, that must be right.

OK, admittedly, the stonewalling by the GOP, especially the Tea Party elements, in the House of Representatives especially hasn't helped, but it still burns my butt that the majority of the electorate would send back the same failure to get another chance *knowing* that he was going to be working with the same cast of characters around him.  It seemed a lot like expecting that George Lucas was going to be able to take the cast from Episode I and actually offer something that didn't stink on ice for Episode II.  If he'd have killed off Jar Jar Binks in the first 30 seconds of Episode II we might have gotten somewhere, but really it was still Lucas' vision that was wrong and it wasn't going to be better as long as he held onto the reigns.

We'll see over the coming weeks if things have gotten any better.  I suppose these two radically different directions can somehow be combined into one that works for enough of us to keep us from going back into a seriously deep recession.  Maybe.  Possibly.

Eh, never happen :/