Tax Cut Votes--the Dems had better show some spine.

So the House passed a tax cut bill for all Americans.  That is, it extended the provisions that apply to the first 250,000 of income but not the lower rates at the very top.  As expected, the right-wing GOP Senators refused to support tax cuts for those who've been left stranded by whatever growth there has been in the economy and insisted that those in the top quintile who have gotten the benefit of whatever GDP growth there has been must also get the lion's share of the tax cut.  A minority of 36 voted no.  They even voted no on cutting everybody except the millionaires and over.

Regretably, our President doesn't seem to know how to negotiate with Congress.  He signalled much to early that he'd be willing to cave.  If he does, he will lose his base, possibly (probably) for good.  What good does it do to ring doorbells, call voters and contribute whatever spare change you can if the president won't even use his bully pulpit and his veto pen to stand up for one of the most important policy issues that will face him in his first term? 

It's not as though the Dems don't have alternatives.  They can keep bringing a tax cut bill for the middle class back to the table day after day after day.  Let the GOP vote no and explain how they think we shouldn't have a deficit but should waste $700 billion on tax cuts for the minority of income recipients at the top of the scale who has been the only group to come out ahead over the last decade.  Wages for everybody else are stagnant or declining, but that top group now owns more of the nation's wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age.

That's what the GOP apparently wants--to usher in a permanent Gilded Age where the rich are incredibly rich and everyone else is just scraping by or not even.

If Baucus and the Dems in the Senate and the purported Dem in the White House go along with that, they will find that their party deserts them even more strongly than it did in the off-year election.  Why bother, if your party doesn't bother to fight for the principles and policies that got it in power.