**The following is a guest post from our friend Tony, better known as Bluzdude, at Darwinfish2 . Bloggers make terrific friends, and we are honored to count Tony among ours. Thanks, Bluz, for this terrific post! Oh and the remotes, all five of them, are on the end table.**
 
Right off, I’d like to thank Rich and Cher for inviting me to invade some of their space. (I promise I’ll move out once I get back on my feet. It should only take a couple weeks. Seriously! Now where’s the remote?)
Cher …

For anybody wondering how the approval rating of Congress (more like the dis-approval rating) could possibly get any lower than its current  9%, the question has finally been answered.  Today the so-called Super Committee, comprised of six Republicans and six Democrats, announced that they had failed to come to an agreement on how to remove $1.2 trillion in spending from the federal budget over a period of ten years. Although the Super Committee utterly failed to come up with a sensible plan for deficit reduction, the $1.2 trillion will still …

As we all can so clearly recall, a disgraceful show of Republican partisanship and recalcitrance last August  nearly brought the country to the point of  financial default.  A last minute deal was reached between moderate Republicans  and Democrats that forced the Obama Administration to agree to deep cuts in domestic spending with no increases in revenues.  At that time  a large contingent of Congressional Tea Party adherents voted against any increase at all in the debt limit ceiling, preferring the near-total collapse of America’s social safety net to a higher …