In a statement Thursday, NOM said it will form a PAC in Illinois and spend $250,000 to oust any Republicans who support gay marriage. The statement also called on Illinois Republican Chairman Pat Brady to resign "for violating the national GOP platform and urging state Republicans to redefine marriage."

“Any Republican in Illinois who betrays the cause of marriage will be casting a career-ending vote and will be held accountable to their constituents,” Brian Brown, NOM’s president, said in a statement. “We will spend whatever it takes – hundreds of thousands of dollars if necessary – to remove them from office, just as we did three of the four turncoat Republican state Senators in New York who were responsible for gay ‘marriage’ passing there."

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This would be the same Christie who, in September 2012, headlined a fundraiser for Iowa congressman Steve King, who is not just one of the craziest members of the GOP crazy wing, but who also announced a month later that he probably wouldn't vote for relief money for Sandy victims for the same reason he refused to vote for federal aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina: Because he was pretty sure people spent the relief money on "Gucci bags and massage parlors." This is a man Christie wanted to win reelection, in order to help Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives, so that they could continue ignoring the priorities and desperate needs of liberal, urban coastal states like New Jersey.

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The details of the deal are straightforward: Tax rates will rise permanently to Clinton-era levels for families with income over $450,000 and individuals with income over $400,000. For everyone below that ceiling, taxes will remain at Bush-era levels. Likewise, for families and individuals at that income threshold, the taxes on capital gains will rise to 20 percent, while staying at 15 percent for everyone else. Given the financial situation of most Americans — who don’t earn much, if anything, from investments — this is a good move, considering the circumstances.

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Aides to Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell presented the Social Security proposal, which included a method of calculating benefits with inflation. The plan would lower cost of living increases for Social Security recipients. Democrats were swift to reject the offer.

A Democratic aide told ABC News that the proposal was a "poisoned pill" in the current negotiations. However, it should be noted that President Obama has suggested a similar proposal within the context of negotiations on a broad deficit-reduction deal. Such a measure had been taken off the table in discussions over a scaled-back, short-term agreement.

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I think, though, that regardless of how completely lost the Republican party is -- and they are well and truly lost, and not currently "negotiating" with anything resembling a coherent plan or unified voice -- they will emerge from the current mess unscathed.

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Sen. Joe Lieberman predicted Sunday: "We're going to spend New Year's Eve here, I believe."

Even those who see the possibility of a deal don't expect a lot.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said she expects "it is going to be a patch because in four days we can't solve everything."

With the collapse Thursday of House Speaker John Boehner's plan to allow tax rates to rise on million-dollar-plus incomes, Lieberman said: "It's the first time that I feel it's more likely we'll go over the cliff than not," meaning that higher taxes for most Americans and painful federal agency budget cuts would be in line to go ahead.

"If we allow that to happen it will be the most colossal consequential act of congressional irresponsibility in a long time, maybe ever in American history because of the impact it'll have on almost every American," said Lieberman, a Connecticut independent.

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A Mormon, the Idaho Republican told The Associated Press at the time that he abstains from alcohol, and he pledged to have a root beer to celebrate if the bill passed.

Crapo's arrest Sunday in a Washington, D.C., suburb on suspicion of drunken driving contradicts his public persona as a teetotaling member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church bar members from using alcohol, as well as coffee, tea and some other substances.

In a statement, Crapo has taken responsibility and pledged to ensure "this circumstance is never repeated."

Colleagues say they're surprised the three-term Republican is in this situation. But Idaho's junior U.S. Sen. Jim Risch offered his support, saying Crapo made a mistake and has apologized.

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But it's his other side, the deeply ambitious one, that clouds our ability to predict where the fiscal saga ends. This is the Boehner who clawed his way to the House speakership for over 20 years, a position that his conference may force him out of if he "surrenders" to President Obama in private negotiations.

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We don't really know, and it's likely we never will. Many of the groups that spent the most on the election aren't required to report their donors. But thanks to recent campaign finance filings, we can get a better idea.

We dug through Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records and found that Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $98 million this election cycle. The money went to at least 34 different candidates and groups, with contributions ranging from $2,000 for a Florida congressional candidate to $30 million for Restore Our Future, the super PAC that supported Mitt Romney.

Adelson also gave $20 million to Winning Our Future, a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich; $23 million to American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC; and $5 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the YG Action Fund, both of which supported Republican candidates for Congress.

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What? Even Grover Norquist blessed Boehner’s proposal, saying it wasn’t really a tax increase. Even Paul Ryan supported it.

What does Boehner’s failure tell us about the modern Republican Party?

That it has become a party of hypocrisy masquerading as principled ideology. The GOP talks endlessly about the importance of reducing the budget deficit. But it isn’t even willing to raise revenues from the richest three-tenths of 1 percent of Americans to help with the task. We’re talking about 400,000 people, for crying out loud.

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Two central issues in the 2012 presidential election were whether the Bush tax cuts should be ended for people earning over $250,000, and whether Social Security and Medicare should be protected from future budget cuts.

The president said yes to both. Republicans said no.  Obama won.

But apparently the president is now offering to continue the Bush tax cuts for people earning between $250,000 and $400,000, and to cut Social Security by reducing annual cost-of-living adjustments.

These concessions aren’t necessary. If the nation goes over the so-called fiscal cliff and tax rates return to what they were under Bill Clinton, Democrats can then introduce a tax cut for everyone earning under $250,000 and make it retroactive to the start of the year.

They can combine it with a spending bill that makes up for most of the cuts scheduled to go into effect in January. Republicans would be hard-pressed not to sign on.

Social Security should not be part of any such deal anyway. By law, it can’t contribute to the budget deficit. It’s only permitted to spend money from the Social Security trust fund.

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Well, obviously Democrats won the election, holding the White House, increasing their lead in the Senate and picking up seats in the House. But while some Republicans promised to commence soul-searching about why most Americans rejected their message, their right-wing flank, and the plutocrats who fund them, are only getting crazier. That leaves victorious Democrats looking for ways to placate them, instead of looking for ways to exercise their mandate. This seems wrong.

I mean, how do you explain the phenomenon of President Obama winning Michigan by 10 points, and the state GOP's very next political move is passing unpopular right-to-work legislation in a lame duck session, before they concede seats to Democrats (and some less crazy Republicans) in January? That flies in the face of the way the political system is supposed to work. The electorate speaks; their servants listen.

But instead, Gov. Rick Snyder, who once promised not to back right-wing right-to-work legislation, instead backed rushing it through, to applause from his friends at ALEC, Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers. The point is to slash wages as well as to defund an institutional pillar of the Democratic Party. No retreat, no surrender.

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The debate over the fiscal cliff, for example, is really about tactical maneuvers preceding a negotiation about how best to reduce the federal budget deficit. This, in turn, is a fragment of a bigger debate over whether we should be embracing austerity economics and reducing the budget deficit in the next few years or, alternatively, using public spending and investing to grow the economy and increase the number of jobs.

Even this larger debate is just one part of what should be the central debate of our time — why median wages continue to drop and poverty to increase at the same time income and wealth are becoming ever more concentrated at the top, and what should be done to counter the trend.

With a shrinking share of total income and wealth, the middle class and poor simply don’t have the purchasing power to get the economy back on solid footing. (The wealthy don’t spend enough of their income or assets to make up for this shortfall, and they invest their savings wherever around the world they can get the highest return).

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"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,'" he said. "By 1968 you can’t say 'nigger' -- that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites."

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Although it is still early, Mitt Romney, who has 16 grandchildren, is leading among the patriarchs of America's dynastic political families, in part due to the present childlessness of George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton, whose presence in articles on this subject is an apparent journalistic convention. Starting families now could give the hypothetical grandchildren of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton a head start on the theoretical grandchildren of Barack Obama, whose daughters are years away from having children if they decide to procreate at all.

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It was a sneak move -- GOP lawmakers only announced Thursday morning that they intended to enact the so-called right-to-work bill (aptly described by its opponents as the "no-rights-at-work" bill). Right-to-work laws ban requirements to pay dues or fees to a union as a condition of employment --  studies have consistently shown that states with right-to-work laws have lower wages for union and non-union workers.

As a study by Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute found:

[O]ur findings -- that "right-to-work" laws are associated with significantly lower wages and reduced chances of receiving employer-sponsored health insurance and pensions -- are based on the most rigorous statistical analysis currently possible. These findings should discourage right-to-work policy initiatives. The fact is, while RTW legislation misleadingly sounds like a positive change in this weak economy, in reality the opportunity it gives workers is only that to work for lower wages and fewer benefits.

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Washed-up, draft-dodging '70s rocker Ted Nugent has never tried to obscure his extremism, and this week he offered an idea that is supposedly related to a budget deal. After exposing his impressive ignorance of the federal budget, especially “entitlements," Nugent offered up a modest proposal:

Let's also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them. That's insane.

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