RE the tea party. I can see why the Indiana Republicans wanted Lugar out. He's 80, he's hung on forever, and he wants another six years. Under most circumstances I would vote to get him out.

My point is this: there are much bigger issues here than Dick Lugar. The Republicans need something like six seats to win control of the Senate. They need another ten beyond that to make the Senate filibuster proof. There are 23 Democratic seats and ten Republican seats up for election in the Senate this fall. So the Republicans need to win something like 26 races out of 33 to take the Senate. That is a steep climb. This business with Lugar makes it much harder to do that.

I dislike it when voters let their emotions get the better of their judgement. Lugar was an ally. The Tea partiers violated the first law of politics: don't pick fights you don't need. Make no unnecessary enemies. This Mourdock seems like a nice chap and a good candidate, but this doesn't look like the time to dump Lugar.

RE; the third party. If we had a real, viable third party they would always present a threat and prevent the major parties from drifting around aimlessly. There is nothing like being voted out that concentrates a politician's mind.

The current makeup of the Senate is 53-47. So a net gain of 4 seats should give the Republicans control, shouldn't it?

But if they do just as poor a job as the Democrats, I see reason to wish for that. You're still assuming that the Tea Party are Republicans, and when the evidence shows that they're not, you're still assuming that they are, and just aren't doing a good job at it. The Tea Party is largely the moderates who were alienated when Obama broke his promises to get the budget under control. In a normal election, those moderates would have rushed back to the Republicans, but in this case, the memory of the awful job the Republicans had also done was so fresh in everyone's mind that they started going after everyone who was part of the problem.

That's why both sides hate them so much. Both parties are used to playing Good Cop/Bad Cop with the public. One party does an awful job, the other party says "they did a bad job, so vote for us". People do, that party does an awful job, and the first party says "they did an awful job, vote for us." In this way, they keep trading power back and forth, with both sides doing an awful job, and conning people into thinking they somehow have to vote for poor candidates to keep even worse ones out.

I don't see Lugar as an ally of anything I want done. A big spender who'd been in Washington almost 40 years, and who lived there year round and didn't even know what was happening in his own state. That's exactly the kind of guy that needs to be gotten rid of. This is only an emotional reaction of we concede that electing Republicans no matter what is what matters. I don't agree with that.

Very briefly: the Tea Party is either a faction of the Republicans or it is a separate party. If it is the former then its members should consider tactical questions. If not, they should run their own candidates. As it is they do all the damage of either with none of the benefits.

They seem to be a separate party, but one with only one major issue: The national debt. That's a big issue, maybe the biggest one, but it's still just one issue, and single issue parties don't tend to do very well running candidates under their own brand name (examples: Free Silver Party, Right to Life Party, and dozens of others). The way to go about it is to campaign for and against major party candidates.

So, on the one hand, they're doing the right thing from their POV. But on the other hand, they may not qualify as a "third party" at all, the way you meant it when you made the original comment.

Their only issue, to my observation, is that they don't want their taxes increased. I don't think they really give a toss about the debt.

Why do you think so? What observations are you referring to? All I remember is that Obama never promised not to raise taxes, but he did promise to cut the deficit in half. When he broke that promise and did the exact opposite, the moderates who felt betrayed by both parties, formed a third party of sorts. In a normal year, they would have gone scurrying back to the Republicans, but the Republican overspending was too fresh in their minds.

I think that even the Democrats would have preferred that they go full bore Republican, because that's the way both parties keep control. One party screws up, the voters go to the other party, the other party screws up, they go to the first party, and both sides keep power by trading it back and forth. A third party going after the worst offenders in both parties is the last thing that either side wanted.

A couple of months ago this showed up in my facebook feed and I thought it was an interesting way to think about the federal budget and debt.

I still haven't had a chance to fact-check the values, but I have reproduced them: (sigh, message board is taking out my spaces used for formatting. )

The U.S. Federal Budget Explained:

US Tax Revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Fed Budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New Debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cuts: $38,500,000,000

At this point the author suggests chopping off 8 zeros and looking at this as a household budget. (I like this because the trillion sized numbers are hard for most people to understand and tens of billions in cuts sounds like a lot of slashing.)

Annual Family Income: $21,700
Annual family spending: $38,200
New Debt on credit card: $16,500
Outstanding credit card balance: $142,710
Recent budget cuts: $385

That's a good way to look at it, but have there actually been any cuts whatsoever? My understanding is that all the so-called cuts have actually been reductions in planned increases, not reductions in spending, which is the bookkeeping trick they've been using since the 70's.

Translated, that means that if you plan to buy a $16,000 car next year but then change your mind and only buy a $12,000 car, most people would think of that as a $12,000 increase in spending. In Washingtonspeak, it's a $4,000 cut because even though you're spending more, it's less more than you wanted it to be. In real life nobody would think of buying any new car as a way of cutting their budget.

Indeed, in Washington speak a "cut" is actually a decrease in planned increases.

I wouldn't mind that so much is some of the reductions in planned spending represented actual cuts in something.

Looking forward to an expense and deciding that you can spend less than originally planned, like reducing how much you will pay for a car, is a good budgeting practice. Down grading from a BMW to a Chevy Impala is a meaningful budget cut.

In Washington their "cuts" involve fitting the BMW with a slightly lower grade of tires or choosing cloth rather than leather.

What is missing in Washington is actually doing away with an expense. At the family level this might mean cutting cable TV or some other recurring expense.

When Washington cuts programs they merely re-arrange the chairs. At the family level they go out for dinner on Wednesdays instead of Fridays, declaring a budget victory because they no longer go out for dinner on Friday!

Yeah, and people are dumb enough to fall for it. Huffington had an article last week trumpeting that Obama had turned in the first balanced budget in... a couple of years. Of course we still have a trillion and a half dollar deficit this year, but they re-arranged the books to show a balanced budget for one month of the 12. And then Huffington, complicit as always, published the story as though it meant something.