Thursday, November 5, 2009 Midday

The Senate voted 98-0 yesterday to extend and expand the tax credit for first-time home buyers. But that’s just the beginning. Over the next year, a slew of tax cuts and credits are set to expire. Some are recent, others stretch back to 9/11, but they’re all about to run out. As much as Congress needs to reduce the deficit, not renewing them would mean heavy new taxes on Americans who are still struggling paycheck-to-paycheck, if they even have a paycheck, and during an election year to boot. So Democrats may find themselves in an unusual position: they’ll be spending the next year frantically looking for ways to KEEP taxes from going up.

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We’ve heard all about Virginia, New Jersey and New York, but there were some other interesting elections Tuesday that haven’t been as widely reported. Maine was the 31st state to let the voters decide on same-sex marriage, and for the 31st time, they said no. But in Washington, voters narrowly approved a bill to give same-sex couples in domestic partnerships legal rights equal to those of married couples, without calling the arrangement “marriage.” Maine did become the 5th state to okay retail dispensaries for medical marijuana, so they’re not entirely conservative.

Down in Atlanta, which went for Obama by 79 percent last year, Republican Mary Norwood got 46 percent of the vote for mayor. She’ll be the top candidate in a runoff. And College Station, Texas, joined the national revolt against red light cameras and voted to get rid of ‘em. Sounds like a lot of people are fed up with having a government nanny on every street corner.

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One of the rationales for the Cash for Clunkers program was that it would get gas guzzlers off the roads. Well, an A.P. analysis found that the #1 thing people bought was…new pickup trucks. The new pickups didn’t get much better mileage than the old ones they traded in, but people were 17 times more likely to buy a Ford F150 pickup than a Toyota Prius. That’s the problem with top-down government planning: people have this selfish habit of doing what works best for THEM.

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Well, you can’t just call it swine flu anymore. It’s been confirmed that a 13-year-old cat in Iowa is sick with the H1N1 virus. It had been found in birds and ferrets before, but experts had been saying it was beyond unlikely for the flu virus to be transmitted to pets like cats and dogs. Turns out the experts were wrong: it’s just EXTREMELY unlikely.

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