The White House is not having any of these Republican sequester-avoidance proposals  like raising the Medicare eligibility age. Press secretary Jay Carney rejected them as "terrible" on Thursday, pointing out that such policy proposals show just how insincere Republicans are with their rebranding efforts. As for the substance of what Republicans are fighting for: 

"It’s a series of measures that basically say that seniors, middle-class families, disabled kids and others will solely bear the burden of buying down the sequester while the weathiest get held harmless," Carney said. "I don’t know where Republicans have been of late, but that is not a winning approach. It is not an approach that the American people support, and it is not an approach that this president will accept.

"We need balance. It is not acceptable to say, seniors, the bill is in the mail, bail us out, but you know those who enjoy the benefit of a loophole for their corporate jet or get subsidies for their large and profitable oil or gas company, we're not going to ask anything of you," he said. "...That’s what apparently House Republicans are saying. We've heard that before and the American public said 'no thank you.' So we need, we can make tough choices but we have to do it in a way that is balanced and fair for everybody."

It is a not a stretch of the imagination to assume that the few wealthy people who control Congress are many of the same individuals who were on Sanders’ list of the 26 billionaires - Link  who tried to buy the 2012 election. Sen. Sanders was correct. The way to take back our elections is to get all of the special interest money out of politics.

Look west after sunset in early and mid-March for Comet PanSTARRS. Binoculars may be needed to pick it out of the sunset glow. Look too early and the sky will be too bright; too late and the comet will be too low. On the altitude scale at left, 10° is about the width of your fist held at arm's length.This diagram is drawn for a viewer near 40° north latitude. If you're south of there, the comet will be a little higher above your horizon early in the month than shown here. North of 40°, it will be even lower in early March than shown here, but higher than here as it fades after midmonth.

Sky & Telescope diagram

John Nichols, a columnist for The Nation, has exposed yet another Republican-backed scheme to rig the electoral college. - LINK

Under the plan now being entertained by Pennsylvania Republicans, electoral votes would be distributed based on the percentage of the vote received by the contenders. Had the plan been in place in 2012, President Obama, who won 52 percent of the Pennsylvania popular vote, would have gotten 11 or 12 electoral votes, while Republican Mitt Romney would have gotten 8 or 9. 

That looks like a more reasonable result than under the plan for allocating by congressional district results, which would have given Romney most of Pennsylvania's electoral votes despite Obama's popular vote win. 

But here's where things get tricky. If Pennsylvania and other swing states that tend to back Democrats move to the proportional model, while big states such as Texas and Georgia that have been voting Republican stick with a winner-take-all plan, they will lock in a national advantage for the Republicans. 

The Pennsylvania initiative may not be quite as "sweet" for Republicans as the initial Priebus plan. But if states that vote Democratic assign substantial numbers of their electoral votes to the Republican loser, while states that vote Republican make no such concession, it will be a lot easier to chart a course where a Republican nominee who is trounced in the national popular vote might still "win" the electoral vote and the presidency.

The Great Gerrymandering of 2012 - LINK 

HAVING the first modern democracy comes with bugs. Normally we would expect more seats in Congress to go to the political party that receives more votes, but the last election confounded expectations. Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II. 

Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based political group dedicated to electing state officeholders, recently issued a progress report on Redmap, its multiyear plan to influence redistricting. The $30 million strategy consists of two steps for tilting the playing field: take over state legislatures before the decennial Census, then redraw state and Congressional districts to lock in partisan advantages. The plan was highly successful. 

I have developed approaches to detect such shenanigans by looking only at election returns. To see how the sleuthing works, start with the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats. In November, five states failed to clear even this low bar: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

Now let’s do something more subtle. We can calculate each state’s appropriate seat breakdown — in other words, how a Congressional delegation would be constituted if its districts were not contorted to protect a political party or an incumbent. We do this by randomly picking combinations of districts from around the United States that add up to the same statewide vote total. Like a fantasy baseball team, a delegation put together this way is not constrained by the limits of geography. On a computer, it is possible to create millions of such unbiased delegations in short order. In this way, we can ask what would happen if a state had districts that were typical of the rest of the nation. 

We need to adopt a statistically robust judicial standard for partisan gerrymandering. In the Supreme Court’s Vieth v. Jubelirer case, in 2004, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted against intervention in chicanery in Pennsylvania, but left the door open for future remedies elsewhere if a clear standard could be established.

“Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission.” 

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session. - U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 3

On January 25, 2013, a three judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued  a decision (PDF) that was, in my view,  stunning in its partisan hackery. What it does, in essence, is eliminate the President's power to make recess appointments, despite the text of Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution.

The DC appeals court panel thrust itself into the political struggle between President Obama and the Republican caucus  in the House (this is due to the need for both houses of Congress having to agree to an adjournment (or recess?)  regarding the power of the President to name members of his Administration. It did so by legitimizing the Republican minority's use of the filibuster to prevent the President from naming members of his Administration subject to confirmation and delegitimizing the president's power to make recess appointments in response to Republican obstructionism.  

Click on Chart - Larger Image

A Nixon-Appointed Supreme Court Justice Powell Set The Stage For Ruling Against Obama’s Recess Appointments  - LINK 

Not satisfied with hundreds of years of precedent and court rulings upholding the practice of recess appointments, Republicans found President Obama’s appointments “too labor-oriented,” and a PepsiCo distributor, Noel Canning, unhappy with a ruling against them in a union dispute, rather than appealing the ruling itself, challenged the legitimacy of the board in court, resulting in this recent decision. 

Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. (September 19, 1907 – August 25, 1998) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He developed a reputation as a judicial moderate, and was known as a master of compromise and consensus-building. 

He was known for drafting the Powell Memorandum, a confidential memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce that described a road map to defend and further their concept of free-enterprise capitalism against real and/or perceived socialist, communist, and fascist cultural trends. .WIKI

Corporate Power - from Starlight News  - LINK

Venus and Mars  - LINK

Mutations in 77-Month Recurrence Pattern since 1960

Aberrations in the Venus-Mars Cycle
By Robert P. Blaschke  - LINK