The government faces a fourth year of trillion-plus deficits in 2012, according to new projections released Tuesday—numbers which also show little relief in the future unless Washington comes to grips with needed changes in its tax and spending policies.

Like Aunt Cassandra coming down from the attic, the Congressional Budget Office steps squarely into the 2012 campaign season with the 147-page report which might have been subtitled “It’s not just the economy stupid, it’s also the debt.”

The $1.079 trillion deficit now projected for this fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is a step backwards from what CBO had predicted in August. And to punch home its message, the non-partisan agency outlines an especially grim scenario in which Congress not only extends all the current Bush-era tax cuts but pulls the plug on the $1.2 trillion in sequester set in motion by the Budget Control Act last summer.

Under this scenario—which can’t be ruled out politically—deficits would stubbornly hover just under $1 trillion through 2017, adding another $4.7 trillion altogether to the mounting federal debt.

Under the more prudent—and many would say unrealistic— scenario of ending tax breaks and implementing cuts, the cumulative deficits would be $1.72 trillion or $3 trillion less from 2013-2017. But even this path comes with a warning from CBO: that debt service costs are already on the rise and will command an ever greater share of the annual budget.

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Read more at Politico.com HERE.

A new InsiderAdvantage poll conducted Sunday night of likely Republican voters in the state of Florida shows a significant surge for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The poll has former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading with 36 percent of voters, followed by Gingrich at 31 percent.

The Sunday results of 646 likely GOP voters are as follows:
Romney 36 percent
Gingrich 31 percent
Santorum 12 percent
Paul 12 percent
Other/Undecided 9 percent
“The race will be tighter than expected,” Matt Towery, chief pollster of InsiderAdvantage told Newsmax.

Towery noted that his poll showed a surge for Romney on Wednesday, with him leading Gingrich by 8 points. The InsiderAdvantage poll was among the first to show Romney’s resurgence after his dismal showing in the S. Carolina primary.

Read More at Newsmax

A former intern for Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney says that contradictory to the camp’s statements, the former Massachusetts governor did authorize flyers in 2002 that championed LGBT rights. The conflict is only the most recent in decades of both endorsement and criticism of legalized same-sex marriage, DADT, and other equal rights efforts.

The Manhattan Institute’s Josh Barro told BuzzFeed that “a full-time staffer” organized the dissemination of pink flyers stating Romney’s support for LGBT equal rights. On Jan. 8, one of Romney’s campaign spokesmen told The Huffington Post that the fliers were not campaign literature, despite the fact that “Paid for by the Romney for Governor Committee” was printed on the bottom of each flyer.

“I don’t know where those pink flyers came from. I was the communications director on the 2002 campaign. I don’t know who distributed them. …I never saw them and I was the communications director,” Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s chief spokesman, told The Huffington Post.

Barro told BuzzFeed that, “On pride weekend, the campaign sent a contingent of about a half-dozen of us to the post-parade festival on Boston Common to hand out those flyers.”

In addition to denying knowledge of the flyers, Fehrnstorm also said that Romney had never supported civil union rights for same-sex couples.

Read more at EdgeBoston.com HERE.

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Soros doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.

He’s not even doing the one thing that you would expect from a man who knows a crippled currency when he sees one: shorting the euro, and perhaps even the U.S. dollar, to hell. Quite the reverse. He backs the beleaguered euro, publicly urging European leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure its survival. “The euro must survive because the alternative—a breakup—would cause a meltdown that Europe, the world, can’t afford.” He has bought about $2 billion in European bonds, mainly Italian, from MF Global Holdings Ltd., the securities firm run by former Goldman Sachs head Jon Corzine that filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Has the great short seller gone soft? Well, yes. Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

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Read more at TheDailyBeast.com HERE.