For nearly a week, the news folks have droned on and on about the fiscal curb of expiring Bush 43 tax cuts and sequestering cuts in federal spending that will occur at the end of this year. It’s like everyone’s desperate for real news. And there won’t be any real news, unless President Obama decides to give in on the Bush 43 tax cuts or somehow decides that Romney’s fraudulent math is no longer a sign of lunacy.

The best coverage I’ve read or seen on this has been on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC, as he recognized early on the difference between higher taxes immediately on January 1, 2013 and gradual but steady cuts for the federal budget over a twelve-month period. Still, O’Donnell’s cliché for the alleged cliff — the final scene of Thelma & Louise (1991), in which the two commit suicide by driving off a cliff into the Grand Canyon — has been so overused that it doesn’t quite get at the mania of both the media and the neocons on this issue of taxes and budget cuts.

Hence the above — albeit low resolution — one-minute clip from Lethal Weapon (1987), where the crazy suicidal character played by Mel Gibson forces a potential suicidal jumper to jump off a building (a better clip is on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOP6uMTYaM8). Now I know that Gibson has become a punchline in recent years, an aging and raging racist drunk. But that wasn’t his persona in ’87, and certainly not in this scene, where he forces the equivalent of Boehner, Cantor and McConnell off the ledge. “Do you really wanna jump? Do you?” Mr. O’Donnell, this is the clip you should’ve ran with last week!