Barack Obama will win the 2012 electionFollow

From your lips, to the RNCs' ears.

Ahh so the idiots managed to agree on something I am impressed. Several Billion concession from the Dems, and dropping stupid tacked on **** from the GOP, why was this not done a week ago/month ago. Honestly, its like children in a school yard playing tag, and no one wants to be it.

Somewhat of a tangent, but I've been listening to commentary on the situation from pundits outside the U.S., and the general mood seems to be that of utter befuddlement and bemusement. That a national government might be shutdown in such a way is such entirely absurd to them because many other governments have parliamentary systems where the separation of powers is not so strong and thus it is harder for one group to block another (such as different parties control different branches or even splitting the Congress), because many other governments have fallback that kick into place should they fall to pass a budget, and because they can't understand how what the parties are fighting over could be so important that it'd be worth shutting down the government rather than capitulating.

Quick gbaji, here's an idiot who you can quote to back up your ridiculous understanding of parliamentary systems.

Edited, Apr 9th 2011 11:16am by Uglysasquatch

We have a caretaker government, which means pretty much everything is stopped. IE. non existent.

LOL

Well, it's good to see that you can take getting rolled and call it a great thing. :D

By the way, 65% said funding for Planned Parenthood should continue and 71% support keeping the EPA rules regulating greenhouse gases. No wonder people think that Obama & the Democrats were the ones who acted like a big boy vs the GOP by a 13 pt margin.

But, yeah... next time when they defend blocking those riders, it'll REALLY make everyone say "Grrrrr Democrats!"

Those riders were not violations of that pledge. I already countered this argument earlier in this thread. The riders were specific to budget items and were contained in a budget bill. Where the hell else would you put spending restrictions except in such a bill? What the pledge was talking about was putting completely unrelated amendments into bills. That's not the case here.



Ah... The "No other conservatives are making the same argument, so you must be wrong!!" argument. Gotta love this one. No, really! But your crazy cousin is clearly the only representative of what conservatives think, right? Lol!




Which is why your argument is wrong. I'm not talking about the nutters, but those who understand how the coming budget battle is going to go. Overwhelmingly, this was about showing how willing the Dems were to put their pet projects ahead of things which most Americans think are more important.




That's an unfair characterization though. They are those programs which happen to meet the axe-cutting criteria of *both* the religious right and the fiscal right. They are clearly not necessary things for the federal government to spend money on *and* they happen to be overwhelmingly opposed by a largish segment of the population. Where else would you start if your objective is to cut unnecessary spending? With programs that are overwhelmingly popular with most Americans? Or those over which there is a degree of controversy anyway?




So you'll hear on the left leaning blogs and news sources. I can find just as many right leaning sources who'll claim with just as much certainty that the Dems wanted to shut down the government as well. We could play that finger pointing game all day and all night and not get anywhere, so how about we just ignore that as background rhetoric and focus on more factual aspects of the issue?



Lied about what? And who are you talking about? You seem to be switching from tea party to republicans and pundits and politicians willy nilly in order to make your point. You do understand that there are many opinions on something like this, and not all of them are going to agree, even when they are nominally "on the same side"? I know that Joph loves to make hay out of this, but it's perfectly normal. Heck, it's healthy.


At the end of the day, this was a continuing resolution from last years budget, which the Dems failed to pass a bill on. This was "free cuts" from the point of view of the GOP. As I've been saying all along, the main point of this exercise is to gauge the Dems reaction to the important budget cut proposals which will be coming up and to set the stage for the inevitable fight which will occur. And on that aspect of this, they absolutely won. That they also got 38+ Billion dollars in cuts which they would not have gotten otherwise is pure bonus.

Edited, Apr 11th 2011 8:07pm by gbaji

Ive noticed when Gbaji is fighting his way up a slippery slope he tends to use a lot of words ,Never retreat always reload I always say....



Edited, Apr 12th 2011 2:00am by rdmcandie

Too bad Mike is an advocate for Americans being force-fed Christianity at gunpoint. Otherwise he might actually be a viable candidate.

Huh. In the "I did not know that" file, the total cuts announced from the Friday night compromise include the cuts already passed in the previous continuing resolutions. It wasn't $39B in new cuts on top of the cuts in the CRs.

That's even weaker than I thought, given that those previous cuts were all things Obama had been asking for (hence their use in the CRs as low-hanging fruit to get the CRs passed).

They included a rider de-listing the Montana wolf from the Endangered Species list. Obviously a pressing budgetary concern.

Edited, Apr 12th 2011 7:44am by Jophiel

More to the point, they sat and crowed about their "Military Funding Bill" to "keep the troops paid in the event of a shut down because you DO love the troops RIGHT??" and tagged a completely unrelated abortion rider onto it. Strangely, no one ever called it the "Pay the Troops & Stop Abortion Bill". It was as blatant an example of quietly bundling unpopular legislation into a "must pass" measure as you'll find.

So what you're saying is that its okay as long as someone else did it as well, even after promising not to do it.