Congress Passes Budget

Let's hope Obama knows what the fuck he's doing, because OMFG $3.5 trillion dollars:

Congressional Democrats overwhelmingly embraced President Obama's ambitious and expensive agenda for the nation yesterday, endorsing a $3.5 trillion spending plan that sets the stage for the president to pursue his most far-reaching priorities.

Voting along party lines, the House and Senate approved budget blueprints that would trim Obama's spending proposals for the fiscal year that begins in October and curtail his plans to cut taxes. The blueprints, however, would permit work to begin on the central goals of Obama's presidency: an expansion of health-care coverage for the uninsured, more money for college loans and a cap-and-trade system to reduce gases that contribute to global warming.

The measures now move to a conference committee where negotiators must resolve differences between the two chambers, a prelude to the more difficult choices that will be required to implement Obama's initiatives. While Democrats back the president's vision for transforming huge sectors of the economy, they remain fiercely divided over the details.

My greatest fear, especially given the administration's silly emphasis on bipartisanship so far, is that any decent plan that has its details hammered out via two-party negotiations will also have any chance at efficacy hammered out, too. I don't know how many unassailably great ideas for spending this money the Dems actually have, to be perfectly frank, but, if they've got any, they'd better be prepared to fiercely defend them against being bipartisanized into complete rubbish.

The Republicans have been pretty clear they want Obama's initiatives (if not his entire presidency) to fail, which ought to be, if the administration and the Congressional Democrats had spines, as good as saying, "We are not operating in good faith and you should not negotiate with us."

The GOP should be cut out of the process as much as possible, not because of spite, not because that's the way they've been doing business for the past 8 years, but because their party line is defeating Obama's policies, despite the fact that he (and a Democratic majority) were voted into office largely on the basis that more Americans than not are sick to fuck of Republicanism.

In fact, the Dems would do well to remember that they were voted in to clean up a Republican mess, and that handing them a broom is less likely to result in a clean floor than a sharpened handle to the gut.

Republicans blasted the Democratic budget as a reckless manifesto that would greatly expand the size of government and double the national debt within five years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he feared the consequences of a budget that "calls for a dramatic and potentially irreversible shift of our nation to the left in the areas of health care, education and private enterprise."

Um, yeah. That's kind of the whole point, because the "dramatic and potentially irreversible shift of our nation" to the right is what got us into the ginormous clusterfucktastrophe from which we've now got to attempt to extricate ourselves before we go right off the fucking cliff.

That's exactly the kind of bullshit about which I'm talking: Fuck Mitch McConnell and fuck his despicable, unethical, ignorant, self-interested, voraciously avaricious party and the elephant they rode in on. We tried their ideas and they didn't work, and even in the face of insurmountable, undeniable evidence that their crackpot, trickle-down, voodoo, social Darwinist, Gilded Age Reloaded policies are abject, catastrophic failures, they still won't get the fuck on board with trying it someone else's way.

Not only is wanting to do the same thing over and over but expecting a different result the very definition of insanity, it's also fucking stupid, and, when the country's future is on the line, it's borderline traitorous at that.

So lock 'em out. And if they want to whine, let 'em whine. They should consider themselves lucky they're not being lined up and shot alongside the treasonous bastards who are holding us hostage over their goddamned bonuses while 10% of the nation is now on food stamps.