“Don’t expect,” blogging law professor William A. Jacobson writes, “much to be made of [Senator Ben] Nelson’s comments [“splitting with his party over the [Obamacare] mandate”], because only heretical comments by Republicans are newsworthy and a big deal.”
It does seem our friends in the MSM make much of divisions in the GOP, but downplay similar splits in the Democratic Party as just civil family misunderstandings that happen from time to time in a big, diverse happy movement. And while the Democrats are busy demagoguing Republican plans to reform Medicare as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed in his budget, in the federal legislative chamber where the Democrats still have a majority, members of the president’s party, in Andrew Stiles words . . .
. . . have now gone 750 days without passing a budget in the Senate, and Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.), the budget-committee chairman, has remained steadfastly aloof regarding his plans to move forward. Conrad’s hesitance should become even more glaringly obvious now that his go-to excuse — the ongoing nature of the so-called Gang of Six negotiations — has been rendered inoperative following Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R., Okla.) decision to “take a break” from the talks.
Conrad served on President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission and has spoken out frequently on the need for urgent action to address the debt problem. But when Conrad presented his initial budget proposal at a Democratic caucus meeting several weeks ago, he was all but chased out of the room by party leaders. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) warned members not to “draw lines” by signing on to any budget plan.
With the deficit now above one trillion dollars and the president expressing a commitment to confront out debt problem, the top Senate Democrat is telling members of his caucus to avoid committing to any budget plan. That’s rich. They’d rather attack the Republican plan than come up with one of their own.
You’d think this might be a story which would merit more attention in the mainstream media.
The Dems do seem to be following a Pretense strategy on our fiscal problem: keep everyone pretending that the problem isn’t too urgent (and/or that it does not exist), and then the problem won’t be urgent / won’t exist. Supposedly.
One must remember that modern liberalism is based on two things: complete relativism, and an utter hatred of anything arbitrary or absolute other than their own rightness.
A budget or a deficit reduction plan contradicts the latter and makes the former an obviously-untenable position.
That’s coming up right after the in-depth expose on which Yassir Obama cronies are getting the ObamaCareless waivers, who they contributed to and how much.
The Democrats are infusing socialism into the soft belly of bloated government and over time, the country will shed itself of its military might, its industrial core and its productive energy. It will be England without the Royalty.
The very rich will stay rich and the poor will be housed and fed and eventually some immigrant groups will bulkanize the cities and force the rule of law to accept new treaties to cope with new realities.
The middle class will be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and the black market will grow and tax evasion will be rife. Finally, the victim class will hold the reigns of government and they will chase the rich out of the country in droves by confiscatory taxation.
Show me a socialist country that has done otherwise.
The Democrats are trying to run out the clock with the 2012 budget; they want higher taxes to support their union shills who in turn give money back to the Democrats. The people, on the other hand, have no patience for such grandstanding.
According to the Powerline, the Democrats want to punt the ball on Medicare until it totally collapses so we will go into a Socailized single-payer medicine all that much faster:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/05/029063.php
However, given the total backlash of ObamaCare & its toxicity remains on top of the numerous new ObamaCare waivers, this looks like another path for destruction for the Democrat Party in the long run.
A fiscally conservative Democrat. Now there´s an oxymoron for you. Democrats do not know how to save a buck. Tax and Spend is a more appropriate description of a Democrat and thus it has been so since the days of FDR and the New Deal.
Here’s a thought… WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY!
Repeat as necessary.