I have been saying they would have a deal done by today and voila, here it is:
"Deal ends shutdown, avoids default"by Noah Bierman and Mattias Gugel | Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, October 17, 2013
WASHINGTON — Congress, dueling to the final hour, voted late Wednesday to avoid a potentially catastrophic default on the nation’s debts and halt a 16-day government shutdown that showcased congressional dysfunction....
I'm $ick of the hyperbole. They have already defaulted on so many promi$es.
Even that relatively modest achievement sent the Dow Jones industrial average up 206 points, with the biggest gains chalked up early in the day as the deal came together....
Well, as long as Wall Street is happy then I'm happy.
Of course, Wall $treet is never happy.
Conservative foot soldiers remained unswayed throughout the ordeal by appeals from establishment voices, including the Chamber of Commerce, conservative strategist Karl Rove, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. The insurgents sounded defeated on Wednesday, but hardly chastened by the experience....
Those are great names in favor of the establishment, huh? Yeah, line up with them criminals. Why isn't Rove in jail, Democrats?
The fight that preceded Wednesday’s deal has prevented Congress from doing anything else for most of the past month. Once-prominent discussions over national security were halted. A bipartisan push for an immigration overhaul lies dormant....
Well, we shall see what comes out after all our attention has been diverted for the past month with this s*** show fooley.
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Related: Other DC Doings
Nothing else according to today's Globe.
"Relief from debt deal will be short-lived; Agreement sets deadlines for next round in unending partisan battles" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, October 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — It means that for all the talk of tectonic battles and doomsday scenarios, the decisions this week will not be the end of the debate. It will instead mark the continuation of a drawn-out process that forces the nation — from Wall Street stock traders to average heartland constituents — to endure similar fights in a matter of weeks.
It's kicking the can down the road, but it is also a useful vehicle for keeping the American people perpetually divided by false paradigm of party affiliation after we all rose up and said NO to the Israeli war agenda in Syria.
As the current chapter lurched to a close, the reaction was not so much relief as despair and anger over the state of things in Washington....
Blah, blah, blah.
The most recent crisis was instigated largely by Republicans backed by the Tea Party movement, who insisted that the government not be funded unless President Obama’s health care law was delayed or defunded.
I'm glad the agenda-pushing Globe applies blame.
GOP leaders opposed the strategy, predicting that it would not work and likely backfire. They were right. It failed miserably. Republicans were unable to extract any concessions from Obama on his signature legislation.
They didn't need to; he already exempted employers, eliminated out-of-pocket caps, and postponed some other requirement that eludes me at the moment.
Some moderate voices in the GOP are now optimistic that arch-conservatives will begin to listen to the party’s wiser, cooler hands — and be more open to compromise as pressure builds to cut long-lasting fiscal deals.
When you see this subtle and slanted agenda-pushing framing of the debate the general rule is you are for who the propaganda pre$$ is against.
“Hopefully, having inflicted this much self-torture on themselves, they will be able to do it now,” said Judd Gregg, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire. “Maybe we had to go through this process to show people [hard-line Republicans] weren’t interested in governing. They were only interested in their own cults. They basically cost us a lot of credibility.”
(Blog editor just shakes his head)
That may be wishful thinking. Conservatives emerged unrepentant from this week’s House defeat and vowed to continue their fight — against both Democrats and their own party leaders.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, an outside group that aims to elect conservative Republicans, sent out an e-mail to supporters this week, blasting Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell for “negotiating the Republican surrender” with Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
“He would rather concede to the Democrats than fight them,” Matt Hoskins, the group’s executive director, wrote in the e-mail. “He would rather fund Obamacare than admit conservatives were right.”
That helps define the political atmosphere in which the House and Senate Republicans will find themselves as the current crisis winds down and the next series of events looms. Under the Senate deal, the government, in its 16th day of shutdown on Wednesday, would be reopened and funded until Jan. 15.
The debt ceiling, which allows the US Treasury to borrow money to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized, would be raised to permit new bond issues until Feb. 7.
Meaning they want to put us FURTHER INTO DEBT!
There would also be a separate budget conference committee that would deal with longer-term spending issues. It would be required to deliver recommendations by mid-December.
That committee, made up of House and Senate members, is eerily reminiscent of the so-called Super Committee that was formed in 2011 to solve similar problems. When that committee failed to broker a compromise, it triggered deep automatic budget cuts known as the sequester.
Which truthfully looks like what both parties wanted while blaming the other guy for divisive political purposes.
Indeed, this Congress’s track record suggests that any far-reaching budget deal will prove elusive, with such efforts failing to produce major action in August 2011, which was the last debt-ceiling crisis, and again at the end of 2012, the so-called fiscal cliff.
See: Sunday Globe Specials: Fiscal Cliff Fraud
How is that for a tax "increase" on the wealthy?
Reining in spending on Medicare and Social Security, tax reform, and reducing deficits — all issues that have certain measures of bipartisan support — remain unresolved....
The way the debate on Capitol Hill has unfolded has left just about everyone looking foolish. Republicans put forward unrealistic demands. When Democrats refused to negotiate, Republicans appeared even more wounded, given their intraparty squabbles and polls that showed that Americans blamed them for the crisis more than they blamed Democrats....
I told you the agenda-pushing ma$$ media would play it that way at the beginning of the month.
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I wish I hadn't opened it in the first place.
