Star One Smart Blog's

Boehner Wins Big:

President Obama’s 2011 budget called for a spending increase of $40 billion. Tonight, he touted a bipartisan agreement on “the largest annual spending cut in our history” — some $38.5 billion [emphasis added]. All told, he got $78.5 billion less than he originally requested.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) didn’t want to cut anything at first. But bowing to political reality, eventually ponied up about $4.7 billion in cuts. He ended up with $33.8 billion less spending than he wanted. And he called it an “historic” accomplishment. (Not surprisingly, the left is appalled).

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), on the other hand, initially proposed $32 billion in spending cuts. House Republicans, led by an undaunted freshman class, bumped that number up to $61 billion ($100 billion off the president’s budget), before settling on $38.5 billion. That’s $6.5 billion more than Boehner asked for to begin with, and $5.5 billion more than the $33 billion that Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats claimed had been agreed to less than two weeks ago. It remains to be seen how much of that will be cuts to discretionary spending, but all told it would appear that we’'ll see a substantial reduction in baseline spending that will yield hundreds of billions in savings over the next decade.

But unlike Obama and Reid, the speaker didn’t quite feel the need to pat himself on the back over it. “We fought to keep government spending down,” he told reporters in a brief speech after the deal was announced. And they’ll keep fighting, because the biggest battles — over the debt limit and the 2012 budget — are still to come.

Standing waaaaay back and looking at the (lack of) carnage, we won a pretty good handful of meager cuts and now have an opportunity to frame the debate the next battle: How Much to cut, and Where to Cut; not Should we Cut?. We’ll have to get behind the Tea Party supporters who are the ‘front line’ cutting-edge of Conservatism and deride the ‘soft’ pragmatics who represent the Blue-Blood, original pre-Tea GOP.

The $38.5 B we wrested from Obama is a far cry from $61 B we wanted, but it represents a sea change in narrative: Republicans forced the Petulant President and Harry Reid's Democratic-controlled Senate to cut the damned budget. Obama and Democrats are probably looking back on their October decision to ignore the 2010 budget until after the election (to avoid getting shellacked even more than they did) and wishing they'd had the balls to force it through when they had both houses; now, they can only look back and despair.

Meanwhile, Democrats (again) demonstrated their willingness to throw our military under the bus whilst fighting for their rights to kill their unwanted children.

Planned Parenthood: "Code Pustulant"

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