How nice was that! Whenever the repubs are allegedly in confusion, done as a party, and completely politically checkmated (as our sheeple describe them), President Obama races to their rescue and bails them out with a New Year's Cave-In.
Not content to wait one more day and claim the high-ground unopposed, Mr President chose to give away the leverage of all the Bush tax cuts expiring at midnight. It also punts away any leverage that those expirations might have had during the debt ceiling talks.
I expect this has been carefully crafted to make sure that a good healthy portion of social security cuts and medicare cuts are cut from the budget in exchange for getting republicon agreement on raising the debt ceiling. Checkmate! Obama gets what he and his fellow republicans wanted from the start....Longterm overhaul of entitlement programs. And Obama will go before the people and eloquently state that he didn't actually pursue entitlement reform, but he had to submit to it to avert the threat of default and as an act of compromise to assure nervous markets.
Compared to Obama, Eisenhower was a socialist. Obama and Reagan are almost 2 of a kind politically conservative. However, the Congress allowed Reagan to spend lavishly. So it almost looks like Reagan was to the left of Obama, too.
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