Stockholm Syndrome, With Fantasy Road Trips

Well, it seems the government's not shutting down. I guess that means I have to do my taxes.

This is pathetic:

“Today, Americans of different beliefs came together,” Obama said. He said the cuts would be painful but necessary to maintain the country’s fiscal health. “We protected the investments we need to win the future.”

This is going to cost over a million jobs. Can someone explain to me how that's going to maintain the country's fiscal health? And what investments did he protect? You have to give the Republicans credit, though -- when we hit the second part of the double-dip recession, Obama's going to own it. Good move.

And you have to love WaPo -- they swallowed the BS that is Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Scott Walkerstan) "Path to Prosperity":

Already, many Republicans have called for the party to finish this fight, and focus on a much more ambitious one over the 2012 budget. This week, the House Budget Committee approved a plan that, over 10 years, would save $6 trillion.

The fight over the 2011 budget “is the first bite of the apple,” said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the budget committee chairman and the architect of that proposal. “We want to get billions in savings and then we want to move on to get trillions in savings.”

Ryan's fantasy is a bold stroke toward making the U.S. an official banana republic. Read Paul Krugman on Ryan's "plan." (Just start at the top and scroll down -- he's been devoting a lot of space to it over the past few days.) The difference is that Krugman's an economist, and he even knows how to do math; Ryan is an ideologue, and doesn't. WaPo, of course, thinks that Ryan is Serious. I have to wonder what WaPo considers a Joke.

This is choice, talking about the stand-off and the "negotiations."

And none of them wanted to be the first to blink. That might have set a damaging precedent for future fights with higher stakes, over the decision to raise the national debt limit, and to pass a 2012 budget.

Obama blinked two years ago, when he ditched the public option in the health-care reform bill, and has never recovered. The Republicans are masters of demanding the outrageous and settling for the extreme, and he's never called them on it. And now he's starting to act as though he likes it that way.

WaPo makes one observation that may be more accurate than they realized:

And in the White House, President Obama seemed interested in cementing his role as a calm mediator, a CEO.

We've seen the kind of crap that CEOs come up with in this country -- is that what we want running things?