Democrats, meanwhile, can work to prove their openness to compromise because that's what both their base and independents want them to do

How can they work to prove anything about themselves, everything is done behind closed doors?  Much of Obama's base doesn't even trust him anymore because of that.  Debate the a-holes item by item in the public arena, let the public see you making certain compromises and let them see the Republicans simply being d*cks. This would let the public voice be heard on specific issues they want Democrats to stand their ground on.  All our leaders want to do is lump everything together, make dirty backroom deals, and nobody comes out clean and trustworthy on the other side and the Democrats consistently STINK of complicity with Independents and now much of the Democratic base.

It is of course disgusting.  But one has to admire the brinksmanship here.  The Dems offered up billions more in cuts to save Planned Parenthood, and when the Dems caved, they moved the goal posts.

One wonders how things would have turned out if the Dems had taken such a hard stance on Iraq funding in 2006.

And, that quaint notion in 2009 of eschewing reconciliation on most things to avoid appearing too heavy handed.  The Republicans would have never done such an idiotic thing.

they've all won in the post WW2 affluence of bureaucracy - better prep school essays, better prep school prep for interviews, better prep for college entrance, better SAT prep and scores, better GRE and LSAT prep and scores -

they have NOT been part of the bottom 80% and 90% getting $crewed for 30 years - BUT - they read "Nickled and Dimed"!

I grew up on welfare & I've been a support serf for 30 years in Boston and in Seattle (and I ain't complaining) - fine dining cook for yuppies in Boston 20+ years ago, email server support & database support  at Microsoft for all kinds of yuppies, math teacher suffering the slings and arrows of deformist yuppies from Bill Gate's crowd of michelle rhee toadies -

oh yeah - and a fly on the wall - grunt in sundry Democratic campaigns over the decades.

THE strategy and THE tactic has been - FIT IN. Don't rock the boat, you won't get to know the people who kick it on Beacon Hill or Queen Anne. FIT IN = we're smarter, we're nobler, we're better ... they're meaner, they're untruth-ier, they're un-trust-full-ier.

DON'T call lying stealing scum doing the dirty work of rich pigs on top what they are, cuz in leafy neighborhoods it is all about obfuscation and being positive and being un-negative and un-angry -

DON'T call thieving scum who are helping pigs stay pigs and stay on top stealing lying scum.

Let's one-up each other on our eco-trip to Amazonia ...

Kevin Drum wrote a conventional wisdom piece about the split in the Dim party between unions the rights crowd - he missed the FACT that the "leaders" of ALL orgs Dem are upper middle cla$$ veal penish dilettantes.

Here is the poll.  This is Front Page Diary at Big Orange.

Numerous GOP and Democratic sources on and off Capitol Hill tell National Journal that the outline of the deal is as follows: up to $39 billion in cuts from the 2010 budget, $514 billion for the defense budget covering the remainder of this fiscal year, a GOP agreement to abandon controversial policy riders dealing with Planned Parenthood and the EPA, and an agreement to pass a "bridge" continuing resolution tonight to keep the government operating while the deal is written in bill form [...]

The proposal under review could form the basis of an agreement on a six-month continuing resolution that averts a government shutdown of longer than a few days. The prospective measure would cut spending by about $39 billion from current levels, two aides said. It would not include a ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but part of the arrangement would likely be an unspecified and symbolic procedural step intended to give Boehner and conservatives political cover on the issue, the aides said. Democratic appear to have accepted an increased level of cuts in exchange for the GOP dropping the rider.

Who wants to calculate the cost of "saving" Planned Parenthood and the EPA?

David Dayen and Ryan Grim:

You have to go back to the initial numbers to see the magnitude of this policy loss. In December, when a continuing resolution for the rest of the year was getting negotiated, the level of funding for FY 2011 was markedly higher than it will be under this deal. Ryan Grim runs the numbers.

The difference comes from the starting point. Democrats are working off of the president's requested budget for the fiscal year, which was $1.128 trillion. That's the same baseline that House Republicans used when they cut $102 billion with their first bill, H.R. 1, bringing the spending down to $1.026 trillion.

But there is a number that realistically could have become law, and that's the one that was proposed by Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). Known as the Sessions-McCaskill level, it blew up in December over a fight over earmarks, but it had the broad support of both parties in general.

That figure was $1.108 trillion -- $58 billion above what Democrats are now willing to accept.

That was written before this latest deal, so it's actually $59 billion. And the benefit for exchanging the Making Work Pay tax cut with the payroll tax cut, one of the only changes in the tax cut deal that didn't simply extend current law? $60 billion. So if you accept that Democrats could have gotten Sessions-McCaskill into the tax cut deal, four months later almost the ENTIRE stimulus from the payroll tax cut is gone. Completely. As Ryan notes, "The focus on Planned Parenthood may be distracting from a dramatic GOP victory on spending."

The $513 defense budget is precisely the level that Senate appropriators targeted back in December. So the defense budget is basically getting out of this untouched. Republicans tried to up that defense budget above the Pentagon's request, so that was beaten back.

This means that all $29 billion in cuts - remember $10 billion have already been enacted - will come from the non-defense budget. The latest on that is that about half will come from the discretionary budget, and half from mandatory spending. This spreads the pain, but there's a great deal of uncertainty about what those cuts will mean in the specifics.

Planned Parenthood and other social issues protected by Dems

GOP gets the level of cuts everyone has been discussing.

The views expressed here do not represent the views of the majority of the democratic party.

Full stop.

Now we can argue back and forth about whether the democratic party needs to move to the left in the way that the GOP was moved right, first by the christian coalition, and now by the tea party.  But that's a different argument than the reality of the party right now.

Which is fundamentally why it appears to some that my sole goal here is to be some kind of Obama cheer leader. I like the guy but the bigger point I try to make is that Obama is a reflection of the core of the party.  What is being attacked isn't just Obama, but the core beliefs of people like me and the majority of the party.  When he is accused of betraying the democrats, what I think is really meant is that he is betraying more left wing members of the democratic party who hoped he'd pull the party left.

As a general matter, I think he's governing pretty much the way that the large base of the democratic party wants him to govern.  There is no betrayal.  He's doing what he said he'd do from the start. He ran on "change" and the central plank of that change wasn't to drag the country left on everything.  It was pragmatism. Bipartisanship.  This is what he campaigned on. This is what his base wants from him.

They should all be 'tarred & feathered' for allowing this country to have this type of avoidable (synthetically generated) "crisis".

I can't wait for the 2011 budget fight.  Like him or not/agree with him or not at least Paul Ryan had the intestional fortitude to propose something.  I'm still waiting for Polesi/Reed to stop whinning & throwing stones and propose something substanitive...

And the less said about the State of the Union and the subsequent budget, the better. "Winning the future" has come at the expense of a plan for the present. Obama's budget doesn't include investments of the size needed to change the trajectory of our economy, and it also waves the white flag on doing more for the unemployed -- and the economy in general -- right now. The best you can say about the budget is that it's smart defense -- but given the criticism it received upon its introduction and the fact that we don't know where the final compromise will fall between the Obama administration's tepid opening bid and Rep. Paul Ryan's radical counterproposal, it's not even clear that it'll succeed at that.