The President's Strange Love: or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Catfood.

"Social Security cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be."

--Representative Eric Cantor (R)

Pay attention folks, they're going for it for real this time. And they will succeed in taking a chunk out of it, because they have something this time around that they have never had before... An opponent that refuses to lead.

As President of the United States and de facto leader of the Democratic party, Barack Obama has repeatedly let one chamber of the legislative branch, Congress, frame every debate, and every news cycle. He continually compromises with opposition that claims they would support his stimulus package healthcare reform tax-break for the middle-class budget cuts raising of the debt ceiling, if he would only include more tax-cuts for the already obscenely wealthy and cut programs that help the poor. Then when Obama quickly acquiesces to Republican/Tea Party demands, they vote against it anyways or demand even more concessions. The latest shit sandwich compromise that Americans received in order to ensure continuity of governance is a prime example of this.

The Republican party threatened to shut down the government unless the Democrats cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Senator Jon Kyl even went as far as to claim that abortions are "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." How the fuck do you lose this argument?!? If you're response is anything other than "Jon Kyl is obviously lying. Abortions attribute for 3% of Planned Parenthood's medical services and the separate wing that handles abortions is privately funded because the Hyde Amendment strictly forbids the use of tax-payer money for abortions... And anyone who tells you otherwise is demonstrably lying, so when they shut down the government, it will be over a lie." If your argument is anything other than that, then clearly you don't want to win this argument.

Instead, the Republicans received seven billion dollars more in cuts to programs that help the poor and elderly than their initial $32 billion demand, and Washington D.C. our state capital is now denied access to Planned Parenthood. Social Security Reform is next on the agenda and the President's strange love of compromising our social services in the name of getting approval from those who would argue with their mailboxes, is quite frankly, making me really nervous.





- Mildly Brilliant