That's the message. Even if you have to do MOST of it through budget reconciliation. GET IT DONE!

Pay for it by taking the cap off the payroll tax and returning tax rates, especially on interest and dividends, to Clinton-era levels. Put a minuscule tax on each and every stock transaction. (The public is SO ready for this after the way we bailed out Wall Street!)

Wall Street and the weasel will scream and holler. The public (except for the weaslites) will cheer!

If the RebCons scream too loudly, their approval ratings will drop even farther.

Dems -- GET IT DONE! (this is what we elected you for.)

Your approval ratings with go through the roof!

See above.

Underwritten by Murdoch, it has very little concern for profit. It is nothing more nor less than the mouthpiece and propaganda machine for RebCon wealthy corporatists, using con viewpoints so extreme as to be anti-American, to appeal to the psychological dysfunctions of their audience. If the Obama administration expects anyone on the weasel to do anything that doesn't follow that very narrow, rigid line, he's got a much bigger blind spot than I feared he might.

Not that he can attack them directly for that would energize their overwhelming, nauseating sense of victimhood ("orphan issues," anyone? Becky?) But he can, quite successfully, ignore them.

If he does so, as Becky has shown so clearly earlier in his career, their increasingly obnoxious, naughty, 2-year-old attention-seeking behavior, coming out of adults with sufficient resources to jump the shark quite spectacularly, may drive off some of the less dysfunctional members of their audience.

We can only hope that "naughty" behavior doesn't involve blowing up buildings or the like (but keep a watchful eye out).

Since many cemeteries around the country already use computerized systems to track who's buried where and record new burials, wouldn't it make better sense to contract to put a system which is already tested and functional in place rather than use "preferred contractors" to reinvent the wheel?

I can't help but suspect that these "preferred contractors" are like the people contracted to build new drainage pumps for New Orleans after Katrina. In that case, rather than using existing companies well-experienced in meeting such needs, some of Bushco's political cronies with no previous experience designing or building the massive special-purpose drainage pumps required, set up a new company and won the no-bid contract to build the pumps. The pumps they built had to be re-built and retrofitted after they were put in place because those who designed and built them had no idea what they were doing. In the end the total cost was far more expensive than the original bid.

It seems highly likely that the fact that "millions" have been spent on computerizing the tracking system for burials at Arlington is the result of the same practice, so prevalent throughout the government, especially anything military-related during Bushco: Politically-connected people with no experience or track record setting up a company to do something they don't know how to do, then winning the contract to do it by virtue of their political connections or an outrageously low-ball bid and eventually proving, despite multiple cost overruns, that they can't fulfill the contract.

The incompetent contractors then walk away with a huge chunk of public money in their pockets, never having produced anything of value, never being asked to pay back the money they've received for which the public received nothing of value in return. Crony Capitalism at it's Reb/Bushco best.