hipmatt, I usually stay away from political commentary because too many people already spend too much time in political debate, in my view. But you are an intelligent person, so I will just interject to say that professional Republicans and Democrats appear to be united in their goal of expanding government, to provide short-term benefits for their most vocal or powerful constituencies.
Those constituencies are different, but instead of that difference acting as a harness around their delivery of more govt for the interests they represent, it simply leads to laws that spend most of what the money one side wants as long as the other side gets to spend most of what they want too. Just look at how the political class modified the 700bn spending bill that was rejected at first: they added another 150bn in spending. That was what the professional political class calculated was most likely to turn their fellow pols. And it worked.
