Thought that might get a response...

I can't deny your point on the President's stuborn stance... but that wasn't my point.

My point was that in holding the President's feet to the spending fire, we are less than 20 days from reaching the debt limit established in 1917 by the Second Liberty Bond Act, which created an aggregate limit on all government debt incurred by Congressional spending.

If no compromise is reached, no money can be spent... thus, the President cannot sign the check for the interest due on debt. In short, government stops... again.

However, my point doesn't negate yours: if the spending doesn't stop, nothing gets fixed.

I'm not looking forward to another two years of recession, and as long as the reasons for the shut down are legitimate and measurably shown to stem from a real attempt to reduce spending by "conservatives"... I'll do my best to grin and bear it. But if this is all a dance for the vote of confidence for Tea Party wannabes running for the White House in 2012, then I'm going to be pissed to no end.

As I have repeatedly pointed out (over and over again), NO President since Andrew Jackson... GOP or otherwise... has ever REDUCED spending while in office. In fact, no one did it before Jackson, either. Every other President we've ever had has spent more than the last... and while no one can hold a candle to Obama's spree, the last GOP President we had was every bit a spendthrift, too.

Who among today's candidates is going to CUT spending? And I don't mean just back to pre-Obama... I mean to pre-Bush, too. Is that going to happen even with a GOP victory in 2012?