This isn’t the first time this has happened with the Keystone Kongress.

It was the fifth straight day of talks, but the first in which attendees, speaking on background, were willing to admit that steps were taken backwards. According to multiple sources, disagreements surfaced early, in the middle and at the end of the nearly two-hour talks. At issue was Cantor’s repeated push to do a short-term resolution and Obama’s insistence that he would not accept one.

“Eric don’t call my bluff. I’m going to the American people on this,” the president said, according to both Cantor and another attendee. “This process is confirming what the American people think is the worst about Washington: that everyone is more interested in posturing, political positioning, and protecting their base, than in resolving real problems.”

They don’t even seem to know who the heck is in charge over on the GOP side. Is it Boehner? Cantor? Or, more likely, people like Limbaugh?

Hell, even with the blue dogs jammed in her side, Nancy Pelosi got bills through the House. Boehner can’t even get a lightbulb bill passed.

Yet somehow, I’m seeing from some – particularly Ezra Klein, who should honestly know better – that this was a bad deal for the President.

On policy, of course these budget cuts targeted at programs that assist the poor and middle class suck. But they were always going to suck. The minute the House of Representatives flipped from Democratic to Republican, anyone without giant stores of money had a target at their back. The Republicans negotiated their way to a $39 billion cut.

But let us remember that these are the same Republicans who campaigned on cutting $100 billion from the budget. Just a couple months ago, conservative blogs were despairing that the cuts had been sliced down to $78 billion.

And John Boehner, wily trickster that he is, has made an agreement – which probably does not have the support of his caucus, possibly needing Democratic help – that cuts that ransom demand in half. I can only imagine that being described as a victory for Boehner at a Beltway party and nowhere else outside of the 495 loop.

What did the polls show that Democrats and Independents wanted out of these negotiations? A compromise that kept the doors open on our government. And that’s what we got. Faced with a fundamentally flawed budget process thanks to the outcome of the November elections, President Obama presided over a bipartisan result that avoided the attempt to scuttle women’s health issues and environmental concerns. From a political perspective, he will have signed into law a cut in spending the year before his re-election as the unemployment rate decreases.

It was enough to prompt Tea Party Nation to claim they will primary Boehner, while base conservatives on the depraved Free Republic gnashed their teeth and made the following statements: “GOP sells out all GOP sucker voters!,” “Cowards, more interested in keeping their jobs then doing what’s right for the country.,” and “The GOP are the modern day Whigs.”

This sentiment goes on for quite a few pages.

This was a negotiating process in which voices of the far right such as Allan West and Michele Bachmann advised retreat for the GOP.

Obama and Reid were operating in an environment infected by the Tea Party House, and secured a deal that averted shutdown and showed the President to be the adult here. Yet a few people seem to think this is the kind of thing that is good news for the right.

As a failed vice-presidential candidate once asked: In what respect, Charlie?

During his weekly news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Boehner claimed that Mr. Obama has added 200,000 federal workers since he took office (a figure that has been disputed), and shrugged at the idea that Republican efforts to slash government spending would put many of them out of work.

“If some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it,” Mr. Boehner said. “We’re broke. It’s time for us to get serious about how we’re spending the nation’s money.”

As a result of changes in direct spending and revenues, CBO expects that enacting H.R. 2 would probably increase federal budget deficits over the 2012–2019 period by a total of roughly $145 billion, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes that CBO and JCT will include in the forthcoming estimate. That figure consists of the following two components:

• About $130 billion, representing the net reduction in deficits over the 2012–2019 period expected to result from the health care provisions of the enacted legislation (as estimated by CBO and JCT last March), plus

• About $15 billion, representing the reduction brought about by the Medicare and Medicaid Extenders Act of 2010 in the estimated cost of subsidies to be provided through the insurance exchanges through 2019.

It continues:

Relative to current law, enacting H.R. 2 would, CBO estimates, increase federal budget deficits in the decade following 2019; similarly, the legislation would increase budget deficits in the decade following 2021 and in subsequent years.

In case, in the middle of the media whitewash, you forgot the sort of person incoming speaker John Boehner is:

A member of the House Republican leadership team admitted Friday he distributed a tobacco PAC’s campaign checks on the House floor, but said he’ll never do it again.

Watchdog groups said the practice is legal but condemned it as outrageous, nonetheless.

GOP Conference Chairman John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he stopped handing out the checks after being questioned about the practice by two freshmen who’d heard about the handoff on the House floor.

“They were appalled by it,” said Boehner. “I thought, `Yeah, I can imagine why somebody would be upset. It sure doesn’t look good.’

“It’s not an excuse, but the floor is the only place you get to see your colleagues,” he said in a telephone interview from Ohio. “It was a matter of convenience.

“You make a mistake, admit it and go on. I just feel bad about it.”

Again, if the media is liberal they’re doing a piss-poor job of doing it.

I think the minority leader has an addiction to tanning. Granted with the new tanning tax, you could argue that there’s a stimulative effect…

Roll Call obtained a letter from Boehner’s office to leaders and lobbyists for the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and about two dozen other business groups inviting them to a forum on the Hill to discuss “ways the business community can be an important part of the discussion on America Speaking Out as House Republicans listen and then form a governing agenda.”

Ensuring there’s enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country’s entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he’d favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.

In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner backed Tom Donohue, President of the Chamber of Commerce, in saying taxpayers should help pick up the tab. “I think the people responsible in the oil spill — BP and the federal government — should take full responsibility for what’s happening there.”

Um, no. Republicans are always for welfare. Corporate welfare.

Boehner has reached for the fainting couch and demanded an apology from Paul McCartney for a joke about Bush’s obvious lack of intelligence. Of course, the Beatles brought us the White Album, what the heck have Boehner or George W. Bush ever done for America?

House Minority Leader John Boehner told his conference to ‘behave like grown-ups’ if the healthcare bill is passed by the House on Sunday.

The Ohio Republican made the warning at a quick closed-door meeting with fellow House GOP lawmakers at noon in the Capitol.

According to several lawmakers who attended the 15 minute meeting, Boehner said ‘we will behave like grown-ups,’ and not engage in taunting the vulnerable Democrats who support the controversial measure.

“As I told my colleagues, we don’t have enough votes to legislate,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. “We are not in the majority. We are not kind-of in the minority; we are in a hole. They ought to get the idea out of their minds that they are legislators. But what they can be is communicators.”

No wonder they’re run by a talk show host.

You know, if you guys don’t want to do anything with those legislative seats, I know of a major political party willing to take them off your hands…

All this handwringing reminds me so much of the campaign, when in some quarters people were comparing Obama to Michael Dukakis when at that very same point in the race we now know he had it in the bag.

Look, while President Obama is the top Democrat in the nation now, he is also the leader of the entire country – including the Republicans. We partisans might pooh-pooh people disliking partisanship as Broderism, but the truth of the matter is the American people are tired of the fighting over what feels to them like marginal issues that get in the way of things getting done.

Obama is throwing a bone to the GOP, making a very public overture for them to get on the bipartisan train. But his past and current actions make it pretty clear that the train is going to leave as scheduled.

The stimulus will pass. It will be mostly progressive. It will, in the long run, help to get the economy back on track. And the Republicans who line up behind John Boehner and Rush Limbaugh will ultimately fail both in the political and policy arena. After the last few years, people have forgotten what its like to have someone wielding the bully pulpit of the presidency with the vast majority of the American people behind him.

We’ve only just begun.

>> Pelosi Touts New Poll: Stimulus Has ‘Broad Support” Among Americans