House GOP Leaders Set to Cut Spending

This should be very interesting...

"House GOP Leaders Set to Cut Spending

Leadership Shake-Up Spurred Policy Shift

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 17, 2005; Page A01


House Republican leaders have moved from balking at big cuts in Medicaid and other programs to embracing them, driven by pent-up anger from fiscal conservatives concerned about runaway spending and the leadership's own weakening hold on power."

This article is starting to give me an inkling of just how fractured the GOP is now. I was completely amazed. There seems to be more than one revolt going on in the typically lockstepped Republican party. It seems that the Fiscal Conservatives are starting to look at the new DeLay-less landscape with an eye for the power to affect real change.

It just seems that the changes they are askeing for might be a really hard sell right now. In the aftermath of GOP bungling and corruption, coming out right now and declaring war on poor and elderly, who have suffered the most in the Hurricanes, might not be exactly politically expedient. It's getting to be a very interesting year around here...

The money quote from the article regarding the war on poor people:

After several meetings, Hastert emerged from a closed Republican session the night of Oct. 6 to announce that he had gotten the message. Cuts to entitlement programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and farm supports would be raised from $35 billion to $50 billion in the massive budget bill that will be compiled in November. Republicans would push an additional across-the-board spending cut for 2006 and would try to trim programs already funded.

That kind of attitude might not play too well to the unwashed masses. I'm sure the rich, white base will get behind it, but the problem with the devide between the haves and the have-nots is that there are far fewer of the rich, white base folks around these days. They have been traded for the super rich, white base and the now-struggling, angry, white middle class. A middle class who's been hearing a lot lately about how they are the ones paying for the rich to get richer...