Budget Deal Averts US Federal Shutdown

Sold out. On all sides? And we don't even know what extra they've now cut to get a deal with thugs. I got the news from Reuters via Al Jazeera:

Budget Deal Averts US Federal Shutdown Republicans and Democrats reach an agreement to keep government institutions running. Al Jazeera April 9, 2011 Barack Obama, the US president, and congressional leaders have reached a last-minute budget deal, averting a government shutdown. "Some of the cuts we agreed to will be painful ... and I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances," Obama said on Friday at the White House after a long day of suspenseful negotiating averted a potential political crisis. "But beginning to live within our means is the only way to protect those investments that will help America to compete for new jobs," said the president. Obama thanked the leaders of both parties for reaching an agreement, he said, delivered the deepest spending cuts in US budget history. John Boehner, the House of Representatives Speaker, said that a deal had been struck on funding the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year that ends on September 30. "I am pleased Senator [Harry Reid] and I and the White House have been able to come to an agreement that will in fact cut spending and keep our government open," Boehner told reporters. Party leaders clinched the agreement, including some $38.5bn of extra spending cuts, after an intense political bargaining, barely an hour before the federal government effectively ran out of money at midnight (0400 GMT). With a midnight deadline looming for a government closure, the compromise between Obama's Democrats and opposition Republicans requires lawmakers to approve stopgap funding to keep federal agencies running into next week until the budget agreement can be formally enacted. Republican Congressman Devin Nunes told Reuters that "the deal" was presented to House Republicans at a closed-door meeting and that most members would vote for it.

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