Same old song and dance on Capitol Hill

The calendar is about to turn on the all new and unimproved GOP debt limit kabuki:

The federal debt limit is set to kick back into effect next weekend after a three-month hiatus, marking the start of a political game of chicken likely to culminate in the fall, when Congress will have to give President Obama a higher limit or risk a federal default.

The GOP's problem is the budget deficit is disappearing on its own. In fact, we're running a bit of a surplus and despite their best efforts at sabotage, the economy is still slowly improving. Government won't run out of money till the fall at the earliest, so the GOPers are left without a hostage to take. Furthermore, GOP leadership isn't keen on threatening default anymore after the beating they took at the end of last year in the polls when they tried to use that trick again.

This is not going according to plan and they don't have a back-up strategy. So after repeatedly demanding the Senate Dems produce a budget, which they did at an astonishing pace, suddenly the GOP doesn't want to talk about budgets anymore.

"I think there's a better atmosphere for a solution than there's been in the past, but I'm a little worried about people here in the Senate having fiscal fatigue. There isn't any sense of urgency right now," said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), one of three senators who joined Obama on Monday for a round of golf.

Got that. They've been wailing for years that this is the biggest crisis in the history of mankind, but suddenly they don't want to think about that today. In fact, they want to just forget the whole thing.

With the House and Senate both having passed budget resolutions, the next step in the process should be a conference committee, which Republican leaders said they wanted. Recently, however, they changed their mind and now refuse to allow the process to proceed.

The problem as usual is the crackpot caucus. If it's not going to piss off the damn librul Dimmocrats, then they don't want to know about nothing.