Nah, not so strange, Art. It's the same old same old: them that gots wants more. Faced with a budget surplus for the first time since WWII, what do politicians on both sides wanna do? Cut taxes. Not cut the deficit--too many campaign contributers make too much of their income collecting interest on the national debt. Not establish a just system for providing health care--they got theirs, screw the rest of the country. Not help lift the rest of the world so they could actually afford our exports--that would eliminate the source of their most important resource: slave labor.

--seed