So where are we now? The President and his Democrat cohort have been put on notice so that negotiations must now take place. Since default was never an option there was going to be an agreement of sorts to get us into the new year when the process can begin again. The sequester cuts, which really burn the Democrats up, have not been reversed and are not going to be reversed under any circumstances. The air space is now clear so that more attention can be focused on the many other screw ups of the Obama administration, most particularly the Affordable Care Act which will burn its way into community consciousness as it burns its way through the incomes of many an American. How to fix it from here is their problem but there will be a lot more sick Americans unable to find medical care at affordable prices as time goes on. Bulk stupidity but if it can’t be stopped it can’t be stopped.

What seems to have been agreed looks in many ways like the maximal position the Republicans might ever have realistically hoped to achieve given that the presidency and the Senate are in the hands of others and the media are like one great big ABC of leftist bias. Big win to the Democrats. I don’t think so, and certainly not if you are thinking about the long-term future of the American economy.

This is from The New York Times relayed via Drudge who of course describe the ongoing economic mismanagement of the American economy as a great victory for those responsible for these disasters:

Speaker John A. Boehner, the leader of conservative House Republicans whose push to strip money for the health law led to the shuttering of much of the government on Oct. 1, said that the House would not block a bipartisan agreement reached in the Senate that yielded virtually no concessions to the Republicans.

‘We fought the good fight,’ Mr. Boehner said in an interview with the radio station WLW-AM in Cincinnati. ‘We just didn’t win.’

In a statement issued as the Senate and the House prepared to vote on the proposal, Mr. Boehner said: ‘The fight will continue. But blocking the bipartisan agreement reached today by members of the Senate will not be a tactic for us.’

The decision came about 24 hours before the Treasury was due to exhaust its borrowing authority, putting the nation on the brink of a default. Mr. Boehner had earlier told colleagues privately that he would not allow the nation to default.

These are the details as reported:

Under the agreement, the government would be funded through Jan. 15, and the debt ceiling would be raised until Feb. 7. The Senate will take up a separate motion to instruct House and Senate negotiators to reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, stressed that under the deal, which he negotiated with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, budget cuts extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown were not reversed, as some Democrats had wanted, a slim reed that not even he claimed as a significant victory.

The deal, Mr. McConnell said, ‘is far less than many of us hoped for, quite frankly, but far better than what some had sought.’

That the American economy will continue its rapid decline is just one of those things.

UPDATE: An interesting take by Tim Stanley in the UK’s Telegraph. But what is particularly interesting is the comment thread that follows. Here, however, is his core point.

What has Obama really won? He keeps his precious healthcare reform and he gets government open again – but tomorrow morning he’ll still have the same gridlocked political system that he had the night before. The shutdown is a rare example of him winning, but remember that this lame duck president has not only had a very simple (and, frankly, inoffensive) gun control bill killed in the Senate but was so spooked by bad poll numbers that he tried to dump responsibility for military action in Syria onto the Congress – before quietly dropping the idea altogether. Any thought that the shutdown payoff will be that he can sail an immigration reform package comfortably through Congress is pure fantasy. This is a broken presidency living out its last few years either holding off Republican attacks or lazily cruising the country on some pointless, endless, fatuous campaign trail. Obama’s administration is politically bankrupt.