Yes, that's what I read in the newspaper. The Republican-controlled House is facing a politically painful decision now, as we speak, whether to give in to increasingly urgent demands from the Bush administration for action to avert a government financial crisis.

What? A government financial crisis! But --But -- Wasn't it he who said, very indignantly I might add, during his debate with Al Gore, his opponent for the presidency in 2000, that no one, no one would touch our country's plus reserve of trillions of dollars? Wasn't there also something mentioned that our reserves and social security funds was in a lock box, secured away to pay down our national debt, both men promising never to open it for any other reason but that?

And didn't Bush say that this key, this very key that keeps the lock box locked, would be safe with him if we elected him president?

Even though the news is that the White House economic agenda's are becoming trapped in partisan gridlock, the administration is likely to succeed in its efforts to persuade the House to support an increase in the legal limit on the national debt, because failure to do so would leave the government unable to borrow enough money to meet all its many obligations starting at the end of the week.

What? Increase in the legal limits of our national debt? We are now unable to borrow enough money to meet out debts? But -- But -- In the Democratic Administration before this one, you know the fraught sex scandalous one headed (Oops! Excuse the pun) by Billy Boy Clinton, we were dancing on top of the world and well ahead of our debts with a projection to completely pay them off in the next few years. Now we are broke and balancing ourselves to keep from falling off the end of our once prosperous world and headed (there goes that nasty word again) deeper into debt?

"We will not let our federal government default on debt," spit out that dickhead, J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois and the House speaker, on his circuit of the television news programs. In his and his dickhead cohorts reluctance to take up the issue, and the eagerness of Democrats in both chambers to emphasize it, is the newest skirmish in the fight over whether the tax cut pushed through Congress last year by President Bush has proved to be too expensive. I wrote in PressPoints early on about my opposition to that tax cut, which was also opposed by Al Gore, would come back to bite the Republicans in the ass.

Both parties are at loggerheads over this issue and I bet confused over where the money is coming from and where it is going. Shades of Enron! On trade, the budget, Social Security, energy, the fallout of many crooked American Corporations and their malfeasance (I bet Bill Gates goes to bed every night lighting candles to the big computer in the sky, thanking it for keeping the government's eyes off of him -- he and Microsoft have not made one headline in recent months.) in addition to efforts to make permanent the provisions of the 10-year tax cut, Mr. Bush has found himself on the defensive, forced into compromises or playing for time.