Cutting out federal funding of Planned Parenthood appears to be the sticking point of a budget compromise that would take cuts down to around $40 or so billion — though we can’t rule out resistance to checks on the EPA as the major contributing factor to Democrat recalcitrance. Both Obama and Biden have previously voted for the very “woman’s health” rider they’re now decrying as unnecessarily “ideological”.

The thing is, the Dems, thanks in large part to a complicit advocacy media, have edged ahead in polls now showing that more Americans will find Republicans at fault for a government shutdown, and so they are beginning to relish their chance to demagogue and fearmonger.

The GOP has had the advantage of facts and common sense throughout this budget showdown. Sadly, they’ve done little to frame a coherent message and sell it to the American people.

GOP members of the House and Senate need to take their arguments local — to local papers, to local broadcast media, to talk radio, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Youtube — and point out that what’s happening here is that the Democrats failed to do their jobs, that for the first time since 1974 there is no budget (despite the Dems full control over the government during the run-up to the 2010 elections); they need to point out and that the GOP is asking for what are modest cuts — between 1 and 2% of a budget already loaded with calls to spend money that doesn’t exist; and they need to hammer home the fact that the Dems are fighting tooth and nail to give the EPA the power to classify humans as environmental pollutants — something that they have heretofore never had the power to do, and something that, as it redounds to trace gases from manufacturing, will give the EPA and its unelected, radical greenies, near total control over industry in this country.

Not exactly the recipe for growth or jobs, that.

In Obama’s America, welfare recipients still get checks during a government shutdown; whereas active military are categorized as non-essential government workers, many of whom have been asked just recently by this President to patrol the skies in what we’re told is an essential humanitarian crisis. In Libya.

In fact, the President threatened to veto any piece of legislation that would assure that the military received its pay in the event of a government shutdown.

The choice could not be starker.

Honestly. This shouldn’t be difficult. Just do it.