Cutting it down to the wire, Boehner and Reid have apparently sold their fellow lawmakers on a compromise deal that would cut some $38.5 billion from the federal budget.

Read here.

Boehner best hope that the spending cuts appease his Tea Party friends, who have made quite a fuss in his home state over the federal debt.

We are T-minus three hours away from the first government shutdown in more than 15 years if politicians in Washington don’t come to an agreement on budget negotiations. According to this article from The New York Times, one of the main points of contention is funding for Planned Parenthood and other services for poor women. This morning, Republican Sen. Jon Kyle from Arizona made this flagrantly false statement about the organization:

Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals, so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

Here’s the video:

Had Sen. Kyl bothered to check the Planned Parenthood website, he would have found that abortion services only account for 3 percent of services rendered by the organization. Some of the services available are as follows from the site:

• Planned Parenthood health centers focus on prevention: 83 percent of our clients receive services to prevent unintended pregnancy.
• Planned Parenthood services help prevent more than 612,000 unintended pregnancies each year.
• Planned Parenthood provides nearly one million Pap tests and more than 830,000 breast exams each year, critical services in detecting cancer.
• Planned Parenthood provides nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
• Three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services.
• Planned Parenthood affiliates provide educational programs to nearly 1.2 million young people and adults each year.

Ezra Klein offers a brief rundown and with a handy chart:

Planned Parenthood)

Here’s the link to C-SPAN’s live coverage of the budget debate in the Senate.

So, let me get this straight: leaders in Washington are essentially quibbling about $5 billion — Republicans have proposed $39 billion in cuts, while the Democrats came back with $34 billion — when we are one day from a government shutdown? This is the basic impasse? Stunning.

What’s more, Tea Party officials, known for their anti-spending rhetoric, actually voted against a bill that would have at least kept the government running for another week, citing incoherent reasons.

Here’s the brilliant Michelle Bachmann:

I had previously pledged to reject any [budget bill] which does not defund that (health care reform) spending. Unfortunately, today’s [bill] does nothing to defund ObamaCare and that is why I voted ‘no’.

Why would the budget bill defund that spending? The health care bill already passed, and has little to do with current negotiations. So far as I know, for health care funding to be removed from current budget considerations, Congress would have to go back and repeal the already passed law and that repeal would then have to go back to the president’s desk for a signature, which we all know, would be a futile exercise since health care reform was one of Obama’s main domestic goals.

Further, we know from past studies that a government shutdown will cost money. A lot of it. The shutdown of the early-1990s cost an estimated $245 million to $607 million, and the one in the mid-90s cost about $1.4 billion. Thus, the advocates of a shutdown, in their notions about reining in spending and their near-hysterical attempts to do anything in their power to thwart the Obama and the Dems’ policies, would essentially bring more, not less, financial burden to the American people. Stunning again.

This article provides a detailed look at the cost of government shutdown of the mid-90s, and here is an L.A. Times analysis of what a current shutdown might be.