Unity...or the lack thereof

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Article to read, if you'd like...
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So, just hours before Obama is going to appear on prime time television to promote his (now 3.6 trillion???) budget plan, a key democrat senator unveiled another more scaled-down version of Obama's budget proposal. North Dakotan Senator Kent Conrad (pictured below), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said that his committee would be voting on his version tomorrow.

^Sen. Kent Conrad*^

(*for some reason, his name reminds me of the name an undercover
superhero would have...but maybe not since he's a politician)

"We've made hundreds of billions of dollars of changes to make this work to get down to the deficit goal and at the same time maintain the president's priorities -- education and energy and health care," -Conrad

Conrad and other centrist Democratic senators -- whose support is critical to passing the legislation -- have raised concerns about the long-term impact of the president's spending plan on the deficit. -CNN Article

You can read the Article if you want to learn more about the specifics.
**(or you can just click this Link if for some reason you just like looking at his face)**

Personally, while I understand Conrad's concern about all this spending and the vast amount of money involved in this plan, I think his timing was...not so good (read: bad bad bad). Dow jumped nearly 500 points simply from the vague idea of this plan floating around with Obama supporting it. Now, we have this sense of "maybe it won't pass" and hopefully it won't be too much of an influence on Dow. (**but then again, people can be strange with the stock market. Apple stocks fell nealy everytime Steve Jobs got ill or showed signs of deteriorating health...). While it may not result in anything important, it does clearly show that the democrats are still (read: as usual...?) split and lacks the unity that may be important in these tough times.

Thoughts / Comments, anyone?