On Friday morning, Reid settled the matter. “In light of recent events,” read a statement sent out by his office, “I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.”

The move by Reid to hit pause on the bill, known as PIPA, is a big deal — not least as an acknowledgment that online protest is shaping his agenda.

“To me, it was a day for the history books,” Sen. Ron Wyden said in an interview with Salon on Thursday night. “In terms of communicating with government, America is never going to be the same. This showed that you can literally have millions of people being able to weigh in directly with their legislators when they feel that they haven’t been listened to.”

Wyden has a unique perspective. It was the Oregon Democrat who was holding up the bill that the Senate was scheduled to vote on Tuesday of next week. Backers of PIPA needed 60 votes to advance a motion to proceed and break Wyden’s hold. As recently as Tuesday of this week, the bill’s supporters looked to be in a strong position.

Objections to the bills from the tech community had not swayed the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, or the majority leader.

“Leahy and Reid don’t care about statements and speeches,” said one Senate aide. “They care about pushing the levers of power. And the Internet stepped up and said, ‘That’s not how you pass legislation anymore.’”

The untold story here is that SOPA, the original target of the online community, had derailed PIPA, a bill with a longer pedigree and, according to online observers, a less aggressive approach. “PIPA is terrible,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff technologist Peter Eckersley. “SOPA is ghastly.”

After SOPA’s introduction in the House in October, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, put on a hearing that was ostensibly intended to give the bill a once-over. The proceedings were comically stacked with Google’s policy counsel, Katherine Oyama, serving less as a technical witness and more of a punching bag for complaints about the search engine giant. That a congressional hearing on a critical piece of legislation could be so vapid infuriated the tech community. In response, technologists rallied around American Censorship Day, and found a champion in Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who suggested an alternative bill. Republicans and Democrats alike condemned the superficial consideration of the bill.

The House meltdown sent PIPA’s backers on the Senate side scrambling to separate themselves from the mess. A two-page fact sheet circulated in the Senate making the case that the House’s bill “differs from the PROTECT IP Act” in several key ways.

• SOPA applies to sites that merely “facilitate infringement,” for example; PIPA targets those solely dedicated to breaking copyright.

• SOPA threatens to ensnare sub-domains in website takedowns; PIPA understands that one music blog hosted on Blogger.com does not implicate the whole site.

• SOPA might violate due process; PIPA requires that any efforts to take down advertising or payment systems of infringing sites be routed through the courts. And so on.

“Much of what has been claimed about the Senate’s Protect IP Act is flatly wrong,” Leahy declared on the eve of the blackouts, “and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions.”

And if Leahy still felt confident of the bill’s passage at the time, it was probably justified. As of last week, PIPA had attracted 41 co-sponsors.

Wyden attributed that more to effective industry lobbying, than senatorial deliberation.

“It’s the content industry lobbyists who are best known in the Senate,” he said. “They’ve always had their way here. It picked up all these sponsors because the content industry worked so cleverly to tell everybody, ‘This is non-controversial. Nobody is in favor of piracy. This is practically a gimme.’ When people hear that, and that powerful industries are for it, often all the implications don’t get thought through. We heard from senators who said, ‘I had no idea that this would do this kind of damage to the Internet, to cybersecurity, and the like.’”

But if the online protests got all the attention this week, equally noteworthy was the reaction of people who had written the bill. They went back to the drawing board — behind closed doors.

The Motion Picture Association of America made little pretense about the fact that it was instrumental in writing the bill. The OpenCongress blog pointed to a New York Times story in which an MPAA executive declared, “We will come forward with language that will address some of the legitimate concerns” about the bill.

This week, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd came out and talked about tweaking PIPA as doing “the hard work of legislating,” sounding much like the Democratic senator from Connecticut he until recently was. (Hollywood, for the record, made noises about dropping its traditional support for Democrats, perhaps not noticing that far more Republicans than Democrats withdrew their support from PIPA in the wake of the protests.)

PIPA’s proponents seemed to be misunderstanding the argument that its opponents were making. They don’t reject what’s in the bill. They reject the bill’s very existence. ”

“We’re fundamentally saying, kill PIPA, kill SOPA, nuke the bills,” said David Moore, executive director of the Participatory Politics Foundation and program manager of OpenCongress. “Then we’ll talk.”

Why is  PIPA so irredeemable? For one thing, say its critics, the congressional copyright crackdown assumes facts about digital piracy not yet in evidence. If online piracy is truly so massive a problem for the U.S. economy, doesn’t it require more methodical study in Congress, with input from a wider range of experts?

For another, they’re not willing to concede that the Senate Judiciary Committee, so diligently cultivated by the MPAA over the years, should be the be-all and end-all when it comes to conversations about fostering profitable digital content circa 2012. Or that law enforcement should be the go-to response framework.

Other committees might deserve a crack at developing legislation.

“How do we get our content industries to migrate to business models that get creators paid in the Internet era?” Eckersly asked. “You don’t need to fight a crazy global war against piracy to have a YouTube or an iTunes.”

This tectonic shift of the ground under PIPA has some people searching for ways to reframe the situation in the dynamics Washington knows so well. It’s Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley. It’s MPAA vs. Google. Dodd, for example, breezily explained the reported removal of domain name filtering from PIPA — one of the provisions that technology types found most egregious for its targeting of the Internet’s core infrastructure — as “something the Google crowd didn’t want to have done.”

Via Twitter, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a PIPA backer, blamed ”Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

The revealing assumption: Congress must be taking its marching orders from someone with a ton of money. But that’s revisionist. All signs indicate that Google was ready to accommodate itself to some form of  PIPA. The company’s blacking out of its logo this week was attention-getting, no doubt. But a close watching of how this has all played out over the last two months suggests that Google was jumping in front of a parade that was already well on its way.

“If it was Hollywood vs. the tech companies,” says Art Brodsky of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, “it would have been over a long time ago, because the tech lobby is terminally weak and disorganized.”

The truth is that the bulk of those objecting to the bill were millions of Americans who use Internet utilities such as Google and Wikipedia and Craigslist.

That said, PIPA is still alive. In his statement, Reid praised Leahy for the work that he’s done thus far on the bill.

“I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the internet,” Reid wrote.

But it does look like PIPA won’t go ahead without fundamental rethinking. Is it naive to see the events this week as evidence that a networked populace might really have the ability to upgrade its country’s politics?

“Everybody retains their constitutional right to be foolish,” says Wyden. “But I hope so.”

As previously noted here, however, more than half of that $2.7 trillion comes from winding down spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as savings from interest payments on debt that the government won’t have to pay since it will be borrowing less money. Which makes the Reid plan a little less scary. But what about the other half? We may not know the final shape of a debt ceiling deal, but it’s safe to say that whatever happens, the ultimate agreement will include at least $1.2 trillion in the “discretionary spending cuts” that were agreed to by both sides during the negotiations led by Vice President Biden. And if you look at the legislative language for both the Reid and Boehner bills, they include very similar language on discretionary spending limits.

But here is where it gets tricky. Because the cuts are not exactly what most people would think of as “cuts.” Discretionary spending authority — the amount government is allowed to spend each year — actually rises over the next 10 years. Under the Boehner plan, the 2021 cap is $1.234 trillion, or about $190 billion more than authorized for 2012. Under the Reid plan discretionary spending is capped at $1.228 trillion in 2021.

So you might well ask, if the amount that Congress is allowed to spend goes up each year, how can either side claim savings of a trillion dollars or more?

The answer: It’s all about the baseline.

Budget planners assume a baseline in which spending rises at the same rate as inflation. Under the Biden framework, spending increases are capped at a rate less than inflation. The exact percentage isn’t spelled out in the legislation, but one report pegged the spending cap at two-thirds the normal inflation rate.

“Savings” are calculated by subtracting what the government will spend with the cap in place from what the government would have spent if spending rose at the full inflation rate. Voilà! Spending, overall, continues to rise, even as a trillion or more dollars are “saved.”

As I contemplated these numbers, I began to understand, for the first time, the psychology of a House Republican freshman. The closer you look at the U.S. federal budget process, the more it all seems like chicanery. But just to make sure, I called up the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities to see if I could get a little more clarity.

Jim Horney, CBPP’s vice president for federal fiscal policy, argued that it is still “appropriate” to call the cap on spending authority a “cut,” for the simple reason that if you hold spending increases to under the inflation rate, the amount of goods and services that can be purchased with that spending is going to fall, since costs will be rising at the full rate of inflation.

Here are some examples of programs that fall under the category of “discretionary spending”:

The single largest non-defense discretionary program is the Veteran’s Health Administration, which delivers free and low-cost health care to more than 8 million veterans. The National Institutes of Health is also entirely supported by discretionary funding. So are the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the whole federal prison system. Federal aid to local school districts comes from the discretionary pot, as does the budget for the Food and Drug Administration. The National Park System operates because of discretionary funding, which puts it in the same company as the United States Coast Guard, the Transportation Safety Administration, and the Farm Service Agency.

I know some of my readers would be delighted to see the FBI, DEA and maybe even the whole federal prison system abolished. But if spending authority rises at two-thirds the rate of inflation for the next 10 years, school districts will be able to afford less heating, national parks will be forced to reduce hours and services, the NIH will be able to fund less research and veterans will get less healthcare — depending on how congressional appropriators allocate funding under the caps.

So the cuts are real — for the recipients.

But they’re also a numbers game. There’s a huge difference between a balanced budget or serious long-term deficit reduction and tweaks to discretionary spending caps based on inflation adjustments. And the more one learns how Congress plays this game, the more one understands why House Republicans are unwilling to endorse any compromise. And that leads us to an ugly conclusion: The better they grasp the numbers, the more determined they might be to drive us toward default.

Never mind the fact that “trillions of dollars of cuts” in any accelerated time frame would “destroy jobs” much more efficiently than ending Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. And it’s not even worth pointing out, again, the Republican demagoguery that portrays the statutory end of the Bush tax cuts as wild tax hikes. The speech is most useful in its demonstration of classic Washington politician projectionism: Boehner did not mention under what time frame the cuts should take place nor did he specify where exactly the cuts should come. So who, precisely, is punting the tough questions to the future?

Boehner is bluffing, just as he bluffed, successfully, about the possibility of a government shutdown during the continuing resolution negotiations. But his hand is much weaker this time around, because as he himself has admitted, Congress can’t actually allow the U.S. to default on its obligations. That would be an act of astounding political irresponsibility and it’s just not going to happen. Boehner also knows as well as any politician that getting the cuts he wants, without any tax “hikes,” would require the kind of dramatic changes to Medicare that voters are extremely skeptical of. His obvious hope is that by threatening to hold the debt ceiling hostage, he can get Obama to meet him halfway or more, and thus insulate the Republican Party from the negative political impact of slashing the social welfare safety net at a time of high unemployment.

But bluffs only work when the opponent folds. In recent weeks, after pundits digested the stunning juxtaposition of Obama’s decision to release his long-form birth certificate with his White House Correspondent’s Dinner comedy shtick while the hunt for bin Laden was going on in the background, there’s been a lot of chatter about the president’s formidable “poker face.” But if the president is really that good at Texas hold ‘em, we’ve yet to see his skill displayed in the ongoing budget negotiations. That’s strange, because he definitely has his own cards to play.

Outsourced to Jonathan Chait:

It seems to me that Obama’s play here is clear: He needs to ask Boehner to spell out his demands. What’s the exact bill that Boehner demands as a condition for not crippling the U.S. economy? If he wants to make demands, he needs to write out those demands …

Allowing Boehner to simultaneously make exorbitant demands, refrain from spelling out those demands, and try to gain bipartisan cover for those demands would be a preposterously weak move by Obama. He can’t possibly be that weak a negotiator. Can he?

The media jumped on this quote immediately, turning the phrase “cowboy poetry festival” into a lightening rod phrase during these budget cut debates. And on the surface, it does seem like a ridiculous choice to single out: After all, whoever heard of cowboys being poets? Apparently the only cowboys who are poets are the gay ones, according to how many “Brokeback Mountain” references have been made by conservative blogs like MoonBattery  and Townhall, the latter of which quoted a new parody song by Mark Steyn in their analysis:

An ol’ cowpoke went ridin’ out one dark and windy day

Upon a ridge he rested as he went along his way

When all at once he spied a posse from the GOP

A-hangin’ from that ol’ mesquite his fed’ral subsidy

His pen was still a-fire and he knew how to spell “git”

But an ol’ paint can’t outride a trillion-dollar deficit

If only Harry Reid can head ’em off at that there pass

‘Cuz he hasn’t finished paying off creative-writing class

Even Politico snickered, with a post titled, “Reid: Save Federal Funding for Cowboy Poets!“

But it’s Reid who may ultimately have the last laugh. After all, it’s not just Nevada who celebrates the poems of the Wild West: Texas has its own Cowboy Poetry Week, which Tea Party governor Rick Perry has given glowing proclamations for since 2006.

Perry, the man who once said:

“Texans…elect folks like me. You know the type, the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”

… is the same governor who just last month wrote this missive about his state’s own Cowboy Poetry Week:

Through cowboy poetry, we can gain insight into the emotions and thoughts of those who made history and those who continue to live and work in the cowboy culture today. Alternately silly, sardonic and tender, cowboy poetry gives us access to life on the range with all its accompanying excitement, hardships, and dreams.

To emphasize the importance of cowboy poetry to western culture and education campaign being conducted during the week of April. I encourage all Texans to participate and join in celebration. By encouraging a love of history, reading, and storytelling through cowboy poetry, we highlight the best of Texas.

So sneer at Harry Reid all you want, and keep making those “I don’t know how to quit you” jokes: You’re just proving his point. If cowboy poetry is supposedly so important to Rick Perry — the definition of a gun-slinging conservative Tea Partier — then by mocking its existence you’re just bring more daylight between John Boehner’s Washington Republicans and their own constituents, exposing the true hypocrisy in their leadership with the H.R. 1 bill.

At the time of this article, Governor Perry’s office has yet to answer our requests for a statement regarding his stance on the importance of cowboy poetry.