GOP: Fund disease control by cutting... health care?

It just keeps getting stranger. In the latest Republican attempt to demonstrate some surreal semblance of fiscal responsibility, they've rejected Bush's call for more than 7 billion dollars for bird flu readiness measures.

After days of intensive talks between the House and Senate, negotiators dropped a plan for $8 billion in funds that Democrats pushed through the Senate last month.

Conservative Republicans in the House insisted that an emergency U.S. effort to stockpile vaccines and anti-viral drugs that could be effective against the deadly flu would have to be paid for by cutting other government programs.

Republican leaders in the House said that instead of attaching the bird flu money to a health and labor spending bill moving through Congress, they would try separate legislation later this year or early next year.

Translation: They're still committed to forcing the $71 billion in tax cuts through.