AP: These confused conservative voters won’t let Republicans compromise

That's actually the story right there. Normal people out in the country, and the representatives they elect, are determined to bring fiscal sanity to the capital. The capital is baffled:

To understand why the nation may remain politically gridlocked for the next two years, talk to people in a place like Heber City, a conservative farming and ranching hub nestled beneath the imposing peaks of the Wasatch mountains. Many voters here, and in conservative communities across the country, still want to do whatever it takes to stop Obama, despite his solid re-election in November, and the politicians they elect are listening. In his State of the Union address this week, Obama laid out an ambitious agenda that includes gun control, raising the minimum wage, allowing most of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country to become citizens and raising tax revenue to help cut the deficit. But the president has acknowledged it will be difficult to get those proposals through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

---

"The House Republican majority is made up mostly of members who are in sharply gerrymandered districts that are very safely Republican and may not feel compelled to pay attention to broad-based public opinion, because what they're really concerned about is the opinions of their specific Republican constituencies," Obama said in an interview with the The New Republic magazine last month. So you see, if it wasn't for these darned conservatives who have this strange desire to "stop Obama," we could all compromise and Obama could pass his "ambitious agenda." Did you miss the part about how Obama refuses to enact real spending cuts? Did you miss the part about how the fiscal cliff deal involved nothing but tax increases, and no spending cuts at all? Did you miss the part about how we're already spending 25 percent of GDP - the most since World War II - and running deficits in excess of $1 trillion every year? Yeah. So did the writer.