Read about this budget. See if you can figure out what game they are playing.
The Washington Post calls it..
A Breathtaking Budget

THERE ARE TWO ways to treat a president's budget proposal. The realistic, even cynical, method is to unmask the various bits of budget gimmickry involved, to assume that some aspects are dead on arrival, and to view the document as the administration's opening gambit in a long political chess match. The other is to take it seriously, as the administration's idealized vision of what government should be. Either way, the fiscal 2006 budget proposed yesterday by President Bush is breathtaking -- in the first approach as farce, in the second as tragedy

Here is the game: One thing the article fails to mention is that, just like the tax cuts, what they really plan on getting is much lower than what they are asking for. It's just like any negotiation. Start with a an outrageous offer and work down from there. That's what this administration is doing. The more outrageous the better. They will look "compassionate" as they give in to the Democrats. They are asking for way more than they know they can get and then they will wind up settling for less. I'll bet around half, which is probably what they wanted anyway.

David Kay from yesterday
Let's Not Make the Same Mistakes in Iran

A year later we are still awaiting the independent commission's report. The discussion of intelligence reform has focused on reordering and adding structure on top of an eroded intelligence foundation. And now we hear the drumrolls again, this time announcing an accelerating nuclear weapons program in Iran.

Paul Krugman
Spearing the Beast

President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.

From Bull Moose
Praise the Lord and Shut 'em Down

The fervent Bible believers in the White House have produced a budget that is contrary to the Judeo-Christian tradition. By hiding the costs of the war and social security privatization, the Bushie budget violates the injunction against bearing false witness. By comforting the comfortable with tax cuts and afflicting the afflicted with cutbacks in food stamps and other services, the spending plan is contrary to Jesus' teachings to put the poor first.

If you thought the Oil-for-food program was corrupt, wait until you see what the CPA did
Fraud and corruption

The Republican senators who have devoted their careers to mauling the United Nations are seldom accused of shyness. But they went strangely quiet on Thursday. Henry Hyde became Henry Jekyll. Norm Coleman's mustard turned to honey. Convinced that the UN is a conspiracy against the sovereignty of the United States, they had been ready to launch the attack which would have toppled the hated Kofi Annan and destroyed his organisation. A report by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, was meant to have proved that, as a result of corruption within the UN's oil-for-food programme, Saddam Hussein was able to sustain his regime by diverting oil revenues into his own hands. But Volcker came up with something else.

- posted by Mom/Dad @ 8:55 AM