Fast foward to today's news, big headlines and buzz across the blogosphere.
New York Times' Headline "Obama Seeks Freeze on Many Domestic Programs", (the headline has since been changed to "Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficits ")
The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.
But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Wow, what difference a year can make huh?
This news is not being taken well by the far left liberals though, as evidenced by Paul Krugman, columnist for New York Times.
Obama Liquidates HimselfIt’s appalling on every level.
It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)
It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
Paul Rosenberg over at Talk Left is a little more blunt, headlining with "It's Official: Obama is an idiot."
Specifically: He's going to announce a spending freeze on domestic programs (but not, of course, on the military) that is "projected to save $250 billion." The rationale is that he wants to appease folks worried about runaway deficits. Which is just what FDR was worried about in 1937.
This is Bush-style idiocy. There is no other word for it.
Adding insult to injury, at the same time, he's also proposing more Ronald Reagan/GW Bush tax cuts... which will, of course, increase the runaway deficits.
And he's also talking about privatizing NASA. Because privatizing the Pentagon turned out so great!
It's time to seriously start talking about primarying Obama in 2012. He's now officially the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland. And the dumbest one since James Buchanan.
Ouch. Harsh.
No need to show all the reactions, you can go and see them for yourself at Memeorandum, they are coming out a mile a minute and from the left they are all pretty much rants, raves and hissy fits.
Big News isn't it?
Well, come on, it is easy to rile the base but what are the chances that all this talk will become reality? Congress and the Senate would have to pass this....sooooooooooo, how about this is Obama wanting to sound good and drag those dwindling poll numbers up in his State of the Union Address and absolutely nothing will really come of it. They will put on a big show, sing and dance a little and then walk off the stage.
How about this is a whole lot of talk.. not action and the liberals, once again, are prematurely having a cow?
The irony here is that these same folks who have been ranting and raving about Obama not keeping his campaign promises to them are actually taking these newest talking points to heart and believing him again.
Say Obama is going to attempt to freeze spending, isn't that a little like closing the barn door after the horses escaped? I mean he has tripled our deficit in one year, Obama and the Democrats in Congress and the Senate have managed to go on a spending binge that would make a drunken sailor proud and NOW he spews about freezing spending?
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