I'm just sayin', let's first take a small step back here -- did Bush ever put put an overview like this out for the public eye for his 8 budgets? What about Clinton? The web was around back then, too, albeit a little less developed, let's say.

god this is getting old.

I wish the President would sound more like his budget message than he typically does in his speeches and comments! The message is very strong and even stern in terms of how it handles how we got here. Impressive!

It is short on demonstrating how he will make his rhetoric on slashign the deficit in half during this term. It think that whole line is a political error because it seems a completely fantastic and impossible goal. Why set a goal you know you can't reach? It just gives the opposition a club to beat you with during your re-election. I think this will be likely to come back and haunt the President, but c'est la vie, eh?

The President clearly has good and clear budget priorities generally speaking, but the 4% increase in the Defense Budget is really unjustified. This will receive no scrutiny in the media and little in Congress, but it is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. This outrageous and unjustifiable annual sum is a bigger drag on our civilian economy than the health care debacle. Despite it being off limits for discussion in Washington I think it needs to be examined by people outside the beltway and made an issue.

According to the figures I saw in the summary the combined total for DOD's regular budget plus the supplemental costs of the war is $633.7 Billion. That's is quite simply obscene and cannot be justified. This amount exceeds what all other nations combined spend annually on defense. It is completely absurd and distorts not only the budget but our society and tilts the whole culture toward war and the industries that make war. It is a threat to world peace and US economic stability because it encourages the sort of military solutions that we have seen over the past 60 years don't work (Viet Nam, Iraq, etc...)and it undermines the much more productive and beneficial civilian economy.

DOD alone has more waste in it than the rest of the federal government's departments combined. Yet, is it the supreme sacred cow and is not mentioned at all when talking about budget savings or deficit slashing which is preposerous since there is simply no justification for the vast sums of money DOD spends annually: none. If we spent half of what we currently spend we'd still be outspending everyone else by leaps and bounds. Imagine the economic boon if we had another 300 Billion in civilian economic activity annually.

The President includes the usual Washington song and dance about procurement reform, but that has been a process totally mismanaged by both parties for decades. In any event, procurement reform is not going to do what needs to be done and really serves as a distraction from what is clearly required. We need to simply get rid of a whole lot of what DOD spends money on because we don't need it and it is the least productive economic use of money that there is. the more we cut from DOD the more is available for vastly more productive civilian use.

Overall though, high marks for the President's budget priorities. Let's hope he can keep most of it in tact without the bloodsucking lobbyists and their pawns in Congress destroying too much of it.

A hypothetical scenario: if Roland Burris went ape-shit, so to speak, and starting shrieking and jumping up and down, and ripped off Nancy Pelosi's face, would the Senate eject him? I can't think of anything less that would make them get rid of that disgraceful clown, can you?

Looks good, Pres Obama--except for the Pentagon's black hole (600 billion) and another 130 billion for the sink holes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Down the drain. Better spend the money here for stuff we can grow an economy on.

And please no more bubble economies, no more globalized information age economies where our best and brightest bankers take in junk mortgages, slice, dice and collaterize them with a few clicks of the computer, then these elite schooled ,information-age, globalized bankers had the rating companies rate this junk as AAA securities , which were then leveraged 30x and sold all over the world as GOLD! (Causing Iceland and others to collapse!)This is a crime scene, not an economy! Can we go back to making things ?

I guess I'm gonna skim the document to see if it says anything about science which I know how to interpret.

Something I notice: In the introduction, in the long confession of sins the government had committed under Bush, this document says:

Finally, because of an insistence on putting dogma ahead of science, the United States has fallen behind in some of the most important, cutting-edge research such as stem-cell research.

But stem cell research is not mentioned in the document again. When is federal stem cell research going to be legalized?

The section on NASA is interesting because it does not seem to fundamentally change the direction of we had at the end of the Bush administration-- a mix of robotic and manned missions, replace the space shuttle, "visit the moon by 2020, I guess?". This is basically the plan the previous administration laid out, although the specific mention of robotics may (may?) be an indication they'll be putting more emphasis on robotic exploration program; my (very vague?) impression had been those programs had sort of seen their resources shift to manned spaceflight programs under Bush, but I'm not sure my perceptions are correct. The document does make a big deal of saying that global warming research is a priority of NASA again, which is very cool but not exactly surprising. The document also says that the space shuttle will be retired for good by the end of 2010. That sounds like news?

The NSF section is kind of interesting-- I don't have any way of judging how big a break it is with previous policy, but they have two separate sections that can be described as "more money should go to training America' future scientists". There's also this bit:

Encourages Promising high-Risk Research. The Budget increases support for promising, but exploratory and high-risk research proposals that could fundamentally alter our understanding of nature, revolutionize felds of science, and lead to radically new technologies.

As a political matter, I hope they come up with 2-3 programs that will be shut down. I'm sure this wouldn't be too hard to find in the entire federal government.

Pretty impressive. If he gets this through, it will be pretty amazing. The debt is really scary but thanks to Bush and his criminal congress there aren't a whole lot of options.

The pics that TPM have up are pretty interesting.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/gallery/2009/02/slideshow-behind-the-scenes-in-the-budget-process.php?img=1
Every picture says I can't believe the steaming s**t pile of debt Bush left us.