Wednesday's speech was a sop to the so-called base, just more words devoid of meaning.

There just was never any reason, as far as I was concerned, to think that someone with Obama's track record was going to all-of-a-sudden find his inner liberal Democrat: that's just not who he is, or where he is comfortable.

I'm getting really tired of the insult-to-my-intelligence that is the Obama method of governance: give a speech to placate the liberals, and then do what he planned to do all along.

The people he needs to convince are Democrats. They're the people that will reelect him. If he hasn't realized that he can never satisfy the Republicans, he has no business being in the WH.

The Republicans have seen him cave on issue after issue. They aren't about to stop the steam roller now.

WASHINGTON - The budget deal struck last Friday to avert a government shutdown cuts the fiscal 2011 deficit by just $352 million, not the $38 billion touted by both parties, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

A CBO analysis found Wednesday that the measure negotiated by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to fund the government through September would yield less than one-100th of the deficit savings touted.

The study confirms that the resolution cuts federal spending authority by $38 billion, but concludes that most of the money was unlikely to be spent anyway.

The CBO figure was achieved after clearing the smoke and mirrors, by adjusting for savings that are likely to occur in a future year, spending increases elsewhere in the budget, and the hike in the military budget.

When factoring in war funding, the analysis found that the legislation could even increase total federal outlays by $3.3 billion from 2010 levels.

There's talk that the McCaskill-Corker spending cap will be the cost of raising the debt ceiling. This would be, to put it simply, completely insane. Spending caps are bad policy, and the McCaskill-Corker spending cap -- which holds spending to 21.5 percent of GDP, or three percentage points lower than it is right now -- is a badly designed spending cap. But beyond all that, it's laughable to posit it as a compromise: It's arguably the most radically conservative reform that could be made to the federal budget. More extreme, by far, than Paul Ryan's plan.
...
The virtue of a spending cap is that by focusing on only one contributor to debt, it admits only one solution to it: spending cuts. Savage ones. The Corker-McCaskill proposal is so aggressive that there are years when even Paul Ryan's budget, with all its fantastical assumptions and hard caps, wouldn't qualify. "You put McCaskill-Corker into law," says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "and progressive policy is dead for the next quarter-century." link

"No country or person can spend more than they have," Mr. Castro told 1,000 delegates gathered for the party congress, which is expected to yield broad changes in the Cuban system before it concludes on Tuesday. "Two plus two is four. Never five, much less six or seven, as we have sometimes pretended."