Word: bush
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...That's a shame, because this is an interesting budget. It was originally drafted last year, but congressional Democrats didn't want to send it to President Bush, so it will only fund the government from April through September. Still, it's a real window into their priorities: a 21% increase for worthy low-income nutrition programs, a 13% hike for the already bloated Agriculture Department, a long-overdue 10% boost for Amtrak, cuts for Bush-era abstinence and foreign aid programs, zero for a Bush-era reading program plagued by cronyism and mismanagement. The budget is also notable...
...That's a real problem. Obama recently released his 2010 budget outline, which addresses those larger issues. He also pledged a new framework for additional earmark reforms for 2010. But it's lame for Obama's aides to dismiss the 2009 budget as leftover business from the Bush era. He's the President. He wasn't elected to ignore the leftover business from the Bush era. He ought to be taking heat for punting - not only on the earmarks, but on the other $402 billion worth of government spending. But his critics, from McCain on the Senate floor to Maureen...
...Indeed, several senior Obama Administration officials told me that the least heralded of the three studies - the one by General Douglas Lute, the Bush Administration's "war czar" - was the most valuable. Lute, who is staying on in the Obama Administration, is known to be very skeptical about the Pakistani army's willingness to fight the Taliban, and equally critical of the Karzai government in Afghanistan. But Lute was operating with the smallest staff, and didn't provide much detail about what to do next. (Read "Pakistan's Prospects...
...send $1.5 billion to Pakistan for each of the next five years - although how that aid would be distributed, a crucial question given Pakistan's rampant corruption, has yet to be determined. Military aid to Pakistan will continue as well, but with more strings and supervision than during the Bush Administration. "We have to re-establish close personal relationships with the army," said a senior member of the National Security Council, who was involved in an intense series of meetings with the Pakistani military leadership during the first week of March. "We have to be sure they...
...Brussels, which is the reconnection of the United States with Europe and really a sense of consolidating this enormous political goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic," interim Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried said in a statement. After years of strained relations between the Bush Administration and much of Europe, Obama should be able to tie this goodwill to some of the policies that are now aligning the E.U. on the side of the U.S., from climate change to Iran and the financial crisis. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...