The only thing sorrier than Obama’s effort at fiscal restraint is the reaction to it in Congress. Republicans derided Obama’s proposed cuts, but where were they when spending went out of control on their watch?

Democrats, meanwhile, built a hard-earned reputation for fiscal responsibility in the 1990s. Now they’re frittering it away. House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., essentially told Obama to forget his cuts, saying that “Congress is unlikely to agree with” all of them. Democratic lawmakers immediately vowed to oppose some of the proposed reductions. To name just a couple, Rep Maurice Hinchey of New York protested cuts in the presidential helicopter fleet, and Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas sought to protect farm subsidies.

This sort of reflexive parochialism leaves us deeply concerned about whether either party, or Congress as an institution, is capable of addressing the nation’s dire fiscal circumstances, which will only worsen as Baby Boomers hit retirement age. Radical deficit reduction isn’t desirable at a time when the administration is spending massive amounts of money in an effort to stimulate the economy. But this is exactly the right time to hunt down serious savings from weak and wasteful spending programs ”” and to signal the financial markets that huge deficits won’t be tolerated once the economy recovers. Instead, Obama’s budget predicts deficits topping $500 billion for each of the next 10 years, adding almost $7 trillion to the national debt.Perhaps by forecasting godawful deficits now, the administration is positioning itself to claim credit for cutting them to slightly less awful levels down the road. If that’s the case, it’s cynical game playing. If that’s not the case, then it’s simply irresponsible.

Read it all.

The U.S. Treasury auction of long-term bonds on Thursday was “terrible”, in the words of one Wall Street economist, with the rate on the 30 year bond jumping from 4.1 to 4.3 percent. This is just the first sign that the debt-based Obama economic stimulus plan is about to become a major drag on the recovery, just as expected.

The economic news is not all bad. We are seeing signs the rate of contraction is abating quickly, promising a bottom to the recession sometime this summer as many forecasters have expected. But therein lies another piece of the interest rate puzzle, and the trouble ahead.

There are two critical consequences to the economy stabilizing. The first is that the massive liquidity injected into credit markets by the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world transforms from economic medicine to inflationary heroin. Central banks are going to face a difficult task of extracting the excess liquidity before inflation soars and without causing another recession. Doubt about the fight against soaring inflation means higher inflation premiums in interest rates.

The second dangerous consequence is that President Obama is on course to double the national debt in just four years….

Read it all.

The formula for restoring national confidence ”” part good policy, part good politics, part good luck ”” can be hard to find. It eluded Herbert Hoover after the Crash of ’29, Lyndon B. Johnson after the Tet offensive, Jimmy Carter after the energy shock and George W. Bush after Iraq turned from quick victory to bloody insurgency.

But President Obama has to try to do just that in a time of crisis. As the government announced this week that the nation’s largest banks had steered away from the precipice and that job losses were beginning to slow, Mr. Obama has carefully begun trying to mine any national leader’s most precious commodity in a crisis: optimism.

His past references to “glimmers of hope” were modestly upgraded at the White House on Friday, with his declaration ”” which he stumbled over, taking some of the assertiveness out of the line ”” that “the gears of our economic engine do appear to be slowly turning once again.”

Read it all.

President Barack Obama is scaling back White House plans for Thursday’s National Day of Prayer even as his administration defends the tradition in federal court in Wisconsin.

Obama’s position has disappointed Christian conservatives, who want the president to do more to mark the day, and an atheist group that wants him to end the tradition.

The Obama administration has asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims the day violates the separation of church and state. In a rare alliance, 31 mostly Republican members of Congress and a prominent Christian legal group are joining the administration to fight the lawsuit.

Congress established the day in 1952 and in 1988 set the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray.

Read it all.

We now know that the reaction of right-wing Catholics to Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama falls into the category of “more Catholic than the pope.”

To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called “a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president’s approach to life issues” — so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI’s daily.

The Vatican newspaper offered its analysis as Catholic liberals and conservatives are battling fiercely over Notre Dame’s decision to invite the president as this year’s commencement speaker and to grant him an honorary degree….

Read it all.

President Obama seeks to change this. Last month, he released a strategic plan that identified 10 corridors for high-speed rail ranging between 100 miles and 600 miles that could be eligible for federal funding. Attention would be shown to Acela. Mr. Obama would plunk down $8 billion authorized in the stimulus package and $5 billion over the next five years. That is a drop in the bucket; a proposed line between Anaheim, Calif., and San Francisco alone carries an estimated cost of $34 billion and would take 10 years to build. But this is a worthwhile down payment on a transportation system that would benefit the environment.

Mr. Obama calls high-speed rail “long overdue.” So is a modern air traffic control system. A car GPS navigation unit is more advanced than the 1950s-era equipment being used today. The Federal Aviation Administration is putting the pieces in place to make NextGen fully operational. It would allow more planes to get into and out of the air faster, relieving airport congestion and reducing delays. This is especially important for the New York area. A third of all U.S. flights go through the region, and a hiccup at any of its four major airports can affect two-thirds of the nation’s air traffic.
ad_icon

But it is not clear how the FAA will pay for key components of NextGen.

Read it all.

As Taliban forces edged to within 60 miles of Islamabad late last month, the Obama administration urgently asked for new intelligence assessments of whether Pakistan’s government would survive. In briefings last week, senior officials said, President Obama and his National Security Council were told that neither a Taliban takeover nor a military coup was imminent and that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was safe.

Beyond the immediate future, however, the intelligence was far from reassuring. Security was deteriorating rapidly, particularly in the mountains along the Afghan border that harbor al-Qaeda and the Taliban, intelligence chiefs reported, and there were signs that those groups were working with indigenous extremists in Pakistan’s populous Punjabi heartland.

The Pakistani government was mired in political bickering. The army, still fixated on its historical adversary India, remained ill-equipped and unwilling to throw its full weight into the counterinsurgency fight.

Read it all.

Pakistani forces battled Taliban fighters on Monday as the militants denounced the army and government as U.S. stooges and said a peace pact would end unless the government halted its offensive.

The February pact and spreading Taliban influence have raised alarm in the United States about the ability of nuclear-armed Pakistan — which has a vital role in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan — to stand up to the militants.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Islamabad of abdicating to the Taliban while President Barack Obama expressed grave concern the government was “very fragile” and unable to deliver basic services.

Obama will present his strategy for defeating al Qaeda to Pakistan and Afghanistan leaders on Wednesday amid growing U.S. concern it is losing the Afghan war.

Read it all.

Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an “ethical populism.” The protesters are homeowners who didn’t walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don’t want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don’t need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right — and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.

Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement — maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off “in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time.” Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed.

Read it all.

Ursula Holmes was settled into her usual pew toward the rear of Washington’s Nineteenth Street Baptist Church when President-elect Barack Obama saw her. Both he and his wife, Michelle, paused, stooped down and took hold of her hand as they left church after a Sunday service in January.

Holmes was too excited then to whisper the advice she now has for them, advice that she says has helped her survive in this city for 92 years. “Find a church family,” she wants to tell them. “There’s no place like the black church.”

Holmes is far from alone in that sentiment. Everyone in Washington’s church-going community seems to have an opinion about where the first family should go to church — and nowhere is hope higher than among the city’s scores of predominantly black churches, which are in the mix for the first time. Their pastors and members are asking: Will Obama choose one of us? Like so many choices the first family is making in this city, the search for a church has spurred discussions about the state of race relations and a hot competition for its mark of approval.

Read it all.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land has worked with presidential administrations going back to Ronald Reagan’s, but he can’t remember any that has convened an advisory council composedimostly of religious leaders, as President Obama has done. The council gives religion “an institutionally higher profile than under President Bush,” says the conservative Land, who directs public policy
for the nation’s largest evangelical denomination. “No president that I’ve dealt with has had anything like it.”

Read it all.

Weighing everything, President Obama got it about as right as one could when he decided to ban the use of torture, to release the Bush torture memos for public scrutiny and to not prosecute the lawyers and interrogators who implemented the policy. But there is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.

After all, we’re not just talking about “enhanced interrogations.” Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.

The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for this policy is surely unsatisfying; some of this abuse involved sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers. Then why justify the Obama compromise? Two reasons: the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart; and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.

Read it all.

The need for more doctors comes up at almost every Congressional hearing and White House forum on health care. “We’re not producing enough primary care physicians,” Mr. Obama said at one forum. “The costs of medical education are so high that people feel that they’ve got to specialize.” New doctors typically owe more than $140,000 in loans when they graduate.

Lawmakers from both parties say the shortage of health care professionals is already having serious consequences. “We don’t have enough doctors in primary care or in any specialty,” said Representative Shelley Berkley, Democrat of Nevada.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said, “The work force shortage is reaching crisis proportions.”

Even people with insurance have problems finding doctors.

Read it all.

President Obama started putting his mark on U.S. foreign policy from his very first hours in office. He quickly and deliberately presented a more conciliatory, multilateral approach to world affairs, analysts say.

While trying to grapple with a global economic meltdown, the new president initiated immediate reviews of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. He started to open diplomatic channels with previous enemy states such as Cuba and Iran. He reached out to Europe and sought to thaw U.S.-Russia relations.

Read or listen to it all.

The habit of assessing a president’s accomplishments after his first 100 days in office goes back to the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his first 100 days, Roosevelt laid the foundations for the New Deal. It’s an impossible standard to meet, says former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder.

“I often say that Roosevelt cursed future presidents with the 100 days concept. … It’s just too short,” Blinder says.

In normal times, new presidents can’t hope to match Roosevelt’s accomplishments. In that regard, Obama has an advantage. These aren’t normal times. In fact, they’re the most challenging economic times since the Great Depression. So challenging, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain’s former top economic adviser, that Obama began to influence economic policy even before he was inaugurated.

“This is the longest first hundred days, at least in my lifetime,” Holtz-Eakin says. “President Obama actually became the leader right after his election.”

Read it all.

If ever there were a time for President Obama to trust his instincts and stick to his guns, that time is now, when he is being pressured to change his mind about closing the books on the “torture” policies of the past.

Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.

He was right to do this. But he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government. And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices.

But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps — or, at least, careers and reputations.

Read it all.

In a 2006 speech here, then-Sen. Barack Obama said Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was so “radical” the Defense Department wouldn’t survive its application. Earlier this month (April), the new president suggested the economy couldn’t get along without it.

In the middle of a nuts-and-bolts speech at Georgetown University on economic policy, Obama overtly cited the sermon’s parable of two men, one of whom builds his house on rock, the other on sand.

“We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand,” the president said. “We must build our house upon a rock.”

Read it all.

Ramping up his campaign to crack down on credit cards, President Obama will meet Thursday with executives of 14 leading companies to press his case for new consumer protections.

The White House meeting comes a day after credit card legislation opposed by the financial services industry moved forward on Capitol Hill. The House Financial Services Committee voted 48-19 to approve a bill to clamp down on rates and fees; nine Republicans joined the panel’s Democrats in voting for it.

Read it all.

Egyptians are cautiously rejoicing over the recent appointment of a veiled Egyptian American Muslim woman as an advisor to President Obama.

Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, was appointed this month to Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Arabs are closely watching for signs that the new leadership in Washington is making efforts to improve relations with Islam, which many Muslims believe were severely damaged during the eight years of the Bush administration. The selection of Mogahed is viewed by many in the Middle East as a step by Obama to move beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that Muslims believe they have encountered since the attacks Sept. 11, 2001.

Read it all.

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved ”” not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees ”” investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

Read it all.

Although President Obama opposes the prosecution of CIA operatives who carried out the most controversial interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration, Obama suggested today that he had not ruled out action against Justice Department officials who authorized the tactics.

The president, who banned and then publicized interrogation tactics employed by the CIA in the early years of the Bush administration, has maintained that he is more interested in looking forward than dwelling on past actions.

Read it all.

Every year between 2001 and 2008, former President Bush’s calendar was cleared on the first Thursday in May to mark the National Day of Prayer in the White House East Room with prominent evangelicals.

Now the Obama White House is facing questions of inside-the-Beltway etiquette: Should Obama maintain the open door to conservative critics like James and Shirley Dobson, and if so, should they accept?

Or, will the White House have an official observance at all?

Read it all.

Yet the idea of non-traditional protesters using bottom-up organizing to foment a national movement in the span of 60 days may have marked a turning point for the tea partiers ”“ especially since the high attendance estimates rivaled the estimated 500,000 or so protesters who converged on New York City and several other major cities to oppose the Iraq War on Feb. 15, 2003.

“I think it’s not dissimilar from what we had in 2003 with the anti-war protests, where a lot of people were uncomfortable with the war, but also uncomfortable with the anti-war position, recognizing there are terrorists out there,” says Jeremi Suri, a history professor who specializes in social movements at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Here we have a similar thing: There are serious economic issues, and it’s unclear to many people whether the stimulus is going to deal with these.”

Read it all.

. Asked about the tea parties, President Barack Obama responded that he was not aware of them. As Marie Antoinette said, “Let them drink Lapsang Souchong.” His Imperial Majesty at Barackingham Palace having declined to acknowledge the tea parties, his courtiers at the Globe and elsewhere fell into line. Talk-show host Michael Graham spoke to one attendee at the 2009 Boston Tea Party who remarked of the press embargo: “If Obama had been the king of England, the Globe wouldn’t have covered the American Revolution.”

The American media, having run their own business into the ground, are certainly qualified to run everybody else’s into the same abyss. Which is why they’ve decided that hundreds of thousands of citizens protesting taxes and out-of-control spending and government vaporization of Americans’ wealth and their children’s future is no story. Nothing to see here. As Nancy Pelosi says, it’s AstroTurf ”“ fake grass-roots, not the real thing.

Besides, what are these whiners so uptight about? CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:

“Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right ”¦”

Read it all.

Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, writing in the Wilson Quarterly (“The World’s New Numbers”), notes that Russia’s declining fertility is magnified by “a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term — hypermortality.” Because of rampant HIV/AIDS, extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis, alcoholism and the deteriorating health-care system, a U.N. report says “mortality in Russia is three to five times higher for men and twice as high for women” as in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report, Walker says, “predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to 1 million people annually.” Be that as it may, “Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.”

According to projections by the United Nations Population Division, Russia’s population, which was around 143 million four years ago, might be as high as 136 million or as low as 121 million in 2025, and as low as 115 million in 2030.

Marx envisioned the “withering away” of the state under mature communism. Instead, Eberstadt writes, the world may be witnessing the withering away of Russia, where Marxism was supposed to be the future that works. Russia, he writes, “has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history.”

“History,” he concludes, “offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.” Demography is not by itself destiny, but it is more real than an arms control “process” that merely expresses the liberal hope of taming the world by wrapping it snugly in parchment.

Read it all.

The Obama administration will declare greenhouse gases a threat to public health today, sources said, marking a major step — both practically and symbolically — toward federal limits on the carbon dioxide emissions scientists blame for global warming.

The move by the Environmental Protection Agency is prompted by a two-year-old Supreme Court decision. It paves the way for the White House to regulate emissions from vehicles and effectively force the U.S. auto fleet to be cleaner and more efficient – a plan the administration is expected to put in place soon.

It also opens the door to broad emissions limits in all other parts of the economy, including power plants and construction sites, which critics say could further chill an already recessionary economy. Administration officials insist they’d prefer to let Congress set those limits, and that they will help spur millions of clean-energy jobs in the years to come.

Read it all.

The president failed to point out, though, that the tax cuts he promoted are part of the problem Volcker was asked to solve. Taxpayers face a thicket of potential deductions, credits and exclusions because Congress and the White House use the tax code instead of direct subsidies to promote certain types of behavior. For example, to boost sales of cars and homes, this year Congress added a temporary deduction for automobile sales taxes and expanded the credit for first-time home buyers. Over the years, lawmakers piled on layer after layer of benefits for social aims, along with a dizzying array of incentives for businesses and investors. Meanwhile, they played a cat-and-mouse game with tax accountants, tweaking the code to deter the gimmicks that shifted income into less-taxed categories.

Read it all.

The president and the Federal Reserve chairman voiced cautious optimism yesterday that the economy could be beginning to stabilize. But the economy wasn’t cooperating.

Retail sales dropped sharply in March, the government reported, and wholesale prices fell steeply. Both pieces of data underscore the hard slog the nation faces to emerge from its deep recession and the limitations of more optimistic talk from Washington. The stock market fell 2 percent, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

President Obama and Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke were hardly effusive. Obama acknowledged that “there will be more job loss, more foreclosures and more pain” before the recession ends. But both men, in separate speeches, spoke of an end to the sense of free-fall that enveloped the U.S. economy in the final months of 2008 and first months of 2009.

Their words reflect a new phase of the government response to the financial crisis and recession. Unlike a few months ago, the major policies meant to prop up the economy– increased government spending, special lending programs and extensive efforts by the Fed to pump money into the economy — are now largely in place. Thus, senior officials are trying to encourage Americans to be confident about the future, so that those who still have their jobs will feel more comfortable buying a house, a car or other large items.

Read it all.

He doesn’t thunder from the pulpit in righteous rage. He’d rather relay stories that make a moral point.

He has no catchphrases, fussy handlers or televised religious talk shows.

What the soft-spoken Rev. Joel Hunter of Longwood does have is an evangelical church of 12,000, a talent for building diverse coalitions and a prominent spiritual advisory role in the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Not bad for a registered Republican who came to Central Florida in 1985 to take charge of a small flock that grew into one of the region’s largest megachurches.

As Hunter delivers his three Easter sermons today at Northland, a Church Distributed, he holds a place in the national spotlight unmatched by any other faith leader in Central Florida.

Read it all.

President Obama picked the self-described “Church of the Presidents,” a history-drenched Episcopal church across from the White House, for his first venture to services since he was inaugurated Jan. 20.

The Obamas’ Easter visit to St. John’s Church doesn’t mean they have found a permanent place of worship in the capital.

Read it all.