Obama Budget Briefing Met with Questions, Not Acceptance (by liberal bloggers)

There's a tale being spun about us liberal bloggers...that, we're on board with Obama's proposed budget cuts. Seems that there was a conference call with the blogging elite to unveil some of the proposals and b/c no one threw rotten tomatoes thru the phone/skype lines, it has been deemed a raging success. -- brook



http://firedoglake.com/2011/02/15/obama-budget-briefing-met-with-questions-not-acceptance/

Obama Budget Briefing Met with Questions, Not Acceptance
By: Siun Tuesday February 15, 2011 2:25 pm



Michael Shear has a piece in this morning’s New York Times that argues the “Obama budget escapes liberal backlash for now.” In it, he references a call with David Plouffe and Ken Baer yesterday evening for “liberal bloggers” to “brief them on the budget’s details and reassure them of the president’s commitment to their causes.”

(snip)

Perhaps Mr. Shear and his establishment media colleagues approach press briefings differently, but those of us on the call were there to ask questions about the administration’s just released budget, not to howl in outrage.

That said, not a single question was framed in a way I’d consider supportive of the administration’s approach. Baer and Plouffe were challenged repeatedly on the tradeoffs they presented over and over again as “shared sacrifice” and “tough choices” for the President who, we were reminded, was once a “community organizer.”

(snip)

When I asked about a claim made earlier in the call that DoD funding was being cut while, in reality, the amount is $22 billion more than appropriated this year – and whether the administration would provide guarantees that no future “supplementals” would be used to add to the $118 billion allocated separate from the DoD budget for what are called “Overseas Contingency Operations” (our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan), the response was, shall we say, less than satisfactory. David Swanson, who listened to a tape of the call describes it well here -->

more at link: http://firedoglake.com/2011/02/15/obama-budget-briefing-met-with-questions-not-acceptance/

:spank: :evilgrin:

nt

hell yeah!