Mayor Henry is heading to Washington with other Indiana mayors to lobby (sorry, forgot that practice will be strictly forbidden by the president) plead for a piece of the stimulus pie. And all he wants is a measly $300 million out of all those hundreds of billions. The Greenwood City Council, meanwhile, is taking no chances, approving paying an Indianapolis law firm $50,000 as lobbyists special envoys to seek a share of the estimated $5 billion expected to come to Indiana. Greenwood wants some of the money to be earmarked for capital projects. It took the $50,000 from its cumulative capital development fund.
And those on the left are already starting to call for Obama to make drastic cuts in military spending:
Obama needs to wise up, totally withdraw from both Iraq and Afghanistan, focus on finding bin Laden in Pakistan, withdraw from the U.S. Empire, and dramatically slash the U.S. defense budget. The U.S needs to take this revolutionary tack as one step toward renewing what is still the world's largest economy—that on which all indices of U.S. national power ultimately depend.
The tentative 2010 budget calls for about an 8 percent increase for the Pentago, which is about what President Bush had estimated, too. So instead of going back the the guns or butter debate, it looks like we're going to try both for a while.
Some conservatives, by the way, are trying to pull the same crap that liberals used to make the government grow so much. Even though the 2010 budget calls for spending more than in 2009, they're calling it a "cut" in defense spending because it's less than the Pentagon said it wanted.
