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House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi just pulled her caucus well to the right of President Obama, as she dramatically broadened the scope of her proposal for extending the Bush-era tax cuts. The White House, since Obama took office, has called for those tax rates to be extended only for households making less than $250,000 a year. The president wants the rates to expire for everybody else. But Pelosi, in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, upped that threshold to $1 million. She urged Boehner to schedule a vote "as early as next week" to extend the "middle-income tax cuts"...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: We're gonna start in Pittsburgh. It's Jim. Great to have out program. You're up first, and welcome, sir. CALLER: Great, Rush. I called Rex Nutting Tuesday night in Pittsburgh. He was on a talk show on that article, and I called him on it. First thing I said is, "They use baseline budgeting." He goes, "What is that?" I explained -- RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold it a second. Hold it. You...? Rex Nutting was on a show in Pittsburgh last Tuesday. You called the show. CALLER: This Tuesday. And I knew enough by listening to...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I had that story yesterday. In fact, I saw that stupid story yesterday and I sent it to everybody I know. And I said, "We're gonna have to deal with this. This has come out of left field. It's come out of the blue. We're gonna have to deal with this." And then I didn't get to it yesterday. I put it so far down in the stack. It's this story about how Obama's not really spending all that much money. Obama's probably the most fiscally responsible president we've had in 25 or 30 administrations. I mean,...

Obama's campaign manager huddles with Senate DemocratsBy Bernie Becker - 05/24/12 06:27 PM ET President Obama’s campaign manager huddled with Democratic senators on Thursday to brief them on the campaign’s grassroots strategy, according to lawmakers in attendance. Speaking to reporters afterward, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, a former top aide to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), said he walked the lawmakers through what the campaign was doing on the ground, and senators said the meeting did not spend much time on other hot-button issues — like the private equity experience of presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney. A number of Democrats have...

<p>One of President Barack Obama’s top campaign spokesmen is a private equity manager whose firm has shut down several factories and laid off hundreds of people amid a stalled economy.</p> <p>Federico Pena’s role at Vestar Capital Partners has emerged as Obama’s aides and deputies continue their effort to portray former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney‘s investment career as ruthless, job-destroying, profit-maximizing “vulture capitalism.” Pena has been a partner at Vestar since 2000.</p>

I hate that I feel compelled to say it, but the gentleman most definitely has a point. Some words of wisdom from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.): Coburn: U.S. "should see another downgrade" "S&P's downgrade on us was right, matter of fact we're going to get another downgrade. I can tell you right now, you can have a great legal case for suing the rating agencies for not downgrading us again because we have not demonstrated the political will to solve the problems," said Coburn on CBS's midweek show "Face to Face," posted online Wednesday. ... "We should see another downgrade,...

Budget: You wouldn't think that, after adding $5 trillion to the U.S.' debt, President Obama would seriously claim he's a fiscal hawk. But thanks to a misleading article on CBS' MarketWatch site, that's just what he's doing. 'Since I've been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years," Obama said on Wednesday. "Think about that." Obama didn't turn to his own Office of Management and Budget to support this fact, or even the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Instead, he went to a CBS MarketWatch column by Rex Nutting, which claims spending under Obama has risen...

Since 2009, and since Senate Democrats last passed a budget, the Congressional Budget Office has calculated $1 trillion deficits each year with 2012 being no exception. But now, a new USA Today study shows that last year's budget deficit wasn't $1 trillion....it was actually $5 trillion. The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government's books. It is well known by now that even if...

Spending has skyrocketed under President Obama, but of late some are claiming that the opposite is true. Case in point: MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting wrote, “Obama spending binge never happened,” and Politifact rated this statement “mostly true.” But Mitt Romney this week said that “Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelrated at a pace without precedent in recent history.” So who has it right? Mitt Romney. What Politifact must have missed is a very important data point: President Obama signed most of the spending attributed to President George W. Bush’s last year in office, which...

It made the rounds on the blogosphere. It got fact-checked by Politico. White House spokesman Jay Carney cited it. It's the latest left-wing talking point that President Obama has actually put a slow to the growth of government spending. And it's completely false. (This despite Politifact's "Mostly True rating. But who's surprised by that?) Started by Rex Nutting at Marketwatch, the claim goes something like this: Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. The claim relies on...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - At a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in Denver tonight, President Obama set out to upend conventional Republican wisdom that his administration has been defined by excessive government spending. "I'm running to pay down our debt in a way that's balanced and responsible. After inheriting a $1 trillion deficit, I signed $2 trillion of spending cuts into law," he told a crowd of donors at the Hyatt Regency. "My opponent won't admit it, but it's starting to appear in places, like real liberal outlets, like the Wall Street Journal: Since I've been president, federal spending has...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will announce it has exceeded the $1 trillion mark in the federal deficit -- predicted by Congress' research arm last week as $1.29 trillion -- for the second straight year as it projects an even larger gap between revenues and spending for fiscal year 2011. The Congressional Budget Office last week announced the deficit for the 2010 budget year that ended Sept. 30 was $1.29 trillion. That's down by $125 billion from the $1.4 trillion in 2009 -- the highest deficit on record. It attributed money recovered from the Troubled Asset Relief Program for the...

I'm always entertained when older folks try to reach out to people my age. It's hardly ever a pretty sight and most of the time these attempts end up being hilarious. I found myself chuckling at Barack Obama's most recent effort to beg young voters to come out to the polls this November. No one is buying it anymore, especially young people. Even the most liberal of my generation are frustrated with the President... The radical environmentalists on college campuses across the country were furious when Obama opened up the coasts for limited drilling. Young Americans are realizing they did...

The Obama's spending goes up while the deficit gets worse.

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. government racked up a gaping shortfall in the first two months of this fiscal year after posting a record budget deficit last year, congressional analysts said on Friday. In October and November, the government spent $292 billion more than it took in, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said. That was even worse than the same period last year, when the government was on its way to posting a record $1.4 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The federal budget has been battered by the worst economic downturn since the...

For U.S., a Sea of Perilous Red Ink, Years in the MakingThere are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years. The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested. The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of...

America could be under a media induced coma, Remember, during the economic crisis of last September is when Barack Obama pulled away from John McCain in the polls because voters saw him as much better on the economy(based on what?). Now Obama will quadruple the deficit. You happy Obama voters?

What does one TRILLION dollars look like? All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"... A billion dollars... A hundred billion dollars... Eight hundred billion dollars... One TRILLION dollars... What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like. We'll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to...