From the Washington Post, from an AP article by Martin Crutsinger. The actual budget can be found here, but if you think I'm gonna read and comment on a 23 Mb, 431-page Acrobat file, you've got another think coming. I don't get paid for this, you know.

Readers on this board may be particularly interested in the NASA portion. I may comment on this, as I hope others will.

Bush will attempt to cut spending in some areas, which in Washington language normally means not increasing spending as much as they would like. No one wants to plow through the whole budget, but please at least look at the tables here. Note what amounts are going up--almost everything--and which ones are actually going down.

When the Democrats bus in their usual displays of pathetic people who they will claim are going to perish on the long knives of the Evil Republicans, I hope you look back at the actual numbers.

A couple of notes rom the article:

Bush's proposed cuts include a $9 billion reduction in highway spending, reductions in water projects by the Army Corps of Engineers and elimination of hundreds of education and health projects that lawmakers had won congressional approval for last year for their home districts.

Ah, yes. One should note that these particular areas of the budget are favored menus from which politicians of both parties select their billions in pork, and, not by coincidence, the areas most loaded with waste, fraud, and abuse. The last bit about "home districts" in this sentence pretty much nails it.

In his new budget, the president proposes spending $344 billion to make that [tax] cut, which is due to expire after 2010, last for two more years.

Notice that word, "spending" sneaking in there. To the article writer, and many in the government, money not taken from citizens is considered money "spent" by the government, and it is this attitude that needs to be scraped out of Washington like something from the bottom of your shoe. I do not know whether the budget itself uses this language. I hope not.

The main points of attack by the Democrats will be the deficit, and the imagined cuts in "critical programs." There is an election coming up, and they will give Bush no quarter.