More Genius

So the Republican members of Congress, or some of them, released their answer to the Obama budget today. It was billed as a budget but turns out to be much, much less than that. The verdict: brutal:



Not to mention:



It's a field day, starting with White House reaction:



Pro blogger reaction includes outright ridicule:

If you're having a bad day, I highly encourage you to spend some quality time with the Republican budget proposal. It's reads like what would happen if The Onion put together a budget. "Area Man Releases Proposal for 2010 Federal Spending Priorities..."

...Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Indeed it was, and did. This isn't. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend.

...to considered analysis:

However, another point of interest in the “plan” is that it stakes out some fairly radical positions on monetary policy near the end. They condemn the Fed’s current quantitative easing strategy and, somewhat confusingly, specifically urge the Fed to stop doing this on the grounds that listening to the Republicans is necessary to preserve the Fed’s independence. They “support a requirement that the Fed establish some numerical definition for price stability and maintain that policy.” And most strikingly of all for a party that mostly defines itself in opposition to the dread specter of Europe these days, they want the Fed to abandon its current generalized prosperity mandate in favor of a European Central Bank-style pure inflation target...

...If you want to make a serious inquiry into the roots of persistently high unemployment in many European states relative to the United States, one great place to start would be in the policy difference that the GOP wants to eliminate here. The European Central Bank has no mandate to concern itself with keeping unemployment low. Consequently, unemployment is generally not low.

I don't doubt that we need parties balancing each other in Federal government, but the GOP is going to have to wash out the whole current generation of leadership and replace them with serious legislators if they're ever going to serve that function. Because the reason for this debacle includes a desire to step on the President's first-ever Internet press conference taking serious questions from regular Americas, and a freight train of GOP internal conflict and individual egos:

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) raised objections to an abbreviated alternative budget "blueprint" released today -- but were told by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) they needed to back the plan, according to several Republican sources.

The argument, coming a week before the full House and Senate are scheduled to vote on the budget, underscores the minority party's woes in a mounting unified opposition to President Obama's $3.6 trillion FY2010 budget proposal.

Ryan, the ranking Republican on the budget committee, plans to introduce a detailed substitute amendment for the Democrats' spending plan next Wednesday -- and still intends to do so.

But he and Cantor were reportedly told by Boehner and Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) they needed to move more quickly to counter Democrats' charge they were becoming the "Party of No," according to House GOP staffers.

The 19-page document, prepared by Pence's office, was distributed two days after President Obama criticized Republicans for trashing his detail-crammed 142-page budget outline without producing a credible alternative.

“In his egocentric rush to get on camera, Mike Pence threw the rest of the Conference under the bus, specifically Paul Ryan, whose staff has been working night and day for weeks to develop a substantive budget plan," said a GOP aide heavily involved in budget strategy.

"I hope his camera time was gratifying enough to justify erasing the weeks of hard work by dozens of Republicans to put forth serious ideas," the person added.

The nation is at a critical crossroads; clowntime needs to be over. But the "detailed" GOP "budget" is being promised for next Wednesday.

You know, April Fool's Day.