AVON, OH--Congressman Sherrod Brown (D-OH) today called the president's proposed FY 2007 budget a set of failed priorities for Ohio families.

The budget, presented to Congress today, calls for drastic funding cuts in health care, energy, veterans, education, and job creation programs. At the same time, the president is demanding that Congress make permanent his tax cuts.

"Budgets are moral documents," Brown said. "The president wants to cut programs vital to millions of Ohioans to pay for billionaire tax cuts. Clearly Republican leadership does not share the same values as Ohio families."

Today the president proposed to:

Cut $36 billion from Medicare over the next five years, and $105 billion over ten

Cut or flat fund energy programs specifically designed to help Ohio industries improve energy efficiency and cut costs

Underfund No Child Left Behind by $15.4 billion

Cut health care for Ohio's veterans

Cut $198 million from children's hospitals

In the House Leadership wars, Tom DeLay's gone, his protege Roy Blunt's been defeated, and the GOP's anointed Rep. John Boehner (OH) as the new face of the party. It's all about reform, right? Guess again. The new guy's no prize either.

According to the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), Boehner's record documents his support for measures that have run counter to the best interests of the vast majority of American Jews. As reported by the NJDC:

1. For School Prayer and Amending the Constitution: Boehner supported a school prayer amendment to the United States Constitution in 1997 (H.J.Res. 78), 1999 (H.J.Res 66), and 2001 (H.J.Res. 52); voted to permit school prayer "during this time of struggle against the forces of international terrorism" (House Roll Call Vote 445, Nov. 15, 2001); and voted to only allow federal aid to schools that allow prayer (House Roll Call Vote 85, March 23, 1994).

2. For Forced Religion in Anti-Poverty Programs: Boehner voted to permit taxpayer-funded anti-poverty programs to require aid recipients to join in religious activities. (House Roll Call Votes 16 and 17, Feb. 4, 2004)

By terrorism standards the attacks of 9/11 were spectacularly successful, not only in the extent of death and destruction they produced, but in instilling a deep sense of horror in the American public. But the attacks were carried out with the crudest of instruments: commercial airliners hijacked by a dozen men armed only with boxcutters who then played out their roles as suicide bombers. In spite of the incredible boldness of the attacks, it was just another variation on an old theme. Nevertheless, there were those who claimed that terrorism had entered a new era, and that “9/11 changed everything.” This argument as we now know was largely self serving.

Remarks prepared for World Can't Wait rally at White House, Feb. 4, 2006.

There are protests outside at least two houses today, the White House and Bush's luxury estate near Crawford, Texas. Bush can run, but he cannot hide.

He tries to hide behind fear, our fear. The only tool in his bag is making us afraid. We have to resist becoming afraid, but we have to be able to talk about the fact that Bush and Cheney have made us much less safe. They have turned world opinion against us. They have turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists. They have turned Afghanistan into a drug production kingdom. Terrorist incidents are up so dramatically that the Bush Administration no longer publishes those statistics.

For those impervious to the suffering of others, a dollar figure sometimes helps bring it home. Two honest economists have recently put one on the Iraq war, and in so doing shown a spotlight on the black hole in the center of our future.

If $1 trillion makes you gag, try $2 trillion.

The latter number is the "moderate," as opposed to the conservative, price tag that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes have put on the war, which they calculated by factoring in some - but by no means all - of its real costs, such as lifelong care for brain-injured U.S. troops.

The most outrageous deception in the selling of this war three years ago is not the claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or had links to al-Qaida, but the blithe assertion that the war could be fought for chump change; it was supposed to be pay-as-you-go, financed by liberated oil revenue. White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey was sacked for saying the adventure could cost the country as much as $200 billion; of course, the total, even by conventional calculation, has gone well beyond that.