Hypocrite GOP Pig says Congress Must Limit Pork Spending

President (out of control spender) Bush sought today to regain the initiative on the eve of the Democratic takeover of Congress, pledging to work enthusiastically with the new lineup of lawmakers but holding fast to his own goals.

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Nothing but swift boating propaganda from the GOP PIG himself!
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Offering his congratulations to the incoming 110th Congress, Mr. Bush made it clear that he will resist being painted as a lame-duck president in his last two years — “one-quarter of my presidency, plenty of time to accomplish important things for the American people,” as he put it in an essay in The Wall Street Journal today.

Mr. Bush struck the same tone this morning in remarks after a Cabinet meeting. He voiced the hope that Democrats and Republicans alike “can find common ground to serve our folks,” and then sounded much as he did last summer and fall while campaigning for Republican candidates and positions.

“One area where we must work together is that we’ve got to make sure we spend the people’s money wisely,” Mr. Bush said after the Cabinet session. No doubt aware that Democrats are wary of being portrayed as members of a tax-and-spend party, Mr. Bush spoke, as he often did on the campaign trail, of “the need to keep this economy growing by making tax relief permanent,” and of his desire to “reform” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Bush laid out his positions in more detail on the OpEd page of The Journal, often a friendly platform. “It is a fact that economies do best when you reward hard work by allowing people to keep more of what they have earned,” the president wrote in The Journal. “It is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues.”

Mr. Bush wrote that he saw “the opportunity to build a bipartisan consensus to fight and win the war” in Iraq.

“Ultimately, Iraqis must resolve the most pressing issues facing them,” Mr. Bush said. “We can’t do it for them.”

Mr. Bush is expected to address the nation soon on his Iraq policy. His speech, to be televised in prime time, is being eagerly awaited in the aftermath of calls for change, both by an independent commission that investigated the Iraq situation and, implicitly, by the results of the November elections, which returned power to Democrats for the first time since 1994.

Democrats may be in a celebratory mood as they prepare to wield the gavels in the House and Senate, but the president was not entirely conciliatory. “The majority party in Congress gets to pass the bills it wants,” he wrote in The Journal. “The minority party, especially where the margins are close, has a strong say in the form bills take. And the Constitution leaves it to the president to use his judgment whether they should be signed into law.”

Democrats will have only a thin margin in the new Senate, though its majority in the House is more comfortably large. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, vice chairman of the Democratic conference in the Senate, said today that Democrats “certainly want to work with the president.”

“We hope that when the president says compromise, it means more than ‘do it my way,’ which is what he’s meant in the past,” Mr. Schumer said.

Mr. Bush asked the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress today to make good on campaign promises by shining light on the previously clandestine expenditures known as “earmarks,” through legislation to require disclosure of their sponsors and other details.

Speaking in the White House’s rose garden after the Cabinet meeting, Mr. Bush noted that the soon-to-be chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees had agreed on a temporary moratorium on earmarks, which are parochial spending measures slipped into larger, often unrelated bills at the behest of one or a few members.

“But we need to do more,” Mr. Bush said. “Congress needs to adopt real reform that requires full disclosure of the sponsors, the costs, the recipients and the justification for every earmark.”

And he said Congress “needs to cut the number and cost of earmarks next year by half.”

The President said he plans to submit next month a five-year budget proposal intended to bring the federal budget into balance by 2012 without raising taxes.

He also repeated his desire for legislation giving the president the power to delete individual provisions from spending bills, known as a line-item veto — a power that Congress, even when controlled by the same party as the president, has refused to grant.

Mr. Bush took a friendly if not altogether conciliatory tone toward Congress in his remarks, saying, “I’ve been encouraged by the productive meeting I have had with many of the new leaders of Congress.”

But he made it clear that he planned to stand firm on his past policy themes, like keeping taxes down and fighting the “war on terror.”

He also said Congress would have to address entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “for the sake of younger Americans.”

Mr. Bush said those programs needed to be reformed, “so future generations of Americans can benefit” from them “without bankrupting our country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/

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Nothing but swift boating propaganda from the GOP PIG himself!
Advice from the Abramoff Mafia? what a fucking hypocrite