February 26, 2009

Obama Increases Military Budget, Ignoring Frank’s Criticisms

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On Tuesday, Rep. Barney Frank said that “To accomplish his goals of expanding health care and other important quality of life services without ballooning the deficit,” President Barack Obama had to cut the military budget. Apparently, Obama didn’t get the message. The White House released its proposed budget on Thursday morning. The very first page of the Department of Defense section of the budget (PDF) proposal trumpets: “$533.7 billion for the Department of Defense base budget in 2010, a four-percent increase over 2009.” (Obama’s budget is for fiscal year 2010, which runs from October 1, 2009 through September 30, 2010.)

There is some good news for Frank and his cohorts. According to McClatchy, Obama may target the air force’s F-22 fighter plane—a program Frank had mentioned as particularly wasteful—for cuts. (Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also criticized the program.) But even if the F-22 program is slashed, or even halted altogether, the military budget is still going up. That’s a far cry from what Frank and other Congressional Dems called for on Tuesday. Will they make a fuss?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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