From last night’s All Stars.

On the Rush Limbaugh dustup:

I don’t think there is anything deep or ideological or even significant about this little dustup. I think it is something that arose because of a misstep by Michael Steele in a radio interview.
And it was exploited by the White House. It wasn’t invented by the White House, but it was exploited because it is amusing. I mean, nominating Rush as the leader of the Republican Party is a clever little ploy. I must say, for my part, that if I have to choose between him and Jindal, I would go with Rush.
But that’s not really what’s at stake. Republicans are now at sea. They don’t have a leader, and they don’t have a direction, or even an ideology. They are recovering from two thumpings at the polls, and it will take them a year or two to reorient themselves.
And they don’t have to have a leader or ideology until November of next year. That’s why elections are spaced two years apart.
In the meantime, what has really happened here is that Michael Steele, who is a rookie at his job, has had a misstep. He insulted Limbaugh at the beginning and inadvertently, I think, goaded into it.
Then he groveled, which made it even worse. And, in the end, I think the real offense was in the same radio spot in which he did. He was with a host. The host actually spoke of the Republicans as Nazis, I think, because–it was indistinct, I think, but because he was attributing it to the fact that it is heavily racially white.
And Steele, who heard this, didn’t protest or argue against it. That was, I think, his real offense.
All of this, I think, is rather trivial and will pass.

On the fading support among some Democrats for the president’s proposed budget:

…it would be the first roadblock in an administration that has been spending promiscuously and promises, too, as far as the eye can see.
The president holds a session today in which he ostentatiously announces a curb on contracting, which will save a bit of money. At the same time he is backing a bill which, as we heard from McCain and Bayh, has got earmarks in it between 8,000 and 9,000. It’s almost uncountable.
I started out this administration agitated by its hypocrisies, but now I’m reaching a Zen-like serenity. I’m merely amused because it’s so comical.
This is a president who holds responsibility on fiscal affairs, a fiscal responsibility summit, a week after he signed the largest spending project in American history.
And then two days later, he submits a budget which into the out years has deficits of trillions of dollars.
The worst example of this, I think, is when he made that speech in Congress in which he spoke about how we can’t have our wars hidden in the budget. It’s got to be on the budget now. The Iraq war is going to be on the budget.
So what does he do? He includes it in the years 2011 until 2019, at which time practically all Americans are out of Iraq, simply as a way of then claiming a savings of $1.5 trillion because the war in Iraq is not continuing.