From today’s Morning Jolt, off to the editors and arriving in your e-mail box shortly:

When You Pay Attention to the Deficit, Washington Seems Disordered
For a long time, there was this sense that the deficit and spending were faraway, dry, technical issues that made most voters’ eyes glaze over. And now we’re in a Tea Party world – hey, somebody get Mark Steyn to write a song with that title – and you see a headline like this one in the Wall Street Journal:
Deficit to Hit All-Time High
And you think to yourself, ‘yeah, if Obama keeps this up, he’s a one-termer.’ You can only ignore public opinion for so long, and the Blank Slate of Obama of 2008 sold himself as the tax-cutting, waste-eliminating, sensible centrist. Now it is clear: fiscal conservatism is as alien to Barack Obama as chanting the lyrics to “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” at a Toby Keith concert.
The guys at Reason are unimpressed: “Meet The New Obama, Same as The Old Obama: Tomorrow We Scrimp, But Today We Spend!” (Isn’t it fun to have the libertarians on our side again?)
Michelle Malkin: “During another brief, teleprompter-aided statement this morning, Obama lectured: ‘Changing spending as usual depends on changing politics as usual.’ Waiting . . .”
Clifton B, writing at Another Black Conservative, concludes, “For now Obama only offers toothless commissions, rosy economic projections, the puniest of cuts and another dose of ‘Blame Bush’ as though any of that is sufficient to address the massive debt we are carrying today.”
Bruce McQuain: “The President, Democrats and some pundits have been trying to set the public up for this for a few weeks. They talk about how important deficit reduction is in the long term, but claim that when the economy is bad and unemployment is high that is not the time to be pursuing that goal. Paul Krugman, for one, has been saying it for months. And Obama made that claim in his State of the Union address. The entire reason behind the prep was to prepare the public for massive spending and budget deficit proposal – neither of which we can afford.”
At NRO, Chris Edwards of Cato looks at some previously wildly inaccurate budget projections and concludes, “The lesson from all this is that an administration’s promised spending beyond the first year is meaningless. Obama is proposing a freeze on a very small part of the budget, for example, but his budget plan next year will likely find reasons to break that promise. It scares the hell out of me that federal spending down the road could be 41 percent higher than even the huge increases projected by Obama. But that seems to be where we are headed unless we put in place laws or constitutional amendments to really clamp down on the spend-happy politicians of both parties.”
Kim Preistap looks at a photo of Obama and his economic team unveiling the budget, and notices, “Larry Summers looks like he’s trying to sneak away.”
This sentence from this morning’s New York Times is probably going to resonate for a while and enter the national dialogue: “By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years.”
Hey, “unsustainable” is the new “normal.”

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