And so the farce begins:

Dear Leader promised that he was going to cut the deficit in half in five years. He’ll drop his budget in the punchbowl in February, but you can count on the fact that no tax increases will be scheduled. Dick “Antichrist” Cheney is already calling for more tax cuts, so what we’ll see is more cuts for interest and dividends for starters. We will surely see funding increases for the military. Where he will nail you and I and the rest of the world will be in the spending cuts for federal programs: clean air and water, Medi-everything, school lunches, aid for the poor, and things his “base” doesn’t seem to care about or notice.

In today’s Times, we can see a hint of what’s to come:

U.S. Cutting Food Aid Aimed at Self-Sufficiency
By Elizabeth Becker, December 22, 2004, The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - In one of the first signs of the effects of the ever tightening federal budget, in the past two months the Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping millions of people climb out of poverty.

With the budget deficit growing and President Bush promising to reduce spending, the administration has told representatives of several charities that it was unable to honor some earlier promises and would have money to pay for food only in emergency crises like that in Darfur, in western Sudan. The cutbacks, estimated by some charities at up to $100 million, come at a time when the number of hungry in the world is rising for the first time in years and all food programs are being stretched.

As a result, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services and other charities have suspended or eliminated programs that were intended to help the poor feed themselves through improvements in farming, education and health.

The article continues here.

This doesn’t bode well for the poor folks who will not be getting the help that was promised.

It’s amazing how often our fundamentalist bible-banging brothers and sisters harangue we liberals about dirty pictures, gay marriage, and abortion. Their “moral values” seem focused on S-E-X. They probably ought to break out the old Bible and check out Matthew, who said ”For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me.” Moral values actually do extend past sex and its aftermath.

Dear Leader and his fundamentalist friends would rather have another tax cut than pay for the things that Jesus really cared about.