Proposed budget cuts to in international food and health aid will result in 18 million people will immediately be cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine.

Here at home proposed 10% cuts to WIC program which provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk. 9.3 million people were helped by this program in 2009. Addition cuts to Food Stamps are also part of the proposed cuts because we are too "broke" to provide humanitarian aid to starving people at home and abroad but we are not too "broke" to spend $40 million a day to drop humanitarian bombs.

Once again, when Obama takes action to prevent the cuts that will increase the likelihood of millions of deaths, talk to me about his humanitarian efforts.  

Save lives?  Maybe if we sent doctors instead of fighter jets.

The White House, meanwhile, has suggested cutting the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program in its proposed 2012 budget.

Meanwhile back in the Senate:

"Sadly, rather than reaching a workable, bipartisan solution to responsibly address our staggering deficit ... our leaders have repeatedly given us a false choice between CR proposals that either don't go far enough to reduce federal spending and proposals that establish the wrong priorities that would disproportionately affect low-income families and seniors," he said in his floor speech, and repeated in his letter.
...
"We must also be mindful that many of the proposed spending reductions would disproportionately affect the neediest among us, including housing and heating assistance. Likewise, some of the proposed cuts would be economically counterproductive, negatively impacting our ability to innovate and invest in research and development."

Source for both quotes

Memo to tyrants: bring the foreign press into your compound so 'events on the ground' prevent your ouster.

The people of Libya rose up and demanded freedom, Ghaddafi demanded blood, moral obligation demanded some sort of response.

As for leadership, that's this amorphous thing that means everything and nothing.  Obama is simultaneously not a leader because he "followed" Britain and France and he's not a leader because he acted too slowly and he'snot a leader because he should have been strong enough to resist the pull to war and he's not a leader because he won't commit to Ghaddafi's removal and he's not a leader because he's allowing NATO to take over and he's not a leader because he won't take a stand and demand that other country's do 100% of the work.

He's not a leader for all of these reasons simultaneously, mind you.  This is in addition t him being a closeted Wall Street fatcat and a socialist and communist at the same time and a christian bigot who doesn't support gays and a secret muslim and an atheist who doesn't share americans christian values.

When Obama said that he was a slate against which people project themselves and there feelings and emotions, he was on to something.

"One time about seventy of us [members of Congress] were asked to the White House for a briefing on Vietnam," Frank Thompson a senior congressman from NJ told me, "and after Rusk and McNamara had given us the usual on body counts and pacification, I stood up and asked, 'Now is someone going to tell us the truth?'  Lyndon Johnson was standing at the side of the room, and when I spoke he strode over, grabbed me by the arm, said, 'I want you out of my house right now,' and, never loosening his grasp, led me out of the room and down the corridor to the exit.  

As I walked out I said to him, 'It's not your house, Mr President.'  Two days later he called me: 'I want you to know that I was right in making you leave, but you were right that it's not my house.' He never talked to me again.  You know," the congressman reflected, "I'm an inch taller than he is.  But he seemed so big, I felt overwhelmed.  God he was a frightening man."

Take a look at this, from the NYT today.

The Labor Department will release its monthly snapshot of the job market on Friday, and economists expect it to show that the nation's employers added about 190,000 jobs in March. With an unemployment rate that has been stubbornly stuck near 9 percent, those workers could be considered lucky.

But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.

A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.

Here's a link to that study.

The Times has a graphic based on that study that shows what people actually need in order to meet their needs, which may allow you to appreciate that it absolutely does matter what kinds of jobs people are getting and how well they are being compensated.

its not even executed well.

It's been one of those weeks, I guess.