RUSH: We’ve got a couple Obama sound bites from his first-ever cabinet meeting at the White House today. Here’s the first of two.
OBAMA: (camera shutter clicks throughout) Veterans Affairs has canceled or delayed 26 conferences, saving nearly $17.8 million, and they’re using less expensive alternatives like video conferencing. Uh, the USDA, under, uhhhhhh, Secretary Vilsack, is working to combine 150, uhhh, 1,500 employees from seven office locations into a single facility in 2011 which we estimate will save $62 million over a 15-year lease term. Uhh, Janet Napolitano, the Department of Homeland Security, estimates that they can save up to $52 million over five years just by purchasing office supplies in bulk.
RUSH: What a joke! What an absolutely insulting joke! Obama has run up $4 trillion in debt, if not more, and he calls this big cabinet meeting today to announce how his cabinet departments are gonna cut a total of a hundred million dollars — and Janet Napolitano is gonna cut $52 million over five years just by purchasing office supplies in bulk. And USDA is gonna save $62 million over 15 years. This is an insult. I’ll tell you why this is happening after this next bite here.
OBAMA: (camera shutter clicks throughout) One of the messages that I delivered today to all the members of the cabinet was, uh, ‘As well as you’ve already done, we’re going to have to do that.’ I’m asking for all of them to identify, uh, at least a hundred million dollars in additional cuts to, uh, pare administrative budgets, separate and apart from, uh, the work that Peter Orszag and the rest of our team are going to go line by line in the budget and identify programmatic cuts that need to be made.
RUSH: He doesn’t have the line-item veto. He can’t go line by line in the budget and cut anything! Now, all of this is happening. They’re going to have to cut a $100 million more. And this gets back to the emotional connection. This is what people want to hear. They don’t hear the end details. Plus, a hundred million sounds like a lot more than eight trillion, because one hundred is bigger than eight. A hundred million sounds bigger than four trillion. Four trillion is the new spending and debt. ‘A hundred million? Why, that’s a lot of money,’ people think. People want to hear he’s gonna cut spending, he’s gonna cut the budget. I’m sure they’ve got internal polling data that shows these tea parties are successful and they’re a problem. So they’re responding to the tea parties here. That’s all this is, and they’re responding to the tea parties with chump change, with irrelevant numbers. Thousands of people turn out at tea parties to protest big government, and Obama can say, ‘I heard you. I’ve cut the budget.’ Fifty-two million over five years by purchasing office supplies in bulk? It’s a damn insult! They should have been doing this years and years and years ago if this was the case. I’m going to take a break. I’m getting to the point of getting fed up to the point I can’t speak intelligently here about this.