$12,302,465,487,917.34

That was the National Deficit as of Midnight last night .... it has of course gone up since then.

Gee imagine this -- remember all that spending that the Dems said had to happen to stimulate the economy .... now DC is scratching its butt and issuing a Spending Freeze -- yeah, isn't that what people were saying should have happened from the start?

He is supposed to be announcing it tomorrow night in his State Of The Union Address .... or as I like to call it "Look How Great I am" speech (they all do it -- its less about the state the country is in now, and more about campaigning from the pulpit)

He will freeze spending for the next three years EXCEPT for:

• Social Security
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Afghan/Iraq Wars (thought we were out of Iraq?)
• other Defense spending
• Veteran Affairs
• Homeland Security (I would hope so!)
• Foreign Aid (yeah, I think we can cut back on this for a while considering how we are asking for aid from other countries ourselves)

So what Pork Spending is being passed now?

• $30,000 for Woodstock Film Fest Youth Program
• $2.7 million for a study on surgery in space (alright, there is real applications for this one even if we aren't planning on sending deep space ships, we have to know what to do if an astronaut gets hurt) ... at Univ. of Nebr. med ctr [hey, didn't Nebr. get a sweet deal in the Health Bill too? hmmm]

One of the ways to tackle the deficit is to raise the debt cieling ... the newest proposed ceiling is

$14,290,000,000,000

yeah you read that correct ... 14.3 TRILLION ... this mean printing more money, which will drop the worth of the USD even more.

Lets see, Congress has raised the budget for Pork by 28% since the Dems took over (don't have a comparative to when the Reps were in charge of all three branches) + the stim package cost (and they still are talking of doing another).

Sen Tom Coburn wants to cut 5% out of EVERY dept of government incl. the Pentagon -- YIKES, I think that's a knee jerk reaction -- btw, he is a Republican from OK.

His idea is that there is too much redundency of programs (he spoke of 105 programs that encourage people in Math & Science, he feels there should be only one ... but he didn't get into how each program differs from each other).

On the bright side --

Unlike London, we are not opening a theme park based on the music of ABBA ... no 25-room ABBAWorld here! You know - if people have all that money to give .... I propose a 9rm, three bath amusement park dedicated to the life of ME - the greatest blogger in my area (that being within 25 ft of my present location) .... wonder how much stim money I could get to make that??? hmmm