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We won't know until perhaps April what President Barack Obama's budget proposal really means for the military and the possibility of serious savings from scrubbing wasteful spending. That's what National Priorities Project Executive Director and budget expert Jo Comerford tells us on the LiberalOasis Radio Show (airing on WHMP in Western MA.) This week's edition breaks down the budget, with Comerford analyzing the military side, and blogger David Dayen exploring the transformational aspects on the domestic side, particularly regarding health care, energy and education.

For more detail on the military component of the budget, check out Armand Biroonak's post, "Push To Cut Defense Waste."

As the right continues its campaign to slander the Obama administration's efforts to stem the foreclosure crisis, ACORN officials are mounting a vigorous defense.

Austin King, director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center, makes the case for the administration's plan as well as for a House bill that will allow bankruptcy courts to rewrite the principal of mortgages to make them more affordable and keep people in their homes. That bill was scheduled to be voted on February 26, where King said he expected easy passage. The real fight will come up in the Senate, where the battle will be to win the votes of centrist senators in both parties.

"The foreclosure crisis is at the heart of the economic crisis," King says, adding that the key conservative failure of the Bush administration was rushing to aid Wall Street but failing to immediately address the foreclosure crisis. If it had faced the foreclosure crisis first, he said, "I have no doubt we would not be in the broader economic crisis we are in today."

Was Eric Holder, the first African American to serve as Attorney General, guilty of a poor choice of words when he said that America is "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race? Yes, says Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University and the first African American to be appointed to a senior-level position at the Justice Department during the Johnson administration. But Wilkins agrees that Holder is right that the nation has a lot of unfinished work on racial matters—and the controversy surrounding a recent racist cartoon in the New York Post is just the latest proof.

While some people may disagree with how Holder characterized race relations in the United States, Wilkins says in this interview, "we shouldn't be able to walk away from Holder's thing by saying 'Oh, Jesus, that was really stupid; he shouldn't have said that; he didn't have to do that right away.' But that's wrong. He did it because he's observed something in his lifetime as a black man in America, and he said it and that's why we should be doing what we're doing, having a conversation about it, writing about it."

Wilkins explains why that New York Post cartoon must continue to be denounced "in the strongest possible way." He also explains why he feels that the progressive movement is not doing enough to address continuing racism in America. "I think [the progressive movement] feels it is pure, that it has crossed over to the promised land. ...They think it's over. On the other hand, black people want to say, 'It's not over. Are you kidding me? Let me tell you what happened to me last Thursday.'"

Wilkins, who has also been a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a board member of the Campaign for America's Future.

In advance of President Obama’s “fiscal responsibility summit” next week, prominent economists and experts on Social Security and Medicare conducted a news conference call with reporters to discuss a progressive approach to achieving a long-term responsible federal budget. Participating on the call with Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, was James Galbraith, economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Nancy Altman, former top assistant to Alan Greenspan on the 1983 Social Security Commission; and Dean Baker, co- director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The campaign that the Peterson Foundation has launched around what it calls the $56 trillion "threat" of unfunded health care and Social Security obligations is "misplaced and much too narrow," says Miles Rapoport, the president of Demos. It's imperative that progressives start presenting a different side of the argument, and Rapoport says in this interview that there are good examples beyond our shores of countries that are using the right approach.

Rapoport cites as one example France, which does have higher taxes than the United States but provides a more secure economic foundation in which both workers and businesses can thrive. This, Rapoport explains, is "a high road to fiscal responsibility" in contrast to the road that would invariably lead to greater economic insecurity and less shared prosperity.

As for the United States, Rapoport explains why "we don't need just a stimulus package...we need a fundamental economic restructuring" that enables our economy to evolve into "a public purpose economy."

Rapoport is one of the panel moderators at the "Thinking Big, Thinking Forward" conference in Washington on February 11.

Scott Lilly, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, answers questions about the findings in his report, "Pumping Life Into the U.S. Economy," and explains why an economic recovery package should be much larger than the one being proposed by the Obama administration.

Economic Policy Institute president Lawrence Mishel puts in context the January 9, 2009 unemployment report, which recorded an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent. "We are facing an economic catastrophe," he says in this interview, because of the "anything-goes" economic policies of the Bush administration, which relied on top-end tax cuts that did not succeed in generating job growth or working-class wage growth even in good times. Mishel makes the case against a continuation of tax-cut-oriented conservative economic policies.

Chair of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Pete Stark, Co-Director of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law Center on Health, Economic and Family Security Jacob Hacker and Co-Director of the Institute for America's Future Roger Hickey led a media conference call on December 17, 2008 to release Hacker's new report, "The Case for Public Plan Choice in National Health Reform."

Economist James Galbraith, U.S. Steelworkers president Leo Gerard and Institute for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage explain why they are calling for a $900 billion "Main Street Recovery Program" over the next two years. The program, endorsed by both Galbraith and Gerard as well as by hundreds of other organization leaders and economists, sets the parameters for the kind of stimulus for working families that they want to see President-elect Barack Obama sign when he takes office in January.