Obama: I demand Congress give me new powers, and in return, I'll cut nearly 1/400th of the debt limit increase I need

Turns out that President Subprime McDowngrade hasn't quite destroyed enough of America's economy. He wants Congress to give him the authority to centralize even more power. And what could possibly go wrong with that?

President Barack Obama will ask Congress on Friday for greater power to shrink the federal government, and his first idea is merging six sprawling trade and commerce agencies whose overlapping programs can be baffling to businesses...

Well that sounds good. How much would the new, combined bureaucracies save?

Jake Tapper noted on Twitter that the proposed savings, $3 billion, is one-four-hundredth of the debt limit increase he just requested from Congress.

It’s also less than half of what Obama tossed away on his supposed green-tech jobs stimulus.

In other words, the President wants new powers over these vast bureaucracies (and guess who will benefit? Hint: starts with the letter U and ends with NIONS).

[Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell laughs at the irony of a President who has spent the last three years expanding government attempting to blame Congress for not reducing it...

Turns out the man who routinely pillories Congress as a "do-nothing" group is now communicating with his partners in the Capitol Building through... the media.

...a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was quick to respond with little enthusiasm.

“After presiding over one of the largest expansions of government in history, and a year after raising the issue in his last State of the Union, it’s interesting to see the president finally acknowledge that Washington is out of control,” said spokesman Don Stewart.

“And while we first learned of this proposal this morning in the press, we’ll be sure to give it a careful review once the White House provides us with the details of what it is he wants to do.”

I wonder why this move appears so harried, so rushed, so unplanned?

He made a promise to come up with a smart reorganization of the government in his last State of the Union speech. That was nearly a year ago.

Oh. I guess he realized that someone in the media would pull up his last State of the Union address and figure out how many of his myriad promises actually came to pass. Answer: none.

If I could make the decisions for the GOP leadership, I'd grant the president's request... on the condition that the combined agencies' budgets were slashed 20 percent. Failure to achieve those cost-cutting goals in 2012 would result in automatic, mandatory 50 percent budget reductions for those areas.

How's that for cost savings?