So how is this news?

The Baltimore Sun reports a “news” story that Governor O’Malley is proposing a new $500 million Medicare add-on in the special session.

A few quick points as we’ve, in the words of the Governor, “beaten this dead horse into a coma.”

I don’t know why this is news today, we knew about it yesterday. Perhaps the Sun hasn’t hit its fellatio quota this week and the Governor is irritable. That makes as much sense for calling this nothingburger news as anything else.

Any budget serious about addressing a “structural deficit” is not going to propose a half-billion dollar new program as part of solving the problem.

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This makes me more convinced that Peter Franchot is right and the tax increases should be held in abeyance until the regular session when we have the financial reports before us. Right now it appears that O’Malley is stampeding a tame legislature into approving a huge package of tax increases to fund new programs, not to solve the “structural deficit.”