AMY GOODMAN: And how would you compare the cuts to the more than 200 federal programs involving social services and education to what we’re seeing at the Pentagon?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, it’s just horrifying, Amy. You know, one of the most frustrating things is how our media covers budgets. And it is, frankly, a repetition of spin. And so, so much of the media reported yesterday that the White House was proposing $70 to $80 billion worth of cuts in Pentagon spending. What that really is is Secretary Gates saying, "Here are some things that we don’t think we need." At the end of the day, however, there are not cuts in military spending. This is an expansion of Pentagon spending at a dramatic level, three to five percent, depending on how you measure it.

And the important thing is, here you have President Obama saying that they’ve gotten down to the lowest level of domestic spending, domestic discretionary spending, since the Eisenhower era. That certainly sounds good as a sound bite, but understand what that means. It means that now Pentagon spending, defense spending, is a dramatically higher level of what our budget goes to. And I wish President Obama would remember what Dwight Eisenhower said about defense spending versus domestic spending. Dwight Eisenhower said, every time you buy a bomb, every time you pay for a bullet, that’s money that comes out of building a school or putting a roof on a house. I just think the President is making a lot of wrong choices here.