Obama Prepares His Budget

It will be a vitally important political document, the crucible for Obama's ideas about economic sacrifice, responsibility and post-partisanship.  Next week's fiscal responsibility summit tees up Obama's first address to Congress, which tees the budget outline (to be released two days later, probably on 2/26), which tees up the schedule for the rest of the year.  Big question: will it be an honest budget? If so, it'll be painful to read -- the administration would get real about war costs, for example, and the budget plan would contain deep cuts in favored Democratic programs. Will it contain specific proposals to address the growth of entitlements? (Remember, health care reform really can't take begin without a firm idea of what Congress is going to do about Medicare and Medicaid.)