I got yer fiscal restraint right here

CRAWFORD, TX (AP)--President Bush, who has spent the past six and a half years emptying the Treasury into the pockets of his billionaire friends and whose business career was a wasteland of bankruptcies and Saudi bailouts, warned Congress on Saturday that he will use his magic veto power to stop runaway government spending not benefiting Republicans.

"The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies," Bush said in his pointless weekly radio address, oblivious to the vast majority of the American people who have expressed a preference for Democratic tax-and-spend policies over the Republican system of borrow-and-steal.

The House passed a $37 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department on Friday, but Republicans, whose piece of the pie was dramatically shrunk by last November's elections, rallied enough votes to uphold a promised veto from Bush.

The measure--one of several annual spending bills that Congress began to consider this week--exceeds Bush's request for the department by $2.1 billion, or roughly the cost of a week in Iraq.

Democrats on Friday defended the extra money in the homeland security bill, noting it contains money to hire 3,000 additional border agents, improve explosive detection at airports and provides money to double the amount of cargo screened on passenger aircraft. Republicans have long resisted anti-terror measures not directly enriching them.

The administration, hoping to appease whining Republican losers suddenly demanding fiscal restraint, has pledged to keep overall spending to the level in Bush's proposed budget, which pretends the war in Iraq is paying for itself.

House GOP conservatives have pledged to come up with the votes needed to grind the whole process to a stop so they can say Democrats are playing politics with national security.

"I am not alone in my opposition," Bush said, stressing that 147 Republicans in the House have pledged to stand with him. "These 147 members are more than the one-third needed to sustain my veto of any bills that spend too much on things I don't care about."

The president, though, has backed away from his childish threat to veto the bill funding veterans' programs. It exceeds Bush's request by $4 billion, but the president acquiesced when GOP lawmakers made it clear that with troops overseas, they would look like assholes in squaring off with Democrats over spending for veterans.

Bush taped his radio message in Washington on Friday before making a visit to Wichita, Kansas to raise money for the Senate re-election campaign of the disturbingly insane Pat Roberts, then headed to his fake Texas ranch for Father's Day weekend. He'll be joined at the ranch, for what is expected to be a weekend of binge-drinking, by his pill-popping first lady Laura, their unemployed bimbo daughter Jenna, and Family friends.

In his radio broadcast, Bush also railed against earmarks--a common Capitol Hill practice of slipping pet projects into spending bills, which Republicans are having a harder time doing now that they're in the minority.