D-Day

We know when the General Assembly is going back to work:

Gov. Martin O'Malley today formally called a General Assembly special session that would start Oct. 29, despite a warning from the state Senate president that lawmakers were far from consensus on O'Malley's plan to close a projected $1.7 billion budget shortfall.

OK, now let's delve into the gobbledygook:

"The time for delay is past. I am very, very optimistic about what the leaders of our state can accomplish when they know so much is at stake,'' said O'Malley, who signed an executive order calling the session. "We have the ability to come together and forge a consensus.

Which is amazing given the fact that the Administration has gone out of its way to exclude the Republican leadership from this process. Also, don't forget the fact that the Administration knows so much is at stake. Why have they sat on the sidelines during O'Malley's entire time in office, fiddling without dealing with the spending problem like responsible adults?

O'Malley has said the special session is needed to prevent the budget gap from growing wider. He has said the state could face a $2.2 billion budget shortfall on July 1 if lawmakers don't act now, rather than in the legislature's regular session that starts in January.

Again, the budget gap could have been lessened or eliminated had O'Malley introduced a responsible budget back in January. One that did not call for increases in state spending.

At a news conference, the first-term governor said he hoped legislators would take action by Thanksgiving, but he added: "If they need to take more time, they will."

"We don't want this to be a slapdash process,'' O"Malley said.

No, they want to continue to fiddle as the deficit goes higher and higher. It's almost as if it took six months for the Administration to realize there was a problem before saying "hey, we have to fix this." Unless you believe that this was their motivation all along; to continue to increase state spending to push through the buffet of taxes O'Malley wants to ram down our throats.

And whether you like Mike Miller or don't, you have to respect him and his intelligence. As evidenced by this:

Although Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller had been pushing for a special session, he told reporters before O'Malley's news conference that he had recommended holding off on calling lawmakers back to Annapolis.

"I asked him if he had the votes, and he doesn't as of this day," Miller said. "I counseled him not to call a special session until he had the votes. He is determined to go forward."

Starting October 29th, the taxpayers of Maryland are going to pay roughly $40,000 a day (a cost of nearly $1 million if it goes to Thanksgiving) for some bizarre Kabuki theater allegedly designed to get us out of the financial hole. In reality, the Administration is going to try to ramrod through historic tax increases that will do little more than cripple our state's economy in an already economically disadvantageous time. And they will try to do so under the cover of darkness, right before the Holidays so your average taxpayer doesn't know what hit them.

Somebody needs to remind Governor O'Malley that there are a lot of things that you could call this, but leadership is not one of them...