Any productivity gains, new innovation, or competitive adroitness – these are really after thoughts, and amount to icing on the cake, provided, of course, that we can even mount that baking challenge.

You are conflating several very different items here:

– corporate welfare, basically the policy of the previous administration, in providing massive subsidies to favored indstries (almost always very large corporations; can it really be an accident that ExoonMobils record profits occurred under Bush's watch?)

– pork barrel, usually meaning earmarks for special pet projects,

there’s sure to be huge pressure not to waste more taxpayer money on top of this staggering figure. Whatever blame Bush deserves, Obama probably doesn’t want to go down in history as the man who finally caused the U.S. government to default on its unmanageable debt burden.

Well, all though you make a sideways passing reference to Bush's malfeasance, you really don't come close to giving the Bush Administration the blame for the present economic mess. They ran the country into the ground, destroyed the USA's image across the owrld, destroyed the economy that Clinton had managed with such care (remember the surplus's he had, there was actually rational hope the the national debt would begin to shrink?

Now, after 8 years of mismanagement during which the TLF hadn't criticized Bush very much at all, esp. on the deficit spending that Bush advocated, suddenly TLF decides to criticize Obama before he even takes office, blaming him for the deficits that will be required to get the country out of the giant Republican-created mess.

Well it won't wash. The fault for these deficits lies with GWB administration.

Hopefully, though, due to the many war crimes commited by the presented administration, we will live to see many of them prosecuted for the crimes they have commited.

That's just a small comfort though, and it would be a luxury except that it is imperative to demonstrate exactly what will happen to those who espouse those failed neo-liberal policies, lest another administration in the future dare to contemplate similar policies.

You may doubt now that the Bush administration will be vigourously prosecuted; I doubt though that such a judgment fully accounts for the reality of the pain that the unfolding economic disaster will create, however. Such pain, suffering and dashing of the hopes of millions will demand justice, and justice it will see.

One of the Bush Administration's greatest failures was in setting a path forward for the development of 21st-century technology. When you really look at the technology trends under development before the dot-com crash, and then compare that to what actually came out of the Bush Administration, you could make the case that we've actually moved backwards in time technologically rather than making any substantial forward progress. However, at the very least we're treading water.

My hope is that Obama will set a tone of leadership in technology that encourages the development of alternative fuels, real advances in computing & IT, and *anything* to substantially move the space-industry forward. I think that part of any “New Deal” mantra begins with establishing that something new is required, and selling the world on the vision of a better future.

Perhaps that's the Bush Administration's greatest failure: instead of telling us that we can make the world a better place, he focused on the message that we can never go home again.