That's the headline from CBS' Mark Knoller, who notes this morning that:

On Inauguration Day, the Debt stood at $10.626 trillion. The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows that as of July 31st, the debt hit $11.669 trillion.

During the last administration, it took over 2 ½ years for the National Debt to increase a trillion dollars.

President Obama's commentary on this situation that sounds an awful lot like passing the buck to me:

"They basically handed me a bill for $1.3 trillion and said, 'Here, fix it,'" insisted the president last week at a Town Hall Meeting in Bristol, VA. "And now they're on TV saying, why haven't you fixed it yet -- in the middle of the greatest recession since the Great Depression."

Knoller also writes that "since Mr. Obama took office, Congress approved his $787-billion stimulus plan. In addition, the new Administration had reign over the second half of the $700-billion bank bailout program."

Indeed.

This is a sad state of affairs, partly because of the riskiness of the US sustaining such high levels of debt, but also because of the intellectual dishonesty that seems to increasingly attach to the President as he makes protestations about spending cuts and his supposed acute awareness of our need to tighten our belts. ...

Over recent days and weeks, I've noticed a heightened media focus on two topics that strike me as saying something important and relevant to the question of where the GOP goes from here, and how the party (further) rebuilds and puts itself into a position where it is clearly able to win back voters' support ahead of the midterm elections. I'm not thinking of health care or the Gates episode (for lack of a better term). I'm thinking of President Obama's polling numbers (say, those detailed here) and the "birther" issue, which has been given fresh life this week by virtue of a) a man called Mike Stark visiting Capitol Hill and capturing on camera various Republicans' reactions and responses to questions posed by him with a birther focus and b) this Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll. It seems to me that these two things provide an important multi-part lesson for Republicans (the vast majority of whom already get this) in terms of what they should, and should not do, to ensure that come November 2010, Republican officeholders, candidates and ordinary party members are treated as more serious, and trustworthy, than their Democratic counterparts. That lesson is: 1) reject birtherism in no uncertain terms, do it publicly, and keep on doing it for as long as it lingers as a topic of media attention; and 2) talk about policy--and do so constantly and consistently. If all Republicans do this (and to be clear, it is hardly the whole party that has been opening itself up to accusations of actual or suspected birtherism), party fortunes (it seems to me) are likely to improve considerably. ...

No pun intended... Congress apparently has little interest in doing anything in health care legislation to deal with the problem of obesity:

Supposedly preoccupied with costs and how to reduce them, the various committees involved in producing health care legislation have all but ignored the, well, husky animal in the room: fat people.

With an epidemic of obesity enlarging the country, Congress — like many Americans blithely ignoring the gradual tightening of their waistbands — is in denial.

Why?

The answer, by some accounts, is astoundingly simple: No one wants to tell Americans the bad news.

“The inability we have to address this issue head-on is because we’re uncomfortable with the reason people are overweight,” said Christine Ferguson, professor of health policy at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. “We haven’t come to grips with whether it is their own fault or a combination of factors.”

Just this week, a study in the journal Health Affairs reported that medical spending averages $1,400 more a year for someone who’s obese than for someone who’s not. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened its inaugural conference on obesity in Washington within a healthy walk of the Capitol and produced a barrage of graphs, studies and scary statistics all showing that Americas are getting fatter faster and are causing diseases that cost an estimated $147 billion last year, nearly 10 percent of all medical spending in the country. ...