Thanks to "clever" writing by Andrew Taylor of the Associated Press in a Saturday story, it took a while to get to the most important point about the "budget" that the US Senate supposedly "passed."

This writer's antennae went up on comparing the headline to Taylor's two opening paragraphs:

Senate Passes Democrats' budget aimed at balance, keeping tax cuts

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Washington -- The Senate approved a Democratic budget plan Friday that promises a balanced budget in five years by mixing spending increases with partial renewal of expiring tax cuts.

The $2.9 trillion budget outline won approval on a 52-47 vote, but only after Democratic moderates rewrote it to favor extending several popular tax cuts that are to expire at the end of the decade.

Plan? Outline? Since when is a "budget" (the headline) just an "outline"?

Reading on, it takes Taylor until the 9th paragraph to get to the truth:

The Democratic blueprint is nonbinding but sets guidelines for follow-up legislation.

Oh please, Andrew. This isn't anything real -- it's "symbolic" nonbinding nonsense like all of those nonbinding antiwar resolutions we've been reading about for, what, eight weeks now?

What AP has published is a deceptively headlined report designed to keep the truth from readers who don't make it through the entire piece. It's not worth the paper it's printed on, or the bandwidth it's burning.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com (fourth item at link).