At one point during Governor Chris Gregoire's budget press conference today, you could hear the protesters chanting outside. She seemed to agree, at least in principle, with their disgust.

“The work of slashing any budget by $2 billion would be dreadful," Gregoire said. "And let me assure you that is what it is.”

After already cutting $10 billion out of the state's budget over three years, Gregoire said, "we have shredded our social safety net"—cutting thousands of workers, eliminating money for public schools, doing all kinds of things that are "not what I signed up to do when I started."

Her major proposals for this round of cuts:

- Eliminate the Basic Health Plan, ending subsidized health care to 35,000 low-income individuals.
- Cut off medical services to 21,000 people enrolled in the state’s Disability Lifeline and ADATSA (Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Treatment Support Act) programs.
- Trim 15 percent from the support the state provides to colleges and universities.
- Reduce levy equalization, which helps property poor districts, by 50 percent.
- Cut the length of supervision for all offenders, based on severity of offense. Sex offenders will be supervised for 24 months, and all other offenders, for 12 months.

What's to blame for this situation? "The reckless behavior on Wall Street that touched off a financial panic three years ago, along with a European debt crisis, and a Congress that simply can’t get the job done," Gregoire said.

Also, drown-government-in-a-bathtub conservatives. “For some, none of this seems to matter," Gregoire said. "Their view of government is that it works best when there is no government. They are wrong.”

She talked about how Washington State has one million more people than it had 10 years ago, yet 2,000 fewer public servants. She said that "rows and rows of cubicles are empty at state offices," the she now has "a demoralized workforce," that she and her budget preparers endured sleepless nights in the lead-up to this morning's proposed cuts.

“This morning is not about cold, hard numbers," she said. "This is very personal. We’re talking about real Washingtonians. Our Washingtonians. They are all around us… And they have needs that we will no longer be able to meet.”

But here's something this morning was conspicuously not about: The governor showing any leadership on raising revenue to forestall some of these "dreadful" cuts when the legislature meets in special session on Nov. 28.

“I have not thought about revenue," she said in response to repeated questions about, well, whether she's thought about revenue.

Which is just not credible after, as she mentioned, $10 billion in cuts over three years—and who knows how many conversations about the possibility of raising revenue to prevent some of those cuts.

What's going on here is the same old kabuki theater. The governor, instead of leading, hides behind her duty to present a budget that works within existing revenue. (“I simply have to be honest with the state of Washington," she said. "While my heart is there, my pocket book is empty.”)

She could make a mad-as-hell case for more revenue, but instead she's just proposing we ask questions: “We have to ask ourselves now: Do we want to look at alternatives of revenue? What might they be? And do we want to go there?”

What's becoming more clear, however, is that Gregoire basically agrees with the Occupy Wall Street movement—"[This] is what Wall Street has done in it’s meltdown, and it’s handed it to our state and our country"—and is inviting people to Occupy Olympia if they want to see something other than cuts, cuts, cuts.