The Desperation in Sequestration

Citing sequestration, White House cancels tours

(Unless, of course, you have $500,000 to meet with Barry)

 Times are tough.
 Some staff members have been seen parading around the WH lawn with these.

The White House announced Tuesday that all tours of the building have been canceled because of the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, which took effect on Friday.

"Due to staffing reductions resulting from sequestration, we regret to inform you that White House Tours will be canceled effective Saturday, March 9, 2013 until further notice," The White House visitor's office announced in an email Tuesday afternoon. "Unfortunately, we will not be able to reschedule affected tours."

"We very much regret having to take this action, particularly during the popular Spring touring season," the email added. (RELATED: Bob Woodward claims President Barack Obama lied repeatedly about sequester trigger)

Federal agencies facing budget cuts have a long-standing habit of suspending their most visible and popular activities in an effort to gin up public outrage, a strategy that Washington journalist Charles Peters nicknamed the "Firemen First Principle" in 1976.

In one famous example of the strategy, the National Parks Service director closed all the nation's national parks, including the Grand Canyon and the Washington Monument, for two days a week after President Nixon cut the agency's budget. The ploy worked, and Congress quickly restored funding amid public outcry.

The Desperation in Sequestration

I'm not buying it and either is Egypt

Napolitano got back on her high horse yesterday and said she is going to have to release more illegals because of financial woes better know as sequestration. This comes on the heels of  announcing we are giving, not selling, 20 F16's and 200 M1 Abrams tanks to the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt.  The F16's alone come to $213 million, which is paid for by U.S. taxpayers and approved by Washington. The M1 Abrams tank goes for about $8.5 million a pop. 

 Mohammed Morsi's (the name alone should have been a show stopper) overriding goal is to establish Shariah law and has thus far decreed near-absolute power for himself while opponents battle outside his palace. So what is really going on in Egypt? With the support of Barry, Mubarak was disposed of and replaced with Morsi who is far more detrimental to the U.S. and Israel then Mubarak ever was.  Someone tell me this isn't going to come back and bite us on the ass. 

Press conference photo of Napolitano trying to explain it away. 

This is what would take place if WH press reporters had any guts.

So you see, it is more important to spend money giving Muslims instruments of war, then it is to keep illegals behind bars ... and to add insult to injury, releasing them back on the streets of America, rather then Mexico where they belong. 

Thought this would send up some red flags but evidently not.

Visit by Egypt’s Morsi to Iran reflects foreign policy shift

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-08-27/world/35491859_1_morsi-nuclear-program-minister-ali-akbar-salehi

The visit by President Mohamed Morsi to Iran will be the first by an Egyptian leader since the nations broke off diplomatic relations in the 1980's after Egypt’s recognition of Israel. 

PS: I'm bet Israel is just tickled pink over the weapons deal.

I'm not buying it and either is Egypt

White House retreats from doomsday spending cuts predictions

       

Gene Sperling... Spin Doctor Extraordinaire :

"Nobody ever suggested that this was going to have all its impact in the first few days," he told "NBC's "Meet the Press.

This idiot must live in an alternate universe!

Did this not occur or was it a figment of my imagination? 

☟

WASHINGTON — The Associated Press has learned that the Homeland Security Department released more than 2,000 illegal immigrants facing deportation from immigration jails in recent weeks because of looming budget cuts. It also planned to release 3,000 more during March.

And the sequester didn't even kick in yet!!!

I guess the nation experienced a collective coma when Napolitano said, "All I can say is, look, we're doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester. But there's only so much I can do. I'm supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those?"

They're undocumented Democrats.

White House is retreated from its doomsday predictions about the impact of the $85 billion in federal spending cuts as they enter a second week -- with Republican leaders appearing at least satisfied about delivering on their promise to limit government spending and hold down taxes.

Gene Sperling, the White House's top economic adviser, repeatedly said Sunday the cuts will not hurt as much on "Day One" as they will over the long haul. 

"Nobody ever suggested that this … was going to have all its impact in the first few days," he told "NBC's "Meet the Press." "It is a slow grind."

His remarks are in contrast to weeks of President Obama and his Cabinet warning that the cuts will result in furloughs or pay cuts for middle-class wage-earners such as teachers, Capitol Hill janitors and air traffic controllers, which they said could cause 90-minutes delays at major U.S. airports.

Sperling declined at least twice to directly answer questions about whether the worst-case-scenario rhetoric has hurt the president's credibility on the issue. He instead stuck to his argument that independent economists forecast the cuts will result in 750,000 fewer jobs and that corporate executives now anticipate slower economic growth.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN's "State of the Union" Americans absorbed similar cuts once already this year.

"This modest reduction of 2.4 percent in spending over the next six months is a little more than the average American experienced just two months ago, when their own pay went down when the payroll tax holiday expired," the Kentucky Republican said.

Congress agreed to the cuts, known as sequester, in 2011 after failing to agree on more measure reductions -- to defense and some domestic spending. However, the cuts were intended to be so drastic that Democrats and Republicans would be forced to compromise before they started.

Still, Sperling rejected several Republican-backed plans and said no compromise would be reached unless the party agrees to tax increases.

Barry came up with sequestration and signed it into law. The whole idea was to cut spending. Tax increases were never part of it and only serves to defeat the purpose of the bill. The words "Cutting Spending" are not in a Democrat's vocabulary.

White House retreats from doomsday spending cuts predictions

Rodman's a gas in North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman met North Korea's Kim Jong Un on Thursday on the third day of his improbable journey to Pyongyang, telling the leader "You have a friend for life," a delegation spokesman said.

Rodman and Kim sat side by side at an exhibition game in Pyongyang on Thursday, chatting as they watched players from North Korea and the U.S. play in mixed teams, Alex Detrick, a spokesman for the New York-based VICE media company, told The Associated Press.

Rodman later addressed Kim before a crowd of thousands, telling him, "You have a friend for life," Detrick said.

The encounter makes Rodman the most high-profile American to meet with the young North Korean leader, said to be a diehard basketball fan, and comes at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.

North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test just two weeks ago, making clear the provocative act was aimed at sending a warning to the United States.

Rodman, three players from the professional Harlem Globetrotters exhibition team, and a VICE television crew are in Pyongyang to shoot a documentary about North Korea for HBO.

Thursday's game in a packed gymnasium ended in a 110-110 draw, with two Americans playing on each team alongside North Koreans, Detrick said.

I'm sure it was just a coincidence it ended in a tie.

Rodman's a gas in North Korea

Obamageddon

On a tip from Phil McCafferty

Weren't we all supposed to die today or has that been cancelled? 

Barry's looking out for your best interest by threatening to veto a bill to let him do less harm.

Article by the WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324662404578332613534040162.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

If you're reading this after midnight on Friday, March 1, the dreaded Beltway hour of doom known as the "sequester" has arrived and the news is that the world has not ended. You can pinch yourself to make sure. This does not mean there won't be more political histrionics, but the beginning of applying reason to Washington is understanding that it is possible to cut at least some federal spending.

President Obama's goal, by contrast, is not to cut any spending in the here and now, only sometime in the "out years," to use the Washington phrase, presumably when he'll be out of office. That's the only way to comprehend the White House statement Thursday that the President will veto any Republican bill to give him more flexibility to minimize any sequester damage.

We think the President already has more than enough authority to avoid harm to air traffic control, national parks and the like, as we wrote earlier this week ("The Sequester Revelation," February 27). We wish Republicans like Paul Ryan would say so. But in any case House Republicans are offering to give Mr. Obama even more flexibility, yet the President won't take yes for an answer.

Mull that one over: The President wants to deny himself and his executive branch the authority to do less harm. Don't stop me before I kill again.

The White House political calculus seems to be that if Americans see that cutting 2.3% of federal spending is possible without catastrophe, they might learn something from the experience. They might even conclude that government doesn't need to be as large as it is, or that government should do some things well but not many others poorly. They might even learn that governing is about choosing, as opposed to merely allowing the government to grow willy-nilly year after year to gather more clients who depend on government.

Thus we get Obamageddon. Mr. Obama and his Cabinet officers feel they must cry havoc so loudly, and try to implement the sequester in such a malicious fashion, that the public will blame Republicans, who will then cancel all of the $85 billion in sequester cuts—which are really only about $43 billion for the rest of fiscal 2013 through September 30.

But that's not all. Mr. Obama doesn't want merely to cancel the sequester cuts. He says he won't even sign a bill cancelling those cuts, or letting him do less harm, unless Republicans also agree to raise taxes again. He calls this a "balanced" approach to deficit cutting, but his fiscal cliff bill in January was all tax increases and no spending cuts. Now his sequester demand is more tax increases and no spending cuts.

For a look at this "balance" in action, consider the sequester-reprieve bill offered Thursday by Senate Democrats and endorsed by the White House. To replace the $85 billion in cuts this year, the bill proposed various tax increases and some defense and farm-subsidy cuts over 10 years that add up to—zero net spending cuts.

The Congressional Budget Office "estimates that S. 388 would increase direct spending by $62.4 billion and revenues by $55.1 billion over the 2013–2023 period. Thus, the cumulative deficit would increase by $7.2 billion from those changes," said CBO in its report on the Senate bill.

So a bill that purports to reduce the deficit as much as the sequester, only in a more "balanced" fashion, doesn't even reduce the deficit at all. It increases it. And it does so despite imposing the "Buffett tax" that amounts to a minimum tax rate on capital gains of 30%, only two months after the capital-gains rate increased to 23.8% from 15%.

No wonder the bill failed to pass the Senate, 51-49, as three Democrats running for re-election in 2014 voted no. They are Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Apparently they also disdain the President's "balance."

Perhaps the real political question is how long this catastrophe charade can continue before it's laughed out of town. Some of the Beltway's older hands seem to be losing patience, including journalist Bob Woodward, who is being excommunicated from the Revelation Church of Obama by the more devoted media worshipers.

Mr. Woodward's sin was to report that the sequester was Mr. Obama's idea in 2011 and that the terms did not then include a tax increase. The blogs have been filled with pseudo-drama over whether White House aide Gene Sperling threatened Mr. Woodward, or not, for reporting facts so impertinently. But the bigger news is that someone in the establishment press is finally pointing out the Obama habit of dissembling about what he once committed to. This is why John Boehner and senior Republicans don't believe a single word Mr. Obama says.

All of this suggests that Republicans, for once, may be winning the political argument. If they hold firm on the sequester, they know the government will have to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond March 27. If no such bill passes, the government shuts down.

Do Democrats really want to be responsible for shutting down the government because Republicans won't raise taxes but will give Mr. Obama more flexibility to reduce the harm from spending cuts? With this willful President, you never know. But some adult Democrats may want to whisper to the President that if he keeps up this Obamageddon act for too long, the voters may figure out how they're being conned.

In all likelihood this will turn out to be another crutch for him. Blaming Bush is wearing pretty thin. Condemning that "do nothing congress" is also getting long in the tooth. The next time the unemployment rate goes up or a negative quarter of GDP he'll use the sequester as the fall guy.

Why?

Because even though he's the quarterback it's alway's somebody else's fault. What's funny is Barry described himself as at least the fourth-best president in history.

I guarantee you when the history books are written it ain't going down like that!

Obamageddon