Obama's sequester machinations are scare tactics, but he is still leveraging this crisis that he manufactured to make us less safe... and I think that was his plan all along. It's the perfect cover. He gets to gut our military with wholesale troop cuts, delay aircraft carrier deployments, etc., while "mainstream" media covers for him.
Still, I say "Embrace that sequester" -- even if it means Obama won't stop using it against us. That's one sure way to awaken more people to the disastrous effects of his agenda. That, in turn, will ignite more "brushfires of freedom" against Obama's tyranny.
Carol Platt Liebau has an article titled "Explaining the Sequester," where she posted Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo's response to Obama mouthpiece "Jay Carney's gibe about what he would say to workers furloughed because of the sequester." Carol calls Pompeo "a conservative who is able to explain his positions with ease and clarity." After reading Pompeo's statement, I think you'll agree. Carol also offers up this chart "that highlights, in graphic form, the size of the cuts the President is claiming will bring America to its knees":
Now on to the nuts and bolts...
Quoting: "The book 'The Price of Politics,' by Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward, makes it clear the idea for the draconian spending cuts originated in the White House – and not in Congress … Woodward describes the behind-the-scenes haggling last year that laid the groundwork for sequestration."
Bob Woodward: My extensive reporting for my book "The Price of Politics" shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government. Obama personally approved of the plan...
The sequester is used against us...
Doug Ross @ Journal: "Obama created the sequester. He designed its brutal cuts to the military. And he desperately seeks to eviscerate the military."
A.W.R. Hawkins: "In anticipation of sequester cuts, Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta has ordered a reduction from two carrier groups to one in the Persian Gulf."
US Naval Institute News: "The U.S. Navy will delay the refueling of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) for an unknown period because of the uncertain fiscal environment due to the ongoing legislative struggle, the service told Congress in a Friday message obtained by USNI News. ... The move by the navy is the second this week involving funding for carriers. On Wednesday it announced it would delay the deployment of the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) to the Middle East do to the ongoing budget strife bringing the total number of carriers in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to one until funding normalizes."
John McCormack: [Sequestration] will force the Marine Corps to shrink by 25 percent--from 202,000 Marines to 145,000. What's more, "by the end of calendar year 2013, less than half of our ground units will be trained to the minimum readiness level required for deployment," Marine Corps commandant James Amos testified to Congress this month.
John Hill: Despite potential budget cuts being 4 days away and with Congress and the Administration negotiating to avoid them, the Department of Homeland Security has already started releasing hundreds of illegal aliens held in local jails in anticipation of automatic "sequestration" cuts – out of a planned total of more than 10,000 aliens to be released.
Note: In my opinion, Barack Obama should be held accountable for any crimes committed by the criminal illegal aliens that he released.
Obama's Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warns of massive nationwide flight delays and the closure of hundreds of air-traffic control towers.
"Sequester: Is your airport on the chopping block?"
Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan: "There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices they can't come back this fall."
Duncan: Thousands of teachers to lose jobs as result of sequester
Obama's AG Eric Holder seems to be inviting a terrorist attack on the United States of America with these sequester comments...
Eric Holder Sounds the Sequester Alarm
Charlie Spiering: "President Obama warned Congress that if the sequester cuts go through on Friday, significant cuts would bring about serious consequences in America."
Obama: "Criminals will be let go if sequester cuts go through"
Amy Payne: "Now that President Obama has turned against sequestration, he is suggesting that spending cuts to federal agencies must result in dire consequences. Firefighters, emergency responders, and teachers will all be cut, he claims. Media outlets have played up these sob stories, copying White House releases in their local news stories and soliciting sad testimonials from people who supposedly would be affected by these cuts."
Amy Payne: "Now that President Obama has turned against sequestration, he is suggesting that spending cuts to federal agencies must result in dire consequences. Firefighters, emergency responders, and teachers will all be cut, he claims. Media outlets have played up these sob stories, copying White House releases in their local news stories and soliciting sad testimonials from people who supposedly would be affected by these cuts."
The demagogue loses credibility...
Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer:
For the first time since Election Day, President Barack Obama is on the defensive. That's because March 1, automatic spending cuts ("sequestration") go into effect – $1.2 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic (discretionary) programs, half from defense.
The idea had been proposed and promoted by the White House during the July 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. The political calculation was that such draconian defense cuts would drive the GOP to offer concessions.
It backfired. The Republicans have offered no concessions. Obama's bluff is being called and he's the desperate party. He abhors the domestic cuts. And as commander in chief he must worry about indiscriminate Pentagon cuts that his own defense secretary calls catastrophic.
Bob Woodward: Obama is exhibiting a "kind of madness I haven't seen in a long time" for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns. ... Under the Constitution, the President is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the President going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. 'I can't do what I need to do to protect the country.'
ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl: "The Obama administration's list of what will happen [scroll to the end of this post] if upcoming spending cuts go into effect is downright terrifying. In recent days, officials have warned of more forest fires, workplace deaths and, heaven-forbid — chicken shortages."
Jeff Sessions: "The President had 18 months to develop reforms to improve the government, but instead he announced furloughs of federal workers as a political cudgel. Yet, his golf weekend at the yacht club with Tiger Woods cost taxpayers over a million dollars—enough money to save 341 federal workers from furlough."
Jeff Sessions: "The President had 18 months to develop reforms to improve the government, but instead he announced furloughs of federal workers as a political cudgel. Yet, his golf weekend at the yacht club with Tiger Woods cost taxpayers over a million dollars—enough money to save 341 federal workers from furlough."
Glenn Kessler on the thousands of supposedly pink-slipped teachers: "...no one in the county seemed to know what [Obama's Education Secretary Arne] Duncan was talking about..."
Doug Ross @ Journal: If Ray LaHood sabotages air transportation as he promises, he needs to be subpoenaed by the House.
Image courtesy of Glenn McCoy
Michelle Malkin: Traffic alert: There’s a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim.
President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending “cuts” of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of “sequestration” was Obama’s idea in the first place.
But that hasn’t stopped the Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be catastrophically victimized by hardhearted Republicans. Curses on those meanie Republicans! How dare they acquiesce to the very plan for “cuts” — or rather, negligible reductions in the explosive rate of federal spending growth — that Obama himself hatched?
John Hayward: [I]n reality, the President has not invested one single moment in putting together a package of “smart” spending cuts to avoid the sequester… while Republicans have. They’ve put several specific, realistic plans on the table. A responsible President would be negotiating the differences between his plan and the Republican plan, not racing around the country whipping up panic without ever putting up ideas of his own. And the notion that this bloated government can’t trim spending by 2.3 percent without grabbing more tax revenue is patently absurd.
Sarah Palin: "If we can’t stomach modest cuts that would lower federal spending by a mere 0.3% per year out of a current federal budget of $3.6 trillion, then we might as well signal to the whole world that we have no serious intention of dealing with our debt problem.
If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.
If we ARE serious about putting our fiscal house in order, then let’s stop the hysterics, tighten our belts, and take our medicine."
If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.
If we ARE serious about putting our fiscal house in order, then let’s stop the hysterics, tighten our belts, and take our medicine."
More from Charles Krauthammer: What we're talking about here is two cents on the dollar. Every dollar the government spends today, 35 cents is borrowed from the Chinese and others. What is going on here is ending up in a position where we borrow not 35, but 33 cents, and that is going to bring Armageddon. An example of the cynicism of this campaign, is one lobbyist for the liberal causes leading 3,000 organizations in opposing the cuts, who told The Washington Post the following: 'The worst case scenario is the sequester hits and nothing really bad happens.'
Think of the cynicism of that. The worst case scenario is that the government makes a small, minuscule cut in spending on the way to beginning of a journey of recovery in to fiscal health, and that it doesn't hurt us, we actually come out of it alive. And, that to them, is the worst case. It means, think of how they are weighing the national interest, which needs a cut in spending and these parochial special interests.
"Thug Obama" threatens critics...
Think of the cynicism of that. The worst case scenario is that the government makes a small, minuscule cut in spending on the way to beginning of a journey of recovery in to fiscal health, and that it doesn't hurt us, we actually come out of it alive. And, that to them, is the worst case. It means, think of how they are weighing the national interest, which needs a cut in spending and these parochial special interests.
"Thug Obama" threatens critics...
Brett LoGiurato: Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a "very senior person" at the White House warned him in an email that he would "regret doing this," the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.
WMAL: Bob Woodward isn't the only person who's received threats for airing the Obama administration's dirty laundry. It seems anyone is a potential target of the White House these days -- even former senior members of the Clinton administration. A day after Woodward's claim that a senior White House official had told him he would "regret" writing a column criticizing President Obama's stance on the sequester, Lanny Davis, a longtime close advisor to President Bill Clinton, told WMAL's Mornings on the Mall Thursday he had received similar threats...
Here's Chris Good's 57 Terrible Consequences of the Sequester:
1. Air Travel Disruption
2. Longer Security Lines at Airports
3. Slower Extreme-Weather Forecasts
4. Greater Risk of Wildfires
5. Pest-Infested Crops
6. Nationwide Meat and Poultry Shortage
7. Prison Lockdowns
8. Slower Gun Background Checks
9. Fewer FBI Agents
10. Immigration Backlog
11. Longer Waits for Passports and Foreign Visas
12. Neglect for Mentally Ill, Homeless, and Substance Addicted
13. 125,000 Would Be at Risk of Homelessness
14. 600,000 Women and Children Thrown Off WIC
15. 424,000 Fewer AIDS Tests, 7,400 Fewer Patients Could Get HIV Medications
16. No Rent Assistance for 7,300 AIDS Patients
17. 807,000 Fewer Hospital Visits for Native Americans, Hospital Closures
18. Dilapidated Low-Income Housing, Closed Projects
19. No Child Care for 30,000 Kids, No Head Start for 70,000
20. Longer Waits for Disability Payments
21. $725 Million in Cuts for Low-Income and Special-Needs Students
22. Cuts to Schools on Indian Reservations
23. Native American Tribes Would Lose Almost $130 Million
24. Higher Risk of Terrorism
25. Untranslated Wiretaps
26. Less Surveillance
27. Classified Information Vulnerable to Foreign Spies
28. An Even More Porous Border
29. Untended Nukes
30. U.S. Less Prepared for a 'WMD Incident'
31. FBI Will Eventually Be Using Broken Equipment, Could Have Trouble Tracking Fingerprints
32. 1/3 Cutback in Pacific Naval Presence
33. Reduced Army Readiness
34. No Maintenance for Some Ships and Planes
35. 46,000 Defense Jobs Could Be Lost
36. Some Air Force Planes Can't Fly
37. Less Cybersecurity
38. $1 Billion Cut from Disaster Relief
39. First-Responder Layoffs40. Coast Guard Operations Cut by 1/4, Drugs Coming In on Boats
41. $500 Million Cut from Foreign Economic and Military Aid
42. $380 Million Cut from Global AIDS Funding
43. Less Security at U.S. Facilities Abroad, Less Protection for Americans Abroad
44. Freed Up Terror Money
45. U.S. Attorneys Will Take 2,600 Fewer Cases
46. Smaller Unemployment Checks
47. 1,200 Fewer OSHA Inspections, Potential for More Workplace Deaths
48. Fewer Mine Inspections
49. No Job Training for Hundreds of Thousands of People, Less Training for Veterans
50. 1,928 Fewer Small Business Loans
51. Slower Reporting on Economic Data, Less Analysis of It
52. Parks? Can't Use 'Em.
53. 128 Refuges Could Close
54. Less Drilling and Exploration, Offshore and Onshore
55. Fewer Air-Quality Forecasts
56. 1,000 Fewer Environmental Compliance Inspections
57. Less Nuclear Cleanup
PostScript from Reason.com Associate Editor Mike Riggs...
[T]here's a small problem with the [OMB] report: One of the cuts it warns against would affect an agency that no longer exists--and didn't exist when the OMB sent its report to congress.
Looks like the only thing left for us to hear is that "sequester" is a disaster of biblical proportions... I mean Old Testament, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
A final note from Charles Krauthammer: The Obama administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting. ... [Obama] cannot win if "nothing bad really happens." Indeed, he'd look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf. Obama's incentive to deliberately make the most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing illegal immigrants from prison) is enormous. And alarming. Hail Armageddon.
T-minus how many seconds and counting?!?
Update: The #sequester a week later: Obama still holding America hostage
A final note from Charles Krauthammer: The Obama administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting. ... [Obama] cannot win if "nothing bad really happens." Indeed, he'd look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf. Obama's incentive to deliberately make the most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing illegal immigrants from prison) is enormous. And alarming. Hail Armageddon.
T-minus how many seconds and counting?!?
Update: The #sequester a week later: Obama still holding America hostage
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