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I am old enough to remember when the GOP said not to worry about it caving on Obamacare funding because, by God, it would hold the line on sequestration. Hell, that was a month ago. Amazing how much can change in a month. Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray have decided to give up the last thing the GOP was fighting for — spending restraint. “Don’t worry,” Paul Ryan says with his boyish charm designed to induce sweats and heart palpitations among conservatives, “it’s only a little less restrained.” The budget deal puts discretionary spending over $1 trillion, which...

In front of television cameras, Republicans wave the flag in support of US military personnel. But behind closed doors, they are taking aim at their pensions. The budget deadline of Dec. 13 is fast approaching with the threat of avoiding another government shutdown waning in the balance. Budget chairs Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) may be close to a deal that could trim $20 billion from federal pensions. Similar to the chained CPI cuts President Barack Obama [Unlink] included in his failed Grand Bargain in 2011, Ryan is proposing changes in the way military pensions are...

Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) were finalizing details and hoping to schedule a press conference to unveil the deal, which …

WASHINGTON — Congressional budget negotiators are zeroing in on a modest deal to keep the federal government operating while easing the grip of the mandatory automatic spending cuts known as sequestration. With the clock ticking toward a Dec. 13 deadline to report to Congress, the bipartisan conference committee led by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is weighing a plan that would set spending levels for fiscal 2014 and 2015. The goal is to avoid a train wreck like the one that caused the 16-day partial government shutdown in October. The shutdown ended when lawmakers agreed to...

WASHINGTON – The Department of Defense is seriously looking at eliminating all of the the military’s remaining commissaries as a budget-cutting measure, but the action, to begin in 2015, would cut one of the basic benefits allotted to military families. Since DOD efforts to shut down the 178 stores statewide and another 70 overseas require congressional approval, there promises to be stiff opposition among lawmakers who are reluctant to cut benefits for the military. There also is concern that elimination of the commissary benefit for service personnel who already receive comparatively lower pay when compared with civilian counterparts could negatively...

The No. 2 Democrat in the House said Tuesday that the top GOP negotiator on the budget is not interested in finding a compromise that would replace automatic budget cuts known as sequestration. Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland says that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is not engaging in “a serious effort to reach agreement” and hasn’t forwarded an offer to Democrats. …

(Reuters) - U.S. military forces in Africa may lose well over a tenth - or some $40 million - from their 2014 budget, the U.S. Africa Command said on Thursday, although it saw success against militants in Somalia and Mali. The bulk of such cuts will fall on headquarters and training programs, AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez said, most likely forcing smaller exercises. The size of AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, is to be reduced by some 20 percent. The planned cuts are part of broader across-the-board U.S. spending restrictions dubbed "sequestration" and imposed after Congress failed to agree deficit...

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on a budget with significant spending cuts, “spending just keeps going up in an uninterrupted fashion as far as the eye can see. By 2016, all you can see is unending red ink.” He added that he has little confidence that the congressional budget committee meeting officially for just the second time on Wednesday will be able to agree on a budget for the rest of the fiscal year that puts the federal government on an economically sustainable course by...

Budget cuts imposed by sequestration will leave the Defense Department with a hollow force and debilitating shortfalls, the Pentagon’s top acquisitions chief said today. At a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, outlined the difficultly that the on-going budget sequester is causing in the department’s ability to plan for the future. “This is probably the worst time I’ve seen … in terms of our ability to do a sound plan and execute it with any kind of confidence at all,” he said. “It is one of the...

In rare political remarks since becoming president of Purdue University, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has voiced sharp disagreement with many fellow Republicans over whether the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration should continue. Daniels, once director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, dubbed sequestration a "bad idea" during a press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. In so doing, the 64-year-old Daniels put himself on the opposite side of such national conservative leaders as Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who recently told Newsmax "in the short term, it's important to...

There is the recent internet sensation (not Miley Cyrus) … the Angolan Witch Spider! Allegedly, it feasts on dogs and cats and took several gunshots to kill. And was found in Texas. Sure-You-Want-To-Move-To-Florida The reality is less interesting. The photo was a fake. Here is the actual photo of the spider in question. Wolfie-(1)-c-2012-Paul-Santa-Maria-(Proof) Remember the dreaded “sequester?” Allegedly, 2.14 million jobs were at risk. And the Federal government partial shutdown? Allegedly, 700,000 jobs were at risk in the Greater Washington DC area. Here is the September 2013 unemployment number for Washington DC and Arlington VA: 5.40%. True, the unemployment...

Perhaps it’s just bad timing, or a lack of perspective. To be fair, the Washington Post is a local newspaper, so its focus on the local economy shouldn’t surprise anyone. Even with that in mind, their story on how the sequestration has harmed the job market in the nation’s capital is rather tin-eared: The local economy saw only meager job growth in its most crucial industries during the one-year period ended in August, according to a recent Labor Department report that offered fresh evidence that federal spending cuts are taking a toll on the region’s job market.The professional services sector,...

The Republicans are desperately losing the government shutdown battle and they’re embarrassing themselves by continuing to fight. It begs many questions, but most importantly, why does the GOP continue to fight a battle with no clear goal at the expense of not just their party, but the fate of then entire U.S. government? Maybe it’s because they’re actually winning. Though the media has largely painted the GOP as the reckless, kamikaze caucus, Peter Beinart argues in a column for The Daily Beast that Republicans are not only in perfect control of the government shutdown fight, but that they’ll win in...

The Chinese sure are doing a lot of worrying these days about the stalemate in Washington. Li Keqiang, China’s Premier, told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that he was watching the tussle over raising the government’s debt ceiling with “great attention” in a meeting last week. He has good reason to be concerned. With a stash of nearly $1.3 trillion in Treasury securities, China is the world’s largest foreign owner of U.S. government debt. If the U.S. Congress fails to lift the ceiling to allow the government to borrow more by Thursday, Washington may not have enough money to...

I was very disappointed to see Robert Costa of National Review use of the dollar sign in this tweet: Praised recently by a lot of liberals in the press, invited to the White House to sit with Barack Obama, and now subtly suggesting the McConnell – Boehner – K Street GOP attack on Heritage Action for America, Senate Conservatives Fund, Club for Growth, and Madison Project is legit, i.e. they’re in it for the money. That’s disappointing, but unsurprising. In fact, the groups mentioned above, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Mark Meadows, Tom Graves, etc. are under withering fire from the...

Journalism icon Bob Woodward wrote in a new Washington Post op-ed first that the sequester was the "brain child" of the White House...

Bob Woodward said that sequestration was Obama's & Lew's idea. Why now is Obama againt it? Why was he for it before he was against it? Why does he flip-flop on his CORE beliefs (raising the debt ceiling, the individual mandate, sequestration, etc)? Not secondary or tertiary beliefs...core beliefs. And why is Lew fearmongering over the debt ceiling? What he has said about it recently has been debunked by Moody's.

A combination of budget cuts and escalating compensation costs will reduce the U.S. military’s fighting forces by at least 50 percent by 2021 and threaten national security, according to a report released Friday. The report by the Bipartisan Policy Center also said that the nearly $1 trillion in defense funding reductions over the next decade, known as the sequester, would cripple the readiness and modernization of military forces. The report pushed back against the notion that the sequester cuts have not been as debilitating as originally thought and actually helped to curb the nation’s mounting debt. While the cuts...

Sequester may force USAF to retire entire fleets of aircraft The US Air Force will likely have to cut entire fleets of aircraft to comply with the Congressional sequestration law, says a top service official. In order to retain a force capable of operating across the spectrum of operations, the USAF will have to sacrifice single-mission aircraft in order to preserve multirole machines. “The only way you really save money is to make entire weapons systems go away,” says Gen Mike Hostage, commander of the USAF’s Air Combat Command. That is “so that the whole logistics train, the whole support...

The federal government has spent $2.2 million studying why three quarters of lesbians are obese despite sequestration-mandated budget cuts that critics warned could “delay progress in medical breakthroughs.” . . . Thus far, the study has yielded one report, published in January, which found that gay and bisexual males had a “greater desire for toned muscles than completely and mostly heterosexual males.”