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Washington's recent failure to meet politicians' self-imposed deadline for broad-based budget cuts does not seem to have yet had much effect on average Americans, but its impacts on the military are on pace to "snowball". That's the word from Lt. Col Don Traud at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, home of the 452nd Air Mobility Wing. The 452nd's pilots and crew members take flight in C-17 Globemaster jets and KC-135R Stratotankers, which are respectively deployed to transport personnel and cargo and conduct air refueling missions. "One of our biggest missions is actually picking up the wounded in the...

President Obama's openness to Social Security cuts as part of a sweeping budget package has put Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a tough spot. The minority leader is straddling the gulf between a Democratic president who's been willing to shrink pay hikes under the popular retirement program for the sake of a bipartisan deficit deal, and numerous liberals in her caucus who are fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent that change. The issue has left Pelosi with at least three balls in the air. First, she wants to keep a united front in the high-stakes budget battle with Obama, who has backed...

Military pay is exempt from the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, that went into effect earlier this month. But scores of military programs that impact service members in their everyday lives — including funding tuition assistance and family-assistance programs — are not protected from the across-the-board budget reductions. And that will certainly have an effect on service members, officials from the Defense Department and the military services told the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on military personnel. The Army and the Air Force both announced this week they would cut tuition-assistance programs for new applicants. Under sequestration, and the...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance." Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., has received two grants administered by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity. “Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today,” the description of the grant reads. “Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution,...

A leaked email from an Agriculture Department field officer adds fuel to claims President Obama's political strategy is to make the billions in recent federal budget cuts as painful as possible to win the public opinion battle against Republicans. ...According to the partially redacted email, the response came from the Agriculture Department’s budget office and in part states: “However you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”

President Barack Obama ordered the start of $85 billion in government spending cuts, beginning a potentially decade-long wave of belt-tightening that risks curbing U.S. economic growth this year. The White House released the order tonight, the deadline set by a law passed two years ago to avoid a debt default, and the Office of Management and Budget sent Congress a detailed list of program cuts. The reductions’ impact will become clear over the next several weeks, as agencies inform affected government contractors and notify employees about furloughs, most of which wouldn’t begin until some time in April. “What’s important to...

Congressman Takes No [Bleep] From Obama Quin Hillyer Sophomore U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, graduated first in his class at West Point, graduated from Harvard Law School, had a hugely successful career in the aerospace industry, and also has a think-tank background. He may be a seriously rising star. Anyway, he put out a self-explanatory press release that is a beauty to behold. Today, White House Spokesman Jay Carney asked during a press briefing what Congressman Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, would say to defense workers facing furlough because of the President’s sequester plan. The following is his statement: “Mr. Carney doesn’t...

The Obama Administration is doing everything it possibly can to inflict the most damage on the United States of America if sequestration, the very sequestration that they came up with, is not repealed in some way. To make the American people suffer, President Obama is promising that these cuts will result in a myriad of terrifying consequences. The average person might think that sequestration could result in higher unemployment. Not quite, the Obama Administration is now saying. If sequestration goes into effect, President Obama promises that Americans will see an increase in illegal immigration, whooping cough, Hepatitis B for children,...

Brief and Direct: Why are Firemen Always the First To Be Laid Off? After garbage workers, that is. By: Flagstaff (Diary) | February 25th, 2013 at 08:33 Maybe because we’ll miss them the most. Because the President has forgotten he’s already been elected and he’s been campaigning across the country to defeat his own idea, there are too many sources to quote regarding the dire consequences President Obama sees if the sequester, or Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), isn’t averted. So without individual attribution here are some of the services we will lose. Local first responders–fire, police, EMS. Teachers....

US President Barack Obama warned warring politicians Monday it was time to start governing as Washington headed into another manufactured crisis threatening the fragile economy. Obama told an annual meeting of state governors at the White House that huge budget cuts due to hit on March 1 would "slow our economy, eliminate good jobs" and leave Americans with "thinly stretched" budgets wondering what to do, AFP reported. The president is demanding that congressional Republicans stave off a set of arbitrary, automatic spending cuts known as the sequester by closing tax loopholes that benefit the rich and corporations. "We can't just...

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward tells POLITICO Playbook that the White House is muddling the facts on the sequester - "a classic case of distortion and confusion." **SNIP** "The White House pushback is a classic case of distortion and confusion," Woodward said in an email to Playbook. "We unfortunately have seen this too often in recent presidential history... I do not think it is willful. They are just mixed up, surprisingly so."

Nothing new here, which is the most depressing part. Scroll halfway down the page at Pew and you'll find a table tracking shifts in public opinion on various programs over the last four years. There are noticeable jumps in support for cuts from 2009 to 2011 as America got a snoutful of Obamanomics, but we've leveled off since then — and in not a single category of the 17 tested is there 50 percent in favor of decreasing spending. In fact, in only three of those 17 categories (foreign aid, unemployment aid, and the State Department) is there more support...

A group of 18 former military and national security officials wrote to President Barack Obama on Friday urging the administration to cancel plans for further cuts in United States nuclear warheads, warning that new arms reductions would undermine U.S. security. The ex-officials, including two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in the letter to Obama that North Korea’s recent underground nuclear test, and concerns about growing Pyongyang-Tehran nuclear arms cooperation, undermines any further disarmament sought by the president. “In our professional judgment, born of decades of experience with national security policy and practice, America’s ‘triad’ of nuclear-armed...

57 Terrible Consequences Of The Sequester By CHRIS GOOD (@c_good) February 21, 2013 If the heads of 20 federal agencies are to be believed, disastrous consequences await if President Obama and Congress fail to reach a budget deal, triggering the automatic, across-the-board cuts known as "sequestration." Those cuts are slated to begin March 1, and earlier this month, the Senate Appropriations Committee asked agency heads to explain what would happen in such a scenario. In separate letters to Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., they warned of terrible things: Greater risk of wildfires, fewer OSHA inspections and a risk of more...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is speaking out against a cut in congressional pay because she says it will undermine the dignity of their positions. "I think we should respect the work we do," Pelosi said. "I think it's necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded."

The Senate's top Republican predicted on Tuesday that automatic spending cuts will take effect on March 1 as scheduled. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he did not expect some last-minute deal to materialize that would avert the cuts, known in budget jargon as a "sequester." "Read my lips: I'm not interested in an 11th-hour negotiation," McConnell told reporters. "It's pretty clear to me that the sequester's going to go into effect," McConnell said. "I have seen no evidence that the House plans to act on this matter before the end of the month." The across-the-board cuts were set in...

THE CAPITOL: With the Obama Pentagon excoriating federal lawmakers for their apparent inability to avoid sequestration or to pass a defense spending bill, and the Navy going down to one carrier in the Persian Gulf for lack of funds, GOP lawmakers today defended the latest Republican proposal to stop the automatic budget cuts. It isn't a mere rehash of a very similar one that fizzled last year, GOP leaders insisted when AOL Defense raised the question at a press conference in the Capitol this afternoon -- although their own staff seem to disagree (click here to read why).The difference...

The Pentagon will have to cut the size of U.S. military forces for the second time in as many years if across-the-board spending reductions of $470 billion over 10 years take effect March 1, the top U.S. military officer said on Saturday. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about a third of the cuts would have to come from forces, with the remaining two-thirds taken from spending on modernization, compensation and readiness. He noted that the Army had begun to shrink last year toward 490,000 from a high of 570,000, a result of efforts...

Republicans open to letting billions in sequester cuts go through figure they can blame the president if the economy goes south. But Democrats are betting they can shift that blame right back to the GOP. They’re so confident, in fact, that they’re already eyeing at least 10 Republican-held seats with strong military connections from Florida to California to target in 2014, after sequester cuts have trickled down to local bases where jobs are lost and voters notice. “Republicans who are unwilling to compromise, unwilling to find solutions and are responsible for cuts to defense and jobs in their districts...

The drag to Gross Domestic Product caused by cuts in defense spending in the fourth quarter of 2012 could be just the beginning of a long, painful process, according to economic experts. GDP fell by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, the first such negative growth since 2009 and an economic wet blanket after a 3.1 percent increase in the previous quarter. A 22 percent drop in government defense spending was blamed for much of the decline. The fourth-quarter drop came as those in the Pentagon waited to see if Congress would reach a deal to avoid sequestration by the...