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Last week President Obama held a photo op an important news conference in which he warned Americans of the dire, disastrous consequences if the Eeevil Republicans have their way and the dreaded, draconian SEQUESTER goes into effect!! Jobs will be lost! Vital services will be lost!! LIVES will be lost!!! Planes will fall out of the sky! First responders won't be there to respond! Teachers will be out of a job! Roads and bridges! Crumbling infrastructure! SCHOOLS! Children's SCHOOLS, Mandrake! The Children--think of The Children!!!! "My fellow Americans, just look at these carefully selected stage props these brave first...

Will President Obama’s sequester interrupt government services you depend on? The media runs alarmist stories about how average Americans will suffer if Uncle Sam has to pass up a fourth sticky bun for breakfast. Politicians often panic the public to keep the money flowing. Washington is warning of three-hour delays at airports. Remember: Democrats insisted on requiring airport security screeners to be federal employees. So now you must support Democratic spending plans or else. Since 2008, federal spending has increased by $800 billion per year. The looming sequester will shave off $100 billion per year. Washington will still be spending...

With less than a week until the automatic slowdown of Federal spending kicks in, it seems like every group in the USA is screaming for mercy from the ravenous spending slowdown. ABC News lists 57 terrible consequences of the sequester, including “U.S. Less Prepared for a ‘WMD Incident’” and “An Even More Porous Border” (you mean, even MORE porous than now??). Wow, all that pain and suffering from a trivial slowdown in government spending. On top of the media hysteria over sequester cuts, I read that IKEA is selling horsemeat in their Swedish Meatballs over in Europe. I doubt if...

Call her MoveOn.Mika . . . Bob Woodward has demonstrated that President Obama was not telling the truth when during the third presidential debate he flatly stated "the sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” In fact, it was two Obama aides who devised the plan, and Obama himself who approved it. But when Joe Scarborough wanted to get those facts on the record this morning, Mika Brzezinski repeatedly declared that discussing Obama's failure to tell the truth was "silly." Things got heated between the co-hosts at one point as Mika cut Joe...

Health world braces for sequester By Sam Baker - 02/24/13 03:00 PM ET Every corner of the healthcare world has something — and potentially a lot — to lose from the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to hit the government on March 1. Doctors and hospitals say the sequester’s Medicare cuts will cost their industries more than 200,000 jobs just this year. A reduction in food inspections could lead to more food-borne illnesses, the White House has warned. And advocates for medical research say their work could be set back a generation. With the cuts looking increasingly inevitable,...

The White House on Sunday detailed how deep spending cuts set to begin this week would affect programs in every state and the District, as President Obama launched a last-ditch effort to pressure congressional Republicans to compromise on a way to stop the across-the-board cuts.But while Republicans and Democrats were set to introduce dueling legislative proposals this week to avert the Friday start of the spending cuts, known as the sequester, neither side expected the measures to get enough support to pass Congress.

House oversight panel Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has agreed to Democrats' request to hold one or more hearings on economic risks from climate change, but while the decision appears to be a significant break from House GOP leaders' opposition to climate hearings it is unclear whether it will change other committees' reluctance to hold such hearings. Given the uncertainty over the fate of climate change hearings in the Republican-controlled House this year, Democrats are launching a new “Safe Climate Caucus” with a strategy of daily speeches to pressure GOP leadership into addressing climate. The caucus “is banding together to...

Just when Californians are finally feeling upbeat again about where the state is heading, here comes a fresh downer: The federal sequester cuts set to kick in this week could cost California billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs while making most of our daily lives more difficult. The state's budget may be balanced and the economy improving, but unless congressional Republicans and President Barack Obama reach a last-minute deal, the federal government on Friday will begin slashing $85 billion this year, including about 8 percent from the Pentagon and about 5 percent from most other discretionary programs....

Sequestration Is the Worst Option Except for All the Other Options Both Democrats and Republicans have been roundly criticizing the security and economic effects of sequestration and, at the same time, taking very little action. The only logical conclusion is that both parties agree that sequestration is an awful, terrible, harmful set of policies - except the other proposed replacements are worse. President Obama said "these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy." Speaker Boehner, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said "there's nothing wrong with cutting spending that much... but the sequester is...

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."

The economy is in freefall. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Walmart calls their sales “a total disaster.” But don’t panic. Our fearless leader Obama is just back from a “Swing State”…you know, the kind of place where you work on your golf swing. He was consulting on the economy with Tiger Woods and Butch Harmon. While Michelle was playing in Aspen. You wouldn’t accept this storyline if it was a fictional movie script. Too unrealistic. This country under Obama is becoming one big scam. A Ponzi scheme. Obama is the guy running the Ponzi, playing the role of Bernie Madoff. But...

Duncan: ‘Dumb cuts’ from sequester will cost thousands of teachers their jobs By Bernie Becker - 02/24/13 10:44 AM ET Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday that sequestration would have a devastating affect on school systems around the country. Duncan said that teachers around the country were already being informed that they won’t be retained, and that some 40,000 teachers in all could lose their jobs. Head Start and programs for children with parents in the military could also be hurt by the $85 billion in sequester cuts, Duncan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We don’t have any ability...

The rhetoric about the sequester is mind numbing. To listen to analysts and politicians, the sequester will be like The Titanic striking an iceberg all over again. President Obama warns of thousands of teachers being laid off, beef prices skyrocketing because FDA inspectors will be laid off, etc., etc. As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria…” Absolutely savage spending cuts. But seriously, can you spot the absolutely savage budget cuts that will cause the mass hysteria? It is almost unnoticeable among the leviathan Federal budget that only keeps growing. Another view of...

The major objection most Republicans have to the coming sequestration budget cuts is that the cuts will fall disproportionately on the Department of Defense. That’s true; defense spending is about one-fifth of the federal budget but will take about half of the sequester cuts. But even for the Pentagon, the cuts are only to the rate of growth for the defense budget in coming years. They are not actual cuts that make spending decline. In a February publication, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023,” the Congressional Budget Office (summary here, full report here) outlines the increases...

Like a breathless 13 year old girl at a One Direction concert, President Obama raced around the nation over the last week attempting to frighten Americans into opposing the modest cuts to the federal budget due through the sequester process on March 1. Never mind that the sequester was President Obama's idea. Never mind that these cuts amount to just 2 cents on every dollar of the federal budget. And, never mind that his Administration has made history, in a bad way, by running four straight trillion dollar plus deficits. No, there was the President standing in front of "first...

The Talk Shows February 24th, 2013 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Govs. Jack Markell, D-Del., and Scott Walker, R-Wis.; Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood; Govs. Deval Patrick, D-Mass., and Bobby Jindal, R-La.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Govs. Martin O'Malley, D-Md., Bob McDonnell, R-Va., Jan Brewer, R-Ariz., and John Chickenpooper, D-Colo.; Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.; Sens. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and Tim Kaine, D-Va,THIS WEEK (ABC): Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Eliot Engel, D-N.Y.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): LaHood;...

Even during this desultory economic recovery, one industry thrives — the manufacture of synthetic hysteria. It is, however, inaccurate to accuse the Hysteric in Chief of crying “Wolf!” about spending cuts under the sequester. He is actually crying “Hamster!” As in: Batten down the hatches — the sequester will cut $85 billion from this year’s $3.6 trillion budget! Or: Head for the storm cellar — spending will be cut 2.3 percent! Or: Washington chain-saw massacre — we must scrape by on 97.7 percent of current spending! Or: Chaos is coming because the sequester will cut a sum $25 billion larger than was just shoveled out...

It’s one thing for a politician to “massage” the truth ... it happens all the time. But it’s quite another for one to so brazenly repeat an easily disprovable lie. But, as in the case of President Obama and sequestration, when the fear of being caught in a lie is removed because those charged with being “watchdogs” are active participants, brazenly lying carries no more risk than saying “hello.” Sequester, automatic across-the-board reductions in the rate of increase in government spending – commonly and lazily called “spending cuts” by the media – was the spawn of the Obama administration. You’d...

Writing for WaPo, and reported on by Politico, Woodward says that the White House was the initiator of this idea.

After more than two decades of espousing patriotism, Rush Limbaugh reached a breaking point this week declaring, “for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.” “I’m into my 25th year,” Limbaugh said on his program Thursday addressing the sequestration debate. “I can’t tell you the number of times this has happened. This hit me yesterday. I’ve said the same things over and over for 25 years. Whether the Clinton presidency or the Obama presidency, whether it’s a Pelosi speakership or Tom Foley, it’s the same stuff. It’s the same threats. It’s the same arguments over...