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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.”

As the sequester took effect last Friday (and the world as we know it began to end), President Obama and his spokesmen took to the airwaves to insist that they had a fairer and more balanced alternative. At his press conference on Friday, the president said, “I’ve put forward a plan that calls for serious spending cuts, serious entitlement reforms, goes right at the problem that is at the heart of our long-term deficit problem. I’ve offered negotiations around that kind of balanced approach.” Over the weekend, Gene Sperling, the White House’s top economic adviser, appeared on the Sunday shows...

NBC's "Saturday Night Live" opened with an economically clueless President Barack Obama struggling to explain his own sequester by presenting ridiculous budget cuts. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the insanity...

Heh.Allahpundit already explained the motivations behind the White House’s announcement that they're cancelling all public tours of the president's residence until further notice; the Obama administration is putting all of their best efforts into making the sequester cuts as painful, visible, and wide-ranging as humanly possible in order to ensure that no ordinary American citizen should be able to escape their effects unscathed in some capacity --- 'cause let's be real, how else will they convince the country that we cannot turn back the tide of government, we must hike taxes, and that we need to elect more Democrats in...

Congressional Black Caucus members, who are all Democrats, flipped out the race card in the talks on the sequester Monday and said minorities will be unfairly and disproportionately impacted. “Sequestration will impact everyone, but it will have a particularly harmful effect on communities of color who were hit first and worst by the great recession, and have yet to significantly feel the effects of the recovery,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, in The Hill. The CBC also said women would be disproportionately hurt by the $85 billion planned cuts, The Hill reports. The reason? More women and minorities hold government jobs,...

(WASHINGTON) -- The sequester likely won’t cause meat and poultry shortages for a while — thanks, in part, to union negotiations and USDA inspectors’ lack of email access. Furloughs to Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors at the U.S. Department of Agriculture could force meat and poultry plants to stop production — with no inspectors to approve products, they can’t be sold — but Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the House Agriculture Committee that those furloughs probably won’t happen until later this year. “We are looking at a several-month period, if you will, before a furlough will be imposed,”...

Say, are you getting frustrated by long lines at the airport? Janet Napolitano wants you to know that the sequester is to blame for your woes. ..... "Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on Monday cautioned airline passengers to get to the airport extra early because U.S. spending cuts have already led to long lines at some security checkpoints, and said the coming furloughs will only make the situation worse. Napolitano said mandatory spending cuts ordered on Friday by President Barack Obama have led to the elimination of overtime for Transportation Security Administration officers and customs agents. She said TSA...

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday suggested the American people are too busy to understand the sequester cuts and their impacts. A Gallup survey this week found that 51 percent of Americans said they didn't know enough to judge if the automatic cuts are good or bad thing for the country, even though President Obama traveled the country and delivered addresses from the White House in an effort to explain them.

The Obama administration denied an appeal for flexibility in lessening the sequester’s effects, with an email this week appearing to show officials in Washington that because they already had promised the cuts would be devastating, they now have to follow through on that. In the email sent Monday by Charles Brown, an official with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Brown asked “if there was any latitude” in how to spread the sequester cuts across the region to lessen the impacts on fish inspections. He said he was discouraged by officials in Washington, who...

Below is the text of an e-mail received by Dana Loesch and one that she featured in the "Hate mail" segment of her Friday show. Thankfully, she posted it on her blog: From: “[REDACTED], Angela” Date: February 25, 2013, 9:57:54 AM CST To: “Dana Loesch (XXXXX)” Subject: I disagree! I’m not sure how you can say with a straight face that democrats caused the equester. This happened because republicans failed to pass a budget on equester in the senate. Had they done THERE JOB it wouldn’t be an issue. Instead the President had to come up with cuts and republicans...

Sequester cuts Obama Tax Increase DHS Janet Napolitano Related Ads Criminal Law Theft Obama Illegal Immigration Income Tax Taxes Aliens UFO Advertisement On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that the Obama administration will continue to release criminal aliens from local jails and detention centers, claiming that the recent sequester cuts demand such action. She made the remarks at an event hosted by the left wing website Politico. Napolitano said: We’re going to continue to do that … for the foreseeable future. We are going to manage our way through this by identifying the lowest risk detainees, and putting...

The impending sequester did not prevent the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from acting in late February to seal a $50-million deal to purchase new uniforms for its agents--uniforms that will be partly manufactured in Mexico. Soon after this new investment in TSA uniforms, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned Americans that the lines are already lengthening at airports due to the sequester. ... the TSA said the uniforms will be "manufactured in the U.S. and Mexico." Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the TSA is required to procure uniforms made in the United States. However, uniform products made in...

Congressional Republicans have had quite a comeback. In January, the GOP was forced to vote for a major tax hike with zero spending cuts. Now it is President Obama who has been forced to accept spending cuts with no tax hike. Who says divided government doesn’t work? Obama continues to complain the sequester does not represent a balanced approach to deficit reduction, and wants to replace some of the spending cuts with tax increases. But the Simpson-Bowles Commission laid out what a “balanced” approach should entail: $3 of spending cuts for every $1 dollar in tax increases. Well according to...

Is it possible that Obama's arrogance, personal pettiness, sanctimoniousness and egotism (for starters) could finally be his unraveling? Even the liberal media are starting to notice, but will it last? Up to this point, they've dutifully played along with his Alinskyite tactics -- converting the office of the presidency into a headquarters for community organizing at a federal level and a position to organize and fund a perpetual campaign against his political opponents instead of governing. The liberal media share Obama's leftist policy goals and the ends-justify-the-means mentality that accompanies them and have thus far been eager not only to...

'We’re going to continue to do that…  for the foreseeable future' Most of you know the story by now: Obama first tried to blame a pending (fictional) sequester apocalypse on the Republicans -even though the sequester mechanism/legislation was entirely the President's own invention, and he signed it. Those who dared point-out the actual truth were threatened, attacked, mocked, and denigrated. So Dear Leader tells us the automatic budget cuts are now bad, and he insists on replacing half the cuts with revenue in the form of NEW TAXES. The GOP astoundingly grew a pair -at least temporarily- and told him to go pound sand. ...

Tax revenue could hit $2.7 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Conservatives say this means spending cuts are the solution, but the budget numbers tell a more complicated story.An impasse over the shape of the federal budget keeps boiling down to this basic plotline: Democrats say the solution to high deficits must include more tax revenue, while Republicans say the fundamental problem is spending. Failure to reach a middle ground has prompted automatic spending cuts known as the “sequester” to go into effect. This wasn’t Plan A, or even Plan B, for either side.As the politicians look for a...

JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS: So on that offer, I mean, you’re absolutely right that some prominent Republicans have come out in recent days and said that they could live with a plan that increased tax revenue -- not to replace the sequester, but as part of kind of a renewed effort at the grand bargain. So are we going to see an effort -- JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: But that would eliminate the sequester, which the whole -- the whole idea behind the -- KARL: But it would be bigger than just eliminate. You’re exactly right. But it...

During the month of February—as President Barack Obama was warning Americans they would see dramatic effects in their lives if “sequestration” of some planned federal spending kicked in—the federal government’s debt climbed by $253.5 billion. That one-month increase in the debt was nearly six times as much as the $44 billion in spending cuts the Congressional Budget Office estimates will take place in all of fiscal 2013 as a result of sequestration. …

The $85 billion in federal spending cuts triggered by the sequester will hit low-income Americans dependent on government assistance especially hard, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive-leaning think tank. According to organization, about 3.8 million long-term unemployed workers with federally funded benefits will see about an 11% cut in those weekly benefits. The Women, Infants and Children nutrition program will have to turn away as many as 600,000 to 775,000 women and children by the end of the year. More than 100,000 people will lose housing aid. "There is no way to cut $85 billion...

Great news! After releasing 2,000 illegals a week before the sequester went into effect, DHS secretary Janet Napolitano is threatening to release even more, unless Obama gets more tax hikes to stop the $44 billion sequester cuts.