How I stopped worrying and learned to love the sequester

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Legal Insurrection:

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the sequester

 

Posted by David Gerstman Friday, February 22, 2013 at 8:20am

A recent Washington Post editorial, The blame game over sequestration concludes:

 

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama seems content to warn of dire cutbacks in everything from naval operations to firefighters and to accuse the GOP of risking them to protect the wealthy. The Republicans denounce the sequester as Mr. Obama’s brainchild (though they accepted it as part of a 2011 budget deal) and say they won’t vote for any more tax increases. Both sides are obviously playing a political blame game, which must give way to serious bargaining soon — or the country will be the loser.

 

Yesterday Washington Post op-ed columnist Ruth Marcus wroteRepublicans rewrite history on the sequester:

 

The tax debate is now closed,” House Speaker John Boehner proclaimed in The Wall Street Journal.

 

But why? The deal that Boehner asserts closed the tax debate involved less revenue than the $800 billion he was willing to ante up as part of the debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011. It involved less revenue than the $1 trillion he was offering last December in the cliff talks. By way of comparison,

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Let’s Go Sequestering!

 

Is there a silver lining in allowing the sequester to go forward?

by

Rick Moran February 22, 2013 - 3:08 pm

 

If you’ve never lived there, Washington, D.C., seems like a pretty conservative place. Perhaps not politically. No — definitely not politically. Washington, D.C, is a place where conservatives go to die and common sense goes into a coma.

 

But it’s a place that doesn’t like new things. It adores tradition, pomp, ceremony, and old-fashioned, stuffy things like dinner parties and cotillions. In recent years, this traditional kind of cultural conservatism has run smack into modern American celebrity hysteria. It says something about the influence of Washington traditionalism that you don’t see politicians dying their hair purple or wearing a lot of bling, but you do see famous performers toning down their act some.

 

So the reaction to the coming sequester, where 10% of all federal spending is going to be lopped off the top on March 1 except for a few sacred cows like Medicare and Social Security, is not unexpected. They hate it. Not just the politicians, but all the lobbyists, lawyers, think tankers, consultants, image makers, image destroyers, do-gooders, and anti-do-gooders in town can’t stand the darn thing.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/lets-go-sequestering/

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Feb 23

 

Obama: If Republicans don’t give me what I want I will make planes fall from the sky

 

By: DrJohn

 

Barack Obama is warning America of the devastation that the sequester will visit upon the country, including

Furloughs of 800,000 civilian Pentagon employees;

Meat inspector furloughs from which food shortages will result;

Air Traffic Controller furloughs resulting in three-hour waits at airports to clear security;

Reductions in embassy protection and border patrols;

Cutting the Persian Gulf Naval presence from two aircraft carriers to one;

Diminished emergency services;

fewer police and firefighters on the streets;

Reduced military readiness;

Criminals going free because federal prosecutors will have to close cases;

Thousands of teacher and educator layoffs

Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids;

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose

 

Page 326 (July 26):

At 2:30 p.m., [White House Budget director Jack] Lew and [White House legislative affairs director Rob] Nabors went to the Senate to meet with [senator Majority Leader Harry] Reid and his chief of staff, David Krone.

http://floppingaces.net/2013/02/23/obama-if-republicans-dont-give-me-what-i-want-i-will-make-planes-fall-from-the-sky/

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Center for American Progress’s silly Social Security sequester small-ball.

 

By: Moe Lane (Diary) | February 24th, 2013 at 03:06 PM

 

With sequester coming in less than a week, there’s a certain amount of sudden nervousness about it… among the DC/Beltway demographic (it’s never a real crisis until it affects the Imperial District, you see). So you can expect to see a few rhetorical Hail Mary plays being thrown, in the hope that one of them will resonate with the voting public… but, still. Is this really the best that the rabidly liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) could have done to scaremonger on the sequester?

REALLY?

The administration’s long reluctance to spell out the gruesome details “doesn’t entirely make sense to me,” said Scott Lilly, a budget expert at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank. “I think Social Security will have to close a lot of offices. And the ones that make sense to close are the ones in the smallest communities. Which, by the way, happen to be predominantly Republican.”

While Social Security benefits are protected, Lilly said, http://www.redstate.com/2013/02/24/center-for-american-progresss-sequester-social-security/