The Republican leadership expresses contempt for any opposition to its budget deal that abandons the cuts imposed by sequestration.
The Republican leadership are fools. If anything, this is the moment to push harder, to not only demand that the sequestration cuts stay in place, but to demand a repeal of Obamacare.
The budget deal: “It’s hard to see how conservatives support it,” he said. “The question is, how angry will they get?”
As is usual, the Republicans negotiated away something they didn’t have to for a promise of something that they will never get. The stupid party loses again.
Why Republicans should reject the surrender budget deal rumors say Paul Ryan is negotiating with Democrats.
Expect more articles like this. There are a lot of conservatives in the Republican House caucus who are no longer willing to lick the feet of Democrats, even if the Republican leadership is. And any deal that gives up sequestration is going to face their wrath.
Also, these kinds of articles serve to pressure Ryan so that he does not agree to a surrender.
Another news report suggests that Republicans are preparing to surrender in budget talks.
Senior aides familiar with the talks say the emerging agreement aims to partially repeal the sequester and raise agency spending to roughly $1.015 trillion in fiscal 2014 and 2015. That would bring agency budgets up to the target already in place for fiscal 2016. To cover the cost, Ryan and Murray are haggling over roughly $65 billion in alternative policies, including cuts to federal worker pensions and higher security fees for the nation’s airline passengers.
Republican leaders are also seeking additional savings to knock a small dent in deficits projected to exceed $6 trillion over the next decade. But the deal would do nothing to trim the debt, which is now larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any point in U.S. history except during World War II. [emphasis mine]
To me, the biggest disappointment of this surrender is that Paul Ryan is negotiating it, proof that he too is no fiscal conservative and worse is far more stupid than I had thought.
The stupid party strikes again! Rumors suggest that Republicans are moving to accept a budget deal that would end sequestration.
At issue are efforts to craft a compromise that would ease across-the-board spending cuts due to take effect in January, known as the sequester, and replace them with a mix of increased fees and cuts in mandatory spending programs.
As de Rugy notes:
The sequester, no matter how imperfect a policy, is arguably the only victory for fiscal conservatives in a very long time. Their victory is also president Obama’s biggest defeat (outside of the self-inflicted disastrous Obamacare rollout). It is also another opportunity to remind the American people that the alarmist predictions that we were all subjected to about the devastating impact sequestration would have on our economy didn’t materialize.
She adds:
So let’s sum this up: a massive and unnecessary surrender on the sequester, some tax hikes, and more unemployment benefits. It seems to me that the Republicans are learning their moves from the French army.
Not only do most Democrats have to be replaced, so do a significant number of Republicans. Too many of these politicians have no interest in serving the citizenry being crushed by this out-of-control federal government. Instead they serve that government instead.
The planetary science community is in an uproar over the Obama administration’s proposed restructuring and possible budget cuts to NASA’s planetary research program.
Though the Obama administration has been consistently hostile to the planetary program, attempting to cut it severely several years in a row, and though I generally have found these particular cuts to be short-sighted, in this case the article is not very clear about the cuts NASA is proposing. It appears they are going to eliminate for one year the general research fund. I suspect there is waste in this budget, but I also suspect that this is a meat cleaver approach that has not been thought out well, as suggested in the article.
One quote from the article reinforces the foolishness of these management decisions:
Next year, a high-level NASA review is likely to have to decide between shutting down either the Mars Curiosity rover or the Cassini mission to Saturn. Both are successful missions that cost around $60 million a year, a level that Green has said the division simply cannot afford for the long term.
Talk about penny wise, pound foolish. The cost to get these probes to their destination was in the billion dollar range, each. To shut them down when they are working and cost relatively so little now is beyond stupid.
As I have written repeatedly, we have a big federal deficit. We need to cut, and I think NASA’s budget can be cut. It just makes no sense to cut planetary research, when there are other portions of that budget that are accomplishing little and cost far more.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal budget deficit for October was “only” $91 billion.
The AP article makes a big deal about how much lower this deficit is compared to past Octobers, but at this level, we would still have an annual deficit over $1 trillion. Even it ends up as half that, the numbers are still terrible.
The budget deal that ended the government shutdown ends on January 15. Be prepared for another shutdown. I expect some Republicans are going to once again tie that shutdown to repealing Obamacare.
Lockheed Martin announced today that it is closing down five facilities and laying off 4,000 employees.
This is actually good news for the company (reflected in a rise in its stock price today) as well as the taxpayer. Faced with less easy money from the federal government, the company is trimming some of its waste and unneeded fat. I am confident these cuts will have zero impact on their ability to operate and compete. If anything, they will improve the company’s abilities.
The cuts are also a recognition that the federal cuts from sequestration are not going away, even though those cuts have resulted in literally no visible problems in any federal program. To me, this is another demonstration that there was (and continues to be) plenty of fat in the federal government that can be trimmed away, without serious harm to any federal program.
A new poll, taken by a liberal poll company, finds that Democratic incumbents took a much bigger hit than Republican incumbents after the government shutdown.
As I’ve said repeatedly, the shutdown was a team effort of both parties, that occurred because of their disagreement over Obamacare. The spin has said the Republicans lost big. The evidences says otherwise.
Also, this poll was taken before the most recent disasters relating to Obamacare became public knowledge. I suspect the numbers will worsen for Democrats in subsequent polls.
“The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law.”
The Right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any major social legislation in a century. They bought this legislation with deceit and the GOP said so. Now that it is going into effect, the facts on the ground are confirming that deceit. Moreover, the same haughty condescending bureaucrats and politicians who told us they were smart enough and tech-savvy enough to do just about anything are being exposed as incompetent political hacks.
And remember: This same President and those same Democrats re-affirmed their support of Obamacare less than one month ago by insisting on shutting the government down rather than agree to even the slightest revision of this disaster of a law.
He lied: Unnamed healthcare officials admit that the Obama administration specifically wrote the Obamacare regulations so that millions would have to lose their healthcare plan.
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
These regulations were written in the executive branch, which is the complete responsibility of Obama. So, the agency he controls wrote regulations they knew would force the cancellation of millions of healthcare plans, and Obama went around the country lying about it. It is as simple as that.
But remember! Obama and the Democrats forced a government shutdown so Obamacare would go into effect now. Shouldn’t we all be grateful?
Update: The quote above is from the original version of the story. The article itself disappeared from the web on Monday night and then reappeared at a new url (which I have linked to above) with some changes to some paragraphs, none of which did much to change the essential content.
From a college student: “Obamacare has raped my future.”
This budget fight exists because Republicans are trying to delay or repeal Obamacare while Democrats are doing everything to keep the law in place. If the Republicans had any brains they would focus on this point, as I do, all the time. Obamacare is a disaster, everyone sees it, and by showing how the Democrats are willing to even shut down the government to endorse it can only work to the Republicans’ political advantage.
The budget negotiations continue: Obama apparently has rejected the Republican capitulation offer from yesterday.
The Republican plan, which I think sucks, was simply not humiliating enough. Meanwhile, there appears to be some pushback from conservative Republicans. I am not hopeful, however. The cowards at the head of the Republican party always back down.
“How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?”
This seems like a perfectly reasonable question to me.
Posted driving past Radford, Virginia.
The public appears to be increasingly defiant about the National Park Service’s closure of parks.
Meanwhile, from a commenter here describing the situation at Great Smoky National Park since we left that area on Friday:
I was at the Smokies this weekend (Saturday and Sunday). The parking lot a Newfound Gap was completely open. The road to Clingman’s Dome was open. I did not travel down the North Carolina side of the park. Major trailheads were blocked at the Chimneys and Alum Cave Bluff. Chimneys picnic area closed. All other trailheads along 441 were open and there were plenty of people parked and enjoying the park. Little River Road was closed. We parked a couple of quiet walkways and took some short walks. Never saw an ranger anywhere.
If you are planning a trip to the Smokies then I would say to go for it. You may not be able to access some of the more popular areas of the park but there are plenty of areas that are accessible. I am planning a horseback riding trip (my own horses) in a couple of weeks and I am not going to let the dictatorial government in Washington ruin my plans.
The Chimney Top trail has been closed anyway during the week because of trail work, and the Alum Cave Bluff parking area is located at a spot where road work is presently going on and therefore might have been closed anyway as well.
And then there’s this: Yorktown restaurant owner defies the federal government, “occupying” his restaurant.
The horror! The government shutdown is forcing House lawmakers to reuse their towels in the House gym.
The important question is why this gym is even open, or even exists. I can think of a lot better uses of taxpayer dollars, especially considering how much money these elected officials make.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided that the shutdown prevents them from paying the death benefits to the families of military soldiers killed in action.
Compare and contrast.
The world that works vs the world that doesn’t.
In Washington, penalties for failure are few: Has anyone been fired over the Obamacare launch debacle? Problems are always the fault of circumstances, or the Evil Opposition, or are simply swept under the rug. Of course, that means there’s not much learning from mistakes, and “more of the same, only we’ll try harder!” is a common response. As in The Hunger Games, life is always posh in Capital City; suffering is for the poor schlubs out in the provinces.
In the world that works, on the other hand, mistakes are painful: They cost people jobs, they cost investors money, they result in bad publicity that’s harder to explain away. Thus, people learn from them. Unsurprisingly, the world that works is where the money that Washington spends ultimately comes from.
The problem is that the bigger Washington gets, the less room is left for the world that works. As more and more of American life is taken over by the world of politics — in which wealth is not generated, but taken from one’s opponents and distributed to one’s supporters — a smaller share is left for the world that works.
Harry Reid drags his feet on alleviating the financial anxiety of hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers, and he’s refused to bring to the floor seven continuing resolutions, all passed by the House, all passed by wide and fairly bipartisan majorities (all or almost all of the Republicans, and another 20 or so House Democrats):
- Authorizing military chaplains to do their duties during the shutdown;
- Continuing appropriations for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children for fiscal year 2014 (food stamps).
- Continuing appropriations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
- Continuing appropriations for veterans benefits.
- Continuing appropriations for the National Institutes of Health.
- Continuing appropriations for National Park Service operations, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- Continuing appropriations of local funds of the District of Columbia.
Not a single one of those resolutions says anything about Obamacare. We know why Harry Reid isn’t bringing them to the floor. If he did, they would pass. Senate Democrats wouldn’t be able to vote “no” on any of those priorities without providing fodder for attack ads next fall (maybe the District of Columbia). And if they pass, the pain of the shutdown is mitigated in part.
Harry Reid doesn’t want to minimize the pain of the shutdown. He wants to maximize it.
Posted from wet and rainy Maryland. And in case you didn’t know it, it is generally wet in the east, even when it isn’t raining. I had lived in the east for most of my life, and now cannot wait to get back to Arizona where I don’t feel sticky all the time from humidity.
Speaker John Boehner on Sunday said that the House will pass no bills to re-open the federal government or raise the debt limit until President Obama sits down to negotiate.
In his first extended TV interview since shutdown Tuesday, a defiant Boehner placed the blame for the fiscal impasse firmly on Obama, who has refused to sit down with House Republicans until they re-open the government at current spending levels. “The president just can’t sit there and say, ‘I’m not going to negotiate,'” Boehner said. Boehner said that there aren’t enough votes in the Republican-led House to simply re-open the government with no other strings attached. “There are not votes in the House to pass a clean (continuing resolution),” he said.
Shutdown fascism: The Obama administration has ordered 1100 square miles of open ocean off limits to private fisherman and tourists because of the government shutdown.
The article above also has a link to a story where voluntary unpaid Catholic priests have been told by the Obama administration that they will face arrest if they try to serve mass at military chapels or minister to military personnel during the shutdown.
