Reaping What Their Republican Votes Sowed

No, Hal Rogers is no whacko bird or even a teabagger. But as the supposedly powerful chair of the House Appropriations Committee, he has made no attempt to mitigate the teabagging whacko birds' vicious and inhuman attack on the working poor who keep voting to send him back to represent Kentucky's Fifth District.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Suzy Khimm has some terrific reporting about the horrible effects of the sequester in rural Appalachia. A teaser:

But sequestration—a series of across-the-board spending cuts that many Tea Party Republicans have come to embrace—and other austerity measures have accelerated the economic free fall. Unemployment benefits to laid-off miners are shrinking; fewer meals are getting delivered to homebound seniors; and there’s less money to help workers retool for new jobs. Beginning Friday, food stamps will be cut by an average of $36 per month for a family of four.

It’s yet another blow to struggling Appalachian mining towns like Harlan, where the mayor estimates that 15% of the town’s residents have moved out in the past year, searching for work elsewhere.

The whole thing is very much worth reading. I wish I was more hopeful that more voters in districts like this would recognize that even if their own GOP representative opposes the worst policies a vote for Republican control of the House is a vote for a war on the poor.

Hal Rogers brings home the bacon: hundreds of minimum-wage, dead-end and soul-destroying jobs at call centers in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Hundreds of thousands of which could not make up for the economic catastrophe caused by repugs' lethal combination of subsidizing Big Coal and shredding the social safety net.

Falling Deficit Harming the Economy

Budget cuts are making this recession worse. What we need is trillion-dollar investment in 10 million new jobs. we should get that money back from the rich motherfuckers who stole it, but we should borrow it if we have to.  Because falling deficits kill economic growth.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

 

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) recently appeared on Fox News and when the discussion turned to the budget, the Virginia Republican said lawmakers should be “focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.”

 

In reality, the deficit is not growing; it’s shrinking. The AP reported this afternoon:

For the first time in five years, the U.S. government has run a budget deficit below $1 trillion.

 

The government says the deficit for the 2013 budget year totaled $680.3 billion, down from $1.09 trillion in 2012. That’s the smallest imbalance since 2008, when the government ran a $458.6 billion deficit.

This isn’t a surprising, at least not to the policy mainstream. Many congressional Republicans predicted tax increases on the wealthy that began in January would fail to lower the deficit, but as is usually the case, the opposite happened. The combination of new tax revenue and reduced spending did what exactly what was expected – it reduced the nation’s budget shortfall.

 

While this shouldn’t surprise anyone, the trend is a well-kept secret – national polling last year found that only 6% of Americans realize that the deficit is shrinking in the Obama era. Whether the public realizes it or not, the facts are not in dispute – the deficit is now down $400 billion from last year, and down nearly $800 billion from when President Obama took office.

 

This is the fastest deficit reduction seen in the United States since the end of World War II.

 

Just so we’re clear, I don’t consider this good news. On the contrary, I strongly believe the nation should be borrowing more, not less, taking advantage of low interest rates, investing heavily in infrastructure, creating millions of jobs, and leaving deficit reduction for another day.

 

That said, if we’re going to have a fiscal debate, it should be rooted in reality, not silly misconceptions. And the reality is, we’re witnessing deficit reduction at a remarkable clip.

From Digby, where the deficit "savings" really come from:

"A budget that reflects our priorities"

Our priorities, Mr. President, include not sacrificing Social Security and Medicare to an unnecessary Grand Bargain in exchange for pocket change from billionaires.



Full transcript here.

Starving Kids in Order to Overfeed Defense Fat Cats

From the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services:

The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) is notifying recipients of funding from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – formerly known as food stamps – that they will see their benefits decrease beginning Nov. 1.

The change is because increased benefits provided to SNAP by the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009 are set to expire. Congress has not voted to extend this stimulus funding.

CHFS’ Department for Community Based Services (DCBS) administers the Kentucky food benefits program, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), in every county.

SNIP

“The additional funding made a significant impact on our customers’ access to nutritious foods,” James said. “Though we are disappointed this extra funding is lapsing, we will still provide benefits to eligible customers and connect them with other community resources that can help feed their family healthful meals on a lower budget.”

The long-term change in benefits, after the stimulus funding expires, will depend on household size, income and expenses. A household of two who currently receives $367 a month will likely see a decrease in benefits by $20 a month to $347 per month.

SNIP
 

Customers cannot appeal the change in benefits because the decrease is a result of a change in federal law.

Meanwhile:

Shutdown? No problem. Sequestration? No sweat. Defense contracts continue to show huge profits.

 Ask any farmer. This is eating your seed corn.

The Real Sodomites

Everybody who thinks that repugs who are willing to crash the global economy in order to deny affordable health coverage to poor people are going to reauthorize welfare, stand on your head.

Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

Congress didn’t just miss the deadline on Monday night to pass a continuing resolution that would keep the government open. It also missed the deadline to reauthorize the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, formally known as welfare.

The TANF block grant that the federal government gives to states to share the cost of welfare programs was scheduled for reauthorization in 2010, but rather than reauthorizing it then Congress instead extended it multiple times. The most recent extension was part of a continuing resolution passed in March that funded the government through the end of September 2013, so it expired Monday night along with all other government funding.

From Juanita Jean:

Hal Rogers Wants Budget Talks the GOP Opposes

Hal Rogers has been representing Kentucky's Fifth District in Congress since Methuselah was a pup. So unlike the teabagger screeching infants ordering John Boehner around these days, Rogers appreciates an orderly lawmaking process.

Sahil Kapur at TPM:

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) told a handful of reporters Tuesday he supports House-Senate conference negotiations over a comprehensive budget resolution, which Republican leaders have blocked since April.

"They should have done that long ago," he said in response to a question from TPM, before walking into a closed-door GOP meeting to discuss the government shutdown strategy.

Rogers, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Coal, also knows what deep game is being played here while the shit-flinging monkeys of the RandPaul/TedCruz caucus entertain the rubes.

Charlie Pierce:

Corporate money is the power behind all of it, and that corporate money has but one goal -- the creation of a largely subjugated population and a workforce grateful for whatever scraps fall from the table. To accomplish this, the corporate money not only had to disable the institutions of self-government that are the people's only real protection, it had to do so in such a way that the people expect less and less of the government and, therefore, less and less of each other, acting in the interest of the political commonwealth. (The dismantling of organized labor is a sideshow to the main event in that the goal there was to cripple organized labor's political power within the political institutions so that there would be no countervailing force that could be brought to bear against the destruction of its power in the workplace.) For all the endless bloviation about the dead-hand of government, what the vandals in Washington are shooting for right now is a subject population whose tattered freedoms depend on the whimsical ethics of the American corporate class. This is the really deep game being played here, and they're more than halfway to winning it.

The Treason of Refusing to Raise the Debt Ceiling

It's the same secessionist motherfuckers playing the same motherfucking games they've been playing for 200 years.

aimai at No More Mister Niceblog:

They are treating the debt ceiling like it is a normal part of the budgeting process, part of the annual round of funding, rather than the part of the script where you sign your credit card reciept before leaving the restaurant. This has, of course, been observed many times before but it bears repeating--their world bears no resemblance to our earth world. In the real world the 14th amendment ought to bar them from refusing to raise the debt limit because to do so is to say that the previous congress (which many of them were in) did not lawfully appropriate the money which we now owe or that they are repudiating the payment of our just debts.

To refresh everyone's memory we passed the 14th amendment because we were about to accept back into political life our former rebels and traitors--these men, once they were back in public life, were quite likely to repudiate the war debts of the victors or to once again engage in sabotage of the union. That is what this neo-southern confederate rump is doing: they are sabotaging the US Government and using the budget to do so. They are both smarter and more cowardly than the previous batch of Confederates. Lets hope the current President can save the Union.

Budget "Win" For Either Side Is Huge Loss for Nation

Even in the best-case scenario, austerity rules.

Digby:

Meanwhile, lest Democrats get it in their head that a clean vote will be Big Victory and we can all start dancing around like a bunch of drunk kids on prom night like we always do when the wingnuts pull one over:

That's a real winner isn't it? But hey, if we're lucky we'll get this "clear CR" and then the White House can start negotiating on the debt ceiling and we can cut all the "entitlements" too.

And David Atkins reminds us that this destructive austerity is taking place while the filthy, obscene rich continue to strip the middle class and working poor of every last dime.

We are living in another gilded age of rampant greed. Conservative talking points that inequality doesn't matter because the economic pie can expand infinitely have been proven to be a joke. We have a moral and economic crisis on our collective hands.

But Republicans are so crazy that all we can talk about is how much to cut from our safety net in order to placate them lest they shut down the government and throw the economy further into tailspin.

It's totally insane.

As Wonkette commenter skmind put it:

The blame game is a sideshow. The Republicans won this shutdown battle.

Think about what each side went into the fight with, and then see what each side agreed to. When they pass the clean CR, you'll have the sequester spending cuts in place.

Except for the defense spending cuts. Those have been restored.

So what the Democrats got out of this bargaining was restoration of the defense cuts, continuation of the discretionary cuts (including more SNAP cuts) and they get to keep a law which was never under any threat of being defunded.

And the Republicans? They get to undo the sequester like they had been wanting to since it went into effect.

No one will remember this shutdown enough to vote the GOP out, in a year.

Till then, we can call the Republicans poopyheads or something.

Or, we can take Charlie Pierce's advice:

Of course, what should happen now, since not much else is going on, is that the Democrats in the Senate should start dismantling The Sequester brick by brick. They should reject it, root and branch, and tell the Republicans that the deal is off and that, for every day the government gets shut down, demands for stimulus spending on social programs is the price of obstruction. Yeah, that'll happen.

Huge Opportunity Now for Senate Dems to Fix the Budget

Now that Ted "I don't understand Senate procedure" Cruz has finished demonstrating his inability to grasp the meaning of Dr. Seuss, Senate Democrats can grab a repug-sent opportunity to cancel sequestration, ban austerity and restore budget sanity.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Senate Democrats are expected to fix the Obamacare provision, leave the rest of the bill intact, and send it back with very little time left on the clock. At that point, House Republicans will either grudgingly pass the Senate version and renew their crusade during a debt-ceiling crisis, or shut down the government.
But Senate Democrats could, if they wanted to, pursue a better deal for themselves -- and for the country.

SNIP

Senate Democrats could, for example, push for a spending measure that scraps the House GOP's Obamacare plan and simultaneously fixes the sequestration policy that's hurting the country. No one can defend the sequester -- it was designed, after all, to impose mindless hardship nationwide -- so some Senate Republicans might even go along.

If the Senate minority balked and mounted a filibuster, they'd be responsible for a government shutdown. If Senate Republicans backed off, Democrats could pass a better bill -- better for economic growth, better for job creation, better for struggling families, better for law enforcement, better for medical research, better for firefighters, etc.

And at that point, House Republicans would face an interesting dilemma.

The House GOP obviously wouldn't be happy, but don't forget, they're not going to like the Senate version anyway since it will fund the Affordable Care Act. So if Republicans are going to be angry no matter what Senate Dems do, shouldn't Democrats pursue a bill they actually like? One that better serves the nation's interests?

SNIP

Indeed, if a significant number of House Republicans are going to reject the Senate version anyway, and support from House Democrats will be necessary to get this bill across the finish line in time, the Senate could make it a whole lot easier to generate support from House Dems if they aimed a little higher in their ambitions.

There are 200 House Democrats. Faced with the prospect of a government shutdown that the GOP would be blamed for, there aren't 18 House Republicans who would vote for the Senate version that scraps a sequestration policy that Republicans say they don't like anyway? Of course there are.

GOP officials would howl, but (a) they're already howling; and (b) do Democrats really care? Should they? Were Republicans concerned about how Dems would react when they passed their ridiculous continuing resolution?

And the idea is catching on among Senate Democrats..

Sequester Cuts Killing Businesses in Kentucky

Next time a teabagging repug like Mitch McConnell or Thomas Massie defends cuts to domestic programs as hurting only the "takers" (sic), remind them of the 87 job-creating Kentucky small businesses they murdered.

Beth Musgrave at the Herald:

Spending cuts on child care subsidies for poor families have contributed to the closing of more than 80 child care centers in Kentucky, and as many as 25,000 children could be dropped from the program in the next year, advocates said Wednesday.

"We're in a lose, lose, lose, lose situation" said Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, a nonprofit group that advocates for children.

Brooks told the state legislature's Interim Joint Committee on Health and Welfare that child care centers have closed in every region of the state since cuts to the child care assistance program began in April.

"The best estimates that we have is that some 87 centers closed since the initiation of these cuts," Brooks said.

Some new centers have popped up, but those are generally smaller sites that offer lower-quality care, he said. Parents have had to quit jobs because they can no longer afford child care, he said.

Oh, but those 87 small businesses were probably owned and run by blah wimmins, not rich white men who are the real job creators, so who cares, right Mitch?

Yep, Sequester Stupidity Is Now the Budget Baseline

The baseline for getting even more stupid with even more economy-killing cuts.

Steve Bennen at Maddowblog:

Which then leads us to the second problem: under this approach, spending levels are still at sequestration levels. Why is that important? Because the sequester is a painfully stupid and destructive policy that's hurting the country for no reason.

In August, Boehner said "none of us like" the sequestration policy. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the sequester "is not the best way to go about spending reductions." House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said the sequester is "unrealistic," "ill-conceived," and a policy that "must be brought to an end."

And yet, the Speaker's plan is to effectively tell the right, "You're not getting the shutdown you wanted, but at least you're getting the destructive sequestration cuts we pretend not to like."

There's a real chance that rank-and-file Republicans oppose the idea because they want to shut down the government, while rank-and-file Democrats balk because they hate the sequester.

All of this will have to be dealt with fairly soon, since the government runs out of money on Sept. 30. Once that's done, we then get to move on to congressional Republicans threatening to crash the global economy on purpose with another debt-ceiling hostage crisis.

So, Hal: will you vote against the sequester budget? Will you propose restoring the trillions in domestic spending your party has eliminated since 2009? And all you Fifth District Democrats who sit home instead of supporting a Democratic challenger to Rogers, when you are looking for someone to blame for the failing economy, will you look in the mirror?

The War-Poverty-War Vicious Cycle Continues

It's not just the binary false choice of guns or butter - it's that choosing guns over butter makes both war and poverty more likely because they feed each other.

War takes money away from infrastructure and social services, thus creating poverty and expanding poverty, which creates both civilian unrest and increased military enlistment of the unemployed, which pushes governments to start wars that distract restless civilians and dispose of excess cannon fodder but cost more money that creates more poverty that ... ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

Digby:

It's interesting how they can always find the money for this stuff, isn't it?

A limited United States intervention in Syria would not require a supplemental appropriations bill from Congress, an Obama administration official told The Huffington Post on Wednesday.

The official's assessment that a narrowly tailored operation could be paid for with "existing Department of Defense resources" was seconded by two high-ranking aides on Capitol Hill.

However, another Hill staffer argued that without a greater understanding of the operation, it would be impossible to settle on an exact price tag or means of payment.

"Who the f--- knows what it will cost? It depends entirely on what happens," said the staffer.

Meanwhile:

Head Start programs cut staff members and students. Meals on Wheels, a federal program that delivers meals to the homebound elderly, scaled back in some communities. Federal public defenders, already strapped for funding, cut an additional 11 percent out of their budgets and are preparing for more cuts this fall.

It’s been six months since the federal government imposed $85 billion worth of mandatory budget cuts, and among those who have felt the impact most acutely have been the poorest Americans.

“Did the sequester disproportionately hurt the poor?” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks. “You bet it did.”

SNIP

Shared sacrifice, dontcha know?

Where Has All the Money Gone?

Gone to war-waging, every one.

Digby:

I posted the whole thing because I think its fundamental point is so important. None of this surveillance and covert activity could be rationalized if this nation didn't consider itself on a perpetual war footing (the enemies changing as necessary with the times.) This is bankrupting our country both financially and morally. It's been going on since before I was born --- and I'm old. And it has enabled a security state of unprecedented proportions. It's especially concerning now that the Manichean rationale of the cold war is long over and we can no longer make even the slightest claim to a serious, existential threat. That we've ramped this war footing up even beyond our cold war capabilities on the basis of a rag tag bunch of terrorists is mind boggling when you think about it.

We had a good run with this. The US was extremely prosperous even as it became a military behemoth. But it's not working anymore. Yet the machine just keeps on cranking creating new and different reasons for its existence. The money, the secrecy, the overriding power this national security state now produces and depends upon is distorting our democracy, our economy and our security. And we can have dozens of Snowdens revealing secrets or other whistleblowers revealing corruption in the contracting business or government officials being revealed to have overstepped their grounds --- along with all the so-called reforms that will inevitably follow --- but it won't change a thing unless we understand that the fundamental problem is our status as global military empire and the resulting necessity to find new enemies and create perpetual war to rationalize it.

Meanwhile, sequestration is making a worldwide pandemic like the 1918 flu outbreak that killed 100 million people far, far more likely.

Digby on cuts to the National Institutes of Health:

"If you want to convert this into real meaningful numbers, that means people are going to die of influenza five years from now because we don't yet have the universal vaccine," he said. "And God help us if we get a worldwide pandemic that emerges in the next five years, which takes a long time to prepare a vaccine for. If we had the universal vaccine, it would work for that too.

"The clock's been ticking on the potential of the next eruption of a pandemic outbreak from South Asia or wherever. And we've gotten lucky so far [that it hasn't happened]. But are we going to stay lucky? So, how can you justify doing anything other than pulling out all the stops in that kind of circumstance? And yet we're prevented from doing so."

Well that's certainly an upper.

Remember, this isn't because there isn't enough money. There's plenty of money. This is happening because rich people are hoarding all their money, we are spending vast sums on a global military empire and the political system is totally dysfunctional.

You are living in interesting times. If you young people live long enough --- and the country and planet survive --- you'll have quite a tale to tell your grand kids. Nobody will believe what morons we were.

 Eating our seed corn.

Sequester Cuts to Defense Hit n Kentucky

Think the federal budget is bloated? That you can't cut domestic spending enough? Tell that to your neighbor who's going to lose her house if this shit goes on much longer.

From the Herald:

Furloughs began Monday for some of the employees at Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County responsible for the safe and secure storage of chemical weapons.Blue Grass Chemical Activity (BGCA) began furloughing 108 employees, the agency said Monday. The furlough is expected to run through late September and will require employees to work 32 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week.

Steve Benen:

Just over the last week or so, one ridiculous policy -- Republicans' sequestration cuts, approved two years ago -- has undermined the federal government's capacity to battle wildfires, hurt the federal court system, undercut job growth, and even canceled 4th of July events. The political world shrugged, if it noticed the effects of the sequester at all.

With this in mind, I don't imagine Pentagon furloughs will generate much attention, but they should.

More than 650,000 civilian workers in the Defense Department will be taking their first of 11 furlough days this week.

The Pentagon's 11 weeks of furloughs kick in on Monday, which result in a 20-percent-weekly pay cut through September for 680,000 of the Pentagon's roughly 800,000 civilian employees.

Those are a lot of numbers, so take a moment to look beyond the statistics and think about the human element: a whole lot of Americans are about to take a huge pay cut for a few months, not because they've done a poor job, but because congressional Republicans support unnecessary spending cuts for no apparent reason. This will affect their ability to pay their bills and purchase good and services, which means undermining the economy.

There was a time -- I believe it's a period of American history known as "last year" -- when the right was outraged by the very idea of cutting Defense spending.

And yet, 680,000 Pentagon employees are taking a steep pay cut -- and being told to stay home without pay -- because of a policy that was designed to hurt the country. Congress isn't rushing to prevent these furloughs; Congress isn't even talking about these furloughs. It just a rolling disaster on auto-pilot.

To reiterate a point from last week, the political world seems to have moved on, and it's fashionable to suggest the sequester is meaningless, but these cuts continue to take a real toll on real people. Congress has the ability to end this pain and turn off the deliberately damaging policy, but for now, it's not even an option being considered in Washington.

To add insult to injury, the sequester cuts not only add hundreds of thousands of people to the unemployment rolls, they also deny those people the unemployment compensation they have earned.

Rand Paul Is a Lying Moron

First, government debt and deficit is only a problem when we have inflation. Remember inflation? Way back in 1980? Hello?  Bueller?

Second, thanks to the sequestration austerity that is literally taking food out of the mouths of starving children and denying chemotherapy to cancer patients, the deficit is falling faster than it has in two decades.

Third, the Tribble-Toupeed One doesn't give a flying fuck about facts or truth or the deficit; all he cares about is spreading bullshit that will make the paultards faint from ecstasy.

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Alas, some folks stick to their old talking points, even when they're now wrong.

Now, this is ordinarily the point at which I note that China owns only a small portion of U.S. debt; large deficits are wise under the economic circumstances; and if Sen. Paul is really eager to reduce the deficit, he should endorse some tax increases.

But putting all of this aside, Rand Paul is using out-of-date math. "We are borrowing $4 billion a day"? Let's see -- there are 365 days in a year ... multiplied by 4 billion ... carry the one ... that means we'll have annual federal budget deficit of over $1.4 trillion.

Except, we won't. The latest CBO estimate says this year's deficit will be $642 billion, down $400 billion from last year, and nearly $800 billion from when President Obama took office. Paul's argument, in other words, isn't even close to being accurate -- we're not borrowing $4 billion a day; we're borrowing less than $2 billion a day.

If the right wants to argue that's still too much, fine. I disagree, but we can at least have a debate. But to use talking points from 2009, as if we have haven't already seen the fastest deficit reduction in modern U.S. history, is absurd. What Rand Paul is telling his followers is simply and demonstrably wrong.

Updating talking points may be annoying, but when the facts change, politicians' rhetoric needs to change with them.

What Can You Eat for $1.40 Per Meal?

An onion? Half a dozen pickles? A box of uncooked macaroni? (cooking takes electricity that costs money, you know)


Think Progress:

The average value of federal food aid will fall to $1.40 per person per meal in November, as a Recovery Act provision expires, but Republicans are already working to impose a further $21 billion in cuts to the program. That’s the upshot of two recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports on the future of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). 

SNAP is authorized through the farm bill, the Senate version of which was passed by the Agriculture Committee Tuesday afternoon. With their counterparts in the GOP-controlled House set to mark up their own farm bill tomorrow – complete with those nearly $21 billion in cuts to SNAP – the Ag Committee senators agreed to $4.1 billion in SNAP cuts on a 15-5 vote.

But while the Senate bill’s cuts to SNAP and increases to crop insurance subsidies represent misplaced priorities, the forthcoming bill from House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK) makes the Senate’s food aid cuts look piddling. As CBPP explained this week, Lucas’s bill would boot nearly 2 million Americans off SNAP – and it targets the food aid program for more than half of its total cuts:

The proposed legislation would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) by almost $21 billion over the next decade, eliminating food assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people, mostly working families with children and senior citizens. The proposal reduces total farm bill spending by an estimated $39.7 billion over ten years, so more than half of its cuts come from SNAP.

Lucas’ bill achieves these cuts primarily by repealing a provision of SNAP that allows states to include citizens whose disposable income (after child care expenses, for example) falls below the poverty line, even if their gross incomes are slightly above the SNAP cutoff, or 130 percent of the poverty line. In other words, it targets millions of working poor and elderly who rely on federal food aid and returns them to an actuarial trap of ineligibility.

This year’s proposed bill cuts SNAP even more heavily than the one Lucas’s committee approved in 2012. While Rep. Steve King (R-IA) recently said the proposed cuts would go unnoticed spread over a decade, the struggling Rhode Islanders profiled in March by The Washington Post would likely disagree.

Regardless of the magnitude, the rationale behind cutting food aid has never made good sense. The program’s expenditures ebb and flow along with the overall poverty rate itself and remain elevated because economic growth remains too slow nearly four years after the official end of the Great Recession. If Republicans want to greatly reduce SNAP expenditures in a way recipients won’t notice, the answer is economic growth.

But hey, rich people like members of congress can get their plane flights without having to wait an extra 30 seconds, so it's all good.

Fuck Congress and Just Do What's RIght

If Kevin Drum is right about this, President Obama knows perfectly well that he won't get a goddamn thing out of congress for the rest of his presidency, but he can't admit it to the public.

I think he should admit it. He should say "Congress doesn't want to govern as long as I'm president. Fine. I AM president, and I say 'fuck congress.' I have executive powers and I am going to use every single one of them to the absolute maximum allowable under the constitution and I am going to get done what Congress will not."
I don't know exactly how much he can do, but it's got to be more than the nothing that's getting done now. And I know that in the past Obama has passed up opportunities to order executive agencies to implement policies congressional repugs don't like.
He doesn't have to care about what they think any more. Nothing he does or declines to do is going to make repugs one iota more likely to cooperate with him.

He doesn't have to worry about re-election, and as for congressional races in 2014, doing something - anything - by executive order is going to be a lot more likely to help democratic candidates than spending the next three and a half years begging repugs to govern.
So fuck congress and just do what's right.   And as for shit like this:

Politico says Obama says he won’t veto the sequester-relief FAA bill because “GOP would blame me for flight delays”

Stop accepting the GOP frame, for pity's fucking sake! Veto the motherfucker, say "I will not help rich people and members of congress at the expense of poor children and families.

"Cancel the entire sequester - that' s a bill I will sign.
"And everything and everything repugs say to the contrary Is. A. Lie."

Because, Mr. President, if you really are not an idiot, you know perfectly damn well that the repugs are going to lie about you and call you names and accuse you of every evil on the planet No Matter What You Do.
So do the right fucking thing.   Veto that motherfucker and dare anyone to stand up and explain how saving a few minutes in line at the airport for the same obstructionist repug members of congress who refuse to deal rationally with the budget is more important than feeding hungry families and housing the homeless and giving chemotherapy to cancer patients and feeding the elderly and giving poor children a head start on education.

Time to Replace the Sequester

Too bad you blew your best chance to do just that this week, Mr. President.



Full transcript here.

Obama Budget Big Blowjob for Pentagon

This is as bad as the chained-CPI attack on Social Security, if not worse: keeping the devastating domestic sequester cuts while restoring extra-dessert funding to a bloating military-industrial complex.

We predicted this was what the repugs would try to pull, but only the most cynical imagined that the president would offer it up first.

Digby:

Awesome:

Last August, at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, I sat in on a meeting between several top current and former Obama officials and a few dozen executives whose support they were trying to enlist in the upcoming fight over the fiscal cliff. (The terms of my being allowed in the room were that I not publish anything until after the election.) Much of the meeting was given over to a question-and-answer session, and one of the first questioners wanted to know why going over the cliff would be such a bad thing. It would, after all, achieve the tax increases Democrats were seeking.

Jon Carson, a top White House official, replied that the $1.2 trillion sequestration cuts that were part of the fiscal cliff worried him and other officials. Not only the cuts to social programs, but also the cuts to the military budget. “They’re too deep,” he said. Although sequestration was delayed until March 1, those cuts ultimately were not averted. The Pentagon budget will be cut by $500 billion over the next decade (an additional $100 billion in deficit reduction comes from interest savings). While it may have troubled the White House, many Democrats regarded this as a huge gift—military cuts were something many of them desired but few would actually argue for. Sequestration delivered more than they could have imagined.

Guess what? The White House still doesn’t like those cuts. And Obama’s new budget, released today, makes this clear. Although the White House doesn’t advertise this fact in the six-page budget overview it put out this morning, the new budget eliminates nearly all of the cuts that sequestration imposes on the Pentagon. Instead of $500 billion in cuts, Obama proposes only $100 billion, and you have to look closely to spot it (“$200 billion in additional discretionary savings, with equal amounts from defense and nondefense programs”).

Along with the well-advertised cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits, this is something that should appeal to the GOP. “It’s another one of the peace offerings in Obama’s package to Republicans,” Robert Litan, the director of research for Bloomberg Government and a former official of the Office of Management and Budget, told me.

I think that's being a little ungenerous, don't you? It's also a beautiful and thoughtful gift to the Military Industrial Complex.

Just Say No To the False Choice

No cuts in domestic spending. No Grand Bargain. No sequester. No cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  Just no, motherfuckers.

Digby:

Essentially, as before, the White House and the Democratic centrists are holding hostages but this time they're basically telling the progressives that a hostage is going to get shot no matter what: Head Start and food inspections today or the elderly, the sick and the veterans tomorrow and they have to choose which one.  Why should progressives bear that responsibility? They didn't get us into this mess.

I say they should just say no. Republicans do it all the time and everybody just throws up their hands and says, "well, I guess we'd better figure out something else." They should hold fast and say "the sequester sucks and so does the Grand Bargain and we don't support either one." Most of the progressives didn't vote for the sequester in the first place and bear no responsibility for it.  (And even those who did have no obligation to defend the monster that everyone assured them had no chance of ever becoming law.) This is a failure of the leadership of both parties and progressives are not required to betray their most fundamental values and defend any of these ridiculous cuts to anyone.

Just say no.  The "sequester vs Grand Bargain" is a phony construct made by man, not God, and there's no reason on earth why any progressive should be forced to own either one. Find another way.

 Here's one: Soak the rich. Restore Eisenhower-era taxes of 90 percent on the parasitic rich, pour the revenues into creating 10 million government jobs and doubling the social safety net.

Done.