Update - Sequester: Obama Not Honest

This tangled tale needs to be unravelled.



The latest Washington crisis is the impending budget cuts called "sequester." The sequester cuts to the federal budget that take effect March 1st (this Friday).



Where did the sequester come from? The sequester is the result of the BCA - or Budget Control Act of 2011 - the 2011 debt ceiling compromise. The sequester was intended to be such a distasteful budget cutting pill that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction ( the “Supercommittee”) would be motivated to strike a deal to cut $1.5 trillion over 10 years.



Surprise - the Washington politicians have not reached agreement. The sequester cuts are coming (maybe - pending a last minute deal). How bad will it hurt? It depends on who you talk to. But, sequester orders that $85 billion in federal spending be cut from the affected agencies in the fiscal year that ends in Sept. 2013. Experts predict about $44 billion will be cut in fiscal year 2013. The remaining $41 billion in cuts will be carried over.



So - who started this whole sequester ball rolling? In the 2nd Presidential debate (Oct. 22, 2012) Barack Obama said: "The sequester is not something that I've proposed, it is something that Congress has proposed." Really?



Well - 2 days later Obama's Chief of Staff Jack Lew said: "There was an insistence on the part of the Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger ... it was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure." Really?



Bob Woodward (No Republican shill. Remember Watergate?) wrote: "The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book "The Price of Politics" shows that the automatic cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors ... "



Woodward continued: "Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (S-Nev). They did so at 2:30 pm, July 27, 2011 according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved."



Bob Woodward: "Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism th ey could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”



Then, on Feb. 13, 2013 in a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Jack Lew's to nomination to become Treasury Secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) asked Lew: "Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”



Lew responds: “It’s a little more complicated than that, and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”



Sen. Burr asked again: “Did you make the suggestion?”



Lew answers: “Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”



Bob Woodward breaks down the above answer: "In other words, yes."



Later that same day, Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary said: “The sequester was something that was discussed,” (Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully) “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”



Note - Jay Carney said: "sequester .... an idea the White House put forward."



Bob Woodward wrote: "This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong."



There ya have it. Sequester originated in the White House, created by then White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors, they presented it to Pres. Barack Obama, and he personally approved it.

Are you suprised?

No.

To answer the question "is Obama being honest?" I must ask "Is he talking?" Yes? Then no, he's not being honest.

These so-called automatic cuts are chump change. It is my understanding that they are not even real cuts but merely reduced growth projections.



They want to make it sound scary like the country is going to shut down but it is all bs.



If you recall, everything this administration has done has been launched by a panic over some impending disaster all of which have been concocted. This is old fashioned slight of and misdirection. They have figured out that if they can scare people then people will give them more power to protect them. They are playing us for suckers.



How can there even be cuts when they haven't produced a budget in four years? Cuts from what budget? This is all just phony baloney crap.



I say bring on the cuts and more of them. We need a trillion bucks a year cut just for starters.

This morning on Morning Joe, Bob Woodward doubled down and escalated his war of words with Obama. It's fairly sharp criticism.



Bob Woodward: "Obama is "exhibiting a kind of madness I haven't seen in a long time."



http://www.businessinsider.com/bob-woodward-obama-sequester-republicans-2013-2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I think he's being honest--if he doesn't get a fit he will throw a tantrum and use every possible avenue available to him to make sure these things happen and then to point the finger across the aisle and blame the GOP for outcomes he could have easily avoided with some creative thinking.



Obama is willing to burn his own house down as long as he can convince some people the GOP did it. He's already refusing to dispatch our aircraft carriers and releasing illegal immigrants in advance of any sequester in an attempt to excoriate the GOP. Why wouldn't he continue afterwards?



Obams isn't on a campaign to save America or to turn the economy around--he's on a scorched earth campaign to eviscerate the opposition in the next two years to leave him unimpeded in 2015-16.

Now, a Senior White House official threatens Bob Woodward ~



Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a "very senior person" at the White House warned him in an email that he would "regret doing this," the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.



CNN host Wolf Blitzer said that the network invited a White House official to debate Woodward on-air, but the White House declined.



"It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'You're going to regret doing something that you believe in,'" Woodward said.





Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bob-woodward-obama-sequester-white-house-reporting-price-politics-2013-2#ixzz2MAOX8oFN" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Doesn't the President also have the ability to choose exactly how the cuts will be implemented? It seems he has instructed directors, secretaries and other program managers to make the cuts in the most painful and visible way possible. It's like he's punishing the American people because he's not getting what he wants - which is another tax increase.

Bob Woodward shared the details of a conversation with a senior White House official, and the email that contains the threat to Woodward, with Politico:



By MIKE ALLEN and JIM VANDEHEI

"Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about — and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half-hour,” Woodward told us in an hourlong interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.



Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”



Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us.’”



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/woodward-at-war-88212.html#ixzz2MCnt8ObB" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

SpiffCoug wrote:
Doesn't the President also have the ability to choose exactly how the cuts will be implemented? It seems he has instructed directors, secretaries and other program managers to make the cuts in the most painful and visible way possible. It's like he's punishing the American people because he's not getting what he wants - which is another tax increase.

Actually no. The sequester law requires every program and every item to be cut equally. Doesn't mean Obama is being honest...

Schmoe wrote:
To answer the question "is Obama being honest?" I must ask "Is he talking?" Yes? Then no, he's not being honest.

Does a bear defecate in the woods?

I like this quote by Jay Carney, the President's press secretary.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/28/carney_on_woodward_we_had_a_factual_disagreement_that_i_think_we_stand_by.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



In response to a discussion about Bob Woodward, he said, "But we had a factual disagreement that I think we stand by, which is that the President was very clear from the beginning that he would push balanced deficit reduction. I mean, how can that be a mystery? That's been his position since the day he signed the Budget Control Act. It was even the position that various Republicans adopted in trying to eliminate the sequester."



You think you stand by it? So do you or don't you? You're not sure? Nice position.



And how can anyone be confused about the President's plan to reduce the deficit. He's put forward SO many spending cuts in addition to ALL the tax increases he wants. He keeps trying to submit balanced budgets and cut spending, but those wrascally wrepubwicans keep stymying his efforts.

Come on Spiff - your assessment is so tough. ;) And spot on.

Well, the White House is admitting that Obama misled (didn't tell the truth, or, lied) to the American people over the sequester issue during the 3rd presidential debate.



Today on Meet the Press, David Gregory pressed Gene Sperling, Obama's chief economic advisor to come clean and - "Sperling finally wilted under the pressure of tough questioning to admit that “yes, in fact, the sequestration was President Obama’s plan.”



Forbes

3/3/2013



"Is the press corps getting some balls (to put it crudely but graphically)? Are they finally prepared to challenge the President’s untruthful assertions on facts that are crucial to understanding policy?



None other than NBC’s David Gregory today pressed Obama’s chief economic advisor, Gene Sperling, whether his boss told the truth in the third presidential debate that “the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” Sperling finally wilted under the pressure of tough questioning to admit that “yes, in fact, the sequestration was President Obama’s plan.”



http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/03/03/white-house-admits-third-time-president-obama-fibbed-on-sequester/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;





Sperling Admits Obama Misled in Debate: The President Did Propose the Sequester



http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/sperling-admits-obama-misled-debate-president-did-propose-sequester_705015.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

nuk13 wrote:

To answer the question "is Obama being honest?" I must ask "Is he talking?" Yes? Then no, he's not being honest.

Does a bear defecate in the woods?

NO!!!! A bear poopies in the woods!

I usually hate mixing scriptures in with politics, but this is so apropos. From Ezekiel 34.



1 And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,



2 Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?



3 Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock.



4 The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.



5 And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered.



6 My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them.



7 ¶Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the Lord;



8 As I live, saith the Lord God, surely because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock;



18 Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have eaten up the good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pastures? and to have drunk of the deep waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?



19 And as for my flock, they eat that which ye have trodden with your feet; and they drink that which ye have fouled with your feet.

urroner wrote:

Schmoe wrote:
To answer the question "is Obama being honest?" I must ask "Is he talking?" Yes? Then no, he's not being honest.

Does a bear defecate in the woods?

NO!!!! A bear poopies in the woods!

Incorrect; he makes ploppies.