Qui, moi?

France has all kinds of faux-excuses at their disposal for why it is the Socialist government just can’t seem to make any progress on righting their seriously stagnating economy and eleven percent unemployment rate, many of which seem to focus on Germany being a big, intransigent bully in coordinating the eurozone’s financial dealings. At a [...]

Read this post »

Busted Rhyme

And here you thought we were broke. I know we’ve annoyed you with all sorts of scandal ridden, Sunday talk show posts today, so there’s a bit of a lighter, government incompetence story to share as we close out the weekend and prepare for QoTD. This one comes to us from long time Green Room [...]

Read this post »

And there was much rejoicing.

Curious to see where it is your tax dollars are going on this fine spring day? The Heritage Foundation has a handy infographic with the breakdown: Or, if you prefer, you can check out the White House’s version of your tax receipt, which gets a tiny bit more specific — but conspicuously not that specific, [...]

Read this post »

Sweet.

The ongoing Slowest Recovery Ever has had our economy growing at only meager rates, and yet the federal government is about to collect record revenues — but President Obama’s budget is chock full of new ideas for still more taxes and still more government spending. The Office of Management and Budget reports that, under the [...]

Read this post »

Déjà vu, anyone?

Ugh. Here we go again: “There are few more important things we can do to create jobs right now and strengthen our economy over the long haul than rebuilding the infrastructure that powers our businesses and our economy — our roads, our bridges, our schools and our ports like this one,” President Obama said. … [...]

Read this post »

Infrastructure buzz on the rise.

Maybe this was inevitable after Senate Democrats started passing budgets again after a four-year hiatus.  That was the last time we heard about using infrastructure spending as a stimulus, when it flopped in Barack Obama’s ARRA program, otherwise known as Porkulus.  One of Obama’s advisers at that time, former OMB director Peter Orszag, warns that [...]

Read this post »

"Pure political posturing on the backs of these dead Marines."

Via Katie Pavlich, at least the man’s consistent. His trademark, evinced most famously when he smeared Romney over his taxes, is his willingness to stoop a bit lower than most in scoring a point on his opponents. Most Democrats are content to demagogue the GOP with the “Washington Monument strategy.” Never to be outdone, Reid [...]

Read this post »

Taking a little off the top.

Well, isn’t this just peachy. This is actually the first time I’ve heard anything about it, but apparently, the public servants of the United States Senate have been enjoying taxpayer-subsidized trims and shaves on Capitol Hill since before the Civil War — an oh-so-beloved tradition that, in merely the past fifteen years, has cost taxpayers [...]

Read this post »

Budgets.

Voters are divided on whom they like in the great debates over the budget and spending cuts. By 45-37 percent, they blame congressional Republicans more than Obama for the recent failure to find a better alternative to reducing deficits than the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts now taking effect. Twelve percent said both shared [...]

Read this post »

Shared sacrifice?

Last week, I wondered if perhaps the Obama administration would consider factor the optics of the decision to cancel White House tours for the public into their upcoming decisions about the executives’ leisure activities, and whether they’d tone them down a little due to the extra security and funds that they require. Evidently not. Not [...]

Read this post »

Pain.

I was prepared to laugh it off but then I found out they’re canceling tours at Joe Biden’s home too. Obviously it’s serious. No, really, though, our president’s a joke: The White House announced Tuesday that it was canceling all public tours of the president’s home because of the sequester spending cuts. “Due to staffing [...]

Read this post »

What if?

Obama’s decision Friday to remove the threat of a government shutdown in late March as a leverage point in the standoff means that the sequester will remain in place for weeks — if not months, or longer. He set into a motion a risky strategy that rests entirely on the slim chance that Republicans do [...]

Read this post »

Pain.

The White House says its hands are tied by the $85 billion sequester, but budget experts counter that it will have some flexibility to choose what to cut and what to save. The wiggle-room is inviting accusations from Congress that President Obama is mismanaging the cuts. Critics also say the flexibility could allow the administration [...]

Read this post »

Doomsday.

To say that the meeting between congressional leaders and President Barack Obama was unproductive might be an understatement. And as the meeting wrapped up, a new reality began to take hold: The sequester may be here to stay… “There will be no last-minute, backroom deal and absolutely no agreement to increase taxes,” McConnell said in [...]

Read this post »

Crisis.

Actually, the GOP bill wasn’t designed to avert cuts, it was designed to avert these cuts by giving Obama the power to replace them with equivalent cuts of his choosing. He’s been screaming for weeks that the sequester will chop crucial services by hitting agencies indiscriminately across the board, right? Well, there’s the solution — [...]

Read this post »

Blame.

[Obama] will divide, isolate and defeat Republicans using all the powers of his office and all his skills as a political campaigner. As Americans grow frustrated with the cuts, Republicans will reject their party’s no-tax mantra and demand that Congress end the standoff, even if it means raising some new revenue – just the way [...]

Read this post »

"A highly unusual move."

C’mon. What’s his next move, ordering the Border Patrol to stand down because he supposedly can’t afford to pay them? Oh, right. That is his next move. This makes me more enthusiastic about the sequester, just because now I’m curious to see how derelict he’s willing to be in his duties to in the name [...]

Read this post »

Crunch time.

The White House plan so far is pretty much according to the Fireman First principle, the idea first promulgated by Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters: that a bureaucracy when faced with cuts will tout its most popular program. Hence a mayor faced with a budget shortfall says he’ll have to “cut firemen first” as opposed [...]

Read this post »

Panic.

The automatic budget cuts set to take hold this week were roundly condemned Sunday as governors, lawmakers and administration officials hoped for a deal to stave off the $85 billion reduction in government services. Suggestions intended to instill a spirit of compromise included bringing all sides to the bargaining table, where they could act like [...]

Read this post »

Posturing.

Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie warned Congress Saturday that sequestration, the $1.2 trillion deficit reduction set to take effect March 1, would pose a threat to institutional health of Pearl Harbor, the Oahu-based headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet that Abercrombie called “the most extensive on the planet in terms of its responsibilities and consequences on [...]

Read this post »

Doomsday.

President Obama said that with less than a week before $85 billion of automatic across-the-board cuts hit, he still believes that lawmakers “have the opportunity to make the right decisions” to avert the sequester. “Hope springs eternal,” Obama said during a brief press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “And I will just keep [...]

Read this post »

Unsustainable.

Nothing new here, which is the most depressing part. Scroll halfway down the page at Pew and you’ll find a table tracking shifts in public opinion on various programs over the last four years. There are noticeable jumps in support for cuts from 2009 to 2011 as America got a snoutful of Obamanomics, but we’ve [...]

Read this post »

Oh, good.

During President Obama’s first term in office, participation in the federal food stamp program increased from about 32 million Americans in 2009 to approximately 48 million by October of 2012 — an average growth rate of just over 11,000 recipients per day, CNS News reports. In dollars, that translates into $55 billion spent on the [...]

Read this post »

Second look?

There’s shameless, there’s really shameless, and then there’s a guy touting his credentials on government accountability after he went AWOL as governor to visit his mistress on another continent and initially stuck taxpayers with the bill. Intentionally or not, the fallout from his affair comes off in the ad almost as a credential. We make [...]

Read this post »

Oh, snap.

Yeah, actually — I’d say that’s a pretty accurate way of putting it. “Trying to find a funding source to repair the nation’s infrastructure is still a big goal of mine. And the president talked about infrastructure, but he didn’t talk about how to pay for it,” Boehner told reporters Thursday morning. “It’s easy to [...]

Read this post »