Cuts could hamper waging of senseless wars

By Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The spending cuts mandated by the sequester may hamper the United States’s ability to invade countries for absolutely no reason, a Pentagon spokesman warned today.

The Pentagon made this gloomy assessment amid widespread fears that the nation’s ability to wage totally optional wars based on bogus pretexts may be in peril.

“Historically, the United States has stood ready and able to throw billions of dollars at a military campaign with no clear rationale or well-defined objective,” said spokesman Harland Dorrinson. “Our capacity to wage war willy-nilly is now in jeopardy.”

In the past, Mr. Dorrinson said, the Pentagon has had the resources to fight three meaningless and completely random wars at any given time, “but now in our planning meetings we are cutting that number back to two.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R—S.C.) agreed about the catastrophic effects of the Pentagon cuts, telling reporters, “The ability of the United States to project its military power in an arbitrary and totally capricious way must never be compromised.”

The cuts are already being felt in a tangible way at the Pentagon, which today cancelled an order for a nine-thousand-dollar pen.

Photograph by AFP/Getty.

The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot

Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

01 March 13

www.readersupportednews.org
 

magine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public's business, and to sow distrust among the population.

Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.

Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what's been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you'd be forgiven if you see parallels.

Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the "sequestration" cuts beginning today (Friday).

"This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington," says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.

Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government - "drown it in the bathtub," in the words of their guru Grover Norquist - slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we've had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.

Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States - notwithstanding the Constitution's instruction that the public debt of the United States "not be questioned."

To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary "sequestered" spending cuts if they couldn't come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.

Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January's fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year - dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers refuse to extend the government's spending authority, which expires March 27.

A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government - blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government's size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.

They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they've sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.

What is the President's response? He still wants a so-called "grand bargain" of "balanced" spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance - $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans' $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.

The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.

And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.

Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP - where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging. These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.

I suggest the President forget about a "grand bargain." In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality - as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.

Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are - a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism. 

Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

What Lakers and Congress have in common

As bad a year as this is for the Lakers, it's an even worse one for Washington. (photo: AP)

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

28 February 13

readersupportednews.org

hat do the LA Lakers and Congress have in common? One is a group of privileged, entitled old guys past their prime who still get paid way too much to do a job that they aren't doing. The other is a basketball team.

While I normally just follow NCAA basketball and don't pay much attention to the pros, I can smell the stink of the Lakers' 2013 season all the way from Wisconsin. On paper, LA has some really great players on their roster, like Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol, Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant. But in reality, despite the skill level of these individual players, they're just a few games out from being disqualified from the playoffs. And the problem is, they just don't care. No matter how they perform, the star players on LA's roster know they'll still get paid millions of dollars whether or not they play their hardest on the court, even in spite of the fact that this is one of if not the Lakers' worst seasons since Kobe Bryant first started playing for them. But as bad a year as this is for the Lakers, it's an even worse one for Washington.

The 112th congress, elected in the Fall of 2010 at the peak of the Tea Party's influence, had the lowest approval rating in the history of congressional polling. Their key goal wasn't actually creating jobs or breaking through the corruption at Washington's core, which they all included in their platforms. Rather, their goal was the same as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's goal – to make Barack Obama a one-term president. And to do this, they relished their low approval ratings, because in their minds, the American people would blame the president for Congress's inability to get anything done or make deals with their opponents when serious issues needed to be addressed. Instead, Barack Obama won in a landslide, and some of the worst do-nothing, mean-spirited, corrupt Tea Party Republicans in Congress like Allen West, Frank Guinta, Chip Cravaack, Dan Lundgren and Joe Walsh – were all soundly defeated in their districts. This happened despite a 2-year strategy of obstruction and finger-pointing, a nationally-coordinated effort to elect Republican governors that would gerrymander congressional districts to the GOP's advantage, and literally billions in dark money spent by right-wing groups to influence the election. You would think having their strategy backfire so bad that their heads got handed to them last November would make the Republicans have a major come-to-Jesus moment and get their shit together, right?

Instead, Republicans are doubling down on the strategy of sitting on their thumbs and obstructing anything that isn't in total lockstep with their backwards, irrelevant agenda. Even though sequestration would result in millions of hungry families not getting food assistance, low-income residents of wintry cities not getting heat assistance, and millions of kids not getting their immunizations, House Republicans have refused to even consider cutting any of the corporate tax loopholes that offshore billions in tax dollars per year. They've insisted that the F-35 joint strike fighter, which has already cost us $400 billion and would require a total operating budget of at least $1 trillion and has been indefinitely grounded due to faulty construction, get full funding even as they ask hungry people to go without food. In fact, Eric Cantor, the #2 Republican in the House, believes the best way to save the economy is to end overtime pay for hourly workers. This is coming from a guy who only works 126 days a year and still gets paid vacations courtesy of the taxpayers.

Now, I'm fully aware that some Democrats are also to blame, though I'm never one for false equivalency. After 4 years, the Obama administration still hasn't brought one banker to trial for the 2008 financial crisis and we still continue the $83 billion annual subsidy to Wall Street. Harry Reid still included 6 times as much in corporate welfare as in unemployment extensions in the "fiscal cliff" deal reached with Mitch McConnell. The Democrat-controlled Senate still unanimously approved a $700 billion military budget in December on a 98-0 vote, and out of 200 House Democrats, only half have agreed that cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be off the table. But at least one of the two parties is willing to have a conversation about stopping the coming cuts that would adversely affect thousands of government employees and their families.

Tech companies alone dodged $225 billion in taxes over the last three years, but these $85 billion in cuts are being directed at programs like Meals on Wheels and early childhood education, instead of the multiple egregious loopholes exploited by multinational corporations. And every member of Congress, no matter their party affiliation, must be held accountable for making us suffer so their campaign donors can keep their tax breaks. The only thing stopping us from giving these corrupt politicians a boot on the ass in 2014 is, well, us.

---

Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Woodward goes wingnut

Associate Editor of the Washington Post Bob Woodward speaks at the Newseum during an event marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate at the Newseum in Washington, DC June 13, 2012. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/GettyImages)

By Matthew Yglesias, Slate Magazine

28 February 13

readersupportednews.org

ob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter turned reliable chronicler of insider accounts of political events, has made a series of bizarre assertions over the past week.

It started with Woodward's odd weekend assertion that the White House is trying "to move the goalposts" by replacing sequestration with a deficit reduction package that includes tax hikes. The idea of sequestration was always that it was something elected officials were going to want to replace with alternative deficit reduction. Republicans have been trying to replace it with a package of cuts targeted at income support programs for the poor. Obama's been trying to replace it with a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes. Either everyone's moving the goalposts (which I think is tendentious but even-handed) or no one is moving them. But it really intensified Wednesday morning when Woodward went on Morning Joe to suggest it's crazy of Obama to be applying the law as written to the military, instead of simply ignoring it.

Things moved into the absurd Wednesday night when it was revealed that National Economic Council director Gene Sperling had concluded an email disagreement with Woodward with the observation that in Sperling's view Woodward would come to regret clinging so tenaciously to an untenable position.

As if determined to prove Sperling right, Woodward chose to start talking around town about how Sperling had threatened him - a ridiculous interpretation that the ridiculous conservative media has been running with - rather than sticking with the obvious interpretation that Woodward's reputation among journalists is going to suffer from flagrant wrongness. It would be interesting to see Woodward try to hash this out with, say, fellow Post-ie Ezra Klein, but instead he's going the full wingnut and will be appearing on Sean Hannity's show Thursday night to advance the agitprop agenda. In retrospect, this whole affair was foreshadowed by the release of Woodward's latest book last fall. It made much less of a splash than many other Woodward books. Most well-informed observers agreed with Noam Scheiber that it was marred by anti-Obama bias, but under the circumstances of the time, it didn't get the right geared up either. By essentially doubling down on the worst qualities of that book, Woodward has managed to make himself the center of attention again.

But none of this changes the fact that we are facing cuts in government spending that are projected to harm the economy in the short term without doing anything to improve the long-term budget picture. The White House wants to replace those cuts with a balanced package of spending cuts and tax hikes. Republicans are insisting on an all-cuts package. It's not a very complicated debate. It just happens to be that the Democratic position is much more popular than the Republican position, so clear statements of what's happening tend to put the GOP at a disadvantage. Woodward's epic week of attention-grabbing tends to obscure the underlying clear issue - are all cuts and no tax hikes better, or is a mix of cuts and tax hikes better?

Chinese hackers drop U.S. from target list

By Andy Borowitz
 

SHANGHAI (The Borowitz Report)—In a rare announcement from a notoriously publicity-shy group, Chinese hackers revealed today that they were dropping the United States government from their official list of high-value targets.

“We have to allocate our time and energy to hacking powerful organizations,” a spokesman for the hackers said. “Right now, calling the United States government an ‘organization’ would be a reach.”

He added that the hackers’ ultimate goal had been to hurl the U.S. government into a state of abject paralysis, “and they seem to have already taken care of that on their own.”

The spokesman acknowledged that despite years of compromising U.S. government computers, the hackers had obtained little of value, especially on the hard drives of congressional offices.

“Those computers did not appear to be used for anything work-related,” the spokesman said. “Basically all we found were restaurant reservations and porn.”

U.S. stock markets plummeted on the news of the hackers’ downgrade, which was widely denounced by American politicians as a hostile act designed to cripple the economy. “This is an insult to the American people,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia). “We demand that the Chinese resume hacking us at once.”

But according to the hackers’ spokesman, any chance that they might put the U.S. government back on their list of targets was remote at best.

“We need to focus on higher-functioning governments,” he said. “We’re taking a close look at Venezuela.”

  
Photograph: Architect of the Capitol.

Appliance free day at Buckhead Mesa Landfill

The Russell Gulch Landfill in Globe, and the Buckhead Mesa Landfill in Payson  will coordinate an old appliance  “free day” on Saturday,  March 2nd  from  8 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

This will include refrigerators, freezers, washers, dish washers, dryers, portable trash compactors and water heaters. Other metal items will also be accepted.

The landfill fee for the weight of all appliances and the freon from the refrigerators and freezers will be waived by Gila County.   As the County will handle the freon  removal from the appliances, please do not tamper with the freon lines and no trash of any kind in the appliances.

All other debris will be regular price, so leave yourself easy access to remove these metal items and appliances so the landfill personnel can exclude the weight from any other trash that you may bring to the landfill to dispose of.

This is a great opportunity to get rid of old, unwanted appliances and piles of metal from local residences for free.

For more information on this event, call the landfill at (928) 425-7470

Local musicians start jam session

Local drummer Gerry Reynolds

  LOCAL JAM SESSION   

A few local musicians wanted to start a jam session where musicians

of all persuasions could drop by to sit-in with the house band on a

few tunes, or more if needed, and enjoy an evening with their friends.

Of course, anyone could come just to listen. There would be food and

drink too.  So we did!

This will be a weekly affair, starting

Wednesday 6-8 + p.m., March 6

Jernigan House Restaurant

200 West Main Street, Payson

Bring your instrument - vocalists are welcome too - chord & mic,

and sheet music or fake books that may be needed for others.

Sound system, bass and drum players provided.

For information, reply to this message, or call Anne James.

"Out of towners" are always welcome. So mark your calendars,

Spring is just around the corner, and in the summer this will

be the place to be on a Wednesday.