Posts

Outrage: Obama Withholds Mineral Royalties to States, Citing Sequester

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

The Obama administration sparked outrage when it announced on Monday that it was withholding $110 million mineral royalty payments that are owed to states and counties due to the sequestration.

“The Budget Control Act of 2011, passed by Congress, mandates across-the-board, automatic 5.1 percent sequester reductions,” said Office of Natural Resources Revenue spokesman Patrick Etchart. “By law, revenue payments to states are not exempt from the sequester. Cumulatively, approximately $110 million will be withheld from states and counties where energy production occurs on federal lands during the remainder of the current fiscal year.”

Western states will feel the brunt of the cuts in royalty payments — 99.3 percent of it, according to the Congressional Western Caucus. This is money that goes towards financing projects such as K-12 education, highways, community colleges, and flood protection.

The Federal government is trying to bow out of their commitments to states after failing to cut wasteful spending within the government,” said New Mexico Republican Rep. Steve Pearce. “Instead of cutting these critical payments to the state, why aren’t we cutting the President’s golf outings or luxurious government conferences? American families carry the responsibility of living within their means and honoring their commitments- the federal government should too.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Sequester and We’re Still Funding Planned Parenthood?!

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue

When it comes to the latest round of budget cuts, there’s one big problem that should bother everyone: Washington’s continued funding of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion chain.

First, the facts: Each year, Planned Parenthood receives hundreds of millions of dollars from you, the taxpayer — and the total is rising. This past year, Planned Parenthood got $542 million from the government (i.e., from you and me), which accounts for almost half (45%) of the abortion chain’s budget. Abortions at Planned Parenthood are rising, while other services are falling. And Planned Parenthood recently mandated that all of its affiliates perform abortions, causing at least one affiliate to sever ties with America’s abortion boss.

All this says nothing of the fact that Planned Parenthood is flush with cash, having reported excess revenue of $87.4 million and $1.2 billion in total assets last year. Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s CEO, makes nearly $400,000 a year. And yet the biggest abortion provider in America somehow still calls itself a non-profit.

And what does Planned Parenthood do with this money? The spokespeople for Big Abortion will tell you that there’s no way for public money to go toward abortion, but this is an outright lie. We know that money is fungible; the rent, the staff, the utilities — all of which support abortion procedures, no matter how indirectly — are propped up with our money. Whether we want to or not, we’re all forced to fund the taking of innocent human lives for profit.

Just before the sequester passed, the White House released a document detailing exactly what would get cut. It’s a great resource, and we all should use it to ask some questions.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sequester Knocks the Navy’s Blue Angels Out of the Air

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: NY Times

A screaming comes across the sky. Again and again, all day long. Here at the 36th annual TiCo Warbird Airshow, fighter jets and vintage planes roar and rumble by as viewers ooh, aah, and then walk over to the line of food stands to buy funnel cakes and gyros, corn dogs and root beer floats.

The undisputed star, of course, is the Air Force Thunderbirds, whose six-plane precision flying team crisscrosses a perfect sky in ever-changing formations and gives an undiluted thrill to the crowd — at least those who brought earplugs.

But this is likely to be the last appearance by the Thunderbirds until the end of the federal government’s fiscal year on Sept. 30, if not longer. A performance this weekend by the Navy and Marine Corps’ Blue Angels near Key West, Fla., will also be their last for some time. The Army’s parachute demonstration team, the Golden Knights, is also suspending performances.

The failure of Congress to avoid the automatic spending cuts under what is known as sequestration is being felt in many ways, including the cancellation of White House tours and the loss of some 70,000 slots in Head Start early education programs. Along with less visible cuts, the Defense Department has suspended operation of the demonstration teams starting April 1.

(The Navy is hedging its bets, having simply announced its intent to cancel performances in April while waiting to see if financing problems are resolved, said Cmdr. Kevin Stephens, a Navy spokesman. “We want these cuts to be implemented at the last possible moment so they can be reversed where possible,” he said.)

Read more from this story HERE.

So Much For Sequester: Obama Quietly Releases $500 Million to Palestinians (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AFP

The United States has quietly unblocked almost $500 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority which had been frozen by Congress for months, a top US official said Friday.

The news that the funds had finally been freed up came after US President Barack Obama met top Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a landmark visit to Israel and the West Bank earlier this week.

“To date, we have moved $295.7 million in fiscal year 2012 money… and $200 million in fiscal year 2013 assistance,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.

The Obama administration also notified Congress in late February that it was seeking a further $200 million to fund US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs for the Palestinians, she said.

The first sum comprises some $195.7 million, allocated under the 2012 fiscal year budget for USAID economic, development and humanitarian assistance, as well as a further $100 million earmarked specifically for narcotics control

Watch video here:

Read more from this story HERE.

Sequester Meat Shortages Months Away, Says USDA Secretary

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

The sequester likely won’t cause meat and poultry shortages for a while—thanks, in part, to union negotiations and USDA inspectors’ lack of email access.

Furloughs to Food Safety and Inspection Service inspectors at the U.S. Department of Agriculture could force meat and poultry plants to stop production–with no inspectors to approve products, they can’t be sold—but today Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the House Agriculture Committee that those furloughs probably won’t happen until later this year.

“We are looking at a several-month period, if you will, before a furlough will be imposed,” Vilsack said, depending on negotiations with the inspectors’ union. A drawn-out notification process will prevent the furloughs from happening right away, Vilsack said.

“This week we will send out notices to the union reps that a furlough is possible, and one of the challenges is that not every one of our workers in this particular area has email, so we actually have to hand-deliver a letter or written notification to those employees. That has to be followed up … with oral conferences to take place with any employee who requests an oral confirmation–that will happen at the local level,” Vilsack said. After all employees are notified, Vilsack said, USDA will negotiate with union representatives over how the furloughs will be implemented.

But if furloughs do happen, Vilsack warned their impact could be particularly severe.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obamas Still Living The High Life Under the Sequester Cloud (+video)

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Glyn Lowe Photoworks

It’s being reported that Adele and Beyonce have been booked to rock The White House on Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday. That should be some party . . .

It’s hard to believe that the politics of the sequester have worked out the way the Obama administration intended. Even their usually-reliable friends in the media have been skeptical, as this report from ABC News demonstrates:

https://youtu.be/RSfIi1SCz8I

Read more from this story HERE.

Coburn Offers FAA Easy Alternatives To Closing Towers, Cutting Air Traffic Controllers

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily CallerIn the latest installment of Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s letter-writing campaign for administration sanity in implementing the sequester, the Republican is taking on the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) spending cut priorities.

In a letter to Department of Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, Coburn called on the FAA to cancel upcoming conferences, stop nonessential hiring or reform low-priority programs before cutting elements that could harm flight safety.

“The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced today that it will close 173 air traffic control towers, effective April 7, and could furlough nearly 47,000 employees, ‘including all management and non-management employees working within the Air Traffic Organization,’” Coburn wrote in the letter, dispatched Wednesday. “All of the 173 towers closing April 7 are privately run under contracts. The department’s inspector general, however, reported that these same contract towers are both cheaper and safer than towers operated by the FAA.”

Under sequestration, the FAA is expected to cut $600 million — or just 4 percent of the agency’s nearly $16 billion budget for fiscal year 2012.

According Coburn, if a reduction in conference expenditures can stop “even one day of furlough for one air traffic controller,” then the FAA should be moving forward with it.

Read more from this story HERE.

ABC Poll: Americans Are Totally Fine With Spending Cuts

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Intel PhotosPresident Obama and company have been beating the drum about the supposed coming disasters of sequestration, but Americans aren’t buying it. Proof: a poll out from ABC news today reveals that the vast majority of Americans are just fine with budget cuts. At the same time, most are not in favor of military cuts, indicating they’d like to see the money come from other places. Some of the numbers:

The public by nearly 2-1, 61-33 percent, supports cutting the overall budget along the lines of the sequester that took effect last Friday. But by nearly an identical margin, Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll oppose an eight percent across-the-board cut in military spending.

These views come before the $85 billion in cuts this year have taken hold, leaving open the question of how the public will respond once the reductions hit home. Nonetheless, the results suggest that warnings about the nation’s military readiness have resonated, while the public is more skeptical about the damage the sequester poses to federal programs more generally.

Support for a five percent reduction in federal spending crosses party lines in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates; it includes 57 percent of Democrats, six in 10 independents and three-quarters of Republicans. Shaving eight percent off the military budget, on the other hand, is opposed by 73 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of independents, with Democrats split down the middle.

Now, before we all start celebrating, there are a few matters of note. The ABC article also points out that, in a similar poll conducted during the height of fiscal cliff hysteria, Americans were largely opposed to cuts to some of the most expensive programs we run (including Social Security).

Read more from this story HERE.

Getting Wise To Government Lies

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Andrew BirajTake President Obama and his Cabinet of Liars, please. We all know what dirty tricks they played to try and stop the sequester’s automatic budget cuts from happening.

They spent weeks trying to frighten the America people into believing the country would collapse into chaos and suffering if the federal government’s sequester-forced spending cuts went into effect. The campaigner in chief and his chorus of toadies did everything they could to make sure the puny spending cuts — which would have merely taken the federal budget back to its 2012 level — would cause the most pain to the most people.

Supposedly the cuts were going to decimate the ranks of our local police forces and firefighters, throw hundreds of teachers into the streets, create long lines at airports and maybe even leave the United States vulnerable to a military invasion by Greece.

Of course, most of Big Media played right along with Obama’s dirty political game. Like the dupes they are, they publicized every sequester scare-story like it was going to mean the end of America as we know it.

(Too bad the MSN don’t devote the same level of hysteria to covering some of our real problems, like Obama’s runaway federal spending and our unpayable future debt load.)

Read more from this story HERE.

Stossel: The Sequester Is Not Even A Cut

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Human EventsIf you’re reading this, you’ve survived the “sequester” cuts!

That may surprise you, since President Obama likened the sequester to taking a “meat cleaver” to government, causing FBI agents to be furloughed, prosecutors to let criminals escape and medical research to grind to a halt!

The media hyped it, too. The NBC Nightly News said, “The sequester could cripple air travel, force firefighter layoffs — even kick preschoolers out of child care!” The truth is that the terrifying sequester cuts weren’t even cuts. They were merely a small reduction in government’s planned increase in spending. A very small reduction.

After a decade, the federal government will simply spend about $4.6 trillion a year instead of $4.5 trillion (in 2012 dollars).

And still members of Congress, Republicans included, look for ways to delay the cuts, like spreading them out over 10 years instead of making any now. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., asked, “If we cannot do this little bit … how are we ever going to balance the budget?” Actually, we don’t even need to balance the budget. If we just slowed the growth of government to 1 or 2 percent a year, we could grow our way out of unsustainable debt.

Read more from this story HERE.