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Video: Sperling Says GOP Will Cave On Taxes After Seeing ‘Pain’ Caused By Sequester

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Photo Credit: KAZVorpalA senior White House official says congressional Republicans who see the damage caused by billions in automatic spending cuts will eventually agree to raise taxes.

Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy, said that Republicans will eventually “choose bipartisan compromise over an ideological position,” on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“As this pain starts to gradually spread to communities” hit by $85 billion in cuts “more Republican colleagues who are concerned about this harm to their constituents will choose bipartisan compromise on revenue raising tax reform with serious entitlement reform,” said Sperling.

“They’ll choose this bipartisan compromise over what is an ideological position that every single penny of deficit reduction going forward must be on the middle class or seniors or children, and that there can’t be one penny that comes from closing loopholes or tax expenditures,” he added.

The automatic across-the-board cuts took effect on Friday after congressional leaders and President Obama were unable to broker a last-minute replacement deal. Democrats are calling for new tax revenues in any deal to replace the sequester, while Republicans insist that only other targeted cuts and entitlement reforms be included.

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Huckabee 2016: ‘The Honest Answer Is Maybe’

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Photo Credit: KUTVHe was Mitt Romney’s political rival in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. Like Romney, Mike Huckabee lost, but he gained an undeniably strong presence on radio and television.

Huckabee also picked up—among some people—a sense of being anti-Mormon.

“It really hurts me to hear that,” said Huckabee, in an exclusive interview with 2News Thursday. “Anybody who knows me knows the respect I have for the Mormon Church is extraordinary, because there has been moral clarity from the Mormon Church on such issues as Prop 8 in California, and pro-life issues.”

The former Baptist minister, former Governor of Arkansas, was in Salt Lake to speak at a convention for a company known as Express Employment Professionals at the Grand America. He also did his daily radio show from Salt Lake, a program aired on nearly 200 stations around the country.

“So this notion that I am somehow anti-Mormon is absolutely not true, never has been,” said Huckabee, who counts former Utah governors Mike Leavitt and John Huntsman—both LDS—as friends. Huckabee said he supported and campaigned “all over the country” for Romney in 2012, and thought Romney would win.

Romney’s political career seems over, but Huckabee said he might make another run for the White House, as soon as 2016. “I’m not ruling it out. The honest answer is maybe,” he told 2News. “I know a little bit of the depth of the water I’d be diving into, so I’ve got to make that decision very carefully and prayerfully.”

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White House Denies Involvement In ICE’s Decision To Release Detainees (+video)

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyThe White House and the Department of Homeland Security were unaware of Immigration Customs and Enforcement’s decision to release detainees until the agency announced it, administration officials said Wednesday.

“This was a decision made by career officials at ICE without any input from the White House, as a result of fiscal uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible sequestration,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.

Personnel at Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington were also unaware of the decision until the announcement was made, a department official told POLITICO.

ICE announced Tuesday that it has released several hundred undocumented immigrants in recent weeks as funding cuts loom. The detainees will instead be monitored in less expensive ways, the agency said.

[Editor’s note: Notice how precisely Carney’s prepared statement is tailored to the question asked by this reporter, if I didn’t know better I might think the whole thing was staged. Surely the White House Press Corps wouldn’t go to such lengths to bail the President out of a sticky situation?]

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Parks and Recreation, Obama Style

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Photo Credit: APSen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) sent a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Thursday asking the administration to terminate its “Connecting Your Community” campaign in which federal officials meet with leaders in 100 cities across the country to discuss ways the federal government can better assist local governments. The campaign began last week.

“Much is being made about the possible impact of sequestration on government programs for the poor and middle class, food safety, and the defense of our nation,” Coburn wrote in the letter.

“It is somewhat surprising, therefore, for the White House to be headlining a 100 city government spending tour, transporting representatives from multiple departments and various agencies around the country to promote federal largesse,” he continued.

Mandatory, across the board spending cuts totaling more than $1 trillion will occur on March 1 unless Congress and the president act to prevent the so-called “sequestration.”

Coburn is the ranking member on the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The letter is addressed to Jeffrey Zients, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. Coburn asks in the letter that the White House “cancel the 100 city government spending tour” even though it is “well intentioned.” He also requests spending and personnel information for the tour.

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Tom Coburn To White House: With Cuts On Way, Why A 100-City Spending Tour?

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Photo Credit: Medill DCWith sequestration budget cuts set to take effect in less than a week, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has sent a letter to the White House asking for more information about a new initiative to help cities receive federal grants and other aid. The initiative involves White House and administration officials traveling to 100 cities around the country, helping local governments apply for federal money.

Given the president’s warning about dire effects from the coming cuts, Coburn wrote to Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Jeffrey Zients, “It is somewhat surprising, therefore, for the White House to be headlining a 100 city government spending tour, transporting representatives from multiple departments and various agencies around the country to promote federal largess. If Washington is truly cutting spending on missions many consider vital, how can we at the same time promise and promote more financial assistance, much less afford this mammoth 100 city cross country tour?”

The White House has not announced the tour. Coburn relied on a news report from the first stop, February 14 in Beaverton, Oregon. “The city will host the feds at a daylong symposium to discuss how government agencies, nonprofits and businesses can help the city,” the Oregonian reported. “The event is the first in a new White House ‘Connecting Your Community’ program, in which national leaders plan to meet with representatives of 100 cities to pair federal programs with local needs.”

The Oregonian reported that officials from the White House, Environmental Protection Agency, Housing Department, Highway Administration, and other agencies traveled to Oregon for the event. The city of Beaverton has hired a consultant to help it win more federal grants, the paper said, looking for more federal dollars to add to millions in current grants from HUD, the CDC, the EPA, and others. The paper said the remaining 99 cities on the federal spending tour have not been announced.

“If Washington is truly cutting spending on missions many consider vital, how can we at the same time promise and promote more financial assistance, much less afford this mammoth 100 city cross country tour?” wrote Coburn. “While well intentioned, I urge you to cancel the 100 city government spending tour.”

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Obama, The Puppet Master, Weaves his Tales with the Mastery of Technology

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Photo Credit: Pete SouzaPresident Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.

Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated.

Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?

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WH: Obama Called Hillary at 10PM on Night of Benghazi Attack–About Same Time Clinton First Publicly Linked Attack to YouTube Video

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Photo Credit: Evan Vucci President Barack Obama called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at approximately 10 p.m. on the night of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told CNSNews.com.

That was more than six hours after the attacks started, more than an hour before Tryone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed–and about the time that Clinton first released a statement linking the attacks to “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” a reference to an anti-Muslim video on YouTube.

“Like every president before him, he has a national security adviser and deputy national security adviser,” Carney told CNSNews.com on Tuesday. “He was in regular communication with his national security team directly, through them, and spoke with the secretary of state at approximately 10 p.m. He called her to get an update on the situation.”

Carney was responding to questions from CNSNews.com about who Obama communicated with on the evening of Sept. 11, 2012. Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee they first notified the president of the attack during a Sept. 11, 2012 meeting that began at 5 p.m. and ran for about 30 minutes. They also told the committee they did not talk to Obama or anyone else at the White House after that meeting.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, State Department Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who worked for CIA, were killed in the Benghazi attacks.

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Obama Made No Phone Calls On Night Of Benghazi Attack, White House Says

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President Obama didn’t make any phone calls the night of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the White House said in a letter to Congress released Thursday. “During the entire attack, the president of the United States never picked up the phone to put the weight of his office in the mix,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, who had held up Mr. Obama’s defense secretary nominee to force the information to be released.

Mr. Graham said that if Mr. Obama had picked up the phone, at least two of the Americans killed in the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi might still be alive because he might have been able to push U.S. aid to get to the scene faster.

The White House has said Mr. Obama was kept up to date on the attack by his staff, though after being alerted to the attack in a pre-scheduled afternoon meeting he never spoke again with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin E. Dempsey or then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Panetta told Congress last week that he knew immediately the attacks were a terrorist assault, though the White House downplayed that notion in the first five days after the attack.

Republican senators said they will still push for more information on who changed the talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who went on the Sunday talk shows after the attacks and blamed protests against an anti-Islam video.

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Toledo Football Player To Forgo Last Year Of Eligibility To Be With Sick Fiancee

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Photo Credit: The BladeA football player at the University of Toledo who has been playing the sport since he was a kid told his coach that he will forgo his last eligible season so he could be at his fiancee’s side while she undergoes treatment for leukemia, The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.

Ben Pike, 22, a 6 foot, 3-inch 260-pound defensive lineman who is coming off his best season and was likely to start next year, learned in January that leukemia returned to his fiancée Ashlee Barrett, the report said.

“I know in some people’s terms, he’s giving up things,” Becky Pike, Ben’s mother, told the paper. “But he’s really not giving up. He’s not giving up anything. He’s really fighting for life. And he’s just turned his forces to he’s going so win a battle for life instead of winning on the football field.”

The attraction between the two appeared to be immediate. They met during a bible study class. Barrett, herself a basketball player at Toledo, was taken by Pike’s confidence when he would discuss various topics in class, the report said. Pike couldn’t help but notice the pretty blonde’s energy.

They began dating and fell in love. Pike took Barrett to Washington, D.C., in December 2011 and proposed, the paper reported. He somehow managed to talk White House security guards into giving them clearance so he could pop the question on the main driveway leading to the White House. They set the date for the summer of 2013.

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Embattled Sen. Menendez Still Welcome At Obama White House

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Photo Credit: Mark WilsonWhile Democratic leaders have softened the tone of their allegiance to embattled New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the White House remains publicly unconcerned about working closely with the powerful Democrat.

Menendez is one of four senators meeting with President Barack Obama Wednesday afternoon at the White House to discuss immigration reform, according to Fox News’ Chad Pergram.

A White House official announced the meeting in a statement to reporters.

“Later this afternoon, the [p]resident will meet with Senate Democrats leading the effort to pass bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform. The meeting is part of the ongoing effort to continue to make progress towards bipartisan reform, which the [a]dministration believes should happen as quickly as possible,” the official wrote.

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