From NRO: The little-reported side of the sequester

Even with the sequester, the 2013 budget will be larger than last year’s. Is that really doomsday?   "Any day now we can expect White House spokesman Jay Carney to take to the podium and read a prepared statement: “And when he opened the seventh seal, there was a small decrease in the rate of increase in federal spending.” "....

What Kind of Cuts Grow the Economy?  "Spending reductions must be large, credible, and politically difficult to reverse."

The Great Sequester Panic  "The sequester may be bad policy, but it’s not going to tank our economy."

Larry Kudlow; The Pro-Growth Sequester; No, it’s not Armageddon.  "The Obama administration is whipping up hysteria over the sequester budget cuts and their impact on the economy, the military, first providers, and so forth and so on. Armageddon. But if you climb into the CBO numbers for 2013, you see a much lighter and easier picture than all the worst-case scenarios being conjured up by the administration.

Sandra Fluke: “We Still Don’t Let Transgender Folks Join the Military, That Needs to Change”

And they call conservatives extremists!

Gateway Pundit   "The genius of the far left in action…"While not out vacationing in Europe or asking her fellow Americans to pay for her $9 a month birth control, liberal darling Sandra Fluke is out giving speeches on college campuses these days."

 

Sandra Fluke has brought her unique insights to bear on U.S. military policy, while teaming up again with Planned Parenthood to support the HHS mandate.
Last week, Fluke told a California college that Barack Obama’s repeal of the “Don’t Ask, “Don’t Tell” policy did not go far enough, because it did not include transgender soldiers.
“We still don’t let trans-folk join the military,” Fluke told a gathering at Claremont McKenna College on February 13. “That needs to change.”
Service in the military, she said, should be open to the entire “the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning” population, according to the Daily Caller.



"Trans-folk"?
 

Bullying the Boy Scouts

Richard Larsen  "It may not be surprising to some that groups and organizations across the country that are so openly opposed to “bullying” are so adept at it. Politically correct groups advancing the same-sex agenda are pervasive in their denunciation of bullying against those who are “different” yet seem to have mastered the practice against those who don’t share their beliefs. The recently announced review of the Boy Scouts of America policies, which reject avowed homosexuals from membership, provides a case study in collective bullying and intimidation of a quality organization dedicated to instilling character in its members."
....
"Rather than create their own programs based on their own “values,” morally relativistic organizations seek to destroy that which is good; based on solid, everlasting principles. Their success in forcing their conformist political correctness is unraveling the social mores of our cultural fabric, strand by strand."
AP award winning columnist Richard Larsen is President of Larsen Financial, a brokerage and financial planning firm in Pocatello, Idaho, and is a graduate of Idaho State University with a BA in Political Science and History and former member of the Idaho State Journal Editorial Board

Priest pedophilia not linked to celibacy: Pope's No.2  "It is homosexuality, not celibacy, that is linked to pedophilia, the Vatican's Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said on Monday, seeking to defuse the sex scandal that has battered the Roman Catholic Church." Queerty disagrees, of course. 

How Should We Treat American Jihadists?

Andrew C. McCarthy  "If a plane full of 200 American citizens is hijacked by foreign jihadists, the law does not tell us whether the president should shoot down the plane or let it be plowed into a skyscraper and kill 3,000 American citizens. It is the kind of excruciating decision that war makes necessary. Legal niceties do not tell us how to resolve it.

Above; American who should have been read his rights

"That is the problem with our debate over the treatment of U.S. nationals who join the enemy’s forces in wartime — most urgently, over the targeted killing of our fellow citizens. We want the legal answer. But the legal answer is not going to help us. Under the Constitution, Americans who join the enemy may lawfully be treated like the enemy, which includes being attacked with lethal force. That, however, tells us only the outer limits of what is permissible. It does not tell us what we need to know: What should we do?"    Emphasis added.
 Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which is published by Encounter Books.

Bob Woodward: Obama Claim That Congress Proposed Sequester Not True; WH Proposed It, Obama Personally Approved It

Hat tip to Weasel Zippers

Lew and Obama

Bob Woodward   “There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”
"The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government."
"Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved."
(Emphasis added.)

Via The Astute Bloggers, whose motto is "All caps in the defense of liberty is no vice": WATERGATE'S HERO-REPORTER - BOB WOODWARD - CALLS OBAMA A LIAR

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.” 

Krauthammer on the Rubio plan: Immigration — the lesser of two evils

newsrealblog

Charles Krauthammer  "The president suggested he would hold off introducing his own immigration bill as long as bipartisan Senate negotiations were proceeding apace — until his own immigration bill mysteriously leaked precisely as bipartisan Senate negotiations were proceeding apace.
"A naked political maneuver and a blunt warning to Republicans: Finish that immigration deal in Congress, or I’ll propose something I know you can’t accept — and flog the issue mercilessly next year to win back the House.
....
"Rubio calls it “probationary legal status.” Obama uses the term “lawful prospective immigrant.” But both would instantly legalize the 11 million illegal immigrants living here today. The moment either bill is signed, the 11 million become eligible for legal residence, the right to work and relief from the prospect of deportation."

usnews.com

From France; "The NeoComs: The final ‘coming out’ of the communist left in the illiterate society of useful idiots that is America

This came to the TW from Vietnam vet, friend, mentor and fellow blogger Ronbo who blogs at The Freedom Fighter's Journal.

"Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…"

No Pasaran*  "It is hard to dispute that the progressive left has a stranglehold on pop culture in America. Firmly entrenched in media, academia and the entertainment industry, and more emboldened than ever, it controls the present.
"Our history has long been under assault, particularly in universities, but never as aggressively as we see in a 10-part Showtime documentary produced by Oliver Stone, “Untold History of the United States.”
"Commenting on Stone’s latest work in a FrontPage column, David Horowitz calls it “a ludicrous encapsulation of the Kremlin’s view of the Cold War, amplified by the Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, Hamas version of the post-Communist decades.” "
....

Lerma concluded, "Who could ever [have] imagined anyone so willing to destroy [capitalism] like Obama, much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist president."

" Indeed, who could have imagined?"

They shall not pass  " '¡No pasarán!') is a slogan used to express determination to defend a position against an enemy.
It was most famously used during the Battle of Verdun in World War I by French General Robert Nivelle."....

Limbaugh blasts president's 'puppets' in media

WND "Limbaugh ripped into Politico.com for being the president’s “puppets,” arguing journalists used to try to expose government cover-ups; now they participate in them! (FREE audio).
“Panetta said he never heard from him the rest of the day or night,” said Limbaugh of Obama, accusing the journalists of negligent reporting on Benghazi. “Now, if that were George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, you would be digging up every rock that you could to find out where the hell the president was while these four Americans were under assault. But with Obama, you didn’t seem to care.”
Limbaugh’s audience was further shocked when he uttered this week, “For the first time in my life, I’m ashamed of my country.”
....
" “I’ve said the same things over and over for 25 years,” Limbaugh said. " “Whether the Clinton presidency or the Obama presidency, whether it’s a Pelosi speakership or Tom Foley (who was speaker when I started), it’s the same stuff. It’s the same threats. It’s the same arguments over and over. Nothing ever changes!” "

Forthcoming regulation likely means no new coal-fired power plants will be built in the United States

Obama Administration Moves Forward on Climate Change Without Congress

Demonstrators march in Los Angeles, Calif., to call on

 President Obama to take action on the environment,

 Feb. 17, 2013.

"Now, with Republicans in control of the House, it's even more unlikely Congress will act on any bill that would accomplish the president's goals, so the president indicated he's moving forward on his own."

The state of "journalism" as of Feb 22, 2013

Did Fox News' Ed Henry blow it?  "It started as a plea for transparency; it's ending up as a public relations disaster.
"When the White House press corps made its plea for greater access to President Obama, they were hoping to force the administration to cooperate on an issue that has frustrated them since the earliest days of Obama's presidency. But by choosing to raise their voices over a golfing vacation -- rather than, say, a foreign or domestic policy issue -- the press corps may have blown its chances for public sympathy, and even damaged its own reputation."
Ed Henry is one of the good guys, too.

More on this: Debate co-chair: 'Mistake' to have Candy Crowley moderate presidential debate  "Crowley... drew heavy fire from conservatives for challenging Mitt Romney after he suggested that President Obama had not called the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, "acts of terror." " 

New Words for the Media  "For those that tend to ignore the gun-controllers rant that deer hunters do not need military assault weapons with high capacity magazines, but can get by with just regular ol' deer guns, we find that a bolt action .308, a regular ol' deer gun suddenly now is a sniper rifle."

 

Government Wants TV Networks to Tout Obamacare in TV Show Programming   "Plans are being discussed to pitch a reality television show about “the trials and tribulations of families living without medical coverage,” according to the Ogilvy plan. The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots."
Hat tip to The Lonely Conservative.

Our children go to school and receive liberal indoctrination; at work their parents are indoctrinated in PC meetings. Then they all come home to be indoctrinated by their TV programs*.
By the way, have you counted how many of the TV "good guys" drive a Prius?

Obama Resorts to Local TV Interviews to Blame Sequester on GOP  "President Obama has launched a campaign to push his tax hikes by granting interviews to local TV news programs in eight states whose viewers will likely be affected by budget cuts as a result of sequestration."

Bozell: Media Simply Won't Report on Sequester Accurately, the GOP Has to Go Over Their Heads to Make Case to American People
"What the Republican Party should be saying to Mr. and Mrs. America is this is an out-of-control government and they can't even cut two percent without claiming that the world is going to come to an end.... This should be a no-brainer."

http://jimunro.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html

Pro-Family Marches Censored by Media While Eco-Group Gets Spotlight
"More than 200,000 citizens participated in a pro-family march last Monday in Puerto Rico, but this event, that the Huffington Post called “one of the largest pro-family demonstrations ever held in the U.S. commonwealth,” received not even a passing mention on NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN."....
...."Meanwhile, a Keystone pipeline protest, just a day before, received massive attention from the news media, despite having only a fraction of the turnout that the Puerto Rican protest had – an estimated 35,000 people."

*Only Truth in ‘True Life’ is MTV’s Contempt for Conservatives   "The episode description reads: “Amelia, Caleb and Andrew are three right-wingers who despise the very thing that holds our country together, the U.S. government.” "

 

Press Bias Evident in New Jersey Beheading Blackout  ...."The press reaction? Based on past treatment of such atrocities as the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords, we know that the media would instantly connect the killings to the alleged murderer’s religious beliefs, regardless of the lack of any evidence that there was any causal relationship at all and indeed in the face of the obvious truth that Christianity explicitly teaches against hatred, revenge, and prejudice.
"Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Paul Ryan, and the other usual suspects would surely be rounded up and questioned about their complicity in the murder."

Obama and the Seuss-quester

Heritage
"On Pennsylvania Avenue, right near the end, there lived a President who wanted to spend.
"He knew spending meant power, so hour by hour, he thought up more spends from his Washington tower.
" “I’ll spend without limits; I’ll spend without blame! Raising taxes to pay—that’s the name of the game.” "

"Down the street, though, a House filled with thriftier folk had a budget to pass, or the country’d go broke. “We can’t spend all day; we’ve got bills to pay! Let’s keep deficits and higher taxes away.”

"The Senate next door to the House just refused. “We don’t like your budget. We’ve got some bad news: The President says we can spend all we want, and we’ll simply raise taxes whenever we choose.”

"So they spent and they spent and they borrowed some more. And when all that was spent, they spent same as before."....

Read more...

ImageBlitz 

Rand Paul returns surplus operating budget

In a related story, a flight of pigs was spotted at 15,000 feet over Massachusetts.

Daily Caller  "Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul says he will send a $600,000 check to the U.S. Treasury, returning the part of his operating budget as a senator that was not spent.
"Paul made the announcement at press conference in Kentucky on Wednesday. According to a press release from Paul’s office, the sum is over 20 percent of the total operating budget." More...