House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that America needs a modern day Paul Revere to warn, “sequester is coming.”
“If Paul Revere were here today, we would need someone like him to be running through the street saying, ‘Sequester is coming!’” She said. “Sequester is here, really,” she added.
NORTH ANDOVER — Officials at Lawrence Municipal Airport learned yesterday that their air traffic control tower will not close tomorrow as a casualty of federal budget cuts, but will remain open for at least two more months.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it has delayed the closing of 149 airport control towers around the country until June 15.
“Obviously, I’m very happy to hear about this,” Lawrence Municipal Airport manager Michael Miller said.
“It gives time for more deliberative thought to go into on the appropriateness of closures — also more time to develop and implement procedures and safety plans that will be necessary because of the closures. I’m also glad for the air traffic controllers who are not going to get laid off,” Miller said.
Vice President Joe Biden won’t be following the president’s lead and returning some of his pay to the Treasury, but may if his staff faces furloughs.
“The vice president is committed to sharing the burden of the sequester with his staff,” his office said in a statement Friday. [...]
Several members of the president’s Cabinet have said they will cut checks to charities or to the Treasury, though most are wealthier than the vice president. Secretary of State John Kerry’s net worth is estimated as being as much as $300 million, while Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s net worth is estimated to be as much as about $10 million.
White House spokesman Jay Carney lamented during a press conference Tuesday that the media are not covering the sequester’s “impacts on real people.”
“The impacts are real,” Carney insisted during an exchange with Fox News’ Ed Henry, “and they effect real people. And I know that there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of the impacts on real people.”
Henry was pressing Carney on why the Obama administration had originally told reporters that the sequester would pull 5,000 border patrol agents off the border, only to announce Monday that the agency had reconsidered the decision for the short-term.
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Now, they are on a ski trip to Sun Vally, Idaho.Sasha and Malia Obama are quietly vacationing at the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, Breitbart News has learned.
A source tipped Breitbart News off to the First Daughters’ spring vacation, which was not publicly announced or reported.
Breitbart subsequently confirmed President Barack Obama’s daughters’ trip with other sources.
The WH has confirmed they had the ski trip story scrubbed from a local news source.A local news affiliate in Idaho reported that the first daughters, Sasha and Malia Obama, are on a Spring Break ski trip in Sun Valley, Idaho. The story quickly spread across the Internet when picked up by the highly trafficked Drudge Report website.
UPDATE: The White House has confirmed the report was removed on their request. From Kristina Schake, Communications Director to the First Lady:
It's good to be the daughters of the King. The school kids who wanted to tour the White House on their spring break are hardest hit.From the beginning of the administration, the White House has asked news outlets not to report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest. We have reminded outlets of this request in order to protect the privacy and security of these girls.
(CNSNews.com) – The National Science Foundation awarded a grant for $876,752 to the University of Iowa to study whether there is any benefit to sex among New Zealand mud snails and whether that explains why any organism has sex.
The study, first funded in 2011 and continuing until 2015, will study the New Zealand snails to see if it is better that they reproduce sexually or asexually – the snail can do both – hoping to gain insight on why so many organisms practice sexual reproduction.
“Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction, yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs,” the study’s abstract asks.
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Just over half of U.S. voters now say the March 1 sequester cuts in the growth of federal government spending have had no impact on their lives.
Only 12% say the sequester cuts have had a major impact on them personally. Despite predictions that the sequester impact would grow over time, there’s no indication of that happening yet. The number experiencing a major impact is basically unchanged from the weekend the sequester first took effect.
Vice President Biden has been flying home to Wilmington, Delaware most weekends at enormous expense to taxpayers, even though he has an exclusive government-provided residence in Washington.
Biden himself acknowledged the flights during recent remarks to the National Association of Attorneys General, noting that the sequester would force him to temporarily alter his expensive habit and use the train instead.
According to reports, Biden generally uses Air Force Two to get to Wilmington.
The cost of flying Air Force Two, a military version of the Boeing 757-200, amounts to about $8,800 per hour, according to the most recent federal data.
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. [...]
Congress froze the US administration’s requests for funds.
Senators voted Wednesday to keep the White House closed to public tours, turning back a GOP-led effort to free up money to open the building back up after the sequesters.
The vote was just one of a series of high-profile votes the Senate was taking Wednesday afternoon as it plowed toward passage of a bill to fund the government through the rest of this fiscal year.
But there was a major disconnect in the way each side was calculating its numbers.
Democrats claimed all along their plan would achieve $1.85 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, half through spending cuts and half through tax hikes.
But the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, argues the plan is taking credit for the reduced spending level already achieved when mandatory, across-the-board cuts known as sequester took effect March 1.
The Democrats' plan would replace the sequester and build on that savings for a total of $975 billion in alternative cuts and $975 billion in tax hikes over 10 years. But, as Democratic staffers acknowledged during committee testimony last week, their plan also counts the replacement cuts toward their total deficit-reduction figure.
"I believe you're using the money twice," Sessions said, arguing that the true savings is more like $700 billion.
For more than a century, the White House Easter Egg Roll has been insulated from the sort of partisan sniping that now dominates Washington politics.If Obama doesn't get his money back, the bunny may get it...
That tradition ended Monday, when Republicans started complaining about a notice that the event could be canceled due to a potential government shutdown. The Obama administration has already come under GOP criticism for canceling White House tours due to the mandatory, across-the-board cuts known as sequestration.
The memo — which doesn’t actually say the White House is nixing the bunny fest, but just that it might do so at some point during the next couple of weeks — warns ticket-holders that the nation’s financial woes may affect the 135th Easter Egg role slated for April 1. (Note: this is not an April’s Fools Day joke.)
“Finally, by using these tickets, guests are acknowledging that this event is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies,” it reads. “If cancelled, the event will not be re-scheduled. We will notify you if there are any modifications to this event.”
The barbershop of the U.S. Senate has run deficits of approximately $350,000 a year for each of the last 15 years. So Senate sergeant at arms Terry Gainer has decided to try out a new model, one that has looked rather unfashionable during the Obama era: privatization.We all know Congress needs a haircut, but not like this.
The Senate BarbershopLibrary of CongressGainer has tried to trim Senate Hair Care Services for the past few years. Now the political climate troubling everyone else on Capitol Hill is allowing him to move faster than he anticipated towards privatizing it completely.“I’ve accelerated my goal to get there through leveraging sequestration,” Gainer explains. “The only real way we’re going to change this thing around without pricing ourselves out of the market is by reducing the number of fulltime employees.”
Obama administration said Thursday it had rearrested and brought back four of the most dangerous immigrants it released from detention last month in the run-up to the budget sequestration.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton testified to Congress that his agency released 10 “level one” offenders, and has gone out and apprehended four of them. He said the other six are nonviolent.
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) on Thursday compared the series of automatic federal budget cuts that took effect on March 1 to the Japanese tsunami of 2011 that killed more than 15,000 people and left millions more without power and water, while sparking a nuclear reactor meltdown.
“And for those whose memories fade, I want you to be reminded of the tsunami,” Jackson Lee said. “For it does not give notice and it is tragic and reckless for those who say ‘You know what, the sequester has started and I feel pretty good’ because you have not been hit by the tsunami.
She also “warned” that this “tsunami” of effects from the cuts, known as The Sequester, could come at any time – even at a time when Congress is not in session.
“It may come at a moment — when we are away on work recess, or when the speaker has sent us home and we’re not here working. And all of a sudden a great percentage of America will be walking around without benefits, without childcare, without teachers in our schools, and we’ll ask the question ‘What happened?’” she said.
“It was the tsunami of the sequester,” she added.
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