Fish Fear Me

To The Barrycades!

Obviously, the government shutdown means the National Park Service has to close visitor centers and other staffed facilities that are normally open to the public. But what the hell is this nonsense about the WWII Memorial in Washington D.C.?

A new wave of veterans were forced to move barricades at the WWII Memorial in Washington Wednesday morning to gain access during the government slimdown, a spokeswoman from Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., told FoxNews.com.

The WWII veterans, from Ohio, Kansas and Missouri, arrived at the memorial one day after another group relied on the assistance from elected officials to move the barricades to allow access. Parks police did not prevent the first group from entering, nor did they interfere with Wednesday's group.

Here's an aerial view of the memorial:

As you can see, it is an open-air memorial and it is normally open to the public 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. No tickets, no staff required. To close it the Park Service had to go out of their way to bring in dozens and dozens of metal barricades(Barrycades!) and spend the time, effort, and presumably wages to set them all up. Why? All they had to do was just leave it alone. A minimal Park Police presence, something that is happening anyway along The Mall and the major monuments, would have sufficed just fine. 

And what's the deal with this?

The National Park Service has ordered the closure of a Virginia park that sits on federal land, even though the government provides no resources for its maintenance or operation.

The Claude Moore Colonial Farm announced on Wednesday that NPS has ordered it to suspend operations until Congress agrees to a deal to fund the federal government.

According to Anna Eberly, managing director of the farm, NPS sent law enforcement agents to the park on Tuesday evening to remove staff and volunteers from the property.

“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” she said.

Vindictiveness. It's the same stupid and ugly vindictiveness that led the Obama administration earlier this year to deliberately seek sequester cuts that were the most painful and disruptive to the public as they could get away with.

"...government of the people, by the people, for the people..."

Well, we still have two out of three. For now.

It's Friday, Are You Ready For Your Obama Administration Screwing?

Yet another announcement today regarding the deliberate screwing of America by Barack Obama:

The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday told 149 regional airports across the country it would begin closing their air traffic control towers in April, but said it would spare another 40 towers that had been on the chopping block.

The agency said the cuts are necessary to help meet $637 million in forced spending cuts.

...

By congressional mandate, the FAA must cut nearly $600 million from its nearly $48 billion budget this fiscal year. Because the majority of its 47,000 employees are air traffic controllers, it is impossible to cut its budget without affecting controllers, the agency said.

I sometimes wonder if they remove the part of the brain capable of simple math as part of granting a diploma in journalism. Our government put the median salary of an air traffic controller at $108,040 in 2010. Let's be generous and account for some higher level executives and things like benefits and taxes and say that the average cost of an employee in the FAA is $250,000. 47,000 x $250,000=$11.75 billion.

So where's the other $36.25 billion going and why can't they find 1.76% of it to skip spending this year?

Saying they must instead furlough federal employees, shut down airports, and cause, in the words of the Air Traffic Controllers Association themselves, "...destructive effects on aviation" is nonsense. Even if you want to argue the most restrictive interpretation of the law, which itself would be ridiculous, Republicans in Congress are more than willing to work with Obama to make sure the administration has all of the flexibility it needs to deal with sequestration reasonably.

The blatant, deliberate, and completely avoidable screwing of America continues. 

Hail To The Dickhead

I was kind of thinking that my contempt for Barack Obama had hit its limit, but he proved me wrong this morning with this:

President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups.

“This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.

“What I’m asking them is: are there ways, for example, for us to accommodate school groups who may have traveled here with some bake sales? Can we make sure that kids potentially can still come to tour?” Obama added.

I'm going to channel my inner Sam Kinison here:

"You don't ask, you dickless wonder, you're the freakin' President of the United States! You tell them!

/Kinison

Instead we get this pathetic mewling:

“What the Secret Service explained to us was that they were going to furlough some folks,” said Obama. “What furloughs mean is people are going to lose a day of work and a day of pay, and the question for them is how deeply do they have to furlough their staff and is it worth it to make sure that we got White House tours if it means you have a whole bunch of families who are depending on a paycheck who are suddenly seeing a 5 or 10 percent reduction in their pay?”

Bullshit. Bull-freakin'-shit. 

Here's the reality according to a CNN story a couple of days ago:

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the Secret Service needs to cut $84 million from a remaining budget of roughly $1.6 billion, meaning that ending public tours of the White House only represents a small fraction of the reductions the agency will have to achieve if forced spending cuts known as ‘sequestration’ remain in effect.

That's 5.25%. The story also notes that cutting the tours out will save $2 million of the $84 million.

The idea that they can't find 5% to cut without hurting employees, in a large and well-funded agency such as the Secret Service, is not just absurd, it's insulting. Give me that budget for a day and I guarantee you I'll find a whole hell of a lot more than $84 million that can be cut without keeping kids out of the White House. No doubt millions of Americans who have had to deal with business and personal budget cuts the last four years could do the same.

It's one thing to have to grin and bear it when it comes to being on the losing end of a political battle, but this is far beyond politics and persuasion. The mind-numbing truth is the president is deliberately fucking with us here. Instead of faithfully executing his office, he has chosen to find the most harmful cuts to present to the American people in a crass and unworthy political ploy.   

My initial flash of anger over how Obama is handling the sequester has faded to just a deep contempt. I've worked hard to remain respectful of Obama the last five years, but this sequester business is too much. He could have rolled with it and done the presidential thing, which would have been to rally the administration to serve the American people and find every bit of waste, inefficiency, and common sense belt-tightening it could. It would have been a chance to prove to America that the federal government could rise to the occasion and reform itself in the name of the people it supposedly serves. 

Instead, we got President Dickhead.

How pathetic.

More About Obama's Sequester Flexibility

The major news media still seem to be missing it, but The Hill posted a piece yesterday about the real flexibility the Obama administration has in dealing with the sequester spending limits. Without getting too deep into what is a fairly tangled mess, there are a couple things to keep in mind as you read that story.

The federal government operates by Congress legislating authority and funds for certain "programs, projects, and activities." Each "PPA" is then assigned to one of more than 1200 account numbers in the federal government and the funds disbursed from there. Those accounts can contain only one PPA or hundreds, maybe even thousands if you count each earmark. For an entity the size of the federal government you can imagine that there's a huge volume of activity and transactions to be managed, but in theory it's fairly simple.

As we all know, reality is rarely as simple as theory. Circumstances change over the course of a year and while Congress in no way wants to give up the power of the purse, they also don't want to be bothered with having to pass laws to handle every small change needed to keep every department or PPA operating. There's a certain amount of wiggle room built into federal spending to allow the administration to manage all of that and it ranges from assumed to explicit depending on the language of the authorization. 

Not only are the account structures and rules complicated, the actual law governing whether the administration should apply cuts at the PPA level or at the account level, leaving even much more wiggle room, is even more arcane and contradictory. Some of it goes all the way back to the Reagan era and the Gramm-Rudman Budget Control Act of 1985, when actual budgets and normal appropriations bills were the rule. Since we haven't operated under those since Obama took office, a strong case can be made that rules that apply to those don't apply to the continuing resolutions we're stuck with today.

Read the article for the details that the Lamestream media aren't telling you. The upshot is that Obama has far more room to manage the spending limits from the sequester than he is telling the us. He is deliberately threatening to inflict unnecessary pain on the public, federal workers, and the economy in hopes of blaming that on the GOP. 

I've seen presidents of both parties make mistakes, but this is the first time seen one made with such intentional and cynical disregard for the welfare of the country.

Happy Sequester Day

Does today mark the beginning of the end? Beats me, because like everything else coming out of Washington D.C. there's so much bullshit and spin surrounding it that we can all pick and choose the reality that supports our political position or team. 

Is it $85 billion or more like $44 billion this year, if that? Are they "deep cuts" or actually just slower budget increases? Is the administration handcuffed in how they have to implement the cuts or does it really have discretion and President Obama is deliberately inflicting the maximum amount of pain in hopes the GOP will cave?

Those shouldn't be difficult questions to answer with certainty, should they? And yet there is no consensus about any of that because the answers are lost in a confusing mess of deceptive talking points and outright lies. Once upon a time we had major news organizations with the integrity and competence to answer those questions, now we don't. It's therefore unsurprising that most of the public throws up their hands and just goes with the narrative that fits their political leanings. 

For the record, I think the correct answers are $44 billion, slower budget increases, and yes, Obama has more discretion than he is letting on. On the latter, I've read the bills and the OMB reports and the issue is complicated, but in that complication alone there is plenty of wiggle room for the administration to look for cuts that will be the least disruptive to the public, federal workers, and the economy. In what amounts to the most cynical presidential action in decades, Obama has chosen to do the opposite.

Krauthammer gets it right here:

A 2011 Government Accountability Office report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.

Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget, and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office, stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

A good faith effort by the president would find more than enough spending to cut without holding kids, teachers, and federal workers hostage. It appears that we are not going to get it from Obama. 

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

      "Unless I can f*ck with people and blame the GOP."

That last line was not widely reported back in January.