A BIG point missing here.

The Republicans, especially the House Republicans have to worry about getting elected again.

Obama has no such worries.

Automatic austerity is the goal of the PTB. That way as they drive by the starving homeless on their way to the Kennedy Center Honors they can believe they are blameless.

Boy was I wrong again.

I never thought the sequester would happen. Not with those huge defense cuts. I thought cutting defense by this much had as much chance to occur as passing single payer health care.

I still think something, somehow, is going to happen to mitigate the defense cuts. Maybe they’ll pass a supplemental like they did in the W and The Dick years. (Didn’t they finance the entire Iraq war with supplementals???)

Right you are. Don’t sell your Lockheed Martin stock, they will be fine.

I’m not a bit surprised. The Democrats, as usual, have done a pitifully poor job of getting out their side of the story. You’d think a political party that has the support of America’s smartest and meanest trial lawyers would have learned a thing or two about advocacy by now.

The Democrats, as usual, have done a pitifully poor job of getting out their side of the story.

What side is that?

The D’s need their own TV network, as slick as Fox.

If we are to be inundated with propaganda 7 x 24, then let’s have all sides doing it.

We could name the Act setting up such a system, The Blond Full Employment Act (with strict adherence to truth in Advertizing).

Who would be doing the inspection to ensure compliance with “truth in advertising” under the act?

Yeah, I can see it now…

Around the August recess news stories will be coming out daily about failures and hardships are poor troops are suffering as a result of the drastic cuts. Scenes of marines getting shot at and not having ammo to return fire….

Then September Congress returns and there’s a nationwide push to please, please, please fund the poor troops.

And they naturally pass a supplemental that puts back in every penny cut by the sequestor, with an extra $20 billion or so for good measure (teach us a lesson for cutting them in the first place).

I’m such a cynic.

There’s other reasons to sell your Lockheed Martin stock (F35).

“The Blond Full Employment Act.” That idea has legs.

Seems obvious to me that the impact of sequester is going to be miniscule. Why else would Obama be flying around the country trying to scare anyone who will listen to him offer tax increases and cuts in lieu of sequester.

When sequester happens and no one notices, Republican Blame will turn into Republican Boast “We cut spending and kept Obama from raising taxes.”

Obama has a lot to lose.

Gerrymandered districts mean few of them are worried about the general election (its doubtful off-year 2014 turnout for Democrats is going to be better than 2012 turnout, and every Republican incumbent beat that tide).

They’ll worry about 2014 general elections sometime after Labor Day 2014, until then their focus is on the primary. They don’t want to give the Tea Party activists back home any reason to primary them. Also, post-Citizens United, they have to worry about bored millionaires throwing a ton of money in support of primary challengers (of both parties) just for the lulz.
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/233813-report-anti-incumbent-campaign-for-primary-accountability-spent-more-than-640000-in-may

What would help with House Republicans is election reform, namely mandating that federal races use Top 2 open primaries. GOP congressmen would start paying attention to polls if their primary electorate and general election electorate were the same.

Obama has a lot to lose

He’ll gain more for him , his wifee and kids than he’ll ever lose, ever.

He’s a better actor than his idiot idol ronnie.

The defense cuts mainly affect ‘little people’ like my niece’s husband, who is a nuclear engineer for a naval repair station that works on atomic subs. He’s being firloughed like the other civil servants. The big contractors don’t have to worry, since they can finance any short term crunch in their cash flow by taking lines of credit or selling bills. They will get paid sooner or later no matter what. The poor fucks who are furloughed will never get back the lost wages.

They don’t have a side of their own to tell. That’s the beauty of the thing. It’s set up to gut the Social Security safety net. It’s the United States of Alabama.

I agree that he has a lot to lose. The manic speeches about the impending doom (now in their third or fourth iteration) are really getting tiresome.

For him to stand there and say that kids won’t get educated and he is willing to allow the many huge redudancies in the Federal Government is preposterous. He looks and sounds like a fool.

Obama will leave office rich and get richer for being the person implementing the “austerity” that was designed to create third world America. All good jobs will eventually be patronage jobs and everyone else will be a peasant.

… ;-> … Obama IS good at acting … the posh/plush awaits the Obama’s post WH in ways the Clintons could only imagine and hoped to see… and the Clintons did quite well piling up the post WH payouts.

Becoming POTUS is becoming / has become all about what the money payouts can be while in WH as POTUS to stay elected as POTUS and will be post being POTUS.

Too bad about what this has led/ will lead to. Pay to play WH politics X 10 X 10? Likely so.

Expect to see the WH slide into being made into a ATM continue unabated.

I think people are missing the real point here and that is that this has taken TWO YEARS of childish squabbling to get here.

You would think a large group of adults would be able to negotiate their budget differences in that span of time but apparently we are dealing with spoiled children. Also what is not being spotlighted in this scare campaign is that things like billion dollar subsidies to large oil companies are not even mentioned nor the fact that many large , very profitable companies who do not pay one thin dime of taxes actually receive millions of dollars in tax refunds!
You betcha, call me when these idiots get serious about a budget.

Republicans haven’t been able to win the messaging war by calling it the “Obama Sequester” but they have muddled the waters enough to prevent public opinion from being too one-sided.

President Catfood is the one who is trying to muddy the waters. The Democrats and the Republicans are all for austerity, just the Democrats lie through their teeth and engage in revisionist history moreso than Republicans who are more upfront. This is just a political version of the 3-card monty scam – where there is an appearance of choice/difference between Democrats and Republicans, but ultimately you get austerity no matter which you pick. It looks the the europeans are beginning to stop being marks for 3-card monty elections by going for third parties and hopefully such sentiment will spead to stop these con games.

“GOP Would Receive Only Slightly More Blame if Sequester Happens.”

The real question is who gets the blame if Obama manages to trade the sequester cuts for earned benefit cuts to SS and Medicare.

The dirty hippies, of course. Had they just simply kept their mouths shut rather than yammer about the public option, the midterm election debacle and the gerrymandering that followed never would have happened.

I’m sure Harold Ford, Jr. would agree with that.

For the most the blame game seems toothless.

Then the dems will be hurt.

President Catfood was for the sequester before he was against it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj1y3q92sog

The grand scam is the false dichotomy of wealth extraction ,where we lose with tax hikes and/or spending cuts .It appears the dem tribalists are assumed to be so stupid that they will fight for tax hikes , and to win these hikes ,which the royalist lobby can recycle into a zero hit , they endure massive spending cuts .

Without a well-conceived stimulus to expand the tax base and balance budget shortfalls ,all roads lead to asset theft via austerity ,and a precocious child could deduce that austerity creates deficits/debt ,not the converse .In an expansionary cycle fiscal alignment can be structurally pursued with tax hikes and spending cuts .

The only choice is expansion via stimulus or extraction via austerity .Anyone who believes economic constriction will engender debt relief or economic stability is the type of fool or ignoramus toward whom manufactured crises were geared for systemic looting .