I can't talk about it anymore, readers.
"Sequester goes into effect as both sides trade blame" by David Uberti and Tracy Jan | Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff, March 02, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama and Republican leaders held another fruitless session at the White House....
I am beginning to think this is all a cleverly-crafted game where each blames the other while both really getting what they want. Then they can turn to their flock of lemmings known as constituents and say see, we tried, but the other guy.... given an out for why they failed when it's not a failure at all for them. It's just a way to avoid blame for social spending cuts.
Waves of anxiety across the country, even though much of the sequester’s impact will not be felt for weeks....
“There’s going to be a lot of kabuki theater and discussion, but until a larger package of tax and entitlement reforms has been agreed to, I wouldn’t count on it happening this year,” said Frederick Isasi, vice president of health policy for The Advisory Board Company, a health care advisory firm in Washington.
I prefer the term s***-show fooley, but same thing.
In the meantime, the sequester’s impact will slowly be felt across Massachusetts....
The White House and Congress are now focused on the next potential Capitol Hill crisis: March 27, when the federal government is slated to run out of cash....
Lurching from one manufactured crisis to another to keep your eye off what, 'murkn?
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"Obama flubs ‘Star Trek’ term" March 02, 2013
WASHINGTON — He is not a dictator and won’t entertain the idea of a ‘‘Jedi mind-meld’’ with opponents. There is no ‘‘secret formula or special sauce’’ he can slip foes to make them see things his way. And not to worry, he says, the situation may look dire but won’t be an ‘‘apocalypse.’’
So who was the guy in a suit and tie who showed up Friday in the White House briefing room, mixing metaphors and references to ‘‘Star Wars’’ and ‘‘Star Trek”?
‘‘I am not a dictator. I’m the president,’’ President Obama declared as he rejected the idea of using Secret Service agents to keep lawmakers from leaving until everyone agreed on a budget. He answered reporters’ questions shortly after an inconclusive 52-minute meeting with the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate....
Related: Inaugurating Obama's Dictatorship
What else would you call it?
Even if he did bar his office — the oval one — Obama said he wouldn’t do a ‘‘Jedi mind-meld’’ with Congress’s top two Republicans to persuade them ‘‘to do what’s right.’’
Yoda-quoting nerds, Beltway insiders, and even Hollywood heroes were instantly abuzz. The presidential mishmash of sci-fi references went viral, turning off geeks who had considered Obama one of their own after a slip of the tongue that was almost as bad as confusing Klingons and Ewoks, or even Democrats and Republicans. Jedi are from ‘‘Star Wars,’’ while mind melds happened on ‘‘Star Trek.’’
Another voting bloc in the long line of disappointed groups.
Mister Spock of ‘‘Star Trek’’ weighed in. ‘‘Only a Vulcan mind-meld would be effective on this Congress. LLAP,’’ Leonard Nimoy e-mailed after the Associated Press sought his reaction. Nimoy signed off with the abbreviation for his ‘‘Live long and prosper.’’
Maybe it was the power of the Force or some kind of Starfleet prime directive, but the White House couldn’t ignore comments like that, flashing in and out of time and space and mixed metaphors like a Tardis traveling at warp speed in social media. It later tweeted: ‘‘We must bring balance to the force,’’ with a link to an Obama photo inside a border designed to look like outer space.
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Maybe someone should ask the question: Is the president on pharmaceuticals or illicit drugs?
Obviously, the crisis can't be that serious if we are getting such s***-slop.
"Sequester’s long-term effects still unclear" by David Uberti | Globe Correspondent, March 01, 2013
WASHINGTON — The automatic budget cuts set to go into effect Friday could eventually be felt by the long-term unemployed, low-income families, and defense workers, but it won’t touch those receiving Medicaid and Social Security benefits.
And the president and members of Congress who failed to reach a deal to avert the so-called sequester won’t see their salaries cut, although some other federal workers will.
Therein lies the paradox of the sequester: For some, the sky is falling. But for many others, the budget cuts will hardly register.
That may explain why legislative efforts to forestall the cuts this week were barely evident, despite dire warnings from President Obama and administration officials.
Democrats and Republicans did offer alternatives to the cuts in the Senate on Thursday. But neither had the needed 60 votes to break a filibuster. The Democrats’ proposal, replacing the across-the-board cuts with targeted reductions and closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, was defeated 51-49.
Meaning even some Democrats voted against it?
The GOP’s legislation offered Obama greater flexibility in slashing the budget, but that plan was defeated 38-62, amid concerns among some about giving too much power to the White House over spending.
Had enough of the political theater?
Obama is slated to meet at the White House with congressional leaders Friday — just hours after the deadline — in the hopes of making a retroactive deal. But the House is not in session Friday, and it is unclear when such a deal will be considered, much less passed.
Translation: No one wants a deal for the reasons I stated above. They both secretly wanted sequester.
The $85 billion in cuts this fiscal year could require hundreds of thousands of furloughs for government workers that, administration officials argue, will lead to less protection on the nation’s borders, longer wait times in airport security lines, and another hit to a still-sluggish economic recovery. During a speech Wednesday at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, Obama said sequestration “will weaken America’s economic recovery. It will weaken our military readiness.”
I'm sorry, sir, but I'm feeling overtax with the overdose of fear.
While down there maybe you might want to do a little fishing, readers.
“The longer these cuts are in place, the greater the damage,” Obama said.
But others — namely congressional Republicans — have decried what they characterize as scare tactics to put pressure on the GOP to act.
“If you’d listen to the administration, you’d assume that this is the last day that it’s safe to go outside,” Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri said in a floor speech Thursday.
That's a blunt way of putting it, ha-ha.
Most of the pain won’t be felt immediately. But experts and lawmakers agree that the cuts will have the greatest and most immediate impact on defense spending, which could have far-reaching implications for Massachusetts and the rest of New England....
That has been the focus of my war paper.
Related: Congress gives reprieve to Mass. military bases
Look$ like we will be making out okay after all.
About 100,000 low-income families nationwide are projected to lose housing vouchers, including nearly 4,000 in Massachusetts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The cuts will also reduce funding to state public housing and homeless assistance by about $14 million.
Medicaid and Social Security benefits won’t be touched by the cuts, while Medicare payments to health providers will drop 2 percent. Head Start, the federally funded early childhood education initiative, will also see budget cuts, leaving 1,100 Massachusetts children out of the program this year, according to the White House.
That's one of the few times I can remember seeing anything about the social impact.
Some outside estimates, however, hold that cuts this year will be less than administration officials expect. The Congressional Budget Office projects that only $44 billion of the $85 billion in cuts slated for this year will go into effect, with the remainder made up in later years. Republicans on Capitol Hill argue that such a number, making up less than 4 percent of federal discretionary spending, is a manageable amount of government fat to cut.
It's still the same old s***-show shenanigans!
Individual agencies will have some power to mitigate the impact, said Patrick Lester, fiscal policy director at the Center for Effective Government, a nonpartisan watchdog group. The difficulty for officials, he said, is mostly political....
And if we talked about it you would find it's because the Democrats f*** op (or did they?).
"People need to keep track of the dogs that aren’t barking.”
Related: The Secret Service at Booker Elementary: The Dog That Did Not Bark
Been tracking him for over ten years now.
Experts differ in their analyses of how severe of an impact the cuts will have. But administration officials say....
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Also see:
"November’s election should have put to rest the question of where the public stands."
Why? We were told we stuck with the status quo.
The most disturbing aspect of the president's political push:
"This week, federal immigration officials, citing anticipated budget cuts forced by sequestration, released several hundred immigrants from jails across the United States."
"Release of immigrants brings debate on freeing many more" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, March 01, 2013
Daphne Alce fled political upheaval and an abusive husband in Haiti. Then she ran from a boyfriend who beat her in Canada and tried to make her way to Philadelphia, where she had sent her children to live with a sister. When Alce tried to cross the US border with a fraudulent passport in October, she was caught and arrested.
US prosecutors, hearing her story, dropped the charges. An asylum officer interviewed her and determined she had a credible fear of persecution if she were deported to Haiti. But immigration officials kept her in jail, holding her in Boston and releasing her only last month after the Globe requested an interview.
“I was crying, crying, crying,” Alce said after a brown minivan dropped her off at South Station one day last month, still dressed in a gray prison sweatsuit and white sneakers. “They were just holding me here for no reason.”
Despite the high-profile release of hundreds of immigrants this week, immigration lawyers and advocacy groups say that thousands of immigrants like Alce — who have no criminal record and pose no threat to their communities — remain jailed by the nation’s sprawling immigration system, sometimes for prolonged periods.
The detainees are held for many reasons, but often they are merely awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge or waging an appeal, and lawyers say immigration officials instead should release them to their families.
Critics say detention is necessary to ensure that illegal immigrants are deported, but advocates argue that many of the roughly 30,000 detainees could be monitored in cheaper and more humane ways.
“We think that most people that are in detention right now can be let out,” said Laura Rotolo, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. “Until now we have not gotten the sense that the administration was willing to do that.”
Immigrant advocates have pushed for years for the release of such detainees, without much success. Even a directive in 2011 asking Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to focus resources on criminals and others considered priority cases did not result in major releases, advocates said.
But advocates recently began stepping up pressure on the Obama administration, seeing a prime political opportunity as the president and Congress attempt to hammer out legislation that could clear the way to legal status for some 11 million illegal immigrants nationwide.
The effort worries critics like Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, whose agency detains immigrants for ICE. He said immigration officials should enforce the law unless it changes.
“We can’t keep marginalizing what the enforcement of our law is,” he said. “If everybody starts interpreting what their impression of the law ought to be, then we’re going to have problems with our democracy.”
This week, federal immigration officials, citing anticipated budget cuts forced by sequestration, released several hundred immigrants from jails across the United States. It ignited a political firestorm, cheering advocates but angering members of Congress and others who said the mass release could derail their efforts to craft immigration reform legislation....
Gillian Christensen, ICE spokeswoman, said immigration officials will keep trying to deport the released immigrants and has placed them on less costly forms of supervision to make sure the agency stays within budget....
Shouldn't they have done that already? What is with the waste of money that now requires a sequester scare?
Immigration advocacy groups, while heartened by the release, say they’ll continue to press for more.
Among those still detained this week was Ronei Ferreira-De Souza, a 36-year-old landscaper from Brazil who has been fighting to overturn a deportation order for five months from Plymouth County jail.
His lawyer, George Maroun, said Ferreira-De Souza is a church-going married man and the father of two US citizens with a stack of reference letters from friends who praise his work ethic and faith. And, his lawyer said, he has no criminal record, though he was once arrested for driving without a license.
Well, he has a criminal record then!
“I don’t know why he’s in jail. It doesn’t follow any of the guidelines that they have,” said Maroun, based in Woburn. “He’s a father of two kids. He’s not a terrorist.”
Well, none of them are. They are either patsies who were set-up or they work for western intelligence agencies. Some may be criminals, though.
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Also see: Sunday Globe Special: Deportation Dilemma
We are told they are fixing it soon:
"Progress made on immigration bill" by Erica Werner | Associated Press, February 22, 2013
WASHINGTON — Business and labor groups announced agreement Thursday on the principles of a new system to bring lower-skilled workers to the United States, a key priority for a comprehensive immigration bill.
The US Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO reached consensus after weeks of closed-door negotiations they were conducting at the request of Senators Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, two of the senators involved in drafting an immigration deal on Capitol Hill.
Labor just abandoned you, American worker.
Ensuring that future workers can come to the United States legally is expected to be a central element of the deal, which will also address border security, employer verification, and a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
I would like to know where they are going to find the jobs, because... unless they have positions waiting for them since so many businesses seem to rely on illegal immigrant labor, and they also make life comfortable for the very rich.
Btw, the country is not the public relations image and illusion you find in the brochure, prospective immigrants -- although I imagine it is better than your home economy that has been ruined by the very system put in place by those now fixing the problem.
The principles announced Thursday include agreement on the need for a way to let businesses more easily hire foreign workers when Americans aren’t available to fill jobs.
From what I've heard they work a day and quit.
This will require a new kind of worker visa program that does not keep all workers in a permanent temporary status and responds as the US economy grows and shrinks, the groups said in a joint news release.
How many of those do we have now?
They also said they see the need for a new professional bureau housed within a federal executive agency and tasked with informing Congress and the public about labor market needs and shortages.
When was the last time another layer of bureaucracy improved anything?
That addresses a key demand from the labor side for a more transparent and data-driven process about business’ needs for workers....
That's it? That's all they got?
The statement from the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO said. ‘‘We are now in the middle — not the end — of this process.’’
Even so, Thursday’s agreement represents a significant step in talks that some on Capitol Hill gave little chance of success....
And when the bill is ready for a vote they will spring it upon us with breaking news and media focus.
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Related: GOP senators pitch plan on immigration to House allies
A path to citizenship — or a maze?
He may have an idea there, but he's a nonresident?
