Government employment by president (charts)
By Will Femia

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Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:41 PM EST
The graphics in last night's Chart Imitates Life segment drew a strong response from the folks I was watching with on Twitter, so I've brought the charts here, after the jump. If you're interested in exploring the statistics yourself and are frustrated by the labyrinthine Bureau of Labor Statistics site, the charts come from Table B-1, here.[In the next blog] Scroll way down toward the bottom for the Government sector options. You're better off with the seasonally adjusted view because otherwise it's all zig-zaggy. Once you ask it to retrieve the data you'll be taken to a page that allows you to choose the date range with a check box option for showing a chart. So, for example, if you're curious what last night's charts look like all strung together (government employees since 1988)...

Just a reminder, this one is showing change in government employment during recession periods for these presidents.

Gov. Rick Scott embraces Medicaid expansion in Florida
By: Jason Millman
February 20, 2013 04:45 PM EST

Scott’s move is a big win for implementation of Obamacare. | AP Photo
Florida Gov. Rick Scott — a fierce foe of Obamacare who fought it all the way to the Supreme Court — on Wednesday announced that he would accept the Medicaid expansion under the health law.

He is the seventh GOP governor to do so — and arguably the biggest political symbol of grudging Republican acceptance that Obamacare is the law of the land.

Scott had campaigned against the health legislation even before he began running for office, and Florida led the 26 states that fought it in court.

On Wednesday, that changed as he agreed to take the federally financed expansion that would cover more than 1 million people — at least for the first three years.

“While the federal government is committed to paying 100 percent of the cost of new people in Medicaid, I cannot in good conscience deny the uninsured access to care,” he explained in a speech late Wednesday.

But Scott’s Medicaid endorsement comes with a caveat no other governor has proposed. He said he’ll push legislators to support just a three-year expansion of the program — which is after the end of his first term. That forces the state to re-evaluate the expansion before getting locked in for a longer-term commitment.

“This is a commonsense solution to dealing with this for the next three years,” Scott said. “It’ll give us time to think about how we can improve the system.”

Democrats and advocates of the health law were jubilant — but annoyed that it took so long.

"Three years of staunch opposition and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars later, embattled Gov. Rick Scott today flip-flopped on the central issue which has defined his political career,” said Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Allison Tant.

“This stunning about-face is merely the latest move to repackage a governor whose approval rating with Floridians remains as toxic as his tea party agenda,” she added.

The road from Obamacare foe to Medicaid expander was a long and strange journey for Scott, a former hospital executive who spent millions four years ago in a failed attempt to derail the health care bill in Congress.

From there, he launched a gubernatorial bid in Florida, took office in 2011 and quickly aligned himself with Govs. Rick Perry of Texas and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — outspoken conservatives who have refused to lift a finger to implement Obamacare.

A few days after Obama won reelection, Scott gave a surprising interview to The Associated Press hinting a softening in his stalwart opposition. Amid unfavorable polls at home, Scott talked about wanting to work with the feds on the health law.

Scott’s Obamacare diplomacy led to a high-profile early January meeting with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, after which both sides expressed a commitment to keep working together. It also became apparent that Scott was trying to win concessions from HHS on how to design Florida’s Medicaid program. He won approval of two waivers — and the announcement came just hours after the second one.

Mitch McConnell gets punk’d by fake national security blog
Clare Kim,
11:00 PM on 02/21/2013

Mitch McConnell got punk’d…by a blog. Well, more like his staff who wrote a letter on behalf of a constituent to Elizabeth King, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs. As the Pentagon’s congressional liaison, McConnell’s staff appropriately forwarded a concern regarding Guantanamo Bay prisoners receiving post-9/11 G.I. bill benefits.

On Nov. 14, 2012, the Senate Minority Leader wrote the following letter that was uncovered byWired magazine’s Spencer Ackerman.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell broke it down in this manner: “The letter is actually asking an Assistant Secretary of Defense if GiTMO Bay al Qaeda detainees are getting—not just veterans’ benefits—but the enhanced veterans benefits of the post 9/11 G.I. bill. You got that? Mitch McConnell’s staff wants to know if the Obama administration is giving veterans’ benefits to the people the Obama administration believes would like to blow up America.”

In the contituent’s note, which was also uncovered by Wired magazine, the individual points out that there was no information about this online, not even on the Pentagon’s website. Instead, the constituent the only place such a claim can be found is in an article on The Duffel Blog, a military news satire website.

O’Donnell discussed two scenarios that could have followed. “Either no one on the McConnell staff went to The Duffel Blog website and read the article–which would be grotesque congressional staff malpractice—or McConnell’s staff did read the article on The Duffel Blog and believed it.”

Which means McConnell’s staff would have had to believe things like this from The Duffel Blog post:

DoD spokesman Wesley Manheim said that it was all a matter of fairness, “The DoD has been doing everything it can to prevent torture from being used against detainees at GiTMO. By allowing the detainees to use the Department of Veterans Affairs, we hope to completely crush their souls with bureaucracy, which to be noted, is completely different from torture. I mean hell, the V.A. does that to our veterans on a daily basis.”

The Last Word traded emails with Senator McConnell’s office on Thursday to try and confirm who wrote the letter and if the Republican leader knew if the letter existed, but the staff did not offer any answers to those questions.

The Last Word did receive a statement today from Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon’s spokesman on all matters Guantanamo. He told us the following:

“To be clear, communications between this Department and members of Congress are not open for discussion. However, any suggestion that enemy detainees are in receipt of the G.I. Bill or any other benefit intended for those who have earned it, is absurd in the extreme. Duffel Blog is a very cleverly put together, but obvious satire, website that has, apparently, fooled more than one person.”

Lawrence O’Donnell continued, “Twenty years ago someone on Mitch McConnell’s staff writing this letter would be fired. No senator would have continued to waste taxpayer dollars on the salary of anyone capable of being duped this way.” O’Donnell then concluded, “As Mitch McConnell continues to push for Medicare cuts and cuts in education spending and cuts in all sorts of valuable investments in our society the government supports, the last place Mitch McConnell will look to save the taxpayers any money is his own stunningly incompetent staff.”

Top Links: One week until sequestration and the Republican strategy vs. Obama doesn't appear to be working

John Flowers,

10:51 AM on 02/22/2013

Republicans’ attempt to blame President Obama for the sequester cuts doesn’t appear to be working. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Top story: This time next Friday, Republicans may be ruing their sequestration strategy versus President Obama.

• It seems the president’s message of what sequester cuts will cost communities is working, as evidenced by local media taking notice. (Buzzfeed)
• President Obama “brings anti-sequestration message Tuesday to #Va, where quarter of economy tied to fedl spending.” (Jeff E. Shapiro)
• “Why the sequester will probably take place (at least in short term): GOP needs to show its base it’s fighting Obama.” (Mark Murray)
• “Conservatives want sequester bc they like things that make govt dysfunctional, so they can say govt is dysfunctional.” (Josh Barro)
• If sequester hits, the FAA – including air traffic controllers – would be minus about 10 percent of its workforce. (The New York Times)
• So when would people begin to notice the cuts? Difficult to say exactly. But by March 1, federal offices tell everybody who loses what; by March 7 unemployment checks will be lower; and by April 6 the Defense Department will begin layoffs and furloughs. (The New York Times)
• Here’s the complete White House fact sheet on how the cuts would affect everything from education to food safety to mental health to emergency responders. (White House)
• Here’s how you run a sequester: ‘Scrape five percent less poop’ (Wonkblog)
• The silver lining to all this sequester talk? Unlike the debt ceiling and fiscal cliff fights, this one “will probably cost ‘only’ around 700,000 jobs.” (Paul Krugman)
• And now for your Friday viewing pleasure, a video history of Paul Ryan supporting the sort of sequestration he now says is the president’s fault:

The ‘suicidal’ Republican resistance to compromiseVictoria DeFrancesco Soto, @drvmds
11:29 AM on 02/13/2013

House Speaker John Boehner, who has previously forsworn the word “compromise,” appeared nonplussed at most of the proposals President Obama offered in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. (AP Pool)

From an early age, around the time we learned ourSchoolhouse Rock!, we were taught that our system of checks and balances is a pillar of American democracy. The different branches serve to check each other so that no one branch becomes too powerful and driven by a narrow set of interests.

The same goes for our party system. The value of having two or more parties—in our case, Republicans and Democrats—is that they can further check and balance democracy across and within branches. In theory, divided government is a good thing. In practice, our norm of divided government has become problematic because of its heavy dose of checking and scant amount of balancing.

Politics is about give and take. But compromise is the one thing that seems to be missing from politics today not only between branches, but in the case of Republicans even among partisans. Herein lies the problem: How can we expect the branches to compromise if the parties themselves cannot agree on how to proceed?

We tend to point the finger at our elected officials. And yes, they do deserve a fair share of the responsibility, or blame—depending on your point of view. However, as individual constituents we also need to share in the responsibility of the diminishing role of compromise. We can’t ask our elected officials to want to compromise when we as voters do not want to. We citizens are the ones who hire and fire our elected officials, so in large part our elected officials are responding to us.

The Pew Research Center recently came out with a study that shows how we as Americans think about political compromise. The good news is that half of us like elected officials who make compromises with people they disagree with. This is especially good news given that just two years ago only 40% of Americans liked officials who compromised. However, a very different picture emerges when that figure is broken down by party.

Close to 60% of Democrats like to see elected officials compromise. In contrast, slightly more than one-third of Republicans do not like to see their elected officials compromise. For a majority of the GOP’s rank-and-file, it’s their way, or “no way.”

In his column last Saturday, the New York Times‘ Charles Blow referred to these unbendable Republicans as “suicide conservatives.” These are the folks that will not support any sort of compromise even among their own party. Not only are these conservative partisans willing to go down, but they’ll take down those around them.

The test of just how true to the cause these “suicide conservatives” are will come in the 2014 election. It’s one thing to say that you don’t like compromising on a political survey and another to vote against your self-interest come election time. Would a conservative Republican really prefer to see a liberal Democratic Senator elected rather than a moderate Republican?

We will know soon enough how this shakes out, but in the short term the collateral damage is being felt by all of us in the stalemate that has gripped our political system. If only we could ask our elected officials—and especially the “suicide conservatives”—to simply follow the playground rule of playing nice in the sandbox.

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, an NBC Latino contributor, was host Melissa Harris-Perry’s guest last Sunday. See below their discussion about the Republican efforts to “re-brand.”

Ted Nugent’s bizarre response to the SOTU

Morgan Whitaker
11:57 AM on 02/13/2013

Texas Rep. Steve Stockman’s controversial State of the Union guest Ted Nugent brought his trademark severe rhetoric back into the spotlight as he took on the “media orgy” in Statuary Hall after the speech.

The aging rocker called Rhode Island Rep. Jim Langevin ”s*#t for brains” for his comments that Nugent was an “odd choice for a member of Congress to invite someone who threatened the life of the President.”

When asked what it was like sitting in the chamber alongside victims of gun violence, Nugent launched into a confusing rant about “engineered recidivism” and the mental health system.

“Our mental health system has failed so thoroughly that people who have threatened lives and conduct themselves in dangerous abhorrent behavior,” he said. “And have been alerted, the officials have been alerted by co-workers, fellow students, mothers and fathers of these mass murderers.”

He took on the president too, criticizing his “predicable, flowery, feel good, save the children, end world hunger insanity.”

“And then I see him either do nothing, or do the opposite,” he said. “I feel horrible that we’re going after my guns, instead of stopping crime and dangerous behavior.”

When challenged by NBC news reporter Luke Russert over comments he made last year, comparing Democrats like Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton to coyotes who deserve to be shot, Nugent became agitated, cursing at Russert and calling him a liar in vulgar terms.

When Russert pressed him to explain what he said, Nugent repeatedly claimed he “never said that,” even though he can be seen on camera comparing those Democrats to coyotes who deserve to be shot and have their heads chopped off.

Nugent became even more agitated when asked why he didn’t stand in acknowledgement “of the brave men and women of our armed forces” during the address. His response? “Both of my legs are shattered, I can’t get up and down because of the pain,” he said. “I’m actually forgoing a double knee replacement today to be here tonight.”

He then lumped Russert into the same category as Congressmen Langevin for even asking the question.

It’s not the first time Nugent has used a physical ailment as an excuse for his behavior. Last May he blew up at a CBS reporter after he insinuated the rocker wasn’t a moderate.

After the interview ended, Nugent’s wife urged him to apologize, and he justified his behavior by pointing out he was rushed to the hospital to treat a kidney stone after the outburst.

Read more about Rep. Langevin’s response to Nugent’s outburst here.

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5 political truths about the sequester

By Chris Cillizza , Updated: February 22, 2013

In seven days, the sequester — the this-will-never-really-happen set of automatic cuts in federal spending — is set to kick in. Given that everyone in Washington expects the sequester to happen, it’s worth detailing what we know about the politics of it one week before it hits.

Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy and a (budget?) ax. Washington Post photo.

Our list of “what we knows” is below. What did we miss? (And make sure to read Wonkblog’s comprehensive breakdown of every sequester-related question you could possibly ever have.)

1. The policy debate is over…if it ever got started. It seems that after Republicans gave into President Obama on the fiscal cliff and then kicked the can down the road — worst metaphor ever! — on the debt ceiling, there was zero appetite for any more deals on debt and spending. And, while the Obama team insists that they have done everything they can to try to bring a deal about to sidestep the sequester, it’s been clear from their actions over the last 10 days or so that they had begun to plot how to win the political fight.

2. Obama starts the post-March 1 debt/spending debate in stronger shape. New numbers from the Pew Research Center show that 49 percent of Americans would blame congressional Republicans more for the sequester while 31 percent would lay the blame at President Obama’s feet.  Those numbers are rightly understood as a stand-in for the approval ratings of Obama and the GOP since people don’t really have any sense of what the sequester is or will do. (More on that shortly.) It’s unclear whether, as (or if) people get more informed about sequester, the blame game shifts — with the president coming in line for more scorn. Republicans certainly hope so but, having never had a moment like this one, it’s very tough to predict what the post-March 1 landscape will look like.

3. Most people aren’t paying any attention to the sequester. That Pew poll showed that just 27 percent of people said that they had heard “a lot” about the “automatic spending cuts” occurring on March 1.  More people — 29 percent — said they had heard “nothing at all” about it. Contrast that level of dis/un-interest with what the public said they knew a week before the debt ceiling hit in the summer of 2011 — in a Pew poll conducted roughly two weeks before we hit the ceiling, 50 percent said they had heard “a lot” about it.

4. And/but Republicans are paying more attention. Thirty six percent of self-identified Republicans say they have heard  ”a lot” about the automatic cuts as compared to 23 percent of Democrats and 25 percent of independents. Among that group of Republicans paying close attention to sequestration, a majority (54 percent) want the cuts to simply go into effect while 38 percent favor delaying them. Those numbers make a very clear political case for why Republican elected officials won’t be cutting any last minute deals with the White House.

5. The new, new deadline for doing something is March 27. That’s when the continuing resolution — that little thing that, you know, funds the federal government, runs out. Most smart Capitol Hill types are pointing to those last few weeks of March as the time when the two sides will come to the negotiating table to try to avert the remaining sequester cuts with a package of spending cuts and closing of tax loopholes. And don’t forget that the debt ceiling is going to need to be raised (or not) by May.

© The Washington Post Company

The Sequester: Absolutely everything you could possibly need to know, in one FAQ

Posted by Dylan Matthews on February 20, 2013 at 3:24 pm.  

At the end of the month, the dread sequester is set to take effect. Hands up if you know what exactly that means — and be honest. Don’t worry, we’re here to set you straight. 

Follow along for answers to some of the most-asked questions about the impending cuts.

What is the sequester?

 

The sequester is a group of cuts to federal spending set to take effect March 1, barring further congressional action.

Where did it come from?


President Obama signs the Budget Control Act into law. (Pete Souza/White House)

The sequester was originally passed as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), better known as the debt ceiling compromise.

It was intended to serve as incentive for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (aka the “Supercommittee”) to come to a deal to cut $1.5 trillion over 10 years. If the committee had done so, and Congress had passed it by Dec. 23, 2011, then the sequester would have been averted.
Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Wasn’t this supposed to happen at New Year’s?


President Obama, Vice President Biden and congressional leaders working out the fiscal cliff deal, which would delay the sequester for two months. (Pete Souza/White House)

Yes. The Budget Control Act originally stipulated that the sequester cuts would take effect at the beginning of 2013. Together with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut, this would have amounted to a giant fiscal contraction, almost certainly throwing the United States into another recession. The combination of policies came to be known as “the fiscal cliff.”

A deal was reached to avert the cliff, in which the sequester was delayed to March 1.

What gets cut?

The cuts are evenly split between domestic and defense programs, with half affecting defense discretionary spending (weapons purchases, base operations, construction work, etc.) and the rest affecting both mandatory (which generally means regular payouts like Social Security or Medicaid) and discretionary domestic spending. Only a few mandatory programs, like the unemployment trust fund and, most notably, Medicare (more specifically its provider payments) are affected. The bulk of cuts are borne by discretionary spending for either defense or domestic functions.

What is exempted?


Food stamps are exempt from the sequester. (For The Washington Post)

Most mandatory programs, like Medicaid and Social Security, and in particular low-income programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, or welfare) and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) were exempt from the sequester.

How much gets cut?
 

 

The 2013 sequester includes:

• $42.7 billion in defense cuts (a 7.9 percent cut).
• $28.7 billion in domestic discretionary cuts (a 5.3 percent cut).
• $9.9 billion in Medicare cuts (a 2 percent cut).
• $4 billion in other mandatory cuts (a 5.8 percent cut to nondefense programs, and a 7.8 percent cut to mandatory defense programs).

That makes for a total of $85.4 billion in cuts. Note: numbers here updated to latest CBO figures; thanks to Center for Budget and Policy Priorities for noting the difference from initial OMB numbers.

More will be cut in 2014 and later; from 2014 to 2021, the sequester will cut $87 to $92 billion from the discretionary budget every year, and $109 billion total.

Will any programs actually end?


No wasteful programs, like Alaska’s infamous Bridge to Nowhere (above), will be eliminated. Instead, almost every program will see an across-the-board cut. (Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority)

Nope. The sequester cuts discretionary spending across-the-board by 9.4 percent for defense and 8.2 percent for everything else. But no programs are actually eliminated. The effect is to reduce the scale and scope of existing programs rather than to zero out any of them.

What notable programs get cut?


The National Institutes of Health will see budget cuts in the billions if the sequester goes through. (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

Here are just a few. Update: Note that these are rough estimates based on numbers put out by OMB before the fiscal cliff deal:

1. Aircraft purchases by the Air Force and Navy are cut by $3.5 billion.
2. Military operations across the services are cut by about $13.5 billion.
3. Military research is cut by $6.3 billion.
4. The National Institutes of Health get cut by $1.6 billion.
5. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are cut by about $323 million.
6. Border security is cut by about $581 million.
7. Immigration enforcement is cut by about $323 million.
8. Airport security is cut by about $323 million.
9. Head Start gets cut by $406 million, kicking 70,000 kids out of the program.
10. FEMA’s disaster relief budget is cut by $375 million.
11. Public housing support is cut by about $1.94 billion.
12. The FDA is cut by $206 million.
13. NASA gets cut by $970 million.
14. Special education is cut by $840 million.
15. The Energy Department’s program for securing our nukes is cut by $650 million.
16. The National Science Foundation gets cut by about $388 million.
17. The FBI gets cut by $480 million.
18. The federal prison system gets cut by $355 million.
19. State Department diplomatic functions are cut by $650 million.
20. Global health programs are cut by $433 million; the Millenium Challenge Corp. sees a $46 million cut, and USAID a cut of about $291 million.
21. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is cut by $55 million.
22. The SEC is cut by $75.6 million.
23. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is cut by $2.6 million.
24. The Library of Congress is cut by $31 million.
25. The Patent and Trademark office is cut by $156 million.

Will military personnel see their pay or benefits cut?


President Obama greets Australian troops, who are actually totally safe from the sequester. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Pay: no. Benefits: yes. While military salaries are exempt from the sequester, benefits like tuition assistance and the TRICARE program (which provides health care to personnel and their families, among others) are not.

Will federal employee salaries get cut?


The federal employees in this picture are going to be very disappointed by how much the sequester punishes the public. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Technically, no, but effectively, yes. The Congressional Research Service has written that a sequester may not “reduce or have the effect of reducing the rate of pay an employee is entitled to” under their federal pay scale. However, the sequester is likely to cause furloughs, which amount to unpaid time off, or, basically, a pay cut.

How many people will lose their jobs?

Depends who you ask. Stephen Fuller, an economist at the libertarian-minded George Mason University, puts the number at 2.14 million jobs lost. That includes the direct loss of 325,693 jobs from defense cuts (including 48,147 civilian employees at the DoD) and 420,529 jobs from non-defense cuts (including 229,116 federal workers — the rest, by and large, are contractors). The rest of the jobs losses are indirect, resulting in a 1.5 point increase in the unemployment rate. However, Fuller’s estimates predate the delay in the sequester passed in December, and other analysts are more measured. Macroeconomic Advisers estimates the sequester will add only 0.25 points to the unemployment rate, a sixth of the impact Fuller predicts.

What will this do to the economy?

The CBO estimates that the combined federal fiscal tightening taking place in 2013 is knocking 1.5 points off GDP growth for the year. Of that, about 5/8 of a percent (or 0.565%) is due to the sequester. Macroeconomic Advisers similarly estimates that the sequester will shave off 0.6 points from the year’s growth rate. George Mason economist Stephen Fuller’sestimates are more dramatic, putting the loss of 2013 GDP at $215 billion, reducing the growth rate of GDP by two thirds. However, Fuller’s estimates precede the shrinking of the sequester.

What does Obama want to do about it?


President Obama has been vague on how he’d replace the sequester. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

President Obama has been less specific than his colleagues in Congress on how he wants to see the sequester replaced, but he has suggested that, in lieu of a bigger deficit reduction deal, he wants to see the 2013 sequester replaced with a package of tax increases (including loophole closures and increases on the wealthy) and spending cuts.

What do Democrats in Congress want to do about it?


Sens. Patty Murray (seated, left) released Senate Democrats’ sequester plan. (Mike Theiler/Reuters)

House Democrats, led by Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen, proposedreplacing the $85 billion in 2013 sequester cuts with a mix of tax increases — including a “Buffett rule”-style minimum tax on income above $1 million and repeal of tax subsidies for oil companies — and spending cuts, notably including a reduction in farm subsidy payments to farmers and an increase in flood insurance premiums.

Most of these policies would be spread over a decade rather than falling entirely in 2013.

Senate Democrats, led by Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, introduced the American Family Economic Protection Act, which replaces the 2013 sequester with $110 billion in spending cuts and tax increases, spread out over the course of a decade. Like the House plan, these policies include a “Buffett rule,” the closure of tax loopholes for oil companies and cuts to farm subsidies. Additionally, the Senate bill cuts military spending in excess of the sequester’s cuts.

Both the Senate and House Democrats’ plans allow the sequester to take effect at the beginning of 2014.

What do Republicans in Congress want to do about it?


House Speaker John Boehner, right, has laid out the Republican position on replacing the sequester. (Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg)

As part of John Boehner’s “plan B” approach to avoiding the fiscal cliff (embarked upon after initial talks with the White House broke down), the House on Dec. 20, 2012, passed the Spending Reduction Act of 2012. The plan would have replaced the 2013 defense sequester with a variety of spending cuts, including cuts to food stamps, the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank (including eliminating the “orderly liquidation authority” at the center of the legislation). It would have reduced the size of the domestic sequester in proportion to the $19 billion in discretionary savings included in the bill.

Republicans have conceded that they won’t be able to pass the bill again, even in the House, but it provides a model for what Republicans want in a temporary replacement: no tax increases, no defense cuts and considerable domestic spending reductions.

What do outside groups want to do about it?


The AARP (whose activists are pictured here) is among many groups resisting the sequester’s domestic cuts. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)

Just about every interest group wants to stop the sequester and just about none wants to see it take effect. Aerospace and defense companies, along with universities reliant on defense research funding, have launched Second to None, a coalition battling the defense cuts. A group of almost three thousand organizations, including the NAACP, AARP, Children’s Defense Fund, the Wilderness Society, Greenpeace, Human Rights Campaign, the Innocence Project, and many, many more, have warned about the impact of the non-defense discretionary cuts in the sequester. Physicians and medical research organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Pediatrics Association and many others, are resisting the discretionary cuts to medical research, and in particular the National Institutes of Health. Liberal groups like MoveOn and the Working Families Party are also getting in on the action.

The Tea Party-affiliated FreedomWorks has put out a letter calling for ObamaCare to be defunded so as to match the expected post-sequester spending level without letting the sequester take effect.

• 

  The problem with Alan Simpson

• 

  Bye bye, big health insurance rate hikes

• 

  How the tax debate moved right

• 

  Obamacare is winning

These 21 animals have strong feelings on the sequester


Posted by Sarah Kliff, Suzy Khimm, Brad Plumer, Ezra Klein and Dylan Matthews on February 22, 2013 at 3:30 pm

Under the terms of the sequester, the Smithsonian will take a $40 million budget cut in 2013. Among the programs run by the Smithsonian? The National Zoo.

In today’s Washington Post, Steve Hendrix talked to employees at the Smithsonian National Zoo about what the sequester would mean for the many animals they watch. They, unsurprisingly, are not pleased. “I have a very ill anteater right now,” said Craig Saffoe, curator of the zoo’s big cats. “I have tigers that are breeding; I have tigers that are being shipped out; I have Andean bears with cubs fresh on the ground.”

But staff are also resolute. “We will never compromise on human safety, and we’ll never compromise animal welfare,” promises Dennis Kelly, director of the National Zoo, which has a $50 million budget and employs 450 people. “These people are incredibly devoted to these animals.” The story is a great read, although it did miss one key question: How do the animals feel about this mess? Let’s take a look!

1. This Andean bear cub has been shouting about the consequences of the sequester for months now, but feels like nobody has been listening.

Beth Branneu, Smithsonian’s National Zoo

2. This short-eared elephant shrew worries that he will lose 5 percent of his regularly-scheduled cricket lunches. This cricket, meanwhile, hopes that is the case.

Photo courtesy of FONZ Photo Club member Clyde Nishimura.

3. This beaver is fed up with the sequester blame-game. Congress passed it and the President signed it!

(Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

4. This octopus worries that he’ll lose two of his eight legs under the sequester.

(National Zoo)

5. These sea lions are debating whether their inflatable balls count as a “program” or “activity.”

(Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

6. This incredibly tiny strawberry dart frog is watching every dime.

(Smithsonian National Zoo)

7. These gibbons are fine with the sequester. They think there’s too much waste around the zoo anyway.

(Meghan Murphy/Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

8. This naked mole rat honestly has bigger problems than a sequester.

(Meghan Murphy, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

9. These otters literally can’t believe this is how Congress chose to cut the budget.

(Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

10. This baby fishing cat thinks we spend too much money on elderly fishing cats.

(Tallie Wiles, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

11. This eagle thinks the deficit hawks are nuts.

(Jim Jenkins, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

12. This tortoise has lived through a dozen sequesters, and will probably live through a dozen more. 

(Brittany Steff/Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

13. This hippo is safe from the sequester in the private industry (seriously: he moved to Milwaukee).

(Smithsonian National Zoo)

14. This alpaca doesn’t understand why discretionary spending is being targeted when it’s entitlements that are out of control.

(Mehgan Murphy/Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

15. Tai Shan is especially worried about the panda breeding program.

(Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

16. This orangutan thinks sequestered agencies should be able to hang in there.

(Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

17. This Cuban crocodile was hoping this big mess would be settled before he hatched.

(Barbara Watkins, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

18. This Andean bear is a fan of Yuval Levin’s plan for means-testing Medicare.

(Mehgan Murphy, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

19. These burrowing owls would like to hear more about Obama’s plan to replace the sequester.

(Mehgan Murphy/Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

20. This anteater thinks we made our own bed by creating the sequester in the first place, so we should just lie in it.

(Mehgan Murphy / Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

21. Honey badger don’t care about the sequester. He does not live in the zoo. 

CORRECTION: The animals in #7 were originally labeled “monkeys,” but they are gibbons. And the critter in #18 is an Andean bear, not a sloth bear. We regret these errors.

Mark O’Mara redefines ‘Stand your ground’ 

Posted by Jonathan Capehart on February 22, 2013 at 7:04 pm

Mark   O’Mara and George Zimmerman (Joe Burbank/AP)

Mark O’Mara summed it up best during our 42-minute conversation on Wednesday: “This is an academic argument over the semantics of words.” The words in question are “stand your ground” (SYG). The argument is over whether Florida’s insane law applies to O’Mara’s client George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin.


In a post earlier this week, I wrote about how “‘[s]tand your ground’ eludes Robert Zimmerman.” George’s older brother has aggressively defended him on television andon Twitter. And I tartly declared, “For Robert Zimmerman to say SYG is not a factor in his brother’s case against the second-degree murder charge shows how little he knows about the law and his brother’s defense.” In fact, Zimmerman knows all about his brother’s defense, twisted though it may be.


Last August, O’Mara announced that he would not argue a “stand your ground” defense, using the same curious logic he used with me earlier this week. What’s problematic is that O’Mara is engaging in semantic gymnastics to avoid using the words “stand your ground” while availing himself of the law’s most generous provision, the immunity hearing. No such thing existed for self-defense cases before SYG became law in 2005.


With a major push from the National Rifle Association (NRA), Florida amended its self-defense statute to allow potential victims to stand their ground against an assailant by removing the duty to retreat and permitting them to meet force with force, including deadly force, if they reasonably believe it is necessary to save their life. It also granted immunity from prosecution. Because of this, SYG has been called a “license to kill” and the “shoot-first” law.


The prime mover behind this insane statute was Marion Hammer, the first female president of the NRA. Around the time of SYG’s passage, she told CNN about the rationale behind the changes.


“The law is constructed to give law-abiding people the right to protect themselves when they are attacked,” she said at the time. “I think the message to criminals is going to be — you break into a home, you run the risk of being shot. You attack people on the street, you run the risk of being shot.”


“Stop calling it a ‘stand your ground’ statute,” O’Mara told me. “We are never going to say that [this] is a ‘stand your ground’ case.” One reason for that, he said, is because the law itself is not called SYG but “Justifiable Use of Force.” Yet, he gave his own definition of SYG that doesn’t exactly mesh with what the law says. “I define ‘stand your ground’ as having an opportunity to retreat and you affirmatively decide not to,” he told me. Here’s what the law says:


Florida statute 776.013(3) says: (a) person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.


As you can see, it says nothing about “having the opportunity to retreat and you affirmatively decide not to.” It clearly states “no duty to retreat.” Still, O’Mara argued in an online post responding to my writing that SYG doesn’t apply to his client.


If the “Stand Your Ground” portion of the law was to be applied to the Zimmerman Case, even if George had an ability to retreat, he would not be required to do so before utilizing deadly force. In this particular case, George did not have an ability to retreat because he was on the ground with Trayvon Martin mounting him, striking blows, therefore the “Stand Your Ground” “benefit” given by the statute simply does not apply to the facts.


Confused? This circuitous logic is what kept O’Mara and me on the phone for more than 40 minutes. Even though standing one’s ground has nothing to do with physically standing to defend oneself, O’Mara insists on making it part of his rationale for why SYG doesn’t apply.


When I asked Benjamin Crump on Friday afternoon for his reaction to O’Mara’s assertion, I was surprised to hear that the lawyer for Trayvon’s parents agreed with the attorney for his killer.


We [are] glad to see that Mark finally agrees with us that it is not a Stand Your Ground case, because we’ve said all along that [George Zimmerman] profiled and pursued Trayvon. And once you chase somebody you can’t, it’s asinine to say that I’m defending myself once I pursue somebody. I go out and start the confrontation and then to say that I’m standing my ground.


Now the question is this here. Let’s don’t have a play on words and semantics and so forth. If he’s going to have a “stand your ground” hearing then call it a “stand your ground” hearing. Let’s don’t try to play on the public’s intelligence. It’s one of those things that you see where people want it both ways. And you can’t have it both ways. … If it’s not “stand your ground” then let’s go ahead and have the trial. Let’s go have the trial

Crump makes a very good point. O’Mara is trying to have it both ways by arguing a distinction without a difference. Either SYG applies or it doesn’t. And since all agree that SYG doesn’t apply, O’Mara should skip the immunity hearing and go straight to trial.

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