Category Archives: Harry Reid
Harry Reid Doesn’t Hate Kids with Cancer
Harry Reid got into trouble with children with cancer last week.
The NIH includes children in some of its cancer research programs. It became a victim of the government shutdown. The House wants to pass bills to fund NIH as well as other popular programs that are being shutdown, but the senate refuses to go along.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, “But if you can help one child who has cancer why wouldn’t you do that?” Reid: “Why would we want to do that? I have 1,100 people at Nellis Air Force Base who are sitting at home.” He then went on to call Bash “irresponsible or reckless”.
Reid later apologized but still refuses to pass any bills the don’t include funding for everything including ObamaCare.
Why Harry Doesn’t Want to Help Kids with Cancer
Seth Mandel, in Commentary, thinks this is a strategy to avoid exposing just how much government spending really is non-essential:
“That raises a different question: if Republicans are willing to pass all these spending bills, why won’t they just remove the strings and fund the whole government? And the answer is because they are–intentionally or not–demonstrating just how much of the government is not essential. John Steele Gordon wrote yesterday that the shutdown exposes the waste in the federal government: if most employees are non-essential, what on earth are taxpayers paying all those salaries and benefits for?”
The Atlantic Wire posted the headline, “Come on, no. Harry Reid Doesn’t Hate Kids With Cancer”.
The WSJ’s Best of the Web James Taranto says, “When you feel compelled to answer a question like that, it’s a sign you aren’t winning the argument.”
The Madness of King Obama
But Mr. Obama really believes the stars will fall from the sky if spending declines. – Daniel Henninger WSJ 2/28/13
“That’s a kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time”, said Bob Woodward referring to the president’s refusal to deploy the U.S.S. Harry Truman to the Persian Gulf because of “sequestration“. The sequestration cuts represent a 4% decrease in spending growth. Obama has been on the campaign trail promoting hysteria and blaming Republicans for the automatic budget cuts.
In a February 22 Washington Post story, Woodward showed, from reporting for his book “The Price of Politics”, that sequestration was the president’s idea.
Update: Bob Woodward has been told he will “regret” doing this by a senior White House official. Here’s a Daily Caller account of Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Woodward on CNN.
BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?
WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter — I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don’t look at it that way, we do look at it that way. and it’s, I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication’s strategy — let’s hope it’s not a strategy, but it’s a tactic that somebody’s employed, and said, look, we don’t go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don’t like, that, you know, you’re regret this. It’s Mickey Mouse.
Politico says the threat came from Obama economic adviser, Gene Sperling. Politico also has a copy of Sperling’s email to Woodward. Here’s an excerpt. You can read the whole email here.
“…But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim…”
The reference to moving the goal posts is that Republicans agreed to a tax hike as part of the fiscal cliff deal in exchange for future tax cuts. The president now wants more tax hikes.
Update to the Update: Now Lanny Davis, former Clinton attorney, says he was threatened by they White House. Here’s a link to WMAL via Drudge.
“…Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, “received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of my columns, even though I’m a supporter of Obama. I couldn’t imagine why this call was made.” Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, “that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials….”
The King’s Court has had a Ministry of Truth attitude from the beginning. Go here for my 2010 cartoon about HHS Secretary Sebalius threatening insurance companies for blaming rate hikes on Obamacare. And go here for my 2009 cartoon about the White House asking you to inform on your fellow citizens if you see “something fishy”. And here’s my cartoon about Justice Department intimidation of CBS reporter Sheryl Attkinsson for her reporting on Fast and Furious.
Senate Budget
The 1974 Budget Act requires both houses to pass a budget every year. The senate is four years in arrears.
House Republicans hatched a plan on Friday to raise the debt ceiling, but only if each chamber passes a budget. If senators don’t pass a budget, they don’t get paid.
This sounds suspiciously similar to Charles Krauthammer’s Friday pitch in his Washington Post column, though he didn’t mention the pay part.
Kimberley Strassel, in the WSJ, details how Harry Reid’s rope-a-dope tactics “hide the party’s spending ambitions” and “casts the Republicans as the cause of every legislative crises”.
Fiscal Sacrifice
The president came to Washington, demanded shared sacrifice, got his fiscal cliff deal and returned to Hawaii. According to Bloomberg taxes will go up for 77.1 percent of American families. The Congressional Budget Office says the deal will cost $4 trillion over the next decade. Spending cuts? … Maybe later. Kevin O’brien has a nice rant about that here.
Budget Baseline Camp
Uncle Sam’s starting point for spending is a baseline of the previous year CBO projections for the coming year.
“The most absurd current example is Mr. Obama’s claim that his “$4 trillion” plan reduces the deficit by about $800 billion over 10 years by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those “savings,” as he calls them, are measured against a White House budget office spending baseline that is fictional. Those wars are already being unwound and everyone knows the money will never be spent. But they are called “savings” to gull the public and make the deficit reduction add up to a large-sounding $4 trillion.”
