If you want to learn more about lung cancer, keep smoking.
If you want to learn more about personal hardship and kleptocracy, keep electing Republicans.
Ouch!
Conservatives can play accounting games, but a massive increase in defense spending is massive spending, and that means massive taxes continuing on.
Republicans are not the least bit interested in lowering our taxes.
If you want to learn more about Russia…
…remember everything runs on блат.
Everyone misunderstands what the GOP wants. They want to campaign against “government spending” and for “cutting programs” without cutting actual programs. They want to campaign on “repealing Obamacare” without actually doing so. Because if they ever did what they campaign on they would be voted out of office so fast their heads would spin. And those who survived would have nothing to campaign on the next time.
Flimflam… Trump’s dream is to buy our land and structures to give to corporations for toll roads and bridges, sell our airports, our heritage for profit. Where the public sector meets the private sector, expect corruption and contributions. Trump: making crony capitalism great again.
Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA),…accused the president of attempting to "balance the budget on the backs of our federal employees.”
Wait, whaaat?!! This apostate needs to be reminded that the goal is to balance the budget on the backs of the POORS (and middle-class, increasingly synonymous these days) while decrying attempts to adequately tax the wealthy as “class warfare”.
Is it too much to hope that this astonishing rhetorical leap is significant of the coming disintegration of the GOP?
Naaah. It’s just posturing.
“The Appalachian Regional Commission has a long-standing history of bipartisan support in Congress because of its proven ability to help reduce poverty rates and extend basic necessities to communities across the Appalachian region,” wrote Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY). “Today, nearly everyone in the region has access to clean water and sewer, the workforce is diversifying, educational opportunities are improving and rural technology is finally advancing to 21st Century standards. But there is more work to be done in these communities, and I will continue to advocate for sufficient funding.”
Amid this assault on environmental programs, a few Capitol Hill Republicans, led by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), are fighting their own party.
“A majority of the Climate Solutions Caucus, including the Republicans, are going to get on the record against these types of proposed cuts,” Curbelo told TPM on Friday. Ignoring the threat of climate change, he said, is “not dissimilar from ignoring our growing national debt and the implications it can have for younger generations of Americans.”
"I’m committed to continuing to do everything I can to protect and preserve Lake Erie, including preserving this critical program and its funding,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).
Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), who represents a Northern Virginia district, accused the president of attempting to "balance the budget on the backs of our federal employees.”
“The administration’s proposed cuts to funding for [the National Institute of Health], Chesapeake Bay cleanup, and our federal workforce, are just a few of the items inconsistent with our priorities,” she wrote.
Even before Trump’s budget saw the light of day, Republicans were sounding the alarm about the proposal to gut nearly a third of the State Department’s budget, targeting foreign aid and diplomatic work in particular.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warned that such a cut has no chance of passing Congress, and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) have all warned against it.
Jeezus, if I didn’t know better, I’d say these folks were “Tax and Spend Democrats.” Come on, Freedom Caucus, do your job – tell these pantywaists Republicans that hardly-working, fly-over state conservatives will not stand for these “values.” Fight them – every step of the way. Make sure Meals on Wheels gets their drivers’ licenses taken away. Dump more coal ash and slag into Lake Erie and the Chesapeake Bay – set fire to those babies. And, for God’s sake, make it more difficult to breathe clean air – make those lungs work for their free breaths!
Photo Caption: Republican Trump giving America the finger while talking with Putin on telephone.
I would be careful that this budget is nothing more than a stalking horse. So horrific ( and Trump knows it ) that the Republicans can return some funding to critical programs, but not all and everybody will breath a sigh of relief. Pay attention!
Exactly. Start out your negotiations in the extreme so it appears as though you are “meeting my opponents in the middle” – when, in fact, you’re getting everything you set out to get. This is an old trick of fiscal conservatives, but to the extreme.
Targeting many small, successful programs with vocal and well-organized supporters? Heckuva job, guys.
Too bad Obama never learned how to do this. He always started in the middle and negotiated with himself to the right.
I have said many times “it is much easier to bitch than to offer solutions” and that sentiment has come home to roost for REPUGS in spades.
I was a member of a school board in the 80s who a a committee member was tasked to create a new complaint/resolution plan. One of the key items involved was a requirement that every complaint must also include a suggested solution. When adopted and approved by the state board of regents, we saw over the first six months of implementation, over a 40% drop in bitching. As stated easy to bitch, harder to do so when a solution is required as part of that bitch.
Yeah, I told my husband last night that Dems are 1) too nice (none of the sort of name-calling the Goopers do) and 2) too willing to compromise. Obama was too nice and too principled on way too many things. Sigh.
Slightly OT, New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz nails it again.
Or you end up looking like a fool. Different situations demand different negotiating strategies. For example, say there is a period where grant applicants seem to be getting about half of what they are asking for. So they double their grant request. After a few years, everybody is wise to this so inflated grant requests get nothing and everybody goes back to specifying forecast costs involved. Similarly, if this is some sort of negotiating strategy, everybody will adjust to it next year. Also you could have a pool of pissed of people out there already. The US public sector is already underfunded and understaffed. Making that situation worse is not going to help with the production of public goods and services.
As a big Obama fan, I have to say that I agree with you to some degree here. I believe if President Obama hadn’t been the first minority to sit in the Oval Office, he might had been more inclined to play hard ball – but he’s an exceedingly thoughtful man and really did try his best to do things by the book, to the spirit of the rules and laws. He’s one of a kind, in this respect. This is one of the reasons I like him so much, I look up to him for his persevering through some of the toughest times and the craziest shit thrown his way – he kept his head high, did things by the books, treated everyone fairly, justly and still looked out for the nation as a whole.
That said, I wouldn’t have minded at all if he had taken a harder approach with the Republicans (Mitch McConnell, I’m looking at you in particular) in his second term, once it became more than abundantly clear the GOP’s only game plan was to obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. I so look forward to his next book.
Are they (allegedly) squirming because they fundamentally disagree in principle with Trump’s budget, or are they disagreeing just because they know that the optics of defunding Meals on Wheels are horrible?
jsfox and others here have hit the nail on the head: whether by accident or by design, the Trumplicans are now positioned to restore Meals on Wheels and school lunches with a bunch of hype and fanfare, and the media and much of the country will jizz in their shorts over how reasonable Trump and the Republicans are being. Which in turn will make keeping the rest of the budget atrocities in place easier, at least in their eyes. Dems can’t fall for it.
The truth is that this budget is Grover Norquist’s and Robert Mercer’s hard-core porn: it advances their goal of the complete destruction of government further than the previous maladministrations of Reagan, GHWB, and GWB combined.
Once Trump “lavishes money on the Pentagon,” It is quite possible that we will NEVER have a balanced budget. Once that genie is out, it will be all but impossible to stuff back in the bottle in future budgets. The republicans can’t cut defense budgets, because they just can’t, and the dems are afraid of appearing weak on defense.