SEQUESTRATION ORDER FOR FISCAL YEAR 2013 PURSUANT TO SECTION 251A OF THE BALANCED BUDGET AND EMERGENCY DEFICIT CONTROL ACT, AS AMENDED
By the authority vested in me as President by the laws of the United States of America, and in accordance with section 251A of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, as amended (the “Act”), 2 U.S.C. 901a, I hereby order that budgetary resources in each non-exempt budget account be reduced by the amount calculated by the Office of Management and Budget in its report to the Congress of March 1, 2013.
Pursuant to sections 250(c)(6), 251A, and 255(e) of the Act, budgetary resources subject to sequestration shall be new budget authority, unobligated balances of defense function accounts carried over from prior fiscal years, direct spending authority, and obligation limitations.
All sequestrations shall be made in strict accordance with the requirements of section 251A of the Act and the specifications of the Office of Management and Budget’s report of March 1,
See the complete lists at Roll Call – can’t find a list for 2009, but presumably it was just as comical.
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And …… this Sunday’s guests include:
ABC’s This Week: Gene Sperling, Kelly Ayotte
NBC’s Meet the Press: Gene Sperling, John Boehner, Rep. Raul Labrador
CBS’s Face the Nation: Dick Durbin, Cardinal Timothy Dolan and …… I’m not making this up …..Lindsey Graham and John McCain
Fox News Sunday: Mitt and Ann Romney. No, seriously.
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As @BillinPortland said, they only want Sperling on “so they can keep milking the Woodward kerfuffle”. Although, he was good enough to say of his “Milking the Woodward” reference – “sorry for that visual”.
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Thank you Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) for the Roll Call link
Charles Pierce: So Sequestration Day is here …. And it seems that the House Republicans are dancing in the streets of Pottersville…..
…. The country’s going to hell, but the Republicans now have a fully functioning marionette in the Speaker’s chair. They want him to be a vandal. He’s a vandal. They want him to be butch. He’ll be butch. If they told him to sprawl across a sofa in the Rotunda dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, well, who the hell knows? Maybe he’s got the legs for it. At least he can sleep with both eyes closed for a while.
10:05: President Obama hosts the bipartisan, bicameral leadership of Congress at the White House; VP Biden also attends.
11:30: Jay Carney briefs the press
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AP: The White House says automatic spending reductions set to kick in will be put off until as close to midnight Friday as possible.
The law, passed by Congress on Jan. 2 simply says that “on March 1, 2013, the president shall order a sequestration for fiscal year 2013.” That’s budget talk for an $85 billion reduction in defense and domestic spending between now and Oct. 1.
Obama can issue that order at any point in the day.
And White House press secretary Jay Carney says that means midnight, Friday – or as close to midnight as possible: 11:59 p.m. and 59 seconds.
And this is what the GOP is trying to destroy, the economic recovery:
Bloomberg: Manufacturing in the U.S. expanded at a faster pace than forecast in February, reaching the highest level since June 2011 as factories boosted production to meet greater demand.
…. The figures exceeded the most optimistic forecast in a Bloomberg survey in which the median projection was 52.5. A reading greater than 50 signals expansion.
…. Orders expanded the most in almost two years, the report showed, as manufacturers such as Applied Materials Inc. (AMAT) emerged from an industry setback in the second half of 2012….
Paul Krugman: So, after reading the Bob Woodward saga of the alleged “threat” from Gene Sperling, the White House supereconwonk, I went through my own correspondence with Gene, and couldn’t find anything threatening – although I guess you could read his injunction, at one point, to “take care” in an ominous tone of voice.
Hey, don’t I rate some proper intimidation?
But then, Woodward’s story is looking supremely silly too. Can Robert Redford unportray him, or star in a sequel titled “All the president’s crybabies”?
It’s mighty interesting reading Scheiber’s review now –
Noam Scheiber (October 2012): …. I didn’t find Woodward’s book unusually tedious. In fact, I learned a lot from it. What I found it to be was remarkably slanted.
…. it is relentlessly biased against the president. Woodward argues that the White House and Congress failed to reach a major deficit-reduction deal last summer because Obama didn’t provide the necessary leadership, even though this thesis is untethered from Woodward’s own reporting, to say nothing of reality.
But, in another sense, the book is perfectly in sync with Woodward’s oeuvre. There is a body of respectable Washington opinion that considers Obama unworthy of the presidency: he hadn’t put in his time before running, didn’t grasp the majesty of the office, evinced no respect for the way things were done. He not only won without courting the city’s elders, he had the bad manners to keep his distance even after winning. This is the view Woodward distills.
Woodward telegraphs his contempt from the get-go…..
I reckon this line says it all: “There is a body of respectable Washington opinion that considers Obama unworthy of the presidency…..”
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ThinkProgress: Bob Woodward appeared on Fox News’ Hannity on Thursday to complain about Gene Sperling’s email…. During his interview with Sean Hannity, Woodward claimed that he had been “roughed up” by Sperling and agreed with the host’s characterization of the Washington journalists as liberals who are disinterested in challenging the president with Bill Ayers, an education advocate who was part of the group the Weather Underground:
HANNITY: The fact that the president …. wasn’t asked about his association with Bill Ayers was troublesome to me, I think we’ve got a media that’s not as critical as perhaps it once was in, for example, the days of Watergate.
WOODWARD: Well, I agree with that. We need to be very aggressive and it’s one of the judges that said democracies die in darkness and I really think that’s true.
Todd Purdum (Vanity Fair – Feb 21): With drastic government spending cuts due to kick in, the top job at the Pentagon still vacant, and Congress conveniently out of town for its Presidents’ Day recess, the White House press corps has paused this week to bemoan not the state of the republic but of itself.
…. as a class, they are the world’s biggest whiners. I know because I was once one of them, and a first-class whiner myself. I don’t think their argument holds water. The modern presidency is so sprawling and complex that the reporters best equipped to cover it are the experts in various fields, from defense to transportation, to agriculture, to health care….
What the White House reporters are good at is “gotcha,” at catching a president’s inconsistencies, slipups, and animadversions—at stirring the pot and producing a sharp headline, however fleeting. When The New York Times can ask Obama (with a theoretically straight face) whether he is a “socialist,” then anything can happen. Is it any wonder that he has not given the paper an interview since 2010? What president would? ….
The Obama Diary 
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