| Morning Jolt – March 1, 2013 By Jim Geraghty Two months of 2013 gone. The year is flying by! Happy Friday! Jim Under Sequester, the Morning Jolt Will Be 2 Percent Shorter Than Before Shortly after midnight, this is what happened, according to Twitter: Stephen Gutowski: "Just tried driving but since sequestration went into effect the roads have all crumbled into dust." Brendan Loy: "OH MY GOD THERE ARE GOVERNMENT WORKERS SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTING ALL OVER THE PLACE, THIS IS HORRIBLE, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP" He added, "BREAKING: CALIFORNIA DECLARES WAR ON OREGON; KENTUCKY LAUNCHES SNEAK ATTACK ON TENNESSEE. MASS CHAOS." Jonah: "It wasn't until I ate my neighbor's pancreas that I realized president Obama was right about the sequester." Iowahawk: "The corpses are piling up outside my window like cordwood, oh my God the humanity." Sebastian: "Nothing to worry about! I grabbed my double barrel shotgun & blasted #sequester through the door, just like the VP said." Ari Fleischer: "President Obama is right. Undo the sequester! I can't stand it already." Becket Adams: "I don't think my neighbors are taking sequestration seriously. They're giving me weird looks and making fun of my war paint and loincloth." Exurban Jon: "So this is what anarchy feels like . . . From now on, I shall be known as ;ExJon, Warlord of the Western Deserts.'" Buck Sexton: "Did America lose 170,000,000 jobs in the last 10 minutes? Keep me informed, everyone." Brandon Morse: "The #sequester may now join the Mayan Calendar and the Y2K bug in the "[Stuff] Everyone Survived" Hall of Fame." By morning, it was even worse: Rick Wilson: "A few hours of fitful sleep, the sound of sirens and screams of the victims of the Barackolypse rending the night air . . . I saw their fires in the dark, savagery swiftly tearing away the thin veneer of civilization only government diversity programs provided." John Podhoretz: "Just looked out the window. Five hedge fund guys fighting over a piece of raw meat." So what's actually going to happen? Nothing much, at first: For one thing, Obama must sign an order formally starting the "sequester" or spending reductions — which according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office — would amount to $42 billion in the current fiscal year. And White House aides have indicated that the president is not likely to put pen to paper on that order until after he meets with congressional leaders, a meeting slated for Friday morning. Once Obama signs the order to start the spending cuts, any furloughs of federal workers could not begin at least for another 30 days due to federal regulations and to collective bargaining agreements which the government has with the unions that represent roughly half of the federal workforce. So the Border Patrol Agents in Arizona won't suddenly vanish on Friday and the civilians who repair Navy ships won't be ordered to immediately put down their tools. As with many things the federal government does, there are multiple rules, regulatory hurdles, avenues for appeal and opportunities for litigation. As Under Secretary of Defense Robert Hale, the Pentagon's Chief Financial Officer, explained last week, "The bottom line is, furloughs would not actually start for DOD employees until late April." He explained, "There's a whole series of notifications. We started the first one today (Feb. 20), with the notification to Congress, along with a message by the secretary of defense to our civilian employees. That starts a 45-day clock ticking. Until that clock has run out, we cannot proceed with furloughs." He added, "At some point in mid-March, we will send a notification to each employee who may be furloughed. That starts a 30-day clock, waiting period, before we can take any action. And then later on in April, we will send a decision to employees, and they have a one-week period, once we've made that decision, to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board." Hmm. Did the administration botch its messaging on the sequester as badly as it appears at this hour? Is this the first bit of post-Election Day hubris biting the president? Speaking of the Departed, Regardless of the Consequences One year ago today, Andrew Breitbart passed away. I came across this column from Jason Weisberger, publisher of Boing Boing, who discusses how strongly he disagreed with Andrew politically but how much he liked him personally. Last year when he passed away, I am ashamed to admit, I was afraid to write anything or to share how sad it was to lose such a good guy who cared so passionately about his friends. I was afraid because his life's work was monstrous. Andrew was an incredible resource to me during the adoption of my daughter. As an adoptee himself, he was passionately engaged in the process with me. If you can imagine the energy Andrew put into his work, imagine what he'd do for his friends. He wanted to know where everything was in the process. When things got hung up in my family's adoption process, he was as angry as I was. He shared so many stories with me about his experience growing up. As an adult, he tried to really help me understand some of what an adoptee experiences in life. The time and energy Andrew invested in me lives on in my daughter. I often remember those conversations, and they do guide my parenting. We watched baseball games together. We laughed about crappy music from the 80s. He was my friend. I hated what he was doing to our country. I miss his friendship. If, God forbid, one of my left-of-center friends passes away someday, I hope I will have the good sense to call them as I see them and find a kind word or two for a departed soul and a suffering family and friends left behind. I would hate to hold my tongue and not say what common decency and tradition used to expect of us, out of fear of some sort of social consequence for saying something nice about someone detested by my friends with strong political views. I mean, our political views and the causes we fight for and the ideas we believe in are important, but . . . they're not everything. Have any of you found an absolute, pure correlation between a person's political views and what kind of person he is, a sense of his moral character? Has every last conservative you've encountered been a shining role model and the kind of person you would want as a neighbor or friend? Has every last liberal you've met been devoid of any virtue, any kindness, any charm or joyousness? If so, maybe I need to move to where you are. Because sadly, there are some jerks on our side. I kind of wish the conservative movement could institute . . . some sort of personality test or something that we could use to filter out the bad apples. "I'm sorry, you flunked the personality portion of the application exam; you're not allowed to call yourself a conservative." "What? What am I supposed to do now?" "You can reapply in a year. I hear the libertarians let in a pretty wide range of personalities." If we ever put together that test, I hope one of the first questions is, "If a good friend of yours who was well known for disagreeing with conservatives passed away, would you say anything publicly about your friend?" Anyone who's too afraid to speak his mind about a person dear to him . . . eh, the other side can have him. Because life is too short. I mean, really, if there's anything we ought to be able to agree on thinking about Andrew today, it's that life is too short. BLAM! BLAM! Time for Crazy Uncle Joe's Home-Defense Tips When you hear the Vice President of the United States offering some astonishingly reckless and wrongheaded advice about firearms and home defense, look beyond the obvious. Try to think of the unexpected ramifications, like . . . . . . how Joe Biden is going to make an amazing surprise expert witness for Oscar Pistorius. No, really, his advice will get you arrested. Vice President Joe Biden told Field & Stream magazine in an interview published Monday, "[if] you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door." Coincidentally, a 22-year-old man in Virginia Beach, Va., was charged Monday with reckless handling of a firearm after doing just that a couple days earlier. Local TV station WAVY 10 reports that the man observed two masked men leaning into his bedroom window. The men allegedly had weapons and told him to close his bedroom door. He stepped outside of his bedroom and did as instructed, then fired his shotgun through the closed door and then several more times at the window. According to the news report there were no injuries and the suspects were not apprehended by police. Biden's comments to Field & Stream came as he summarized a hypothetical question in which someone from California pondered "when the end days come" or if there's an earthquake. Earlier this month, Biden told an interviewer that he had advised his wife, Jill, "if there's ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house." Okay, sons, I don't care how much you whine, we are not going trick-or-treating at the Biden house next Halloween. Cam Edwards: "Following Joe Biden's self-defense tips is like letting a Lohan tell you how to raise your kids." ADDENDA: As mentioned yesterday, here's my work-related Facebook page. Iowahawk with one more on-scene report of an America ravaged by the Sequester: "AIIEEE TRANSFATS EVERYWHERE, GET THEM OFF ME!" Get all the latest news, 24/7, at www.NationalReview.com Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives. Conservatives – stay healthy! Get plenty of Vitamin Sea on the next National Review cruise. Visit www.NRCruise.com for complete information. National Review, Inc. | 
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
No comments: