Rep. Maxine Waters said 170 million Americans would lose their jobs. (I hope you guys are smarter than this; there aren’t that many jobs in the U.S.) I think I even heard the Earth could possibly move in the opposite direction. Well, maybe not, but close.

Democrats are good at spinning fairy tales.

Why do Democrats think we are such idiots? Well, maybe we are. They need to cut $82 billion from a $4 trillion budget. That’s 2 percent of the budget. It’s negligible. Budget? There is no budget. So why is it so difficult to cut 2 percent from something that doesn’t exist?

We do have $4 trillion in expenses, but certainly we could cut 2 cents on every dollar, considering the federal government overpays as much as $50 billion for goods and services every year (according to Sen. Tom Coburn).

Mr. President, stop playing games and act like a leader. I have been saying on my radio show that he needed to stop campaigning and get back to Washington, lock himself in a room with House and Senate leaders and – taking the lead from Sheriff Joe Arpaio – feed them bologna sandwiches, give them pink underwear, and don’t let them out until they have a plan. The American people deserve that.

Apparently the president heard my show, flew back to D.C. on Friday, went into a room with only Republican leaders and tried to browbeat them into dropping the cuts and giving him more revenue (read: tax increases). When they refused, he walked out. Great negotiating skills.

After that, he went to his pre-arranged press conference and miraculously had a 20-minute speech prepared (because he can’t just “talk” to the public), in which he proceeded to blame Republicans for everything.

The president got his tax increase in the first round of negotiations back in January. He was downright deceitful because, as he said in his speeches, after those meetings he would meet with “the other side” to lay out meaningful cuts and take a balanced approach moving forward.

Republicans should have learned from the days of President Reagan. At the time, Democrats agreed to give Reagan the funds to secure the border, both physically and with human resources, in exchange for amnesty. What did the Democrats do in Congress?They reneged on the deal. Amnesty came, but nothing else did. And we, the American people, got screwed. Now we have eight times the number of illegals in a relatively short period of time.

Once again, Democrats are hiding the facts. Why exactly does money have to be taken from first responders? Is that really the only place we can cut? I guess if you’re looking to bamboozle the American public, it might be a good idea.

There’s more than $32 billion in grants for green and alternative energy research and development. Why can’t we start there instead of public safety? We don’t need green energy to keep our homes from burning down, or crime out of the streets, or our emergency rooms open. Friday, another green energy company that received a government grant closed its doors. Why doesn’t the president just flush the money? It wouldn’t be as painful.

According to Sen. Coburn, there are a few other areas we can make cuts without impacting vital services for public safety:

* Nearly $700,000 went from the National Science Foundation to a New York-based theater company so it could develop a musical about climate change and biodiversity.

* Close loopholes in the food stamp system to reduce widespread abuse such as the exotic dancer who earned more than $85,000 a year in tips, but also collected nearly $1,000 a month in food stamps while spending $9,000 during that time period on “cosmetic enhancements.”

* Although NASA has no plans or budget for any manned spaceflights to Mars, the agency spends about $1 million each year on developing “the Mars menu.” It’s an effort to come up with a variety of food that humans could eat one day on Mars.

* A $325,000 grant was awarded for the development of “Robosquirrel,” a robotic rodent designed to test the interaction between rattlesnakes and squirrels.

* An estimated $70 million is lost on the production of pennies. According to the Waste Book, “The cost to produce a penny in 2012 is more than two times its actual value.” After billions of one-cent coins are manufactured and sold at face value every year, taxpayers are left to cover the loss.

* Billions of dollars of government-owned real estate sits empty while we rent or lease billions of dollars in office space.

And these guys want to manage health care? Buy your plot while there is still room.

These guys couldn’t manage growing grass.

After bringing in several federal workers who share how they will be affected by the budget cuts, the President explains  that America will survive.

“Trust me, nine months from now, you won’t remember this sequester ever happened,” he said. “Why? Because there will be another way worse financial crisis to deal with.”

Two things to take from this parody: One, that the writers of SNL are no longer peeling grapes for their hero and two, the above quotes have a real element of truth in them.

You can watch the opening skit below or at NBC.

“O Duck Luck, ” says Hen Pen, “the sky is falling!”
“Why, how do you know it?” says Duck Luck.
“Obama Chicken Little told me.”

And so goes the story of another famous alarmist, Chicken Little. President Obama has attempted for the past few weeks to raise alarm about the awful “cuts” that would affect everything. The economy will be hurt and crippled for years, other results include millions of furloughed federal employees, and a non-functioning military. All because those darned Republicans would not agree with him to further increase spending.

Stoking more fear and animus, the president now seeks to paint the entire fallout from the ever-so-slightly decreased future spending on Republicans. The president specifically named John Boehner and Mitch McConnell as the responsible parties. And although Obama has to yet figure out how to paint the reluctance to support spending as either racist, or to invoke class warfare narratives, we need only to give it time, and his friends will spin furiously until a good excuse develops. It is their nature.

The president, when asked by the adoring press, what more he could have done to ensure sequestration did not take effect, blurted out, “I am not a dictator…”, and says he could not send the Secret Service after Republicans to prevent their planes from taking off. From your mouth to Uncle Joe’s ears, eh Mr. President? If only leadership were that easy – but, then again no one has ever made a good case for your leadership abilities.

In blurting out his most recent excuse for his failure (or was sequestration itself the failure? Obama previously supported it), the president again reveals his juvenile mindset when it comes to politics. It is frequently his way or else. If things do not go his way, then the most dire circumstances will occur. How can you nudge people into thinking or behaving the “right way”? Send your sycophants out to do the dirty work for you. Bob Woodward’s being threatened by a White House insider is the most recent example.  Have your supporters engage in some name-calling and belittle your opponent. It is all in a day’s work for any grade-school bully.

For a president who has also: bemoaned the fact he has to work with Congress and wished he could work around them, threatened to use executive orders to accomplish things that Congress balks at doing, and who actually has a “kill-list” that gives him the final ability to determine who has the ultimate right, that is, to exist – when he claims, “I am not a dictator…”, if he is not, he is the closest thing the country has ever had to one. The rights so valued and inherent in each of us have slowly continued to erode away, and with a president such as Obama, this will be a long four years.

We are warned that in the event of sequester, massive TSA layoffs will result in airline passengers waiting up to three hours before they can be groped by a highly–trained government sex harasser. Slashing the budget by two cents on every dollar will also mean TSA guards won’t be changing rubber gloves between touchy–feely sessions.

Female passengers, who undergo nearly nude full–body scans, will be relieved to learn this drastic reduction torpedoes the ink budget. TSA can no longer afford to print particularly comely images for posting in the lunchroom. And since it’s too costly to store the pictures on government hard drives, TSA will ask remaining employees to work overtime and upload the images to their Facebook accounts for safekeeping.

According to the White House, you aren’t even safe on board the aircraft. Air traffic controllers will be awakened from their control tower naps and told to go sleep at home. The few remaining will be grumpy and sleepy, with a consequent slowdown in takeoffs and landings.

Assuming one gets in the air, passengers will be shocked to learn airlines will no longer offer free in–flight meals and instead expect passengers to pay handsomely for sandwiches wrapped and catered by 7/11. Wait, that’s already happened. Sorry, false alarm.

All in all it’s a horrible foretaste of privation and delay, yet not a single Republican Congressman is hanging from a lamppost. In fact there is so much indifference here that Obama has taken his nationwide Hyperventilation Tour on the road.

The reason for our calm in the face of the impending storm is that Metro, our local DC subway system, has essentially been sequestered for the past two years and life has continued. It’s more inconvenient, spontaneous and ad hoc — at least when it comes to arriving on time — but it is life.

I’ve long contended Metro is the only mass trans system run by an improv group, but now the passengers are joining in the fun. Take this week for instance: Tuesday morning on the Silver Line (this is DC, so everything has to do with money) crack Metro crews were testing equipment. As the WaPost reports, one of the brakes began to lock up. Like the spinster on the way to church who assumes a flat tire will heal itself, the crew continued operating the train trying to get off the track before rush hour or looming obsolescence caught up with them.

They didn’t make it. The wheel wore down to a nub, a pantoodler fell off and sliced through 60 cables and the system ground to a halt. The only thing left to do was call AAA and wait for the tow truck.

Metro officialdom predicted repairs would be complete by noon, but it took a total of nine hours. Metro sent alerts to passengers twice and then their thumbs got tired. So between 7 AM and 2 PM Metro passengers were on their own, which is a not uncommon condition. Then a train malfunctioned on the Yellow Line. There was a track problem on the Blue line. And another train shot craps on the Green Line.

And those are just the unplanned shutdowns.

The system regularly closes entire stations on the weekend and as a matter of fact the Reagan Airport station will be shut for three days beginning March 1^st. (I guess they figured what with the sequester and all, no one will be flying anyway.)

Metro limits the number of trains on holidays and shuts escalators for months at a time forcing passengers to trudge upward toward daylight from the bowels of the system. Recently on a single day Metro passengers suffered seven electronic thefts and every last one of them was during daylight hours! Thieves evidently rest during the night so they can read the manuals and learn how to download apps.

The reason Metro ‘service’ is such a gamble is management didn’t bother with routine maintenance for the past 15 or so years. I’m guessing the thinking was: We’re the government, what could go wrong? So current passengers pay for the mistakes of past incompetent management, a situation young people are soon to encounter with regard to Social Security taxes.

Frankly, I’m hoping the full effect of the sequester hits when the majority of members of Congress are out of town. That way if they can’t get back, they can’t resume spending.

WASHINGTON, DC—President Obama used this week’s address to urge Congress to stop the harmful automatic cuts that threaten thousands of jobs and affect our national security—called the sequester—from taking effect on March 1st. The President and Congressional Democrats have already put forward solutions to avoid these cuts and reduce the deficit in a balanced way, and now it’s time for Congressional Republicans to compromise by closing some loopholes that protect the wealthiest Americans so that we can reduce the deficit in a balanced way and create jobs for the middle class.

The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, Saturday, February 23, 2013.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
The White House
February 23, 2013

Hi, everybody. Our top priority as a country right now should be doing everything we can to grow our economy and create good, middle class jobs.

And yet, less than one week from now, Congress is poised to allow a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts that will do the exact opposite. They will slow our economy. They will eliminate good jobs. They will leave many families who are already stretched to the limit scrambling to figure out what to do.

But here’s the thing: these cuts don’t have to happen. Congress can turn them off anytime with just a little compromise. They can pass a balanced plan for deficit reduction. They can cut spending in a smart way, and close wasteful tax loopholes for the well-off and well-connected.

Unfortunately, it appears that Republicans in Congress have decided that instead of compromising – instead of asking anything of the wealthiest Americans – they would rather let these cuts fall squarely on the middle class.

Here’s what that choice means. Once these cuts take effect, thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off, and tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, causing delays across the country. Even President Bush’s director of the National Institutes of Health says these cuts will set back medical science for a generation.

Already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay the deployment of an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf – affecting our ability to respond to threats in an unstable part of the world. And just this week, the Pentagon announced that if these cuts go through, almost 800,000 defense employees – the equivalent of every person in Miami and Cleveland combined – will be forced to take unpaid leave.

That’s what this choice means. Are Republicans in Congress really willing to let these cuts fall on our kids’ schools and mental health care just to protect tax loopholes for corporate jet owners? Are they really willing to slash military health care and the border patrol just because they refuse to eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies? Are they seriously prepared to inflict more pain on the middle class because they refuse to ask anything more of those at the very top?

These are the questions Republicans in Congress need to ask themselves. And I’m hopeful they’ll change their minds. Because the American people have worked too hard for too long to see everything they’ve built undone by partisan recklessness in Washington.

I believe we should work together to build on the more than $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction we’ve already achieved. But I believe we should do it in a balanced way – with smart spending cuts, entitlement reform, and tax reform. That’s my plan. It’s got tough cuts, tough reforms, and asks more of the wealthiest Americans. It’s on the White House website for everyone to see. And it requires Democrats and Republicans to meet half way to resolve the problem. That’s what the American people expect. And that’s what you deserve.

We just need Republicans in Washington to come around. Because we need their help to finish the job of reducing our deficit in a smart way that doesn’t hurt our economy or our people. After all, as we learned in the 1990s, nothing shrinks the deficit faster than a growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs. That has to be our driving focus. That has to be our North Star. Making America a magnet for good jobs. Equipping our people with the skills required to fill those jobs. Making sure your hard work leads to a decent living. That’s what this city should be focused on like a laser. And I’m going to keep pushing folks here to remember that.

Thanks.