OBAMA'S DERPY DERP SEQUESTER FAIL REDUX

Once again Barack Obama has managed to achieve bipartisanship in Washington - in opposition to his agenda.  In the latest blow to Dear Leader's credibility and influence, the House overwhelmingly passed a measure to end furloughs at the Federal Aviation Administration, sending it to President Obama for his signature. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday the president would sign the bill, which the Senate approved late Thursday by unanimous consent. Meanwhile, the proglodytes are upset, complaining that Democrats caved to Republican demands, and have essentially lost the sequester fight:

The point of sequestration is supposedly to create just enough chaos that regular people - people with political clout, such as, say, business travelers - demand that Congress fix it. Or as the Democrats conceived it, to create the public pressure they need to knock Republicans off their absolutist position on taxes

Well, they got their outcry…and then promptly folded. They allowed Republicans to inaccurately characterize the FAA furloughs as a political stunt. Then without any organized effort to cast the flight delays as part of the same problem that’s also keeping poor people homeless they assented to providing special treatment to the traveling class.

So now the big, predictable opportunity to return to the sequestration debate under genuine public scrutiny is gone.

Inaccurately characterized?  Wrong again.  This was nothing but a political stunt and everybody knew it:

The corrupt media is largely falling into line, blaming "steep budget cuts" for the flight delays. But President Obama's original FAA budget request for fiscal year 2013 was $15,146 million. Congress, knowing sequestration loomed, appropriated $16,008 million. From that, sequestration cut $637 million; so this year's actual, final FAA budget is $15,371 million. That's a cool $225 million more than Obama's original budget request.

So why can't the FAA simply implement the original plan? Heck, they could even ask Congress to rescind the extra $225 million they don't need - and use it for deficit reduction. But that would prove there is plenty of room to cut spending in the bloated federal budget. And the Obama administration instead insists on arbitrarily and artificially making spending cuts painful.

On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal summed up the "harm offensive" strategy:

The Federal Aviation Administration claims the sequester spending cuts are forcing it to delay some 6,700 flights a day, but rarely has a bureaucracy taken such joy in inconveniencing the public.

Though the FAA says it is strapped for cash, the air traffic control agency managed to find the dollars to update its interactive "command center" tool on its website so passengers can check if their airports are behind schedule due to what it calls sequester-related "staffing" problems. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn noticed this rare case of FAA technological entrepreneurship and fired off a letter Wednesday protesting what he called the agency's "full blown media rollout" to hype the flight delays.

That had zero impact on FAA bosses, who were on Capitol Hill rationalizing their dereliction. But after Mr. Coburn published his letter on his website, FAA regional employees wrote to blow the whistle on their bosses. As one email put it, "the FAA management has stated in meetings that they need to make the furloughs as hard as possible for the public so that they understand how serious it is."

Strategies include encouraging union workers to take the same furlough day to increase congestion. "I am disgusted with everything that I see since the sequester took place," another FAA employee wrote. "Whether in HQ or at the field level it is clear that our management has no intention of managing anything. The only effort that I see is geared towards generating fear and demonstrating failure."

Harry Reid began the week with a statement that was framed as a dire warning but was really more of a boast:

"In airports across the country, millions of Americans will get their first taste of the pain of sequestration."

But the braggadocio quickly turned to concern and then panic as the public saw right through the media smokescreen and correctly blamed the incompetent Obama administration for the annoying delays.  Once Senate Dems backed down, Obama had no choice but to signal that he would sign the legislation because to veto it would only confirm the suspicion: that his goal was to turn the American people into collateral damage in order to hurt the House GOP.
    
Speaker Boehner left no doubt who he blamed for the problem:

"The disruption to America's air traffic system over the past week was a consequence of the administration's choice to implement the president's sequestration cuts in the most painful manner possible... With this solution, Americans will no longer be burdened by President Obama’s flight delays and our economy will not take an unnecessary hit."

House Majority Leader Cantor weighed in as well on the GOP's latest triumph:

As a CQ / Roll Call reporter tweeted last night, "Make no mistake, this FAA fix is a complete, utter cave by Senate Democrats and, if signed, by the White House." This is a sentiment expressed in other press reports over the last 12 hours, including, Politico: "Democrats blink first on aviation" and Chicago Tribune: "White House Scrambles For Damage Control."

Consider that the Democrats opening position was they would only replace the sequester with tax increases. By the first of this week Senator Reid proposed replacing the whole sequester with phony war savings. And by last night, Senate Democrats were adopting our targeted "cut this, not that" approach. This victory is in large part a result of our standing together under the banner of #Obamaflightdelays.

When Dear Leader tries to harm us, we'll just keep dancing. Power to the people!