-By Warner Todd Huston
President Obama has launched a campaign to push his tax hikes by granting interviews to local TV news programs in eight states that will likely be affected by budget cuts that are soon to be realized as a result of sequestration.
The goal of Obama’s local interviews is to halt $85 billion in budget cuts. The five-minute segments were granted to stations in states that have a high military presence. Adding weight to Obama’s local TV interview campaign, the Pentagon announced cost-saving layoffs of up to 800,000 civilian employees who will be furloughed for 22 days.
In the interviews Obama warned of the potential job loss that might occur in those eight states and blamed Republicans for it all because of the sequestration that is soon to hit.
“What I say to them is that there’s no reason they should be furloughed, there’s no reason they should lose their jobs or be laid off. This is a problem Congress can solve,” Obama told a station in Maryland.
Obama has spent a lot of time attacking Republicans over the sequestration policy that will force an across the board $85 billion cut in government spending, but the whole plan was originally a White House idea.
The sequestration policy was an idea created by the White House and pushed by Democrat Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. Even the left-leaning PolitiFact fact-checking website has admitted as much.
Even as Obama has continued to say that sequestration is the Republican’s fault, PolitiFact points out that the President’s claim is “mostly false.” Last October, PolitiFact noted that “Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his.”
Circumventing the White House Press Corps to other media outlets has been a standard habit for this President, too. It’s become so blatant that even the left-wing outlets Slate and Politico have complained about the President’s refusal to engage with them.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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