Internal E-Mails Tell Feds to Make Sequester Cutbacks Painful to the General Public

According to an Animal & Plant Inspection Service internal e-mail, an agency official was specifically instructed not to do anything that would lessen or minimize impact to the public ahead of the sequester cuts this month.

In the internal email, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown said he asked if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact, and he said he was told not to do anything that would lessen the dire impacts Congress had been warned of.

“We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be,” Mr. Brown, in the internal email, said his superiors told him.

Neither Mr. Brown nor the main APHIS office in Washington returned calls seeking comment, but Agriculture Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack, who oversees the agency, told Congress he is trying to give flexibility where he can.

“If we have flexibility, we’re going to try to use it to make sure we use sequester in the most equitable and least disruptive way,” the secretary told Rep. Kristi L. Noem, a South Dakota Republican who grilled Mr. Vilsack about the email. “There are some circumstances, and we’ve talked a lot about the meat inspection, where we do not have that flexibility because there are so few accounts.”

Ms. Noem told Mr. Vilsack that the email made it sound like the administration was sacrificing flexibility in order to justify its earlier dire predictions.

“I’m hopeful that isn’t an agenda that’s been put forward,” the congresswoman told Mr. Vilsack.

The content of the e-mail is similar to what US Park Ranger who chose to remain anonymous told Fox News. According to a March 9th article, the National Parks Service had overruled plans to deal with the sequester that would've had marginal impact on the public and was told instead to axe special events, talks, tours and other educational or information services.

"Apparently, they want the public to feel the pain," the ranger said.

The National Park Service is among many federal agencies warning of a major impact from the sequester cuts, which took effect last Friday. The agency has warned of delayed access to portions of Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, closed campgrounds at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, reduced hours at the Grand Canyon visitor center and other ramifications.

The Obama administration says these cuts must be made in order to make the $85 billion in cuts from Congress' failure to avert the sequester. At the NPS, the agency was dealing with an across-the-board 5 percent cut.

At the Park Service, the alleged incident occurred in one region and it's unclear whether other divisions were given similar guidance.

Last week the White House announced that tours were being cancelled until further notice, blaming cuts related to the sequester, even though the tours cost an estimated $74,000 per week- a fraction of the cost of President Obama's recent trip to Hawaii and golf vacation in Florida.

Even before the March 1st Sequester went into effect, the Department of Homeland Security released illegal immigrants from detention centers across the country in late February.

Gillian Christensen, an ICE spokeswoman, said ICE has reviewed "several hundred cases" of immigrants being held in jails around the country and released them in the last week. They have been "placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release," she said.

Christensen said the agency's "priority for detention remains on serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety." She did not say how released immigrants were selected or what jails they were released from.

The release of thousands of illegal immigrants ahead of the sequester led to accusations that the Obama Administration and DHS was playing politics with public safety ahead of the sequestration deadline. Homeland security chief Napolitano claimed that the relase of such a large number of inmates wasn't out of the ordinary and that the decision was left to her subordinates in Homeland Security, not the White House.

Napolitano also claimed that lines at airports were "150% to 200% as long as what we wound normally expect" due to sequestration cuts to the TSA and US Customs, but media inquiries to the airports that Napolitano mentioned (Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago's O'Hare) found there were no significant delays.

As the World Weiner Turns Roasts; A Weiner Bun in the Oven? Delaware Police Interview Underage Girl in Contact w/Congressman

Well, it's been quite the week for New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, the Democrat representing the 9th Congressional district that includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

After his bizarre press conference in which he was upstaged by conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart before confessing to sending sexually explicit texts and pictures to followers on social networking sites on Monday, it was learned that his wife of 10 months, Huma Abedin, is pregnant [she was also noticeably absent from the press conference as well- NANESB!].

There have been bipartisan calls for the disgraced Queens congressman to step down, and news of Huma's pregnancy would give the shrill congressman the opportunity to resign and honestly (for a change) cite family concerns, but Weiner had indicated he intends to ride this scandal out.

Also during Monday's press conference was a reporter asking whether or not Weiner was in communication with any underage girls. Instead of a categorical denial, Weiner curiously gave an answer along the lines of 'Not to the best of my knowledge'. Among the known recipients of Weiner's 'sexts' [including some reportedly unsolicited images] include porn starlet Ginger Lee, a 26 year old single mother in Texas, 21- year old Seattle college student Genette Nicole Cordova and 40 year old Las Vegas blackjack dealer Lisa Weiss.

Now, a review of some of Weiner's communications that were made public (along with some of his followers) seems to indicate that he was in contact with underage girls via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and possible talking dirty to them as well.

At first glance, this has all the makings of some ribald and salacious tabloid gossip, but it's apparently being taken seriously by police in New Castle, DE where two officers from the New Castle County police department appeared at the home of a 17 year old High School Junior to interview her regarding direct online communications she had with Rep. Weiner.

Sources close the student said the girl followed Weiner on Twitter after seeing him speak during a school trip to Washington on April 1. Weiner, after signing on to follow the girl's Twitter feed, direct-messaged the girl on April 13, the sources said, though it is not clear what other communication the two may have had between or after those dates.

A Fox News reporter was at the girl's home when police arrived. The girls name hasn't been released yet due to her being a minor.

[Hat tip- Ace of Spades; Patterico's Pontifications]

Egypt Unrest Continues- Natural Gas Pipeline Attacked; Egyptian VP's Bodyguards Killed in Assassination Attempt? Foreign Reporters Attacked in Cairo

Egyptian state TV is reporting that saboteurs taking advantage of near lawlessness in some parts of the country have attacked a natural gas pipeline that runs between Egypt and Israel.

Residents of the El Arish area in the North Sinai region of Egypt reported a loud explosion on Saturday. It's not clear the immediate impact the blast had on supplies to Israel, but a state TV correspondent blamed the act on terrorists.

Earlier in the week, President Hosni Mubarak had promised to step down after the September 2011 elections, but that was not enough to assuage most of the demonstrators.

The protests in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo escalated on Thursday when Mubarak supporters approached the square and occupied rooftops above, clashing with the anti-Mubarak demonstrators and pelting them with rocks and chunks of pavement from above.

By Friday morning,the scene had become even more surreal when more pro-Mubarak demonstrators mobilized by horse and camelback [way to live up to the stereotype, gentelmen- NANESB!] and charged into the assembled crowds, whipping and beating some of the anti-Mubarak demonstrators. Some in the crowd had managed to pull the riders off of their mounts and said that their would-be assailants were carrying Police ID. By nightfall, each side was hurling Molotov cocktails at each other and Egyptian soldiers were attempting to disperse crowds by firing warning shots into the air.

There were also incidents of Western journalists being attacked and some news agencies offices being torched. FOX News' Greg Palkot and Olaf Wiig and CNN's Anderson Cooper and his camera crew were repeatedly punched and kicked by pro-Mubarak crowds that had descended on them in separate incidents in the capital [Just putting this out here, CNN- How about sending Joy Behar to Cairo??- NANESB!]. The Cairo offices of al Jazeera were torched and it's website was hacked on Friday as well while a Swedish TV reporter was recovering from stab wounds in a Cairo hospital.

Reports are also circulating that there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt this week against Egypt's newly-appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman. The office of Vice President was vacant when Mubarak appointed him to the position on January 29- Suleiman is also chief of Egypt's intelligence services and would likely be the head of an interim govern. It wasn't immediately clear who was behind the attempt, but Egyptian officials said that two of Suleiman's bodyguards were killed and that his motorcade was the target of the would-be assassins.

'Grim Milestone': The Election of Barak Hussein Obama- 1 Year Later

Referring to the Obama Administration as a 'disappointment' would be terribly misleading on my part, since- to put it charitably- I didn't consider President Obama the most qualified man for the job in the first place.


To give the President credit, he had a hand some things that I agree wholeheartedly with; calling Kanye West a jackass, ventilating the pirates who tried hijacking the MV Maersk Alabama, Predator drones incinerating Taliban vermin in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan whether the world's first failed nuclear state likes it or not, coordinated strikes against Al Qaeda operatives in the Horn of Africa....you know, mostly stuff that would probably require Executive-level approval somewhere along the line. Stuff that- most importantly- leads to the enemies of these United States of America dying an abrupt and violent death.

But it's rather telling that a year ago tonight, thugs and tyrants like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe were hoping the US election would turn out exactly the way it did.

Then there's the issue of the leaders of Canada and France treating the issue of Iran's nuclear programme with more urgency than the White House. Keep in mind Iran's mullahs are the same people who set the basiij militia on the populace, arbitrarily beating, detaining and shooting Iran's civilians for all the world to see or follow on Twitter. Yet they can somehow be trusted with the raw materiel for a nuclear programme? Or better yet, these are the people who President Obama wants to negotiate in good faith with?

Domestically, the President has been enthusiastically championing some God-awful legislation such as Card Check, Cap & Trade, Obamacare (or the ill-defined, nebulous 'Healthcare reform' if you prefer) and the $787 Billion stimulus package. The stimulus was supposed to create jobs, repair or replace crumbling infrastructure and prevent the jobless rate from rising above 8% nationally. As of this afternoon, the National unemployment rate is just under 10% (9.8%). Cap and trade is guaranteed to make that jobless rate higher, increase the costs of energy and transportation for Americans and lower the standard of living in this country.

Let's not forget the whole matter in Cambridge, MA between Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge PD and Harvard professor Henry Gates. During a Q&A press conference shortly after the incident, the president arranged for a question to be asked about Gates' arrest and release by the Cambridge Police. Even with a friendly press pool, the President still managed to screw the pooch when he said he wasn't aware of all the facts in the case, he was biased because Prof. Gates was an acquaintance of his but still decided right then and there that the Cambridge police (specifically Sgt. Crowley) 'acted stupidly'. As more information came out about the arresting officer and his credentials and Prof. Gates and his belligerence, Obama had to backpedal and ultimately staged a photo-op beer summit at the White House.

The incident was fairly minor in the grand scheme of things, but that's exactly my point. If the President got it wrong on a fairly minor matter that would hardly make the police blotter of a small-town newspaper, why exactly should I trust him on the bigger issues?

Then there's the matter of the war.....no- not Afghanistan, silly! Fox news, insurance companies, the US Chamber of commerce and....Edmunds.com- the publisher of the Blue Book used to assess used-car prices. If the White House isn't directing their time and energies towards thwarting these insidiously evil enemies of this great republic, then they're busy blaming the previous administration for the economy, Afghanistan, the present state of healthcare, housing, Iraq (which- like it or not- is logistically more tenable than Afghanistan) subprime lending, the auto industry or America's standing in the' world. At this rate, I hope President Obama keeps using the 'Failed policies of the last 8 years' mantra for his 2012 campaign. Sure, it's a little tiresome- but by that point in time, he'd be admitting that his first term- even with a filibuster-proof supermajority for at least the first 2 years- was a complete and utter failure. Having said that, this comes across as petty, incredibly shallow and thin-skinned on his part. Think about it- he campaigned on his willingness to sit down and negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejahd, but his administration will have nothing to do with The Hartford?

Am I leaving anything out? The takeover of General Motors, AIG or Citibank maybe? That incredible clusterf*ck down in Honduras that's playing out pretty much how Hugo Chavez wants it to? The ill-fated Olympic bid? Releasing Gitmo inmates so they can be tried in the USA and have the same rights as a motorist pulled over by a state trooper for a broken taillight? His circle of questionable associates- many of whom have been appointed 'czars'?

I'm sure there's more I'm leaving out, but there are only so many hours in the day.