Run With The GOP's New Sequester Plan!

The GOP's sequester plan is very clever - too clever, by half:

The GOP’s emerging legislative fix to the sequester is both counterintuitive and clever.

...Senate Republicans along with influential conservative commentators are proposing to provide federal agency heads the flexibility they currently lack to allocate the sequester’s cuts at their discretion.

Per the conservative National Review: “In the face of poor alternatives, it is best to accept the new spending levels for 2013, including decreased defense spending, and to focus on ensuring that the slightly smaller pool of money is managed slightly more intelligently — by, for instance, giving agency managers discretion about where the cuts come from in the near term and using the appropriations process to allocate future cuts in the out-years.”

Karl Rove proposes a similar idea.

One of the problems with the sequester — which this proposal would attempt to address — is that its spending cuts come uniformly, from almost every government account. That’s why they’re often called indiscriminate and across-the-board. Under the sequester it doesn’t matter if one part of an agency is bloated and another part is lean: both must be cut.

The GOP proposal would give the executive branch more discretion over where to make those cuts for the remainder of the current fiscal year, which ends in September. After that date, congressional appropriators would make decisions about where the specific cuts would come from, while still adhering to the sequester’s new lower spending baseline.

The irony is that in the near term, the GOP’s proposed fix would delegate a great deal of authority to the executive branch — and thus to President Obama. And for the GOP that would come with the risk that the administration would target the cuts at GOP constituencies, which would undermine the political rationale for their own plan.

But aside from that potential flaw it’s a clever idea.

It's not a bug, it's an opportunity! Federal spending supports innumerable, extraordinarily-whiny, federally-dependent, FOX News fans. Aim the cuts directly at them! Teach the whiny bastards a lesson!

For example, the reddest state in the last election was Oklahoma. The place is full of FOX-News thralls (who fancy themselves as 'independent thinkers'). They've got the lowest hanging fruit - Tinker AFB. Shut the whole place down! Shut down every other federal facility in Oklahoma too. Send the Oklahoma unemployment rate to 30% (sorry, John - hope you understand)! Whiny, effin' bastardos!