Jonathan Weisman and Elizabeth Bumiller report for the New York Times: “With at least one million jobs on the line, Senate Democrats on Wednesday said they were closing in on legislation to temporarily head off nearly $1 trillion in cuts that were already affecting Pentagon decision-making and could force significant reductions in staffing and services across the government. …Lawmakers were being spurred by increasingly dire warnings from top Pentagon officials about the implications of the automatic reductions…” Politico’s Manu Raju reports, “Senate Democrats are digging in against Republican calls for deeper spending cuts by bringing out some of their favorite punching bags: corporate jets, Wall Street and Big Oil … in hopes of shifting the blame when the GOP inevitably rejects it. Stay tuned for the pubic rollout.” OBAMA: AVOID SEQUESTER. BOEHNER: NOT WITH REVENUE INCREASES “Speaking from the White House on Tuesday, President Obama, called on Congress to push through a package of limited spending cuts and tax changes that would stave off the sequestration. With the delay in automatic cuts, he said, lawmakers could negotiate a full budget to resolve the repeated threat of sequester,” according to The New York Times. Politico reports that House Speaker John Boehner will not accept any revenue increases in a deal to hold off the sequester.
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Feb 2013
