I live about two miles from where the Camarillo Springs Fire began. We live here because we love being within a stone's throw of the beaches and canyons along the California coast while still able to get to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara without too much aggravation. For nineteen years we've called this place home, and in that time we've seen wildfires before, but never one like this one.

As I write this, Point Mugu State Park is going up in a blaze of smoke and ash after our local foothills burned in a blaze of glory yesterday here. Until May 2nd, Wood Canyon was a quiet place to ride mountain bikes or hike on little out-of-the-way trails. It's one of our favorite places to go, and this time of year is usually one of the best times to go there because it's cool and spring wildflowers are in full bloom. Deer, hawks, rabbits and the occasional bobcat can be spotted alongside the bike trails from time to time.

Or at least, they used to be able to. Now they're fleeing an out-of-control conflagration that has chewed through most of their habitat and threatens the rest.

Watching exhausted firefighters cut away brush with shovels and bulldozers on TV causes my blood to boil. Here's a fact: Budget cuts due to sequestration cost us some of the most beautiful resources we have in this area. It cost endangered species their habitats, and from bird to butterfly to bobcat, it has devastated the populations living in the now-charred canyons.

Thanks to Republicans' stupid sequester and our former Republican governor's penchant for slashing the budget far deeper than it ever should have been rather than tax corporations even one extra dime, 18,000 28,000 acres have burned away, with more threatened. Deeper firefighting resources might have saved it. At the very least, having a Supertanker on standby might have bought a bit more time before the flames leapt into the canyon and rolled down the other side to the ocean.

Anyone familiar with wildfires knows there are few weapons to battle them, but one of the most effective is the Supertanker airplane, which is why Schwarzenegger cut their contract short by a year, of course. Governor Brown renewed it, but only beginning in September, which is when fire season used to be before our climate got crazy and screwed up. He should have known better.

It's not just the state cuts. In fact, the federal cuts do more harm than state cuts, because the federal budget pays for wildfire and forestry personnel. Thanks to sequestration, firefighting resources took their share of the hit, too.

This is the product of hard-core right wing libertarian destroy-the-government policies. Don't let anyone tell you this was President Obama's idea. It never was. It was hatched by Mitch McConnell and bearhugged by John Boehner as a way to get past the debt ceiling crisis without actually tanking the economy in real time by defaulting on our debt. McConnell came up with it, Boehner sold it to teabaggers, and Obama signed it because the alternative was worse. I've heard you deniers say otherwise. Be advised you're mistaken.

Their messages speak for themselves. Here's National Review Institute, debunking the "liberal myth" that we need federal funding for firefighters.

Our nation somehow managed to survive over two centuries without any federal police and fire department spending. Perhaps the sequester can help remind local governments of this fact.

I suppose they forgot the days when a routine house fire ravaged entire cities. I suppose they've forgotten even back to last year when Colorado lost firefighters, homes, and thousands of acres of forest to wildfires.

Here's the Heritage Foundation.

Fire grants appear to be ineffective at reducing fire casualties. AFG, FP&S, and SAFER grants failed to reduce firefighter deaths, firefighter injuries, civilian deaths, or civilian injuries. Without receiving fire grants, comparison fire departments and grant-funded fire departments were equally successful at preventing fire casualties.

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That's Steny Hoyer letting the House have it during the short debate about whether or not the FAA should receive an exemption from the sequester. You go, Steny. I may not agree with you about everything, but I do agree on this.

Just repeal the damn thing already. It's doing more harm than good across the entire country, from Meals on Wheels to unemployment benefits to government contractors holding onto their jobs by their fingernails across the entire nation and for WHAT? To satisfy the phantom austerity leprechaun hiding between the cells in the Reinhart-Rogoff travesty study?

Today's sequester news comes from David Cay Johnston, writing about cuts at the IRS, where employees will now be furloughed since tax season is behind them.

Last week, we pointed to a piece of news that we have yet to read or hear from most major news organizations: The federal budget deficit is going to take a hit, because Congress included the government’s fundraising arm, the Internal Revenue Service, in the sequester.

Put in proper context, meanwhile, that story is a bigger deal than just a sequester tale. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, Congress has cut the IRS budget 17% since 2002, context that no major news organization has reported, as far as I can tell. Such cuts have real impact, as we shall see.

Moreover, news hooks to this are all over the place. Last Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told House members (the Committee On Appropriations Subcommittee On Financial Services And General Government) that the president wants “a $1 billion increase” for the IRS budget, “of which $412 million is to maintain the integrity of tax law enforcement” through “initiatives that provide a high return on investment.” In plain English, that refers to the budget for tax detectives to ferret out cheats.

Before you all cheer about the odds of being audited dropping, rest assured that if they're stretched for resources, the audits they'll drop will be the ones for large corporations and billionaires. They'll keep the ones for the little guys because they don't take much in the way of resources and can be handled without an army of government lawyers and accountants. YOUR audit could still happen tomorrow, but the Kochs' audit? Not gonna happen.

Just to show you how stupid this whole sequestration is, look at what the furlough will cost in terms of revenues:

• IRS revenue officers, otherwise known as tax collectors, earn an average salary of $50,485, while bringing in $2.5 million each per year.
• IRS auditors who examine individual tax returns, earn on average $75,577, and on average annually find more than $1 million of taxes due.
• IRS auditors working on the biggest corporations, who make nearly $150,000, identify on average $19 million in extra taxes per year. That’s $126 for each dollar of pay, an extraordinary return for the cost.

We've seen how easy it is for these Congresscritters to "come together" when they want something, like a fully-funded FAA. So let's make them repeal this whole thing, restore Meals on Wheels, Head Start, unemployment benefits and yes, even the IRS.

You can sign the Campaign for America's Future petition for repeal here.

While still a positive, there's no question that last month's jobs report was disappointing. And financial soooper-gen-i-us (/sarcasm) Jim Cramer knows who to blame. None other than Our Lady of the Sherry, Peggy Noonan.

GREGORY: Let’s look at the numbers here; the unemployment right now is 7.6%, only 88,000 jobs created. You look at the context in terms of recent months, we have that chart as well, you’ve got much fewer than we’ve seen. What’s going on?

CRAMER: This is stunning. Stunning. I think a lot of it had to do with fear-mongering. Remember we had Peggy Noonan on? Not that I don’t…she’s the fear monger in chief. The president did make people feel everything is going to shut down in the country because of the sequester. A lot of the CEOS were scared; a lot of the small business people held back, bankers would tell you that. Only Ben Bernanke, Fed Chief, got this right. He seemed to understand that the country’s hiring is really coming back down.

I know it will shock and surprise you that Peggy Noonan's appearance on last week's Meet the Press included absolutely zero comments on jobs and the sequester, proving once again that Jim Cramer cannot think his way out of a paper bag.

Jim Cramer did also call out President Obama's fear-mongering as well, which frankly, proved to be accurate when he warned that the sequester could hurt jobs. Evidential proof is a concept largely foreign to Cramer. It's interesting that Cramer adopts the framing of right wing blogs to implicate Obama.

There is little doubt that the obstruction and gamesmanship in DC surrounding the sequester, the trumped-up deficit "crisis" and absolute demand from within the Beltway for austerity measures has made an impact on hiring and jobs. Who has confidence in these yahoos in DC anymore to work on behalf of Americans? Paul Krugman:

That deficit has declined from 5.6 percent of potential GDP in 2011 to 2.5 percent in 2013 — that’s 3 percent of GDP, which is a lot of austerity. Not all of that cut has even hit yet — the sequester isn’t in the macro numbers yet — but the rise in the payroll tax is very clearly driving the latest bad numbers, which show big declines in retail.

This is really stupid; as long as we’re at the zero lower bound, austerity is a huge mistake. Yet for what, the third time since 2009, all discussion in Washington has turned away from job creation to deficits (even though the debt problem has largely faded away) and the need for an early Fed exit from stimulus (even though unemployment remains high and inflation low).

Clearly, the answer is to cut Social Security!

Would it be too much to ask NBC News to stop propping up someone with little understanding like Jim Cramer and actually be informative for their viewers?

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On the day when House Republicans once again pass a budget that kills Medicare and Social Security, perhaps it's worth taking a look at what real people are going through.

Yes, Republicans, it's about far more than White House tours. Employees losing the equivalent of a months' pay, losing their jobs, services being cut and more.

Meanwhile, I'll bet no one is reporting on the Progressive Caucus budget, which actually did create jobs while saving Medicare and Social Security.

2014 is coming. Time to retire the tea party.

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In case you missed it, the right wing has been feasting over a Daily Caller report that President Obama has a food tester. Besides the fact that this is not news – Hot Air reported on President Obama’s food tester in 2009 - it’s not even new for this presidency. Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher points out that St. Ronnie Reagan had one, too. But leave it to born-into-privilege Tucker Carlson to use his site's “scoop” as an excuse to accuse Obama of behaving like a king and then suggest the security measure is a waste of money.

Wonkette snarked Friday afternoon:

Why the nation’s first black president would feel compelled to employ someone meant to protect his food in this wonderful era of complete racial transcendence and political civility is beyond our comprehension, but it does automatically mean that Obama is an evil aristocratic dictator whose tyranny is only matched by his disdain for the common people.

From Wonkette's print to Carlson's lips, but in all seriousness. Friday night, he sneered on the Hannity show: “A food taster? It is good to be king. …and you’re paying for it.”

For anyone who didn’t get it that Carlson was suggesting we’re spending too much money on President Obama’s vainglorious security, he made that more explicit on Fox & Friends Weekend this morning.

In yet another segment in which the “fair and balanced” network whined about cuts to White House tours (and ignored cuts to programs for the poor), co-host Clayton Morris "asked," “How could you turn down kids yelling outside your gate, ‘Please let us in?’”

Carlson replied, “Because you gotta pay your food taster... your dog walker and all the rest.”

OK, it was a throwaway line and, fortunately, nobody has called for an actual reduction in President Obama’s security operation. At least not yet. But Carlson is deliberately planting the meme that a food tester is a wasteful frill less important than a White House tour. And nobody on Fox is objecting. In fact, Morris chuckled heartily at Carlson’s jab and FoxNews.com did its part with an article called, "Longtime Presidential Secret Revealed? GOP Senator Says Obama Has a Food Taster." Given the disgusting NRA ad suggesting the Obama daughters enjoyed special privileges with their security, it shouldn't surprise any of us if this latest nastiness didn't work its way into the mainstream of right-wing rhetoric.

I am thankful each and every day that Barack Obama won the 2012 election, and that he is our president instead of Mitt Romney. The current version of the Republican Party is the most extreme, cynical, and utterly heartless group of people I have ever witnessed in American politics- and I have witnessed a lot in my 30-plus years in politics. I am proud of the president for the good things he has done on many different issues, and for many of the fights he has chosen to take on.

But on economic policy, and especially on fighting for the middle class, this President has two blind spots the size of a Mack truck.

The first is Wall Street. Obama’s first term Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner believed that the most important thing in making the economy work better was to help the biggest banks on Wall Street, and Obama’s current Attorney General openly admits in official testimony to Congress that he is hesitant to prosecute criminals who are executives at big banks because it might hurt those companies, and therefore, apparently, the broader economy. These policies are bad economics, bad morality, and bad politics. This allegiance to Wall Street’s interests has drained vast amounts of money out of productive investments in the real economy, put millions of homeowners underwater on their mortgages or into foreclosure, made big bank execs feel free to commit financial fraud, and allowed continued dangerous speculation in our financial markets that could lead to another financial panic in the not too distant future. These pro-Wall Street policies have slowed the economy down dramatically. Favoring the biggest banks over the rest of the economy is terrible policy if you want to help the middle class.

The other huge blind spot is on Obama’s great desire to strike this “grand bargain”, including cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. He seems obsessed with the idea, offering it up to the Republicans over and over and over again, no matter how many times they say no. He is dead wrong on this issue, and Democrats in Congress should fight him on it tooth and nail.

On Medicare, there are plenty of ways to save serious money without hurting seniors. Negotiate drug prices, for example. Bring younger, healthier people into the Medicare pool. Ask hospitals, who cut a sweet deal in the health reform negotiating process, to find more cost savings. Squeeze the medical equipment industry more. Re-orient health care toward paying for good outcomes rather than fee for service. There’s a ton of savings to be had if we would take on the big health industry special interests, but Republicans have no interest in doing that. They want to squeeze those old people Paul Ryan describes as the “takers” in society. And because Obama wants to have a grand bargain with the Republicans, he has at various points offered up raising the retirement age (although he seems to have backed away from that offer, which is good given that the blue collar folks helped by Medicare and Social Security don’t enjoy the benefits of longer life expectancy nearly as much as high income people) and means testing Medicare. Do these proposals make good sense? Do they help the middle class? Who cares, we have to be bipartisan!

On Social Security, the president keeps suggesting a benefit cut called Chained CPI. The theory is that when inflation goes up, people can always substitute lower cost items- you know, if the cost of Ferraris heads north you can always switch to buying a Cadillac. The problem is that most seniors these days are retiring without pensions, their houses are worth less than used to be, and they don’t have the kind of savings that earlier generations of seniors did. They aren’t choosing between Ferraris and Cadillacs, they are choosing between cottage cheese and Velveeta at the grocery store. The product substitution thing on inflation that economists theorize about just doesn’t work with people on low fixed incomes.

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Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano upped the ante on his impeachment talk this morning during today’s visit to Fox & Friends. Last week, he accused “President Panic” of commiting “almost an impeachable offense” for (in Napolitano’s view) deliberately sabotaging the budget in order to score sequester political points. Today, in a Fox News twofer, Napolitano dropped the “almost” and went full out for impeachment – this time, adding one of Fox’s scare-quester tactics: the supervised release of some ICE detainees.

In case you missed it, Fox has been fear mongering that ICE’s supervised release of undocumented immigrants means that a vicious killer is on his or her way to your neighborhood.

Even though the New York Times reports they are “noncriminals and other low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal histories.” The Times also noted, “Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at a regional immigration office as well as wearing electronic monitoring bracelets, officials said.” Furthermore, as Media Matters pointed out, “(T)here is nothing unusual or illegal about supervised releases. This policy has been a regular part of Department of Homeland Security enforcement procedures since at least 2002.”

None of that information was brought up in this discussion. Instead, Steve Doocy actually prodded Napolitano into talking impeachment:

NAPOLITANO: This is really a new low for the government. …(Obama’s) micromanaging the government in a way consistent with his message of pain, not consistent with his Constitutional obligation to enforce the laws whether he agrees with them or not.

DOOCY: Ask a question: Is what he’s doing Constitutional?

NAPOLITANO: It’s within his power to do it. But it is so offensive, it’s impeachable.

DOOCY (feigning surprise): Oh-Kay. Judge Andrew Napolitano. There’s the impeachment word.

Napolitano is not the first person on Fox to talk impeachment. Sean Hannity has been salivating at the thought for years. Even Neil Cavuto has brought it up, and there's every reason to believe it will continue through Obama’s second term.

At the end of the segment with Napolitano, Doocy teased an upcoming guest: a woman whose “brother was killed by an illegal alien… and she’s not buying the sequester excuse, either.” The message was clear: Your brother could be next.

So while Fox is shrieking about the Obama administration deliberately causing pain, it’s “willfully” doing the same thing to its viewers for political gain. If only THAT were an impeachable offense!

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Someone talk me down, please. When I got the email from Tea Party Nation whining about the House voting down Louis Gohmert's stupid bill to bar any federal payments for President Obama's golf games, I laughed.

And then I heard Luke Russert's reflexive "both sides do it" retort that Gohmert's little hissy was as petty as the president cutting off White House tours due to the sequester, proving that Luke simply has no clue about what is happening.

Neither is a solution to this gawdawful stupid, idiotic impasse. In that regard, they're similar. But for Li'l Luke, they're exactly the same thing. Either that, I think he's echoing the Villagers' general mopiness over not being BFFs with the president anymore. Here's what he said:

It looks bad on both sides. I think it’s a pox on both their houses, which is a thing we’re never supposed to say these days, is that, you know, an easy way to get out for the media. But in this case, it’s actually really true.

No, Luke. It's actually really false. Really, really false. No one really cares if you say it. We care that you think it. This isn't about a golf game or White House tours. This is about a petty, vindictive, recalcitrant bunch of Republicans who actually celebrate the damage they're doing to the economy with this nonsense austerity drive.

There's nothing petty about that, and if you're so shallow you think it's about golf and White House tours, I suggest you find a different career.

So Republicans are feeling the public (and private) opinion pressure enough to pretend to moderate the effects of the sequester (when really, they're just trying to save their largest campaign contributors). Yet despite their vulnerability, Obama is once again offering up Social Security and Medicare as a sacrifice:

(Reuters) - Congressional Republicans announced a plan on Monday to avoid a government shutdown later this month, seeking to calm the waters after months of budget fights that ended in a failure last week to halt damaging spending cuts.

Just three days into the $85 billion of automatic "sequester" cuts, Republicans in the House of Representatives turned their attention to the next fiscal deadline: the March 27 expiration of funding for government agencies and programs.

[...] After bruising encounters last year over the fiscal cliff of broad tax increases and spending cuts, and now sequestration, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have lost some of their appetite - at least temporarily - for more confrontation and want to get through March without having to fight about how to keep government funded.

The bill gives some relief to the Defense Department, military construction and the Veterans Administration, but Democrats complained that it does not do enough to help domestic programs also hit by the sequester cuts that started Friday.

Sounding conciliatory, President Barack Obama said he was not giving up on trying to work with Republicans to reduce the deficit.

"I will continue to seek out partners on the other side of the aisle so that we can create the kind of balanced approach of spending cuts, revenues, entitlement reform that everybody knows is the right way to do things," he said at the start of a cabinet meeting.

In phone calls with lawmakers at the weekend, Obama raised anew the issue of cutting entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security as a way out of the budget cuts. Reforming the social safety net is a pet project of Republicans.

Uh, not just the Republicans. The Republicans are worried, yet instead of kicking them when they're down, and putting the squeeze on to get additional tax revenue, Obama offers up the safety net as an enticement. I'm not surprised, of course. But I'm still furious.

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Nice to know that in this time of sequester madness, we have intellectuals like Bill Maher working so hard to find workable solutions to the impasse. This made me laugh out loud, especially the Rube Goldberg part.