Sequestration and the shutdown

"Who's being played here?" Dems lost the austerity battle, and sequestration is here to stay. (Click on this headline to read more)

And via Michael Hiltzik's latest Los Angeles Times column:

The clean CR that was most recently on the table at the House of Representatives would incorporate 100% of next year's sequester cuts in nondefense spending and 60% of the cuts in the defense budget.

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It's proper to recall the sequester's devastating effects on millions of Americans, keeping in mind that it was created only to settle a major debt-limit fight in 2011.

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It will cost as many as 1.6 million jobs over that time frame, the CBO says.

Just as the government shutdown leaves congressional pay and benefits intact, so does the sequester. The damage is all done at the opposite end of the economic scale.

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Yet the best we can hope for is that the sequester continues, and doesn't get worse.

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The best clue to the poverty of the Republican anti-Obamacare argument is the breadth of the lies told to justify it.

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There is absolutely no evidence that any workers have lost their jobs because of the reform act. Part-time work?... [T]he share of total employment represented by part-time jobs nationwide has actually fallen slightly (from 19.49% to 19.41%).

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Big business... may well be using Obamacare as a whipping boy to avoid the impression that they're just being cheap... As for "skyrocketing" healthcare premiums, they're nowhere in sight.

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One big lie has been attached to the GOP's determination to overturn a tax on medical devices... But as we showed back in May, no objective data support that claim — all the numbers come from studies the industry commissioned or from libertarian think tanks that would oppose any tax.

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The players are all out for themselves — their profits, their ideology, their TV time. The real-world effect of their actions? That ball isn't in their court.