“They’re rolling up the welcome mat at the White House,” said Joseph Straw in the New York Daily News. As part of the $85 billion in mandatory, across-the-board federal budget cuts called “sequestration,” the Obama administration has canceled all public tours of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The move, said the White House, would save $74,000 a week on Secret Service staffing. Since White House tours are arranged through congressional offices, Republican legislators are furious, accusing Obama of deliberately picking popular programs to cut so as to turn voters against sequestration. “The suspension of these tours reeks of political calculation,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who suggested Obama cancel his golf outings instead.
Poor, poor President Obama, said Charles C.W. Cooke in NationalReview.com. He’s now so “strapped for cash” he’s been forced to ban the people from “the home he’s borrowing from them.” Of course he couldn’t bear to sack the three White House calligraphers ($277,050 a year) or the chief of staff to the president’s dog ($102,000 a year) or to ground Air Force One ($181,757 for every hour it’s aloft). God forbid that Obama should live “like the president of a republic instead of a king.” This “sheer pettiness” from our “Sequesterer in Chief” is sure to backfire, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. He’s given us an open invitation “to dive into the gory depths of the federal budget,” and pinpoint dumb spending that deserves to be axed instead. To start, how about the $27 million spent to fund Moroccan pottery classes?
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