Politics

No compromise for you, says soup-kitchen Obama

Neil Munro White House Correspondent
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President Barack Obama interrupted the Senate budget talks Oct. 14 by publicly repeating his no-compromise demands shortly before Democrats and Republican leaders were slated to meet in his Oval Office.

“If Republicans aren’t willing to set aside their partisan concerns in order to do what’s right for the country, we stand a good chance of defaulting, and defaulting could have a potentially have a devastating affect on our economy,” Obama declared during a lunchtime photo-op at a soup kitchen in D.C.

Shortly after Obama’s super-sized partisanship, the White House announced that the pending Oval Office meeting was put on the back burner.

“The President’s 3:00 pm meeting with the bipartisan leadership has been postponed to allow leaders in the Senate time to continue making important progress towards a solution that raises the debt limit and reopens the government,” said the statement.

The statement did not say whether the Senate’s GOP and Democratic leaders are getting closer to agreement, of if the talks had broken down again.

Since September, Obama has repeatedly declared that the GOP must give up its demands for Obamacare reforms and for spending cuts, before he’ll provide his signature for the 2014 federal budget bills.

That strategy is likely designed to starve the GOP of political support prior to the 2014 midterm election.

Obama and his Senate allies have blocked numerous GOP funding bills, including some bills that do not cut spending or do not require popular reforms of Obama’s troubled takeover of the nation’s health sector.

Also, Obama’s administration is set to hit its $16.7 trillion credit-card limit on Oct. 17. Once the government hits the debt-ceiling limit, it is required to cut domestic spending so that creditors are paid first, unless Congress raises the debt limit.

Obama is using the establishment media to blame the GOP for the government furloughs and for a possible credit default.

On Oct. 12, for example, he slammed the GOP for supposedly halting research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But the House passed a $29 billion bill to fund the NIH on Oct. 2. The Democratic-controlled Senate has declined to pass the bill.

Obama ladled out the partisan rhetoric on his Oct. 14 visit to Martha’s Table, a soup kitchen in D.C., to repeat his no-compromise strategy.

“This whole shutdown has been completely unnecessary,” he said, according to the pool report.

“This afternoon, I am going to once again urge them to open the government and urge them to make sure that the United States government is paying it’s bills,” he said.

There’s been “some progress on the Senate side with Republicans recognizing it’s not tenable, it’s not smart, it’s not good for the American people to let America default,” he said, without offering a morsel or soupcon of compromise.

D.C. is a Democratic-controlled city. The city’s poverty rate dropped to 23 percent in 2007, during the real-estate bubble, but has risen back up to 30 percent during Obama’s tenure, despite vastly increased government spending.

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