Whut got cut - holy shut the f*ck up!

Well, the details about the cuts that staved off the government shutdown are out. There are some real gaspers in there, especially the massive slash to the EPA. Well, it's a campaign issue to run on -- GOP Tea Party types don't care about public health, clean water, clean air, and clean up of toxic waste.

Katrina vanden Heuvel's op-ed from the Washington Post is agonizingly breathtaking. Parts of it:

The most sensible American economists warn against cutting back spending and laying off workers now. Even fiscal hawks like the co-chairs of the president’s deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, opposed cuts in spending in the current fiscal year. Similarly, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, the conservative appointee of George W. Bush, warned against cutting spending or raising taxes in December, arguing that the economy still was struggling to get going.

That’s all forgotten now. “So be it” was Speaker Boehner’s infamous response when asked if the House budget assault would cost federal jobs. Goldman Sachs and Moody’s projected the original Republican plan would cost 700,000 jobs over the next year; now we’ll lose only three-fourths of that number. Some triumph.

...***...

Lost in this discussion is what the country needs: a clear strategy to build the economy and revive the middle class. That requires making the investments vital to our future and figuring out how to pay for them. It requires taxing what we have too much of (financial speculation and extreme concentration of income and wealth) and investing in what we have too little of (education programs such as pre-K, 21st-century infrastructure and renewable energy). And it would address the real —
and sole — source of our long-term debt crisis: not Social Security and Medicare, not “entitlements,” but a broken health-care system, dominated by powerful drug, insurance and hospital lobbies, that costs about twice as much per capita as the health systems of other industrial countries and ensures that while other systems may have bad results, our has worse.

Monitoring Twitter found some of these informative resources:

"RT @AGUSciPolicy: More details on NOAA/NASA/NSF/NIST cuts; polar-orbiting satellites (#JPSS) don't get funding to launch on time http://1.usa.gov/gRFppk"

"Shutdown deal defunds NOAA climate service, cuts NSF $50 million, cuts EPA $1.5 billion--summary here: http://1.usa.gov/fUmDVo"

This section of the CR [continuing resolution] also prohibits funding for: the establishment of a Climate Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the approval of new fisheries catch-share programs in certain fisheries; and for NASA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to engage in bilateral activities with China.

Interior: The CR includes $29.6 billion in discretionary funding in the Interior and Environment section of the bill, which is 8.1%, or $2.62 billion, below the fiscal year 2010 enacted level and 8.5%, or $2.8 billion, below the President’s request. [ A billion here, and billion there, and pretty soon you're talking really debilitating cuts -- which is the GOP's basic intention.]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reduced by $1.6 billion, a 16% decrease from last year’s level. The cuts to the EPA alone represent 61% of the bill’s reduction compared to last year’s level. Funding levels for Land and Water Conservation Fund (land acquisition) programs are reduced $149 million (-33%), climate change funding bill-wide is cut by $49 million (-13%),
and funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is reduced by a combined $25 million from last year’s levels.

"More details on EPA, DOI cuts--USGS cut $25.9 million, USDA Forest Service
cut $602 million http://1.usa.gov/gwEjMh"


And the really scary thing is: the GOP isn't done yet. They've already cut to the bone; their next step is to start removing bones until the whole corpus collapses.