We will likely be warned, apocalyptically, for the next five days. The effects on our air travel, our food inspection, our health research, our military “readiness:” all catastrophic. House members, House leadership, House minority members, Senate leadership and members, Administration spokespersons and Cabinet members — all the way to the president.

PANIC

Everybody with the power to stop this thing is going to tell us how terrible it is.

Mostly with an eye to ensuring Americans blame somebody else. But every time anyone with the power to stop the sequester rails about the sequester, Americans need to ask, “Why don’t you simply repeal it, then?”

Not a new idea. But one with increasing urgency: it’s five days away, and Congress can make it stop. So, make it stop?

I’m not sure I dislike the cuts to defense too terribly much, but I’m quite sure I dislike any cuts to Head Start, so I’m willing to see the sequester go away. It’s the worst kind of chicken-government: let’s put government on the chopping block, and see if we can do something to avoid it before it gets here.

Well, it’s here. And our ‘government’ didn’t do a single thing to avoid it. Now, can they all please walk back from the brink to keep from ruining what the talking heads like to call America’s fragile recovery but the rest of us experience as continuing ruinous depression? I mean, if an outside terror group were threatening this level of chaos, uncertainty, and economic ruin we’d all be pressing for pre-retaliation.

Clearly, we’re past the point of being able to do anything constructive in place of the sequester. Congress doesn’t have enough in-session days left to get anything done. And yet every one of them will tell us how awful this not-carved-in-stone law is. A law they wrote (not important anymore who moved what goalposts, although it’s instructive that Village Media has become obsessed with that aspect) is a law they can repeal.

Let’s press the folks who can make it go away: why won’t you simply make the sequester go away?