Members of Congress are all back home for their August recess, and all is quiet on Capitol Hill – for now. But don’t be fooled; this is merely the calm before the storm that is coming in September, when Congress returns and has to pass a bill to fund the government by October 1st.

Here we go again. The White House is, once again, complaining about the sequester. John Podesta, the chief adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote an op-ed at the Washington Post, in which he urged Congress to roll back cuts to the rate of spending increases over the next decade.

While the administration has been taking a 'sky is falling' approach regarding the effects of the sequestration, one Department of Energy (DOE) contractor has claimed that the financial cuts had little effect on their operations.  In fact, Daniel Coyne, President of the B&W West Valley division for CH2M Hill, claimed that his company actually received an additional $10 million in funding because of it.

It has been a harrowing six weeks for the nation, what with the sequestrapocalyse and all. As of March 1, our underfunded federal government was forced to slash indispensible initiatives such as robot squirrels, pickle specifications and cowboy poetry.

One would have hoped that after a couple of weeks the overblown brouhaha over the consequences of the sequestration cuts would have died down, but alas, there are those still insistent that the meager $85 billion in cuts will somehow result in a cataclysmic shock to the American economy.

Never before have the sentiments of this 'politics over prosperity' President been more clear than in the aftermath of the sequestration debate. Since the reality of the $85 billion cuts across government departments, agencies and programs has set in, the President has set a clear and convincing course in trying to punish Americans in a very public manner, for the concept of reigning in government spending, and has continued to reward those outside our country.

Despite having received nearly $2 billion in stimulus funding, contractors at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation cleanup project in Richland, Wash., have consistently hemorrhaged jobs over the past couple of years as taxpayer dollars dried up, and companies had to return to more realistic budgets.  And while this has been a consistent pattern established for years now, a new round of a couple hundred layoffs at the site is being attributed to - you guessed it - sequestration.

Seven US Marines died and several others were injured when a mortar round exploded in its tube during a training exercise in Nevada on March 18th. The cause of the accident is still under investigation.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) took to the floor of the Senate and in a move of incredible political cynicism, blamed the deaths on sequestration.In effect, the Senator blamed the Marines involved for their own deaths.

Despite every attempt by congressional Republican leaders to preemptively surrender, the fight to get a sane Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund only the necessary parts of government is not over. Senate Democrats and the White House, not content with victory, are pushing for even more spending and taxes, giving reformers an opportunity.

To hear the president tell it, you would have thought the world was going to end the day the sequestration went into effect.  When the world actually went on and the president's dire warnings became even more laughable, the White House responded with the emotional maturity we've come to expect from this administration: they canceled White House tours.