The Huffington Post set out to do an extensive review of sequestration stories from the past week, with the goal of finding 100. What seemed like a daunting task was completed in hours. No one region of the country has been immune. Rural towns in Alaska, missile test sites in the Marshall Islands, military bases in Virginia, university towns across the country, and housing agencies in inner cities are all beginning to feel the cuts.

They’re pretty dreadful, too. It’s a litany of layoffs (that Marshall Islands story is of a place I know well: Kwajalein. It’s not the civilian contractors who are going to lose jobs; it’s the Marshallese support workers — cafeteria servers, step-van drivers, building cleaners — who will. And Marshallese society is built around extended families pooling incomes, so if one man or woman loses a cash job everyone suffers).

There are similar stories of Head Start employees losing jobs in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, general aviation airports closing or losing air traffic controllers in Maryland and Idaho, housing agency staff layoffs in Illinois, Alabama, Sacramento and Michigan, and on and on and on.

This is completely counter to what the national Republicans keep saying: “Meh, it’s just White House tours that are closed, and the President could fix that if he wanted to.” It’s an idiotic way to cut budgets even if that had been the real goal, and it just goes to show how completely out of touch the people in Congress are from the way people live out in the country away from the Beltway.