The Long October And The Damage Done

Word is the deal is done in the Senate, and it's pretty much all over but the shouting (except for any last-minute disaster that may yet rear its head).

But the Shutdown caused by this reckless House GOP has left major damage across the board:

• The sciences - which rely a lot on funding from the federal government as much as foundation support - have taken a huge hit.  The ongoing sequestration was cutting back heavily on projects, studies, new developments... the Shutdown piled on top of all that, disrupting a lot of work and forcing a good number of scientists to start over from scratch.  A lot of potential innovation and discovery is going to be devastated by all this.

• Economic confidence - one of the driving forces of a consumer-capitalist system is the willingness of people to spend money on stuff - has dropped as though we're in the middle of another recession.

• No matter how quickly a deal gets done, the Shutdown has forced a lot of government systems to stall or go inert, requiring massive effort to reboot their offices, restart projects, get funding out, get financial aid out, all of that.  It will take weeks even after the Shutdown ends to see government functioning anywhere near normal levels.  And the costs will be enormous.

• Foreign investors - a serious way to get economic growth happening in our nation - have been scared off by the uncertainty of a political system that kills itself on the whim of a mere handful (32 Far Right Republicans in Congress) who under other circumstances would have no power like this anywhere else.

And there's little hope to be certain that this all won't happen again.  This current deal from the Senate, after all, only delays the fight another three months.  The debt ceiling will come up again as an issue.  The threat of a Shutdown can well happen again even though the Republican Party has been hit HARD by the public's revulsion of how this whole Shutdown came to be.  That's because the Far Right Tea Partier elements of the House GOP - and worse their media elite enablers like Limbaugh and Erickson - have not been fully chastened by their screw-up: some of them have even been emboldened by the publicity they think they've received, that they're still heroes to the Far Right Noise Fear-Making Machine.  As Tomasky says over on the Daily Beast:

Today, we have a clavern of sociopaths who know nothing of honor, and we have no easy way to stop them. Except at the ballot box. Except that they've rigged that, too, with their House districts. They've rigged the whole game so that they light the match and then point at President Obama and shout: “Look! Fire!”...

...This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren't going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren't suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren't going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn't you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will...

This is why it is very important to stop voting Republican.  Just stop.  Don't vote for ANY Republican at any level.  They cannot be trusted with the jobs.  They cannot be trusted with government.

Please, for the LOVE OF GOD.  Stop voting Republican.  Get your voter identification switched from "Republican" to "No Party Affiliate" or hell even the "Libertarians" at this point (okay, maybe not). I don't know for how long.  Maybe when they're finally down to just three Representatives from one state and they're all thinking "gee, what's the Modern Whig Party got that we don't?"

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The Long October: When The Republicans Had To Notice Their Hostage-Taking Suicide Mission Was Failing

...was pretty much the point when the mainstream media noticed that Nickelback was more popular than Congress.  To which I can only beg: can we please stop picking on Nickelback?  I'm not a fan or anything - I liked them back when they were Foreigner -  but even they didn't do anything to deserve getting compared to Congress...

Actually, the Nickelback thing relates to a poll taken back in January, or maybe February, of this year.  Public Policy Polling held a more recent poll (Oct. 4 to 6) and found out these things were more popular than Congress:

• Dog poop
• Toenail fungus
• Hemorrhoids
• Cockroaches
• The IRS (the tax collectors, not the college-radio record label, although I'm pretty sure the record label will poll popular as well)
• The DMV
• The Mother-in-Law
• Public Radio fundraising drives
• Potholes
• Zombies (Must be a Walking Dead fanboi thing)

Sadly enough, neither Miley Cyrus nor Lindsey Lohan proved more popular than Congress, which is sad because both those young ladies are still more coherent and (dammit Miley stick that tongue back in!) reasonable than Congress really is. P.S. can we also stop picking on Lindsey Lohan.  Even she doesn't deserve getting compared to Congress...

On a more serious note, that poll showed only 8 percent approved of Congress' job, with a staggering 86 percent disapproving.  Harry Truman never polled lower than 22 percent.  Bush the Lesser never polled lower than 26 percent.  At a Presidential level, their parties suffered with that unpopularity.  Congress ought to see the same negative result: When you poll that low, no matter how you've got your congressional district gerrymandered to your favor, you are losing voters at an exponential rate.

When voters hate you... you tend not to get those voters back to your side.  No matter how short-term their memories are.  Remember Machiavelli's warning: while being loved or being feared helps, being hated is the worst thing a Prince or any person of power can become.

And making it worse for Congress is that this is a lousy time to be dropping your favorables.  The 2014 midterms are not going to be about Obama the way the 2010 midterms were: the President is not going to be up for re-election again, he can live with having his popularity numbers tank as low as Congress' numbers are tanking right now...  except for the fact that Obama's numbers AREN'T tanking, he's actually going up (he's back over 50 percent in one poll) while the Republicans are going down.  The 2014 midterms are going to be about Congress - much in the way the 2006 midterms were, much in the way the 1998 midterms were - and right now every American voter is seeing how messed up the GOP-led House has been behaving.

Even Obama's signature law the healthcare reform AKA Obamacare - the thing the Far Right Republicans were attacking in the first place as an excuse for the shutdown - is growing popular even though A) people still are confused about what it does and B) the rollout of the Obamacare website was an unforced error and still glitchy.

And the polling is showing a majority of those polled hold the Republicans accountable for the very unpopular shutdown mess.

If the Republicans were doing this whole shutdown / debt ceiling fight to embarrass or weaken Obama, they've done a piss-poor job of it.  I can see how the Republicans would think that if they screwed government up enough, make an incompetent mess of it, they could drag everyone's popularity - not just theirs, but also Obama's - down with them.  A kind of kamikaze "taking-you-with-me" scheme.  The Republicans could normally believe in that, considering that their modern ideology revolves around the belief that government is bad for you anyway.

However, committing suicide thinking your hated enemy is going to fall with you isn't the wisest course of action to take.  All it does for you - for your political party - is bring out the hate from the people who would have normally backed your move... all it's doing is pissing off the people who are/were Republicans suddenly inconvenienced by the shutdown you've caused... and not at all happy with the lies they've been told that "Obama is weak and gonna cave to our demands."

Obama didn't cave.  The Democratic Senate didn't cave.  The current status of the shutdown is that the House GOP is trying to negotiate a short-term extension on the debt ceiling - the big threat looming less than a week away - even though Obama and the Senate Democrats are insisting rightly on resolving the debt ceiling for a longer period along with passing a "clean" Continuing Resolution to get government open again.

We're at the point where it doesn't matter who the "winners and losers" are over this crisis: it's pretty clear the Far Right Republicans took a high-risk gamble and lost.  The smart move for the GOP is to make the deal Obama wants, take the hit from their wingnut voters, assure their financial backers to not support any primary challengers for their gerrymandered districts, and work hard to make voters forget this Long October.

Then again, that plan of action is based on there being enough sane and competent Republicans left in government able to do any of that.

/headdesk

Here's hoping the Nickelback/Miley Cyrus/Lindsey Lohan "Suck On This Congress" nationwide tour generates a lot of ticket and t-shirt sales...

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Fantasy-Hoping Tea Partier Ted Yoho Vs. Fact-Based Experts

As part of the ongoing efforts to drive the United States federal government as well as the whole nation over that cliff, there is a discernible faction within the Republican Party known as "default denialists" proclaiming that the debt ceiling isn't that big of a deal and that, hey, defaulting wouldn't be that bad.

One of these idiots is from my state, and worse he's from my alma mater of University of Florida.  Rep. Ted Yoho (Tea Party) is on record saying he won't raise the debt ceiling, and that the United States ought to go broke as a wake-up call of sorts.

His one-liner: "I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets."

Yoho's degrees, by the by, are in Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine.  Not in business or finance (both of which ARE taught at UF).  Any financial experience he has mostly relates to running his vet office.

In the meantime, there's a slew of people who actually HAVE college degrees in business and finance, and at least a sizable amount of working in the fields of business and finance, who are absolutely freaking out over the possibility that the U.S. will default.

“We can’t even imagine all the things that might happen, just like Henry Paulson couldn’t imagine all the bad things that might happen if he let Lehman go down,” said Bill Isaac, chairman of Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp and a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., referring to the former U.S. Treasury secretary. “It would create chaos in financial markets...”

The market shocks would be enough to tip the U.S. back into recession and drag the world economy down, according to Desmond Lachman, a fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. The event could prove to be the trigger that reverses a weak and fragile recovery, said William Cunningham, head of credit portfolios for the investment arm of Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. Lehman’s collapse was a similar spark, he said.
“Is this the straw among other things that tips an economy without drivers of growth back down into a negative spiral?” Cunningham said...

Labeled technical or not, a default is still a default, said Jim Grant, founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.
“People have typically turned to Treasuries as a safe haven, but what will happen when they realize it’s not safe anymore,” said Grant, who has followed interest rates since the 1970s. “Financial markets are all confidence-based. If that confidence is shaken, you have disaster.”

You'll notice a lot of the financial sector experts quoted in those paragraphs kept referring back to the Lehman Brothers collapse, which is regarded as one of the prime elements of the 2007-08 Financial Crisis that led to the Great Recession.  They are pointing to a track record, a historical moment well-documented of where a global economic collapse occurred due to a large-scale default that went into the billions of dollars.  (and the Lehman Brothers collapse occurred because the federal government refused to help)  The United States default we're facing due to the impending debt ceiling cap?  That will be in the trillions of dollars.

Failure by the world’s largest borrower to pay its debt -- unprecedented in modern history -- will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse.

Just for the record, my degree from University of Florida is in Journalism, which gives me some expertise writing this blog.  I've got a Masters in Library Information Sciences from University of South Florida, which gives me some expertise in research, finding relevant resources, and sharing of information.  I may not have a degree in finance, but I know where I can find the ones who do and I can ask them.  And what they're saying carries more weight than a Teabagging whack job who's ruining one of my university's reputation by talking like a self-serving idiot.

It's like Yoho wants to drive this car over the cliff just to prove something.

Dear University of Florida: can you revoke Ted Yoho's degrees?

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Ongoing Reports From The Long October

I'm trying to come up with some poetic-sounding names for the Shutdown Showdown of 2013, and right now "The Long October" is about as good as I can think of a name.

Because for the most part we're now expecting the current Shutdown to merge into the scheduled Debt Ceiling crisis set for October 17th, simply because the House Republicans are driving the nation off the cliff (via Jonathan Chait at the New York):

...Last Tuesday, House Republicans shut down the federal government, demanding that Obama abolish his health-care reform in a tactically reckless gamble that most of the party feared but could not prevent. More surreal, perhaps, were the conditions they issued in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this month. Lifting the debt ceiling, a vestigial ritual in which Congress votes to approve payment of the debts it has already incurred, is almost a symbolic event, except that not doing it would wreak unpredictable and possibly enormous worldwide economic havoc. (Obama’s Treasury Department has compared the impact of a debt breach to the failure of Lehman Brothers.) The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, plus tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends...

We're basically unable to do anything about the current Shutdown: the Democrats are attempting to force a vote on the House floor for a "clean Continuing Resolution" using an obscure mechanism called a "discharge petition", but to pull it off they seemingly need more than 17 Republicans to commit publicly to vote for it.  And while there's a solid number of anonymous House Republicans complaining about the Far Right taking their own party hostage during these "negotiations", only two of them have been brave up to stand up... because if anyone else did so they'd be primaried within a heartbeat.

Molly Ball at The Atlantic makes the observation that Republicans are the one voting bloc that refuses to compromise (the poll is linked from her article):

Republicans, it seems, are different: They value compromise far less and principle far more than other Americans. In refusing to give ground, then, Republican politicians are reflecting their base's priorities.

This result helps explain more than just GOP intransigence, it seems to me. It also helps explain the parties' mutual incomprehension. Since Democrats value compromise by such an overwhelming margin, they assume their opponents do too. But Republicans, it turns out, are wired a bit differently.

Andrew Sullivan makes the observation that the Republicans aren't so much refusing to compromise, it's that they can't accept the reality of the situation and are grasping at anything:

They say they want to reverse what they see as the end of American freedom because of the dawn of public subsidies for private insurance policies, based on a Heritage Foundation idea and implemented by their last presidential nominee in his home state. Okay, so how about running a campaign for Congress and presidency that explicitly promises to repeal Obamacare entirely? Oh, yes, they already did that and lost. How about upping the ante and making it explicit in the campaign that this is the very last chance to end Obamacare and save America? Oh, yeah, I forgot. They did that too. So what do they want? I’m not sure they even know.

Even though there's another poll, this time on approval ratings for the parties involved - Obama, Democrats in Congress, and Republicans in Congress - and showing why this is still a serious problem for Republicans continuing this path to self-destruction:

Problem with that poll is while the numbers show the Republicans in trouble with Americans overall (at 70 percent disapproval), the House GOP are only worried about the Americans (Tea Partiers) in their gerrymandered districts (and yes, the gerrymander is one of the things at fault here), and most of them are in the 24 percent bracket still approving of their hostage-taking BS.

This is going to be a Long October after all.

I only hope this won't interfere with trick-or-treating... 'cause if our kids can't trick-or-treat due to an economic collapse then we are going to see some SERIOUS street riots led by kids dressed up in superhero costumes and wielding plastic pirate swords.  CANDY OR DEATH!  CANDY OR DEATH...!

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How To Survive The Impending Shutdown In Three Easy Steps

Considering we're facing the last day before October 1st when a new budget has to kick in - either with a Continuing Resolution or an actual budget - and that the odds are very high that the Republicans' demands will be rejected by the Democrats... we're pretty much facing a government shutdown.

Having survived the Shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, I would like to offer up my expertise on the matter and provide some emotional and spiritual support in these trying times.  So here now is a simple, three-step guide to surviving the Shutdown Showdown of 2013:

1. Don't panic.  The ones inflicting the shutdown - the Far Right - are in fact counting on a lot of people freaking out and calling their elected officials to scream about getting something done.  While the House GOP will get those calls same as the Democrats, the Far Right are so out-of-touch with voters... so willingly out of touch with voters... that they will easily ignore the shouting in their own ears.  They are sociopathic enough to know that while they can endure the screaming, their Democratic opponents - who actually want government to work - may well buckle under the pressure and give in to a handful of demands... at which point the Far Right knows that hostage-taking works and will continue to play this game of destruction.

Now, there will be a lot of people inconvenienced by the shutdown.  That's the whole point of it.  The thing not to do is give the ones pushing the shutdown any satisfaction.  You're just going to have to endure this and wait for the financial sector power leaders to dopeslap enough Republicans for them to pass a clean CR bill.

Voters need to realize something: Washington doesn't really listen to protests anymore unless it's a protest they themselves organized.  When hundreds of thousands marched in the streets against the Iraqi invasion in 2002-03, the media ignored it or dismissed it and the elected officials didn't give a rat's ass.  When hundreds of thousands marched in the streets in favor of immigration reform in 2005-06... take a look, we're still stuck with a broken immigration system.

The only thing our elected officials even pay attention to anymore are election results.  They only care about who wins and who doesn't.  The reason the Far Right Republicans pay no mind to protests is because they've insulated themselves into gerrymandered districts where they can always get re-elected by pandering to the base, not the masses.  Which brings us to...

2. Change your voter ID information.  This will take some time on your part.  You can go online or to a location that will carry voter registration forms - while the federal government agencies are closing down for the shutdown, the county and state offices ought to stay open - and fill out a change of voter identification form.

This step is very important: change your voter ID from whatever party affiliation you've got - Republican or Democrat - to No Party Affiliate or Independent.  Also, change your Ethnic identification - if it asks for one - to Other.  That's all.  This is important because this will eventually screw up the political parties in a variety of ways.  And while it won't do much good right now, hopefully if enough voters change their identities over to NPA as well as hide their ethnic identity on the records, it will screw up the parties' ability to craft out gerrymandered districts.

Now, the deal is the states are not supposed to be creating districts for partisan gain.  But the law is one thing: the practice is another.  Parties dominating in a state use specially designed software programs to calculate out the best ways to carve out districts by ethnicity - some states by law have to carve out minority-majority districts - and by party affiliation (they're not supposed to, but they know the loopholes to mask what they're doing).  This is why here in Florida even though there's a 800,000 voter advantage to Democrats over Republicans, the Republican-controlled legislature still figures out how to create more Republican districts than Democrat.

Ah, but what if a massive majority of registered voters were suddenly No Party Affiliate?  There's a good 2 million now out of 11 million registered in Florida... what if it's suddenly 6 million, more than the Dems and more than the GOP put together?  The state lege could still figure out a few things by ethnicity - Black-majority communities by census are bound to be Democratic by default when 98 percent of Blacks vote that way - but now they can't tell exactly where to make their cuts into urban and suburban areas to ensure GOP-friendly districts.  No more safe districts in Florida for Republicans.  If they gerrymander the wrong way they could make it more Democratic-leaning than if they just did it by population density like they're supposed to.

It's also pretty liberating to not be tied down to one party.  You'll still get their junk mail begging for donations, but you're no longer under any kind of peer pressure to subsume your political beliefs to a group that will just ignore 'em.

Meanwhile...

3. When the time comes, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Don't listen to the "both sides do it" bullshit.  The Republicans are totally on board with crashing the government and ruining the nation's credit rating.  Yes, the Democrats have voted before against the debt ceiling and they rail against the Continuing Resolutions that make do for budgets when they're in the minority.  But the Democrats don't schedule an entire government shutdown around it.  My God, some of the Republicans came out of their Saturday pep rally openly cheering what they were planning to do.

The Democrats never held up an entire government like this to pass basically an entire Presidential platform (Romney/Ryan's 2012) that got rejected by a solid majority of American voters.

And the Democrats never pushed an agenda like this that was so sociopathic, where the Republicans want to kill off a health care reform package designed to help more people, not less.  We're talking about a Republican Party so obsessed with punishing poor people they are willing to cut food stamp aid by $39 billion under the argument that "the poor just gotta suck it up".

And we're talking about a political party in the modern Republicans who refuse to negotiate on good faith, issuing demands so far to the right there is no room for Obama or anyone on the left to see a point on which to compromise.  A Republican Party that keeps thinking it won everything in 2012 and so ought to get all the pretty prizes it wants.

The Republican Party is going to keep taking hostages and ruin our nation's credit and credibility until they get voted out of power for good.  And even then they may not accept the reality - mostly because the real party leadership (hi Fox Not-News!) aren't elected officials, meaning they won't get burned if the GOP no longer has legislative or executive powers - but at least they won't be in any position to ruin our lives for a good long while.

So there you have it.  Just follow those three easy steps and you'll get through this showdown crisis just fine.

Also, stock up on a lot of bottled water, portable battery extensions for your tablet devices, and food for yourselves and your pets.  ...You know, just in case.

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Hostage Taking Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed...

The Shutdown Showdown of 2013 is kicking into third gear as I type this, and it ain't pretty.

From The National Review and thence to other news sources like ThinkProgress, the GOP House leadership has crafted a list of demands for Obama and the Democratic Senate leadership to surrender to:

As the nation moves dangerously close to a government shutdown on Oct. 1, House leaders are shifting their focus to the next big fiscal fight: raising the nation’s $16.7 trillion borrowing limit by one year before Oct. 17. On Wednesday night, Republicans circulated an outline of demands, threatening to push the nation into default unless President Obama and the Democrats in the Senate agree to enact a wish list of Republican priorities.

Though Obama has repeatedly insisted that he would not negotiate over the must-pass legislation, leadership is hoping to satisfy conservative members by including every “major piece of the Republican agenda” save a “ban on late-term abortions — and some lawmakers who oppose abortion were arguing to add that,” the Washington Post reports...

Igor Volsky's ThinkProgress article - alongside Derek Thomspon's over at The Atlantic - proceeded to break down the demands, which I can summarize here as well:

1. Delay Obamacare by one year.  Rather than defund or eliminate outright, the Republicans would at least want Obamacare stopped from being enacted before more Americans find out the health care reforms might actually work.  At least until the 2014 midterms, during which the Tea Party candidates can indulge in more fear-mongering to scare up votes and campaign moneys.  Meanwhile, the delay will cut into elements of Obamacare that have already kicked in, causing even more confusion.
2. Weaken/defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Created as a response to the massive fraud that led to the 2007 Economic Crisis / Great Recession, the CFPB is a bogeyman agency for the Far Right who prefer to deregulate everything and let the uber-rich banks defraud everyone until there's another need for a massive bank bailout.
3. Approval to build the Keystone Pipeline.  This is a pet issue for Republicans who view this as "more oil more money" kind of thing as their energy platform (drill baby drill).  This also includes letting the Coal industry and offshore drilling companies getting everything they want.
4. Enact the budget and tax plan created by Paul Ryan.  It's basically the plan he campaigned for as Romney's Veep partner, and it basically disqualifies the fact that a majority of Americans voted against it by voting against Romney/Ryan.  Plus the simple fact the Ryan budget is evil.
5. Cut funding to health care and social safety net programs, and enact a method of "means testing" Medicare (what is "means testing"?  It's where they test a person's eligibility for Medicare, and the GOP can be mean about it.).  Means testing, my ass: Republicans want any excuse to cut people off Medicare, they just want to cover up what they're actually doing by hiding behind Orwellian wording.
6. Massive cuts to the federal employee pension fund.  Considering the massive number of people reaching retirement age, this is bound to not work out well.
7. Block recent federal regulations capping greenhouse gases.  Because we all know that greenhouse gases are vital to the functioning of our proud country.
8. Tort reform.  Like it was the lawyers' fault doctors commit malpractice or corporations commit fraud/failed safety standards.
9. Passing the Republicans' ideas of "jobs bills"... which are A) cutting safety regulations everywhere and with little to no evidence ending those regs would create more jobs, and B) massive tax cuts to corporations that won't require those tax savings go to actual job creation or wage growth.

I'm with Andrew Sullivan on this: "why not ask for Obama's resignation while they're at it?"

What the sheer gob-smacking scale of these demands means is that the GOP effectively wants to nullify the last election entirely (except of course for their gerrymandered, no-popular vote House majority). The staggering thing about this party as it now exists is that it views the governance of the other party as always effectively illegitimate. Elections do not matter. Only their agenda matters. No compromise is possible, even when this kind of catastrophic default is hanging over our heads. In fact, the danger of catastrophic default is something they relish in order to undo the basic principles of democratic government.

This is not a bargaining position; they already voted for the budget that requires us to raise the debt ceiling. It is a bald attempt to reverse elections as the mark of a democracy and replace them with endless blackmail until they get their way. This isn't conservatism. It’s pure constitutional vandalism...

Sullivan later makes a question about American history where a party in the minority made such an egregious list of demands... and he quickly got an answer from readers who pointed out that yes this has happened before.  Back in 1860, when the Republicans were poised to elect Lincoln into the White House, the slavery-owner leadership of the Southern Democrats faction threatened secession unless Lincoln caved on all demands.  And when it became clear the South had little to threaten with, they seceded and forced the civil war (anyone calling it a War of Northern Aggression is selling you snake oil.  The South wanted a fight and by God they got one).

It shouldn't be a surprise that the end result of Nixon's Southern Strategy would have the southern conservative agenda seek another go at wrecking the nation.  We shouldn't be at all surprised that the Far Right - in the House, Senate, and wingnut media - want push this issue well over the cliff (no matter how much the party's own leadership is aware of the disaster that awaits them).  Their way or the highway.

This "negotiation" over the debt ceiling and the budget by having the Republicans demand this "We Get Everything WE Want" wish list is in my mind akin to a bank robber taking hostages during a heist... and then demanding that not only the cops let him go with all the cash from that bank, but that the cops help him rob three or four more banks right down the road because dammit he's in the right.  That's not negotiating.  That's not even practical hostage-taking.  That's batshit insanity. (pardon my Swedish)

There is no reason for Obama or Reid to answer this list at all.  The Republicans can scream all they want about who to blame when the debt ceiling crisis reaches the Defcon-1 level.  Insisting the majority party enact the worst elements of the minority party's agenda isn't democracy, isn't republican, and isn't sane.

And the polls are reflecting that, yes Americans know exactly who to blame if the shit goes down.

I want every voter to remember this by November 2014: The Republicans do not care to compromise, they do not care to govern, they do not care period.  They want it all.

Please for the love of God vote them out.

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How It Came To This, A Government Shutdown

Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains. Like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the west. Behind the hills, into shadow. How did it come to this? - JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

It hasn't yet come to pass, but the inevitability of a government shutdown is as certain as a sunrise on October 1st.

The damage of another shutdown, similar to the ones we had in 1995 and 1996, are pretty clear: lost earnings reaching into the billions, petty inconveniences to average Americans, loss of confidence in the governance of the nation.  The stock market as always is worried and at risk.

Shutdowns are serious business.  The results of the previous ones didn't go so great for the party that pushed for them: the Republicans ended up getting the blame, failed to achieve much of what they wanted, and made Bill Clinton look good for his re-election in 1996.  The more recent shutdown threat in 2011 over the debt ceiling tanked Congress' polling numbers from which it has yet to recover.  And the polls are showing that a majority of Americans don't want a government shutdown, and will blame the Republicans if one takes place.

And yet, here we are.  The Republicans - and no matter how they try the blame game on Democrats ("If only the Democrats would compromise on everything we want like tax cuts and defunding Obamacare and infinite military spending...!") - are pushing for this showdown.

How did it come to this?

An interesting reason is that a sizable number of the Republican voting base want a shutdown in the first place.  There's that strain of uber-libertarianism that doesn't so much want "small" government as it wants NO government: full deregulation, no taxes, free reign on finance and do-what-thou-will will be the Law of the Land.  A kind of conservative variation of anarchism that would make Randians weep for joy and a majority of Americans weep in pain.  The faction of the GOP that wants to prove government is ineffective and will happily crash it over a cliff to prove it.

The other faction of that Far Right voting base isn't as extreme as that, but are convinced that the threat of a shutdown - if not the shutdown itself - will force the Democrats to defund Obamacare.  These are the voters who have been told since 2009 about how Obama isn't really the President, that Obama is a socialist fascist fake American, that he's imposing Sharia law and taking our guns (personally, in the dead of night, through 10 miles of snow, uphill, both ways), and that above all Obama's signature health care reform law is unconstitutional and full of death panels.  Having been told for four straight years, these are the people who wholeheartedly believe Obamacare is outright evil... and that you don't compromise over evil...

But it's not just the base.  This is an action being pursued by the elected officials in the GOP-led House - not so much in the Senate, where Ted "All About Me" Cruz is the biggest thumper on the showdown - who have sold themselves as liberators of the Right and have obsessed themselves over eliminating Obamacare at all hazards.  Up to and including the fact that they've voted 41 times now to overturn, kill, or defund Obamacare and yet never find the time to pass a jobs bill for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.  These are the elected officials who are on a singular mission: make Obama a failed President.  They couldn't succeed making him a one-termer, but now they're aiming for the next best thing: force Obama to reject his own signature achievement in office.

Another reason the GOP leadership do not seem so concerned about the fallout from pursuing a government shutdown is that in practical terms it didn't cost the Republican Congress of 1995-96 all that much.  They only lost a handful of seats in the House and gained a couple seats in the Senate that election cycle (the only real loss was making Clinton look good enough to win re-election).

The failing of that logic is that for starters this isn't 1996: in 1996 the economy was booming behind the Internet Tech bubble; in 2013 the economy is still in a recession of failed wage growth and wobbly housing values.  Also, in 1995 and 1996 Congress was functional enough to have passed spending and appropriations that kept much of government functioning quite well during the shutdowns: in 2013, this Congress hasn't passed or agreed to much of anything and is in fact mired in a sequester cutting program that has left government dysfunctional.  A shutdown today would be a disaster, and the GOP doesn't see it.

What does concern the GOP leadership is that voting base they've stirred up the past four years.  Placating the base is far more important to them than actual governance.  For all the reality of incumbents enjoying near-certain re-election wins in general elections, those incumbents are terrified of facing primary challenges.  Say hello to one of the major costs of gerrymandering: outside of the fact that gerrymandering creates wasted votes, these specially-crafted congressional districts are designed so that the party candidate of that district is favored to win no matter what (almost).  The big reason the Republicans held onto the House in 2012 wasn't because of their popularity: it was due to having crafted enough gerrymandered districts to maintain control.  But while it was good for the party in 2012, it's bad for the Republicans in 2014 because the gerrymanders don't stop primaries.

The Far Right base - the Tea Partier faction - is stirred up and angry... and utterly convinced that if "their" elected officials so much as blink towards a compromise with hated Obama, they'll put up an even Further Right wingnut as a challenger.  And the nature of a primary fight is "who can pander the most to the voting base who turns out": primary elections are poorly attended by moderate (aka sensible) party members, and so candidates veer sharply to their base (Dems to their Left, GOP to their Right).  An incumbent could win a general election but before that happens he/she can seriously lose a primary to a more extreme opponent: it has happened before.  The RINO party purge hasn't finished yet: it's even going after incumbents who had purged out RINOs three or four election cycles ago.  And if the extremist candidate replacement is extreme enough, the Republicans could lose what would have been an easy gerrymandered (or Red State) win.

So this is how we got here.  A political party in the Republicans who have been for decades purging out more moderate party leaders until a more partisan faction is in control... and yet the mechanisms they used for those purges are still in place and eagerly purging out the partisans for even worse extremists.  Now fearing their base as much as they pander to it, the Republicans have to pursue an obsessive agenda - defund Obamacare or otherwise make Obama concede to Far Right policy - at all hazards, up to and including a government shutdown and economic crisis for which they'll be blamed and which for most reasons will have far greater repercussions in 2014 than previous shutdowns had in 1996.

And this is all on top of the House GOP voting on a Food Stamps defunding bill that cuts $39 billion in aid to starving families.  Basically an open act of sadism that hurts more poor whites than it does any minority group.  It's like the Republicans WANT to commit political suicide.  Who's gonna be left voting for Republicans by 2014?



 

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The Simplest Reason Why Republicans Get the Blame For the Sequester

So why would Republicans get blamed by a majority of Americans if the Sequester comes to fruition?

My theory is that it's because the Sequester is exactly what the Republican wingnuts have been screaming about every time there's a Democrat in the White House.  Because it's large-scale spending cuts.  And the Republicans are on record for wanting large-scale spending cuts ("shrinking government down to where we can drown it in Grover's bathtub", remember?).

It may also have a bit to do with a majority of Americans thinking the deficits can be fixed with a combination of spending cuts AND tax increases on the uber-rich, something that Obama is pitching as his alternative to the Sequester whereas the Republicans insist on cuts ONLY.

So that's my thought on the Sequestration Crisis of 2013.  After this gets resolved, we should be ready for the Bad Budget Crisis of May 2013... then the Let's Force Obama To Veto a Crazy-Ass Bill and Impeach Him For It Crisis of July 2013... and then...

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