How Low Can They Go?

Posted on by

Some children with cancer are now blocked from experimental trials that may have been their parents’ last hope. Nearly 9 million mothers and children under five are in danger of losing WIC vouchers they exchange for food. But the House is hysterical about the closure of … national monuments?

Today’s screaming point is that some World War II vets were barred from the World War II Memorial in Washington. Leaving aside the fact that the World War II memorial looks like something designed by Albert Speer — damn shame about that — did the baggers really think the shutdown would have no effect on real people?

Anyhoo, barricades got moved and the vets charged in. I understand some Republican House members claimed to have moved the barricades. At the very least, somebody should march them back to the mall and insist they pick up the trash and put the barricades back themselves, since there are no employees to do it.

Last night Jon Steward reminds us that awhile back the Faux Nooz crowd was screaming about closing tours of the White House. How low can they go? one cried. But, y’know, it’s possible to live a long and happy life without ever touring the White House. Letting cancer go untreated, not so much.

(Warning to my brother and sister geezers: Do not watch with full bladder.)

Sen. Ted Cruz got the bright idea of funding individual items piecemeal, so yesterday some House baggers proposed appropriations resolutions to fund the District of Columbia, veterans programs and national parks. Hungry children with cancer are not a priority, I guess. But the resolutions were shot down. Nancy Pelosi compared the resolutions to releasing one hostage at a time.

Conventional wisdom among Dems this morning is that a prolonged shutdown will give them leverage on the upcoming debt ceiling fight.

Ed Kilgore writes,

For the past several weeks, of course, John Boenher has been committed to the demand for major, disabling Obamacare changes as a price for either the CR or a debt limit increase (the identify of the hostage has changed constantly). With the president and Democrats refusing to make concessions on ACA in order to secure a CR, and refusing to negotiate over the debt limit at all, it’s not clear what the the parties would be negotiating about if they were in regular talks. It’s also not clear that Boehner has the Republican votes in the House to pursue a different strategy.

So at this point we are looking at a scenario where only a major retreat by one side or the other is going to make any difference. There are some extraordinary remedies the president could take to avoid a debt default (e.g., the one urged on him by Brookings’ Henry Aaron just yesterday). And presumably Wall Street will weigh in with pressure on Boehner and company to the effect that stupid gesturing on Obamacare isn’t worth a major risk to the national and global economies. But I suspect we’ll have to experience a staring match until the Big Blink becomes possible.

Drunk and Derelict

Posted on by

Being crazy and stupid is bad enough, but Alan Grayson says some House Republicans seem drunk as well. And smell of booze. And he’s not the only one saying this; Politico reporter Ginger Gibson tweeted on Saturday —

See also Joan Walsh and Paul Krugman.

Let the Brawl Commence

Posted on by

Charles Pierce — The Democrats Are Bringing Guns to a Gunfight —

Senate Democrats are considering leaking emails between Harry Reid and John A. Boehner’s chiefs of staff. . . . I also spoke to a leading Democratic congresscritter over the weekend who told me that, very soon, the Democrats in the Senate will start going through the sequester line-by-line, demanding public votes on funding things like medical research and environmental protections, and sticking Republicans with a choice of being for or against curing, say, Alzheimer’s Disease or cancer. As someone who thought the sequester not merely stupid but Beltway stupid, I applaud this decision as well. Forcing people into uncomfortable votes works both ways. Making John Boehner cry should be a bipartisan affair.

Meanwhile, Fox News is (a) denying there has been a real shutdown; and (b) blaming Dems for rejecting an 11th hour (almost literally) demand to meet for a conference committee. Chris Hayes explains why this is bogus.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The thing is, Republicans going back several years have whined to anyone who will listen that the Dems are ruthless and mean to them, even as by all objective measures the Dems resembled a warm Jello mold. If the baggers keep this up, the Dems of their fantasies may actually materialize.

Happy Early Halloween

Posted on by

I agree with Digby — the House baggers who forced the shutdown are basically thrill-seekers. They’re like the kids who cruise your neighborhood to TP the trees and break eggs on your car. It makes them feel alive. But they haven’t thought out the consequences.

I also agree with Dana Milbank, that the baggers are so deep in the echo chamber they sincerely believed (a) Dems would concede something rather than allow the government to shut down; and (b) if the government shuts down, they will receive love and admiration as a result.

The bigger mystery is John Boehner. One would think he would know better. I’m beginning to wonder if he secretly hopes the baggers will get a huge public spanking so they will get off his back.

See also Jon Stewart.

Also, too, the insurance exchanges open today! The New York page is a bit glitchy, but maybe it’s getting slammed.

Away We Go

Posted on by

I understand that the Senate convened at 2:00 pm today, and at 2:01 sent a CR stripped of conditions about Obamacare back to the House. The House is expected to vote tonight on a new CR that delays the individual mandate for a year (yeah, right) and would require members of Congress and their staffs to buy insurance on the exchanges without any subsidies. Why that last one makes sense to anyone is unclear.

The Extortionists

Posted on by

The House Republicans still think they will win and the Senate and White House will cave on delaying the ACA for a year.

House Republicans may appear to observers to be pushing the government toward a shutdown, but that’s not even remotely how they see it.

The GOP rank-and-file still believe that the Senate might accept and the White House might sign a one-year delay of Obamacare in exchange for two months of sequester-level spending to briefly stave off a government shutdown.

“How dare you?” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said when reporters asked how the House would respond when the Senate rejected its offer. He grew angrier as he continued to question how one could assume the bill was dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“I have never foreseen a government shutdown and I continue not to see a government shutdown,” said Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.), who was a senior Hill staffer before being elected to Congress in 2010. “The Senate has plenty of time to deal with this. This is good, common middle ground that is in this package. I think we’re gonna get a big bipartisan vote in the House. I think we’re gonna get a big vote in the Senate too.”

A right-wing news outlet reports that House Rules committee attendees actually laughed when someone said the President would veto their bill. They seem supremely confident that either they will win, or if they don’t win nothing bad will happen, or if it does happen people will blame President Obama.

What galls me is that the baggers and the media still talk about the impasse as a “negotiation.” A negotiation happens when two sides agree to give up something they want to get something else they want more. The Republicans are not offering to give up anything they want. If they had offered to raise taxes on the rich or increase the budget for entitlement programs, that would be a negotiation. But they’re saying, in effect, buy our plan or we’ll shoot the dog. That’s not negotiation; that’s extortion.

As I understand it, there are enough votes in the House to pass a clean cr if Boehner would put it up for a vote. But the baggers apparently have Boehner’s boy parts in an industrial compactor.

A government shutdown would be bad, but not nearly as catastrophic as a failure to raise the debt ceiling, which is going to have to be done within the next couple of weeks. Ezra Klein argues that it’s a good thing the baggers are throwing their temper tantrum over the cr, and when they lose it will make it less likely they’ll pull the same stunt over the debt ceiling. I think that’s wishful thinking, though.

Bill Keller has an interesting thought:

The Republicans are finally having their ’60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis. Ted Cruz is their spotlight-seeking Abbie Hoffman. (The Texas senator’s faux filibuster last week reminded me of Hoffman’s vow to “levitate” the Pentagon using psychic energy.) The Tea Party is their manifesto-brandishing Students for a Democratic Society. Threatening to blow up America’s credit rating is their version of civil disobedience. And Obamacare is their Vietnam.

To those of us who lived through the actual ’60s, the conservative sequel may seem more like an adolescent tantrum than a revolution. For obvious starters, their mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance. Printing up unofficial “Obamacare Cards” and urging people to burn them is a silly parody of the protest that raged 50 years ago. But bear with me.

There are significant differences, of course. For example, the 1960s New Left stayed out of party politics and never became a force within the Democratic Party. But I think the differences are in keeping with the temperaments and psyches of righties and lefties. Lefties want equality and justice; righties want power.

See also Paul Krugman, “Rebels Without a Clue.”

Damnfools Are Going to Do It

Posted on by

It’s what we might call an “impasse.” The House keeps attaching a one-year delay in the Affordable Care Act, plus a lot of other random stuff, to the continuing resolution to keep the government funded a couple more months. The Senate keeps saying no deal; they aren’t agreeing to the delay. The President says he will veto a cr that contains a delay. I don’t think anyone is going to blink.

I get the impression that the House baggers sincerely believe the Senate will cave and are genuinely baffled why they haven’t already.

John Dickerson writes at Slate,

With less than two days until the government runs out of money, the clock is ticking and no one is negotiating. House Republicans voted Saturday on a new set of amendments it would like to tie to continued funding of the government, and Senate Democrats promptly said, “Nuts to you!” They’re going to vote to table the amendments on Monday, which will kick the issue back to the House.

Depending on when the bill returns, Republicans may try one more gambit to chip away at Obamacare, but time is growing short—the deadline is Monday at midnight. That means the decision whether to keep the government open will fall squarely on House Speaker John Boehner. He has two options: He can allow a vote on the Senate bill that passed (with Democratic votes) on Friday to fund the government until Nov. 15 or permit the shutdown to go forward, as a way to pressure the White House and satisfy his most conservative members.

C’mon, Boehner, for once in your sorry-ass life, be a mensch. Fall on your bleeping sword and put the Senate bill up for a vote.

Boehner and other House Republicans are pissed that the Senate didn’t meet today.

Speaker of the House John Boehner accused Harry Reid and other Senate Democrats of “breathtaking arrogance” for intentionally not convening a Sunday session to deal with compromise legislation to stop a government shutdown.

“The House worked late into the night Saturday to prevent a government shutdown, and the Senate now must move quickly, today, to do the same,” Boehner said Sunday.

Which of course is crap, because the Senate has made its final offer. The House can either take it or leave it. It’s that simple. Whether the Senate met today or not doesn’t change anything.

The Slaughter of the Innocents

Posted on by

There’s a must-read in-depth report at the New York Times about the accidental shooting of children. The article presents evidence that these shootings have, for years, been grossly under-reported in official statistics, perhaps by as much as half. Because of quirks and inconsistencies in the way the deaths are recorded and reported, many are neither counted as accidents or prosecuted as homicides. It’s like they don’t happen.

Further, very few states have effective “negligence” laws in the books that make it a crime to leave a loaded gun where a child can get to it.

Researchers recognized this under-reporting probably was happening back in the 1990s, but the NRA successfully lobbied to stop the research.

House GOP: Terrorists or Traitors?

Posted on by

Yeah, the title is a tad inflammatory, but I’m with James Fallows on this:

This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.** Outsiders to this struggle — the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or “opinion leaders” outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority — have essentially no leverage over the outcome. I can’t recall any situation like this in my own experience, and the only even-approximate historic parallel (with obvious differences) is the inability of Northern/free-state opinion to affect the debate within the slave-state South from the 1840s onward. Nor is there a conceivable “compromise” the Democrats could offer that would placate the other side.

Here is the footnote, btw:

** The debt-ceiling vote, of course, is not about future spending decisions. It is about whether to cover expenditures the Congress has already authorized. There is no sane reason for subjecting this to a repeated vote. And there is no precedent for serious threats not to honor federal debt — as opposed to symbolic anti-Administration protest votes, which both parties have cast over the years. Nor for demanding the reversal of major legislation as a condition for routine government operations.

First, I agree with Fallows and David Kurtz that this crisis is not a standoff between President Obama and the Republican Party. It’s between extremists in the GOP versus the “not enough Thorazine on the planet to deal with these whackjobs” wing of the GOP. And Abraham Lincoln couldn’t reason or negotiate with the whackjobs of his day, either.

Second, the time for polite and tempered rhetoric on anyone’s part is over. Steve Benen called out Senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer for saying “What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest.” No, Republicans are not al Qaeda. But it’s becoming a difference in degree, not in kind.

I don’t expect anyone in Congress to strap a real bomb to his chest. They and their followers are not so much motivated by a cause, or a faith, but by a fundamental belief that they are the real Chosen People, the real Americans, dammit, and they deserve to rule. Self-sacrifice isn’t their thing, I don’t believe. But if the current fiasco ends in their humiliation, expect the more-unglued among them to step up with “second-amendment solutions.” They’re more than flirted with the idea already —

Steve Benen again,

In 2010, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he could “empathize” with a madman who flew an airplane into a building on American soil. In 2009, shortly after President Obama’s inauguration, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said if congressional Democrats didn’t allow Republicans to influence policy debates, the GOP would have to emulate the “insurgency” tactics of “the Taliban.” Sessions added, “[W]e need to understand that insurgency may be required,” and that if Democrats resist, Republicans “will then become an insurgency.” The Taliban, Sessions went on to say, offers the GOP a tactical “model.”

If a White House aide compares Republicans to suicide bombers, it’s outrageous, but if a Texas Republican congressman compares his own party to the Taliban, it’s fine?

Yes, because freedom.

But if you’re familiar with antebellum history, you must recognize the strong parallels between the old southern fire-eaters and today’s wingnuts. So the traitor label works, too. And it serves no purpose for people in the national spotlight to be expected to mince words and extend the usual courtesies to them.

Greg Sargent:

Do Dems have to give Republicans something in exchange for not allowing economic havoc to break out, and if so, why isn’t that threatening extensive harm to the country, and to all of us, in order to get your way? Or are Republicans of course going to raise the debt limit in the end, because of course they know it’s the right thing to do, and if so, why do Dems have to give them anything in exchange for it? …

… This gets to the core truth about this debate: As long as it’s an open question whether Republicans are prepared to allow default, the claim that Republicans are threatening to do extensive harm to the country in order to extort concessions from Dems that a radical faction of their party is demanding is 100 percent right.

So the suicide bomber metaphor is off. It would be more correct to compare them to hostage takers holding a gun to America’s head while they demand tax cuts for the rich and building the Keystone pipeline.

A Conspiracy So Immense

Posted on by

Charles Pierce sums it up:

[T]here is no pile of money anywhere in the country, no matter how large or small, and no matter how vital to the people who were depending upon it, to which the grifters in the financial-services “industry” do not feel entitled as fuel for their unquenchable greed.

To see what Mr. Pierce is reacting to specifically, see “Looting the Pension Funds” by Matt Taibbi. Please read it all, but in brief, he’s showing us that the financial sector has been looting government worker pension funds for years, because they could, and now that the pension funds are mostly gone, the public workers are being blamed for the dire circumstances of state and local governments. Taibbi:

It’s a scam of almost unmatchable balls and cruelty, accomplished with the aid of some singularly spineless politicians. And it hasn’t happened overnight. This has been in the works for decades, and the fighting has been dirty all the way.

All across America, pension funds have been diverted into “investments” that somehow made no money for anyone except the power brokers on Wall Street. Or else the pension funds were used to make up the revenue shortfall created by tax cuts that benefited only the wealthy. David Sirota provides some examples:

In Rhode Island, the state government slashed guaranteed pension benefits while handing $75 million to a retired professional baseball player for his failed video game scheme.

In Kentucky, the state government slashed pension benefits while continuing to spend $1.4 billion on tax expenditures.

In Kansas, the state government slashed guaranteed pension benefits despite being lambasted by a watchdog group for its penchant for spending huge money on corporate welfare “megadeals.”

Paul Krugman today came out and called the Masters of the Universe types a “powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths.” These malefactors of great wealth not only think they are entitled to any remaining bits of wealth or privilege still available for plundering, but they want our adulation as well. When they don’t get it, they feel persecuted.