Sen. Rand “Aqua Buddha” Paul is threatening to put a hold on Janet Yellen’s confirmation for chair of the Federal Reserve. His intention is to hold the nomination hostage in exchange for allowing his “audit the fed” bill to come to a vote. Whether he has the support among other Republicans to pull this off is an open question.

Surprise! Texas taxpayers are funding charter schools teaching nonsense, like Darwin causing the Holocaust. No one could have imagined such a thing, huh?

Charles Pierce writes about a pregnant Wisconsi woman who was jailed on suspicion of taking drugs that would harm the fetus, even though drug tests showed no trace of those drugs. At one point she was denied access to a lawyer. However, the Court helpfully appointed a lawyer for the fetus. See also Pregnant? That Might Get You Arrested about similar cases.

See also In many states, “fetal rights” laws are putting pregnant women in jail.

Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the Times her organization has documented hundreds of cases in which women like Beltran were arrested or detained in the name of “fetal rights.”

“This is what happens when laws give officials the authority to treat fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as if they are already completely separate from the pregnant woman,” she said.

In El Salvador, and elsewhere in Latin America, women are serving prison sentences for having miscarriages, because they can’t prove they hadn’t had abortions. Yes, it can happen here.

Jaclyn Friedman’s piece on the Men’s Rights Movement is a must read. Friedman thinks men have legitimate grievances, but the Men’s Rights Movement is actually making it harder to address those grievances. That’s because the MRA amounts to the new He-Man Women Haters Club, a bunch of misogynist weenies who think women are manipulative bitches who make up stories about being raped and abused to oppress innocent men.

See above about women being jailed for being pregnant.

Via Richard Mayhew, there are some articles by tech experts at TPM discussing the federal insurance exchange website and why it is a mess. See “Misunderstanding the Problem,” which speculates —

Healthcare.gov is basically just showing you your menu of insurance options, taking your order for insurnce, and bringing everything back to you when the order is complete. In tech terms, it’s just the front end. All the heavy lifting takes place on the back end, when the website passes your data to an extremely complex array of systems that span multiple agencies (like so many cooks in a kitchen). A central processing hub needs to get data from each of these systems to successfully serve a user and sign up for insurance. And if one of these systems — several of which are very old in IT terms– has a glitch and can’t complete the task, the entire operation fails for that user. Only if everything works perfectly, and the data gets passed back to the website, does the user have a good experience with Healthcare.gov.

Basically, the biggest problem might be that the website needs various government legacy data systems to work together, and they aren’t. See also “Binders Full of Insurance Companies’ (Databases).”

Meanwhile, the contractor companies are blaming the mess on the Obama Administration. For example, one is blaming the Obama Administration for a last-minute decision (I don’t know how last minute it was) to make consumers create accounts on the federal site before they could start shopping. But based on what the tech guys at TPM are saying, that probably isn’t the problem.

And even if it was, did any of these execs advise the Obama Administration that the decision could cause glitches, and maybe that should wait? Or did they promise to deliver and then dump the mess on the programmers?

Republicans want Obama Administration officials to be fired, of course. That’s what they always want. I still say the most likely culprits are the executives from the contracting companies making promises their programmers couldn’t deliver.

It seems to me that if individual states have been able to get their exchanges up and running, which I understand to be the case, then the exchange thing is still do-able.

The Administration announced yesterday that people will get an additional six weeks to purchase insurance before the individual mandate penalty kicks in, which means they’ve got until the end of March. However, in the department of “when can we primary this turkey,” Dem Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has joined Republicans in calling for a one-year delay of the mandate. I wish someone would ask these clowns if they want a one-year delay for requiring insurance companies to take customers with pre-existing conditions, because that’s really what they’re asking for.

The death of former Speaker Tom Foley has inspired all kinds of nostalgia for the good old days of Congress when legislators were gentle-persons and loved to reach out across the aisle, as opposed to what we have today, which is something like World Wrestling Entertainment but with flabby old men in suits.

Except Tom Foley’s day wasn’t that genteel, either. Steve M catches Brian Williams revising history, and comments,

Foley lost his speakership when an unknown named George Nethercutt beat him for his House seat in the Gingrich/Contract with America Republican wave election of 1994, which was not exactly a campaign full of sweetness and light.

Yes, every obituary of Tom Foley says that he worked extremely well across the aisle. But he did not “serve in a different era.” He served at the dawn of the godawful era we’re living in now.

Charles Pierce says,

Steve rightly points out that Foley’s career was demolished, possibly fatally, by some disgusting ratfking out of the office of N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of civilization’s rules and Leader (perhaps) of the civilizing forces. Foley got fag-baited, and the fag-baiting ended only when Barney Frank, in one of the truly awesome examples of I-Don’t-Give-A-Fk congressional oratory, threatened to out a whole bunch of closeted gay Republican congresscritters unless Gingrich’s people knocked that shit off. Shit was forthwith knocked off, but the damage was done. Gingrich, of course, is now so respected a figure in our politics that CNN went out of its way to give him a gig. CNN is run by moral centipedes.

This kind of swill is reaching high tide these days.

Orwell imagined a totalitarian state rewriting history, but we don’t need a totalitarian state for that. Humans lie to themselves and each other all the time. But it would be really nice if news media at least made an effort to keep things straight, y’know?

More on the crashing federal ACA site — see The real story with Obamacare IT woes is out-of-control private contractors.

Of course, the Obama administration is to blame for the botched rollout, but there are other culprits getting less attention – namely, global tech conglomerate CGI, which was responsible for the bulk of the execution, and in general the ability of big corporations to get massive taxpayer-funded contracts without enough accountability.

Government outsourcing to private contractors has exploded in the past few decades. Taxpayers funnel hundreds of billions of dollars a year into the chosen companies’ pockets, about $80bn of which goes to tech companies. We’ve reached a stage of knee-jerk outsourcing of everything from intelligence and military work to burger flipping in federal building cafeterias, and it’s damaging in multiple levels. …

…To this end the Healthcare.gov experience should serve as a wake-up call to President Obama, who, after all, said early in his first term he wanted to rein in the contractor-industrial complex, and to the state governments doling out multi-million dollar contracts. The revelation here is that an overdependence on outsourcing isn’t just risky in terms of national security, extortionate at wartime, or harmful because it expands the ranks of low-wage workers; it’s also messing with our ability to carry out basic government functions at a reasonable cost.

I still say the Iraq War was mostly a money-laundering scheme. And I don’t think we’ve even begun to look at the money allocated for Hurricane Katrina repairs, and track how many pennies on the taxpayer dollar might have trickled down to the neighborhoods that needed repairing.

And one more time, anyone who believes that the private sector is always efficient and competent never saw corporations from the perspective of someone working in the production or engineering departments. Most of the time, the challenge isn’t doing the best job you can; it’s doing the job at all when upper management belongs in a clown car.

The Right wants to spin the dysfunctions of the ACA federal website as the train wreck they predicted. But dread pirate mistermix writes,

I’d have to consult a psychiatrist or a circus owner to get an expert opinion, but I have a couple of unschooled guesses why the Obamacare rollout isn’t occupying banner headlines on Fox and shooting to the top of Memeorandum.

First, the right is dealing with an audience that’s been told that Obamacare will lead to an end of the American way of life as we know it, create panels that determine whether you live or die, and make you stand in line for hours to get even a band-aid from some doctor (not your own) toiling under the thumb of faceless bureaucrats. Compared to all that, a website that crashes or takes a long time to complete an enrollment is almost a good news story.

Second, if you start talking about exchanges having trouble signing people up, you must acknowledge the fact that people are signing up. If you acknowledge that, you acknowledge that a four year effort to kill off Obamacare has amounted to precisely nothing.

Garance Franke-Ruta writes,

Much of the debate about the Obamacare rollout has centered on whether or not its early troubles will turn people off the idea that government can do big things well. But people do not turn to government programs because they believe in them. They turn to them because they need them, and the market is not meeting their needs. When your alternative is not something excellent but nothing, you use whatever is there. A bad lunch is still lunch, an overrun city college is still a pathway to prosperity, and Medicaid is far better than six months of calls from debt collectors.

That’s going to save the Obamacare rollout.

Paul Krugman writes,

For now, the big news about Obamacare is the debacle of HealthCare.gov, the Web portal through which Americans are supposed to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges. For now, at least, HealthCare.gov isn’t working for many users.

It’s important to realize, however, that this botch has nothing to do with the law’s substance, and will get fixed. After all, a number of states have successfully opened their own exchanges, doing for their residents exactly what the federal system is supposed to do everywhere else. Connecticut’s exchange is working fine, as is Kentucky’s. New York, after some early problems, seems to be getting there. So, a bit more slowly, does California.

Professor Krugman also points out that the “rate shock” some experts were predicting isn’t happening, in spite of the bold-face lies on Fox News that it is.

The problems with the federal website are seriously bad, however, and may take weeks to straighten out. If it isn’t fixed by December 15, this could have an impact on the ACA rollout. So let’s hope it gets fixed.

See also Hey, Ted Cruz! These Texans Say Obamacare Is Helping Them.

Yesterday, among other things, the President said,

So let’s work together to make government work better, instead of treating it like an enemy or purposely making it work worse. That’s not what the founders of this nation envisioned when they gave us the gift of self-government. You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country is about.

Also yesterday, Daniel Larison of The American Conservative responded to Erick Erickson:

The fixation on punishing the Senate Republicans that “surrendered” is revealing. It shows that Erickson still doesn’t grasp that lack of control of the Senate doomed any effort to force significant concessions from the administration, and it shows how oblivious he remains to the greater political dangers that the GOP just escaped. Having a larger number of uncompromising Republicans in the Senate probably wouldn’t have prevented yesterday’s deal, since nearly two-thirds of the Senate GOP voted for it anyway. That’s a lot of “charlatans” to defeat.

People talk about “extremists” and “moderates” in the Republican Party. But what is the difference, really? They don’t disagree on issues, from what I can tell. On issue after issue — taxes, reproduction rights, health care — they’re all pretty much on the same page. The only substantial difference I can see is that the “moderates” realize elections have to be won, and the “extremists” don’t know that, or don’t care.

Conventional wisdom is saying that the GOP can kiss off any hope of re-taking the Senate in 2014, and they might also lose seats in the House. Obviously many Republicans in Congress saw their poll numbers diving and realized the hostage-taking amounted to the GOP shooting itself in the foot. And, as Larison says, there was never any realistic chance that all but the most inconsequential hostage demands would be approved by the Senate and accepted by the President. But the extremists couldn’t see that. Did the results of the 2012 elections not sink in? Well, no, I guess not.

It seems to me that the extremists are so intoxicated by their pathological certitude and entitled self-righteousness that elections are a mere technicality to them. Of course they like winning elections, because they see that as vindication. But when elections are lost, it doesn’t sink in that maybe their would-be constituents disagree with them. Rather, when elections are lost it is because the Will of Real Americans like them is being blocked by demonic forces. These demonic forces are served by the secret liberal elite cabal that runs the world and their lackeys in news media.

Obviously, God does not want them to accept the results of elections that go against them, because they are on God’s side. And to purify elections, they feel they must put bigger and tighter filters between voters and voting, so that only God’s People are allowed to vote. Only then will America be saved from the hell of multiculturalism and affordable health care for everyone.

Seriously; that’s how they think. In their minds, voter restrictions do not weaken republican representative government. Rather, by taking voting away from unclean riffraff they are restoring America to the pure and holy state the Founders intended. Or something.

And if they have to destroy the government and the economy and even get people killed to bring about their ends, so be it. “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.” (Malachi 3:1-18)

Sarah Proud and Tall collects reactions to the Great Fold from RedState. One is especially hilarious:

The Palin, to whom Cruz gives credit for his Primary win, is now in Iowa, I believe. A Palin Cruz ticket would float all Conservative Candidates, who had fought their way thru the Primary. The work ethic of the Palin will draw votes from all quarters.

To which SP&T comments, “Please proceed, wingnuts.”

So are they going to pull this stunt again in January? Hell yes. They haven’t learned a thing. Dylan Scott writes,

For a certain block of House conservatives, the ones who drove Speaker John Boehner toward a government shutdown and near-default against his will, the lesson of the last few weeks isn’t that they overreached. Not that they made unachievable demands, put their leadership in an impossible position, damaged their party’s position with the public and left a deep uncertainty about whether the GOP conference can recover and legislate.

No, what they’re taking away from the 2013 crisis is: They didn’t go far enough. …

… “I think we’re going to see a drumbeat out there that our spineless leaders caved,” Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told TPM. “If we had held on, we would’ve defaulted, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Obama would have caved, and we would have gotten what we wanted.”

Dave Weigel is the go-to-guy if you want to know what the baggers are thinking. And some of them think they won, sort of.

House Speaker John Boehner would admit defeat. But some Republicans were declaring a victory of sorts—maybe not now, but down the road—for what the media had already judged to be a historic debacle. They had revealed President Obama to be a cynical political operator. They had proved to voters that they did everything they could to stop Obamacare. When the next spending fight comes around, they insisted that enduring this shutdown would strengthen their position..

…Does this mean that Republicans would enter into another shutdown standoff with no fear? That’s not how they look at it. They view any attempt to blame them for the shutdown, and not the president, as media bias in concentrate. This shutdown proved them right, and they’ll carry that knowledge into the budget battle.

“I think this exposed the president and made clear to the public that he’s unwilling to compromise,” said Michigan Rep. Justin Amash. “There’s going to be a lot of focus over the next few months about the failures of Obamacare. It’ll help Republicans because we stood up and fought—and there’s nobody who can blame Republicans, at this point, for Obamacare. We did what we could.”

So, yeah, the die hards are preparing to do it all again.

Where we are: Last night John Boehner made another attempt to get a bill through the House. But the House baggers, on orders from the idiot child running Heritage Action, shut him down. Brett LoGiurato writes at Business Insider that Heritage Action did Harry Reid a big favor.

GOP leadership in the House planned to disrupt the Senate negotiations by pushing forth its own bill to lift the debt ceiling and reopen the government.

The bill might have put Democrats including Harry Reid in an awkward spot because the GOP bill was not going to be wildly unreasonable, but because acquiescing to it would have been acquiescing to “ransom” demands.

But in the end, Harry Reid was not forced into a difficult position.

First, Heritage Action, an influential conservative group that has led the charge to “defund Obamacare” in recent months, came out and urged lawmakers to vote “no” on the House’s legislation, arguing that it didn’t do enough to change the Affordable Care Act.

About an hour later, FreedomWorks echoed Heritage’s key vote of “no,” with President and CEO Matt Kibbe saying the legislation amounted to a “full surrender” from Republicans on Obamacare.

This tells me that neither Kibbe nor Heritage Action’s Michael Needham are bright enough to find shit in an outhouse. However, today Needham told a Fox News interviewer,

“Well everybody, understands that we’ll not be able to repeal this law until 2017,” Needham said Wednesday. “We have to win the Senate and win the White House. Right now it is clear that this bill is not ready for prime time. It is clear the bill is unfair.”

And this tells me that somebody over Needham’s head just jerked Needham’s leash. But as David Kurtz said, “Thanks for the last two weeks?”

Some pundits, possibly reading tea leaves, are predicting that Boehner will allow whatever bill the Senate sends to the House today to be voted on by the entire House, where everybody says there are enough votes to pass it, and have been all along. Let’s hope.

Update: Both TPM and Politico are reporting that the deal worked out between Reid and McConnell in the Senate will go to the House first, where Boehner has agreed to allow it to go to a vote, and it is expected to pass with mostly Dem votes. TPM says,

The Senate deal lifts the debt ceiling through Feb. 7, re-opens the shuttered government through Jan. 15 and sets up bicameral budget conference tasked with sending policy recommendations by Dec. 13. It will include a provision to enforce a part of Obamacare where subsidy recipients have to verify their income eligibility first. It won’t include a previously considered plan to delay a reinsurance tax under the health care law. Ultimately neither side will make big concessions.

Assuming the House passes this, the Senate will vote next. It is believed that Ted Cruz will not try to delay a Senate vote, because then he would be taking sole ownership of everything that happens after, and it is believed that he isn’t stupid enough to do that. We’ll see.

This is the most recent update on the Great Stupid Tantrum, from Mother Jones — House GOPers Pushing for Anti-Birth-Control Measure in Debt Ceiling Deal.

Y’know, there’s no point. Send everybody home, lock the doors, roll up the sidewalks, hang a “We’re Closed” sign on the Capitol.

The House baggers rejected the House proposal discussed in the last post.

House Republican leaders scrambled Tuesday after conservatives criticized their new plan to avert default. Just two days away from the deadline, it quickly hit turbulence with lawmakers concerned about the lack of spending cuts and upfront debt reduction.

We really are being governed by idiot children.