See GOP’s Dangerous Debt Limit Demand: A Christmas Tree Of Conservative Goodies. Then read Matt Yglesias, House GOP Just Showed Why Obama Can’t Compromise on the Debt Ceiling.

The one thing Obama absolutely cannot do under any circumstances is negotiate over the statutory debt limit.

The reason is that Republicans are essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system.

From Jonathan Strong’s report at NRO, what Republicans want in exchange for agreeing to not default on the national debt is a one year delay of Obamacare, Paul Ryan’s tax reform, the Keystone XL pipeline, partial repeal of the Clean Air Act, partial repeal of bank regulation legislation, Medicare cuts, cuts in several anti-poverty programs, making it harder to launch medical malpractice lawsuits, more drilling on federal land, blocking net neutrality, and a suite of changes designed to make it harder for regulatory agencies to crack the whip.

Things like this do happen. The British system of government used to feature a ruling monarch who was checked in limited ways by two houses of parliament. Over time, those houses of parliament leveraged their control over tax hikes into overall control of the government. On a somewhat slower time frame, the elected House of Commons nudged the House of Lords out of almost all of its de facto political power. And that’s the House’s proposal here. The president should become an elected figurehead (not dissimilar to the elected presidents of Germany, Israel, or Italy) whose role is simply to assent to the policy preferences of the legislative majority.

They aren’t even pretending to care about democratic representative government. They’re just out to use whatever brute force they have to get what they (or their masters) want.

While Cruz and the Baggers belt out their out-of-tune cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender,” rightie pundits are rehearsing Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare.” But they can’t get the words right.

I give you the increasingly incoherent George Will, who simultaneously believes that Republicans must press their advantage by giving “Democrats a ruinous opportunity to insist upon unpopular things,” like the individual mandate, while at the same time admitting the American people might like Obamacare once it’s started.

It is two minutes until midnight. On Jan. 1, the ACA’s insurance subsidies begin, like a heroin drip, making Americans instant addicts. The Obama administration knows that no major entitlement, once tasted, has been repealed.

Even so, Will proposes that Obamacare could collapse of its own weight. “If the ACA is, as conservatives believe, as unpleasant in potential effects as it is impossible to implement, conservatives should allow what Lincoln called “the silent artillery of time” to destroy it.”

The government should not be closed; the debt ceiling will be raised. Republicans should, however, take to heart the last words of H.L. Mencken’s summation of Theodore Roosevelt: “Well, one does what one can.” Republicans can give Democrats a ruinous opportunity to insist upon unpopular things. House Republicans can attach to the continuing resolution that funds the government, and then to the increase in the debt ceiling, two provisions: Preservation of the ACA requirement — lawlessly disregarded by the administration — that members of Congress and their staffs must experience the full enjoyment of the ACA without special, ameliorating subsidies. And a one-year delay of the ACA’s individual mandate.

By vetoing legislation because of these provisions, and by having his vetoes sustained by congressional Democrats, Obama will underscore Democrats’ devotion: Devotion to self-dealing by the political class, and to the principle that only powerful interests (businesses), not mere citizens, can delay the privilege of complying with the ACA.

Arithmetic, not moral failings, makes Republicans unable to overturn Obama’s vetoes. So after scoring some points, Republicans should vote, more in sorrow than in anger, to fund the government (at sequester levels, a significant victory) and to increase the debt ceiling. Having forced Democrats to dramatize their perverse priorities, Republicans can turn to completing the neutering of this presidency by winning six Senate seats.

First, what is it about right-wingers and their love for florid prose? Do they think that if they crank out rhetoric that smells like a florist’s hothouse we won’t notice their ideas stink?

Second, the business about Congress and their staff being either exempt from Obamacare or the recipients of special subsidies because of Obamacare is false. It’s a figment of wingnut imagination. And there is no way in hell the individual mandate will be delayed, but I think once Obamacare kicks in most people will be OK with it. I think a lot of people still don’t understand that if they get insurance through their employer or Medicare, nothing will change. When January 1 rolls around and the sky does not fall, a whole lot of air will be sucked out of the Obamacare “crisis.”

As for the exchanges, Jonathan Chait writes,

The Obama administration today released the final numbers on the premiums in the state health exchanges. This is the single most important piece of data we have to gauge the plausibility of the exchanges, which are the crucial mechanism of Obamacare. The premiums are not spin, they are the collective judgment of the marketplace. The conservative judgment of Obamacare has been a ceaseless litany of doom — rate shock, fumbling bureaucracy, unreasonable regulations. If that indictment were true, insurers would be charging higher rates than the administration initially forecast. Instead, the premiums are clearly lower than forecast — 94 percent of customers in the exchanges will have the chance to pay below-forecast premiums.

Of course, at Forbes Avik Roy is still cranking out scarey headlines like “Double Down: Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women,” but Roy has gotten so ridiculous lately even Ezra Klein is just ignoring him. As has been pointed out, Roy reaches his conclusions by comparing the lowball introductory prices of really awful, not-even-bare-bones plans offered only to young healthy people in unregulated states to the cost of full-feature insurance offered on the exchanges for those same young people, without factoring in subsidies.

Now, let’s go to Wall Street Journal, where Daniel Henninger says “Let Obamacare Collapse.”

As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This thing called “ObamaCare” carries on its back all the justifications, hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently.

If ObamaCare fails, or seriously falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with the American people. It will finally be vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.

Himmiger’s hope is that when Obamacare collapses it will take Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid with it, and Americans once and for all will get over the idea that government of the people, by the people, and for the people can respond to the needs of the people.

An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

Six months ago, that didn’t seem likely. Now it does.

The public’s dislike of ObamaCare isn’t growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

The article is accompanied by a cartoon of the “Four Horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.

Hinniger grudgingly concedes that the public came to support the first three “horsemen,” but he thinks the ACA will be the straw that broke the camel’s back — “The discrediting of the entitlement state begins next Tuesday. Let it happen.”

Yeah, let it happen. If it’s that awful, what are they worried about? Or maybe that’s not what worries them …

For those of you (including me) who didn’t have time to waste watching the Cruzathon, TPM provides highlights.

I understand Ted Cruz is still at his fake filibuster. Comments?

All the political buzz is about Ted Cruz today. Little of it is flattering.

Having run a scorched-earth campaign calling for defunding Obamacare by any possible means, he has reached his put up or shut up moment.

After months of fiery rhetoric, Cruz and his allies are scrambling to salvage their strategy. For starters, Cruz wants Reid to make an exception to Senate rules that would make it easier for Republicans to block Obamacare funding.

And he expects Sen. Reid to do this, why?

When that fails, Cruz wants other GOP Senators to vote against a procedural bill that will allow the Senate to consider the House bill. In other words, he wants them to vote against the House bill that defunds Obamacare. Heritage Action already has warned the GOP senators that a vote against the House bill will look bad on their wingnut scorecards.

So when that fails, he wants the House to pass individual funding bills to keep the government from shutting down.

“The House should hold its ground and start passing smaller resolutions one department at a time,” Cruz said. “The House is the only body where the Republicans have a majority. My job is [providing] as much support and air cover as we can for the House to stand up and lead.”

Such as?

Regardless, the House should stand its ground, and if Reid kills this Continuing Resolution then the House should pass smaller CRs one at a time, starting with the military. Dare Reid to keep voting to shut down the government.

That’s right. He wants to hold the military hostage to defund Obamacare.

I doubt even Cruz expects any of this to happen . He’s trying to cover his butt so he can blame everybody else if the GOP fails to stop Obamacare.

See also Charles Pierce.

So the House has voted to drastically cut the food stamp program and to defund Obamacare. You will recognize these to be Republican initiatives.

Timothy Egan looks at who is going to be hurt.

Certainly there are frauds among the one in seven Americans getting help from the program formerly known as food stamps. But who are the others, the easy-to-ignore millions who will feel real pain with these cuts? As it turns out, most of them live in Red State, Real People America. Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half.

You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010.

We could analyze this until the cows come home. The bottom line is that the Founding Guys assumed that the way this republican thing would work is that people would vote for other people who would represent their best interests. I don’t think James Madison anticipated that there could ever be big chunks of people voting against their best interests.

I don’t see any fixes here; it’s all gone too far. The course must be run, and when the dust settles maybe we’ll be able to rebuild.

Krugman:

First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.

But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.

So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”?

Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.

Well, folks, here we go again — extremists are threatening to not raise the debt ceiling, and all kinds of people who (mostly) know better are whipping up support for not raising the debt ceiling by lying about what it is.

For example, this article at The Federalist about how the American people like the debt ceiling, says that “voters like the the idea of embedded limits on government spending.” And perhaps they do, but that’s not what the debt ceiling is.

The wingnuts got hold of a speech by President Obama in which he said that raising the debt ceiling doesn’t increase the debt, and of course they’re tripping all over themselves laughing and calling him a fool (example). The joke’s on them, though, since raising the debt ceiling actually does not increase the debt but only allows the Treasury to pay bills already due. The actual debt is not limited by the debt ceiling, and the consequences of not raising it would be catastrophic. Which is not, of course, funny.

Mr. Happy owns a laundromat!