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!

The Republican Study Committee announced it finally had come up with a replacement for Obamacare. Ed Kilgore:

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

WORLD EXCLUSIVE MUST CREDIT POLITICAL ANIMAL

Through carefully cultivated sources in my own cerebellum, I’m able to reveal the mysterious House conservative health care plan:

High-risk pools, HSAs, tax credits, interstate insurance sales, “tort reform,” “entitlement reform.”

Pretty exciting, eh? Encourage bad and expensive insurance for the people who actually need it, probably while easing Medicare into a private insurance system and Medicaid towards the dustbin of history.

Kevin Drum finds the actual plan, and checks to see how well Ed called it:

OK, smartypants, let’s just compare that to reality. Here’s the actual plan:

• Spurs competition to lower health care costs by allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines….
• Reforms medical malpractice laws….
• Provides tax reform that allows families and individuals to deduct health care costs….
• Expands access to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)….
• Safeguards individuals with pre-existing conditions … by bolstering state-based high risk pools….
• Protects the unborn by ensuring no federal funding of abortions.

Hah! You didn’t mention that last one, Ed. What makes this plan unique and exciting is its ban on federal funding for abortion. Boo-yah!

Some days the snark writes itself. Or, at least other people write it.

I’ve been holding back on commenting on the terrible shooting at the Washington Navy Yard today. We’re finally getting some information on one alleged shooter —

The suspected shooter, identified by three law enforcement offcials as Aaron Alexis, a man in his 30s from Texas, is among the dozen dead. . . .

. . . Two law enforcement officials said the shooter is among the 12 dead. The dead shooter had an assault rifle and a handgun, two law enforcement officials said. One said he also had a shotgun.

The first, sketchy details about the suspect give no hints about what may have gone wrong.

Aaron Alexis, 34, grew up in Brooklyn with his mother Sarah and father Anthony Alexis, according to his aunt Helen Weeks.

“We haven’t seen him for years,” Weeks said of her nephew in a telephone interview. “I know he was in the military. He served abroad. I think he was doing some kind of computer work.”

A 2007 Navy Times feature cites an Aaron Alexis as having graduated from Navy boot camp that year from the Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, Ill. Its unclear if this is the same Alexis, but the newspaper listed his occupational specialty as an Airman Recruit. A deleted web profile of an Aaron Alexis listed him as being stationed at Naval Air Station, Fort Worth, Tex.