U.S. Politics - shut down, fed up, chime in

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Like Yglesias says, it's interesting who we consider to be essential. The answer is typically people with guns and badges.

[Inigima]

First of all, Jesus, it's "defuse," not "diffuse." To diffuse is to spread out.

Second: Passing the piecemeal bills is an awful idea. You'll end up with a government funding only the things Republicans like, and they'll have little incentive to agree to anything else.

What the Democrats need to do is figure out a way, messaging-wise, to prevent the Republican spin that Democrats are blocking these things everyone likes from taking hold. They absolutely can't cave on the piecemeal stuff.

[awesome possum]

All Boehner needs to do is let a clean CR come to the floor for a vote. There's enough not-treasonous Republicans in the House to vote with the Democrats to pass one. He's resisting because he's afraid of offending his Teabagger base and getting primaried out of office.

Yep, seems like most everything Boehner has done the last several years is based on capitulating to the teabaggers so that they don't label him the dreaded RINO and turn on him. His actions stink of cowardice.

What the Democrats need to do is figure out a way, messaging-wise, to prevent the Republican spin that Democrats are blocking these things everyone likes from taking hold. They absolutely can't cave on the piecemeal stuff.

Well, "Republicans shut down the government" should have some mileage on it. If not, "Republicans want to keep open parks while refusing to give help to hungry low-income children. Where are their priorities?" sounds game to me.

[Mexal]

I'm still cracking up at the "Slimdown Showdown" on Foxnews. Too funny.

From Foxnews homepage - first article.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION'S selective slimdown of government during the budget stalemate is even reaching into America's wilderness, where searches for missing hikers have been curtailed — including Dr. Jodean Elliot-Blakeslee, missing while hiking Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho.

Really? Obama Administration's slimdown? Wow.

[sologdin]

I'm trying to see if the thing actually works

i can only assume that teabagger central (the teapot?) has issued orders for everyone to access the site at the same time in an attempt to break it?

[lokisnow]

So now the house GOP is pushing hard for the piecemeal approach. Canter and a few of the others gave a statement at the WWII memorial. That pushes the ball on the Senate and makes the Dems look bad for not funding the stuff that everyone agrees on.

Harry Reid basically called one of the CNN corespondents a moron for asking why they wouldn't cave to a few of these individual bills. I support the president and the Democrats on this whole shutdown thing, but Reid is insufferable, and also stupid. They ought to call the GOP bluff and immediately pass those small bills and then criticize the House for taking the piecemeal approach. Seems a simple way to diffuse this latest tactic to me.

Nope. The government is not in the business of picking winners and losers.

[sologdin]

Republicans have been cultivating the dumb-ass know-nothing constituency for decades

it's like the simpletons in canticle for leibowitz.

[TrackerNeil]

This is what the Republicans were afraid of...

How long until they give up the ACA fight, or will this be part of the GOP platform for years to come?

You've got to figure that, once a few million (or perhaps tens of millions) people are signed up and receiving policies and subsidies that the GOP will start to tone down the anti-ACA rhetoric. I suspect that they'll occasionally rant and rave but not try to turn that into policy. Eventually the fever-eyed conservatives will crawl back into their bogs and marshes, where hatred for all things Obama will live on but be largely harmless.

[thecryptile]

I didn't intend to imply that the function of the website was a referendum on Obamacare, I just want to see what it's about.

[DanteGabriel]

The problem with this line of reasoning is that open enrollment lasts for six months. You're seeing this level of demand in the first two days. Generally, when people are reluctant about participating in something, they put it off until the last minute.

Also, the attempt to use the operation of healthcare.gov as a referendum on Obamacare is an extremely weak argument. The kinks in the website will get worked out and there is also a toll-free number to call. Obamacare will succeed or fail on its own merits, not based on whether its website is working at optimum performance on day one (which rarely, if ever, happens with new launches).

The GOP and its affiliated media organs are grasping at every straw they can to distract from the Shutdown Shit Pie they served to America. Also explains Rand Paul's histrionics over the WW2 memorial.

[Sci-2]

The problem with this line of reasoning is that open enrollment lasts for six months. You're seeing this level of demand in the first two days. Generally, when people are reluctant about participating in something, they put it off until the last minute.

Yeah, I can see that. I'd say there is likely some concern about penalties driving hits, but the (vast?) majority of people are either curious or excited.

There's also the fact that organizations of all sorts are looking into the topic, so you're going to get an insane amount of traffic that'll likely die down in the next week or so.

Anyway, here's a biased in the bag for Obama site's take:

Do HealthCare.Gov’s Early Glitches Mean It’s Doomed To Failure?

[DanteGabriel]

An interesting insight into the decentralized nature of the current Republican Party, and how the Tea Party wing basically no longer has to answer to the party establishment:

In fact, “partisanship” isn’t the cause of the shutdown. And we’d probably be better off if politicians -- that is, Republicans -- were thinking more about the interests of their own party. Consider that Republicans led themselves into the fever swamp of the shutdown even as many of its advocates said out loud that it would hurt the party, harm their election chances in 2014, and embarrass them, all without any possibility of achieving their objective of ending the Affordable Care Act.

Politicians motivated by the interests of a political party wouldn’t do this. Political parties in a winner-take-all electoral system are broad coalitions with an inherent interest in widening their scope to attract more people to their general vision. Their long-term goal is in winning elections, at many levels, now and in the future. So long as they are organized around a reasonably coherent philosophy (as the Democratic Party was not, when it was divided between Dixiecrats and northern liberals before the 1970s), parties are a stabilizing force in American politics, pulling it towards the median voter and offsetting the many other forces and interests that pull in other directions. The current Democratic Party, which trims and disciplines the aspirations of its core progressive activists, is a good example of a fairly strong party, which is why it’s consistently frustrating to the left.

But the modern Republican Party is not strong. It’s something more like a loose association of independent forces, including Tea Party-backed members, those with their own sources of campaign money from ideological backers, many with seats so safe that they can happily ignore all their non-conservative constituents, and outside agents like Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, who Businessweek recently described as the de facto Speaker of the House. Many of its politicians have deliberately cut themselves off from all the incentives that traditionally moderate and stabilize politics--earmarks, constituent service (many offices say they won’t help constituents maneuver the ACA), and infrastructure spending. With safe seats, and hearing little dissent at home, they are able to do so. Cutting themselves off from the incentive to build and maintain a strong and viable party is part of the same story.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114950/government-shutdown-2013-democratic-republican-are-too-weak

Here's my favorite part:

Consider this analogy: Traditional parties are like old-fashioned corporations, whose executives aim to build market share and long-term growth. But in the 1980s, armed with the doctrine that the goal of a corporation is to deliver returns to shareholders, a group of financiers swept in, and whether it was called a leveraged buyout, greenmail, or the more anodyne term private equity, they essentially extracted the value in the corporation for themselves and for other shareholders. As we saw with Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital portfolio, some companies survived these raids but many were wiped out. Cruz, the Koches, Sheldon Adelson, DeMint, and even Paul Ryan should be seen as something like the corporate raiders of American politics. They are trying to extract maximum value from their current position in the system, with little regard to the long-term future of the Republican Party and its shrinking demographic base, or for the system in which it operates.

[TrackerNeil]

Cruz, the Koches, Sheldon Adelson, DeMint, and even Paul Ryan should be seen as something like the corporate raiders of American politics. They are trying to extract maximum value from their current position in the system, with little regard to the long-term future of the Republican Party and its shrinking demographic base, or for the system in which it operates.

I think this is right on point, except that Ted Cruz may well have managed to both pillage the party and extract no value. Fact is, this shutdown will end. Perhaps not today, and perhaps not tomorrow, but at some point the Republicans will either 1) cave or 2) cut some kind of deal. Cruz spent the weeks leading up to the shutdown railing against 2, and therefore making 1 even more likely. Should the politics of this little adventure go against the GOP - and it's easy to imagine that they will - Cruz will long be remembered as the guy who helped tank the party's image. That won't matter with the teabaggers, or course - they're crazy people who don't care about trifling details like the public's view of the party - but the party elite will keep it in mind when making donations and offering support for Cruz's presidential campaign.

[DanteGabriel]

I think this is right on point, except that Ted Cruz may well have managed to both pillage the party and extract no value. Fact is, this shutdown will end. Perhaps not today, and perhaps not tomorrow, but at some point the Republicans will either 1) cave or 2) cut some kind of deal. Cruz spent the weeks leading up to the shutdown railing against 2, and therefore making 1 even more likely. Should the politics of this little adventure go against the GOP - and it's easy to imagine that they will - Cruz will long be remembered as the guy who helped tank the party's image. That won't matter with the teabaggers, or course - they're crazy people who don't care about trifling details like the public's view of the party - but the party elite will keep it in mind when making donations and offering support for Cruz's presidential campaign.

Cruz is kind of fascinating to me, much in the way that a three-day-old piece of sushi is fascinating. He's too much of a visible asshole to be President, yet seems to be gunning for it. Does he really think this whole circus, and the "I half-assed a fake filibuster against it before I voted for it" thing from last week, are going to make him anything more than a guerilla nominee who either tanked at the convention, or got drubbed in the national election?

Or is this a Palin-level grift, where a long enough stint as the darling of the Know-Nothings will ensure him speaking fees and a Fox Contributor gig for life?

[Inigima]

Should the politics of this little adventure go against the GOP - and it's easy to imagine that they will - Cruz will long be remembered as the guy who helped tank the party's image. That won't matter with the teabaggers, or course - they're crazy people who don't care about trifling details like the public's view of the party - but the party elite will keep it in mind when making donations and offering support for Cruz's presidential campaign.

I think the truth is more complicated. I think teabaggers like Cruz do care about their public image, but are True Believers in the idea that the public is, collectively, with them.

EDIT: I keep trying to find a better descriptor than "teabaggers" since it bothers people, but I run into two obstacles. One is that it's absurd to object to a label you made for yourself; the other is that I simply can't find a better word. I don't want to call them "tea partiers" or any similar phrase, because I resent the attempt to co-opt a piece of shared American history for the use of a fringe group. It's an attempt to borrow legitimacy from the rest of us.

[bbstark]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/wp/2013/10/02/shutdown-slams-doors-on-scientists/

The Mars probe MAVEN is supposed to launch Nov. 18. It takes weeks to get these things ready to launch. If the shutdown lasts only a few days, they’ll probably be fine, but if it drags on and on, there’s a chance MAVEN may have to go into mothballs until the planets align again in two years. You can’t argue with orbital dynamics.

just don't argue with orbital dynamics, k?

I've been burying my head in the sand from various taunts of my European and Canadian collagues... yes, we're embarassing ourselves, I know!!

[DanteGabriel]

I think the truth is more complicated. I think teabaggers like Cruz do care about their public image, but are True Believers in the idea that the public is, collectively, with them.

EDIT: I keep trying to find a better descriptor than "teabaggers" since it bothers people, but I run into two obstacles. One is that it's absurd to object to a label you made for yourself; the other is that I simply can't find a better word. I don't want to call them "tea partiers" or any similar phrase, because I resent the attempt to co-opt a piece of shared American history for the use of a fringe group. It's an attempt to borrow legitimacy from the rest of us.

Teahadis? Teahadists?

[Merentha]

Cruz is kind of fascinating to me, much in the way that a three-day-old piece of sushi is fascinating. He's too much of a visible asshole to be President, yet seems to be gunning for it. Does he really think this whole circus, and the "I half-assed a fake filibuster against it before I voted for it" thing from last week, are going to make him anything more than a guerilla nominee who either tanked at the convention, or got drubbed in the national election?

Or is this a Palin-level grift, where a long enough stint as the darling of the Know-Nothings will ensure him speaking fees and a Fox Contributor gig for life?

Conservatives (and liberals, but conservatives especially) have a tendency to over-estimate the conservativeness of their district on many issues. A few of them go so far as to rate their district something like +20 points on whatever scale the study I'm half-remembering uses, which was more conservative than the reddest district in the country. I'll try to find the study and will post it back here, but it really isn't out of the question that Cruz honestly thinks that a significant portion of the public is with him.

edit: Shryke has the link below.

[Inigima]

Teahadis? Teahadists?

I laughed, but if you think they're mad about being called teabaggers....

[Ser Reptitious]

Teahadis? Teahadists?

:rofl:

Also, Millions flee Obamacare!