Republican Shutdown and Default Apocalypse Open Thread, Day 12

Here is the current state of negotiations as I understand it:

• Obamacare is alive and no longer a hostage
• The government is still shutdown and still a GOP hostage
• The debt limit is still a GOP hostage
• White House talks with the House are done or stalled — it looks like the President is not negotiating  with the threat of shooting hostages on the table still
• White House is talking with the GOP in the Senate who are trying to get a 6-month plan to open the government and and the borrowing limit extended through January.

From NPR:

The central hang-up remained House Republicans’ insistence that Democrats agree to conditions before Republicans agree to hike the debt limit and reopen the government.

Republicans’ initial proposal was that they would agree to end the debt ceiling and shutdown crises if President Obama and congressional Democrats agreed to future negotiations to slow the growth of entitlement spending.

Obama and congressional Democrats continued to reject that notion, saying that neither ending the shutdown nor preventing a potentially catastrophic default should be subject to “ransom.”

And here’s a wealthy GOP Congressman from New Mexico telling furloughed Federal workers to take a loan out to cover their bills:

Remember Joe the Plumber? The Joe the Plumber who wasn’t really a Plumber? Well he’s back and asking the readers of his website to ““Admit it, you want a white Republican president again.” But before the actual author of this piece gets to his point, he spins up an inoculation against any racism issues:

But Joe — and Kevin Jackson, the actual author of the piece — want you to know that “before you start feeling like you’re a racist, understand you are not.”

You see, before we had a black president, “to criticize the president meant that you didn’t like his policies.” Before we had a black president, nobody was “ever accused of being racist for disagreeing with white presidents.”

Many deranged Mexicans believe we should open the country up to them, some saying that much of America belongs to Mexico anyway. They are not called racists.

Liberal blacks have disagreed with most Republican presidents since Eisenhower, yet these blacks are not considered racists. In fact, when blacks had sanity and disagreed with the policies of racist white Democrat presidents, nobody accused black people of being racists.

Never has a black person been called racist, because they didn’t like one of the white presidents’ policies. Blacks were just exercising their First Amendment rights to speak freely.

Take Reagan for example. Reagan ushered in a veritable Renaissance for blacks, as Fox News showcased.

The Reagan business is choice, seriously. But if you need to spin up a rationale for why your screed is not racist — it really is. That’s the rule.