Open Thread Jan. 22: Eagles and Catfights

As Philadelphia football fans continue chanting the longest word they’ve learned how to spell, life continues elsewhere, except in much of the federal government.

The Jets and the Sharks in Congress couldn’t get their choreography together so now the whole government is shut down (suggested headline: This Bunghole Is Corked). You can’t swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting an opinion piece announcing which side will win. Tony and Maria, meanwhile, twist in the wind, but we know how it ends for them. I’ll just point out that when the libertarian Cato Institute is against a Republican policy, it must be a really bad policy.

The only one I saw with an interesting point was by Michael Tomasky in the New York Times. He says the unified Democratic stance on the government shutdown shows the party is indeed moving to the left, but it’s not a mirror image of the GOP. He analyzes what that might mean in the longer-term picture.

Overlooked in all the furious inactivity was a bigger story — the enormous turnout for women’s marches all around the country, from DC to the hinterlands. In many locales, more people turned out than last year. It all culminated with a rally in Las Vegas, where many of the speakers eschewed solidarity to specifically call out white women for their electoral support of both Trump (53%) and Alabama’s Roy Moore (63%). Solidarity, amiright?

What could diminish this November’s blue wave? Traditionally, the economy was a strong barometer of how incumbents will fare, so the upward revision of growth expectations should be good news for the GOP.

Finally, in honor of women’s solidarity weekend, I would note that you can take the blonde journalist out of Fox News, but you can’t take the Fox News out of Megyn Kelly, who went off on a Hanoi Jane rant after Jane Fonda slagged her again for that awkward interview where Kelly asked about her plastic surgery. Catfight! Reowr!