Open Thread
Republican Shutdown and Default Apocalypse Open Thread, Day 14
Today is Columbus Day (if you are in South Dakota, this is Native American Day) so much of the government (Feds and state) is REALLY closed, as are many other companies. But this is Day 14 of the Republican Shutdown and here is the state of the government as I understand it:
- Obamacare is alive and no longer a GOP hostage
- The Government is still shutdown and the GOP wants to keep it as a hostage
- The debt Ceiling has not been raised and is still a GOP hostage — although there are plenty of noises this morning looking to raise the debt ceiling
- Various Federal parks or monuments are opening using state funds, and good luck getting those back from this Congress.
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.
Republican Shutdown and Default Apocalypse Open Thread, Day 11
Here is the current situation from what I can tell:
Obamacare is alive and it is no longer a hostage.
The Government is still shut down and the House is still trying to keep it as a hostage.
The Debt Ceiling limit might be extended a few weeks (maybe a few months), but the GOP is still trying to keep it as a hostage.
The GOP is really being beat up in the court of public opinion.
Republican Shutdown and Default Apocalypse Open Thread, Day 8
Barack Obama was never likely to be popular with the Republican base. It’s not just that he’s black. He’s first president in 76 years with a foreign parent—and unlike Hulda Hoover, Barack Obama Sr. never even naturalized. While Obama is not the first president to hold two degrees from elite universities—Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did as well—his Ivy predecessors at least disguised their education with a down-home style of speech. Join this cultural inheritance to liberal politics, and of course you have a formula for conflict. But effective parties make conflict work for them. Hate leads to rage, and rage makes you stupid. Republicans have convinced themselves both that President Obama is a revolutionary radical hell-bent upon destroying America as we know it and that he’s so feckless and weak-willed that he’ll always yield to pressure. It’s that contradictory, angry assessment that has brought the GOP to a place where it must either abjectly surrender or force a national default. Calmer analysis would have achieved better results.
The Frum piece is really a must read in its entirety.
Republican Shutdown and Debt Default Apocalypse Open Thread, Day 6.
House Republican Ted Yoho (FL), a member of the treasonous Tea Party that is driving this Republican Shutdown and Debt Default, said this yesterday about the affects of a debt default.
“I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets.”
Morons. These traitors are literally morons.
And for the record, the world’s markets disagree violently with that assessment from the Teabagger.
Republican Shutdown Open Thread, Day 5
The internal GOP civil war continues, the Dems still hold firm and Americans are still getting screwed over by this. And Obamacare is enrolling people for insurance the entire time. Time Magazine may have the best cover depicting the current madness:
Republican Shutdown Open Thread, Day 3
This, from Esquire’s Charles Pierce, is a classic:
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed [Tuesday].
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
GOP Shutdown Open Thread, Day 2
Jason pointed us to this interview of Robert Costa of the National Review by Ezra Klein. I have been following Costa for the very latest reporting inside the Republican House caucus, and his reports have been some of the best:
EK: How much of this is a Boehner problem and how much of this is a House Republicans problem? Which is to say, if Boehner decided to retire tomorrow, is there another House Republican who has enough trust and allegiance in the conference that he or she could manage the institution more effectively?
RC: What we’re seeing is the collapse of institutional Republican power. It’s not so much about Boehner. It’s things like the end of earmarks. They move away from Tom DeLay and they think they’re improving the House, but now they have nothing to offer their members. The outside groups don’t always move votes directly but they create an atmosphere of fear among the members. And so many of these members now live in the conservative world of talk radio and tea party conventions and Fox News invitations. And so the conservative strategy of the moment, no matter how unrealistic it might be, catches fire. The members begin to believe they can achieve things in divided government that most objective observers would believe is impossible. Leaders are dealing with these expectations that wouldn’t exist in a normal environment.
Shutdown Open Thread, Day 1
The GOP saw the polls this morning, and now they are knifing each other in the back like the criminals they are. Peter King blamed Ted Cruz and all who follow him for the Republican Shutdown. I cannot embed the video, so go to Buzzfeed and watch it there. Here is the transcript:
“That’s Ted Cruz’s fault. Ted Cruz led us down this path. This was a disaster from the start,” King said. “I could have predicted this and this is what the leadership predicted three weeks ago when they said they would never pursue defunding because it was going to work against us and we’d be blamed. But Ted Cruz insisted that his people follow him, and we did it, and that’s why we’re in this position. It’s his fault, and he wants us to get him out of it. Listen I’m saying the president should negotiate, but I ‘m saying that this was caused by Ted Cruz and his acolytes in the House of Representatives. They led us down this dead end street.”
King continued battering Cruz, citing other prominent Republicans who had attacked Cruz’s strategy in the past.
“Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, Tom Coburn, all solid conservatives said this was a terrible policy to begin with,” King said. “We had a Republican Senator say it was the dopiest idea they’d ever heard. Ted Cruz is to blame, and those in the House who stand with him have brought about this train wreck. It’s up to us to try to get it out and it’s up to the president to step in and stop standing on the sidelines.”
No, Mr. King. The President is not obligated to help out the Republian Party in its Civil War. The President is not obligated to solve a problem the Republican Party started. The solution to this whole mess is so fucking simple my 3 three old niece could figure it out: Pass the clean Senate bill.
That is your solution, Mr. King. Stop being a coward and vote no on these Obamacare defunding blackmailing hostage taking House CR and tell each sane Republican to do likewise. That is your job, Mr. King, not the President’s.
Monday Open Thread [9.30.13]
![Monday Open Thread [9.30.13]](http://delawareliberal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Boehner-192x180.png "Monday Open Thread [9.30.13]")
The National Review on Speaker Boehner’s dilemma:
“That aura of Republican infighting will create an interesting dynamic if Tuesday morning comes without an accord. While Boehner and other leaders will be defending the GOP’s position in front of the cameras, there may be a subtle effort to use the episode — and what many expect to be its disastrous political results — as a means of discrediting the hardliners who give the speaker headaches. Conservatives, meanwhile, will try to show that the tactic is helping focus public attention on Obamacare.”
Said one veteran House Republican: “It may have to shut down. Until people feel the political pain, I doubt we can come together on anything. Boehner knows that, probably more than anyone.”
If Boehner does not allow the Senate’s clean CR to get a vote today, he and his Republican Representatives will be directly and solely responsible for the government shutdown and every single consequence resulting from it. As a result, if those consequences are negative, the Republicans may lose the House in 2014. But at the same time, if Boehner allows the clean CR to come to the floor for a vote, then the only way it passes is with a majority of Democrats and sane Republicans. Boehner has done this before, on the Hurricane Sandy Aid and on the Fiscal Cliff Deal. But if he does it this time, he will lose his Speakership.
So we are going to learn today whether Boehner is a opportunistic coward or a self sacrificing patriot.
Friday Open Thread
Are you watching the circular firing squad that is the GOP right now? Of course, all of this depends upon the Democrats holding firm and not seeing themselves as hostages here. A tall order. But so far, so good. Yesterday, Harry Reid tried to speed up the votes so that the Senate could be done that evening to send the CR back to the House with some time to spare. Carnival Cruz and his sidekick Lee were having none of that, so they worked pretty hard to make sure that the bill was delayed — sparking this great smack back by Senator Bob Corker telling Cruz he was confused:
Thursday Open Thread [9.26.13]
![Thursday Open Thread [9.26.13]](http://delawareliberal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/DL.Thumbnail.4.png "Thursday Open Thread [9.26.13]")
Brian Beutler today at Salon:
What happened over the past 48 hours is a direct consequence of Republicans making sport out of misleading the public, and particularly conservatives, about the threat Obamacare poses to the country. It created an incentive for publicity-hungry members to stage more and more elaborate, but ultimately symbolic, anti-Obamacare performances
If Republicans really worried that Obamacare is as dangerous as they’ve been claiming for years — if they truly believed it will sap the middle class of ambition and bankrupt the country — then many more of them would have joined Cruz over the past 24 hours. At the very least, they wouldn’t have blown him off and attacked his motives and trashed him anonymously in the press.
But the deceptive nature of their opposition campaign created an opening for a false savior like Cruz to outperform them.
Republicans are annoyed with Cruz for plenty of reasons — he’s arrogant, he’s lying to primary voters about the limits of GOP power, he’s inching Congress toward a government shutdown most of the party wants to avoid. But a big subtext here is that he’s exposed the simple message that once united the party as a sham. If Obamacare is as perilous as the party claims, why wait until the next election to try and derail it? By swooping in like he did, knowing he couldn’t deliver, he actually exposed both charades — his own and his GOP antagonists’ — and left ACA intact.
So Republicans are liars. This is not news. What is news is that they might, finally, at long last, be paying a price for it.
Tuesday Open Thread [9.24.13]
“The only real way to repeal the healthcare law is to win elections,” – The Wall Street Journal.
Indeed. But the GOP has taught us that elections have no consequences, and that an opposition party must oppose a President’s entire agenda absolutely. The President can never me allowed to do his job or see his nominees or policies enacted. So, if a miracle happens and a Republican gets elected President in the next few generations, as unlikely as that is, he or she should expect Democrats to treat him or her as Republicans have treated Obama.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein shows us why this financial showdown shutdown default drama in 2013 is different than what occurred in 2011.
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