Government Shutdown!!!!

[NeonLX]

BPH...have a great time. I visited Mother Superior for 4 short days at the end of August. Could have easily spent months near my favorite body of water...

I agree that the government *should* protect us from the wolves and vampires. I also believe in public education, public mail delivery, and public health care...oh yeah, and public transportation!

Enjoy yourself!

[norton ash]

Hi, Carol. It's such a damned shame that all the freedom-loving assholes can't figure out a a single-payer payroll deduction system, like any fucking sane modern country might. And I was just wishing BPH a good holiday, 'cause Mama's awesome... the winds of autumn, Gitchigumee, and the turning Michigan woods. Tis a terrible beauty.

[Elihu]

Short answer: You're the only western country with a debt ceiling mandated by law.

right answer: because the world's population is coerced to use our currency scrip. and you will notice: the legal mandate does nothing to restrain the balance. they're not related at all. the ceiling peageant is like a bit of honey to make the pill easier to swallow.

[Carol Newquist]

Hey Norton,

I hear you.....I guess that's why I implied Mother Superior's bout to jump the gun. She may not give up her dead, but I fear she will give up her water as one of the last freshwater repositories as the others run dry. Every time I hear, or see, the word Gitche Gumee, Gordon Lightfoot's ode to the Edmund Fitzgerald starts playing in my head. Here's to you....and I agree about Single Payer. I was once for it, and still am in the abstract, but no longer with THIS government. I don't trust it'd do right by it, not that it'd even consider it, because it's owned by, and is a division of, the corporations.

[norton ash]

Deep down, we're scared of her. See the voracious wolf's face?

[Asta]

Belgium was without an official government for 535 days starting in 2010. If I am not mistaken, Belgium still exists, there is no giant sink hole in its place, and from some of the stories I recall reading during that time, the people of Belgium had a good time. They didn't start any wars, no major riots, and they continued making premium beers. Well, upon further reading, there was a small protest after the first 250 days when a whole bunch of students took to the streets and took off their clothes.

The motivating force that finally allowed the opposing parties to sit down at the negotiating table was...the economy. No surprise there. And viola, a budget was agreed upon.

[Elihu]

wow that is cool. all four of you with an abiding connection to lake superior.

[NeonLX]

North Shore, near Split Rock, August, 2013:



North Shore, Bob's Cabins near Two Harbors:

[Carol Newquist]

the people of Belgium had a good time. They didn't start any wars, no major riots, and they continued making premium beers.

Exactly! I bet they finally got back together because they were like "shit, this isn't working. The people are going about their daily routines and acting as if they don't need us and having a good time. Pretty soon, they'll be cooperating and collaborating and we can't have that!" So, the budget gets passed poste haste and the illusion continues.

BTW, I love me some Belgiumese Beer. Best anywhere, IMO. They're the masters of that craft.

[8bitagent]

Why the fuck didnt Democrats threaten to shut down the gub'ment to protest the Iraq war or any of the Bush bullshit?

Fuck it, shut it down. So sick of everything. Fiscal Cliff, Obama Got Osama, "We gotta go into Syria!", drones are acceptable and are not like boston/sandy hook, etc. Fuck all these shitheads. Wasting $4 trillion to slaughter a whole generation of Muslims for no reason is ok. Fuck it all. The majority of America's politicians are old vampiric men STRAIGHT out of Dark City. I realized life in modern American city is like Dark City, just inverse dark and dreary noir for Walmart and Apple store brightness.

[seemslikeadream]

fucking babies

21 Things Republicans Have Demanded In Exchange For Not Shutting Down The Government Or Tanking The Global Economy
BY JUDD LEGUM ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2013 AT 10:08 AM

Since the Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 2011, they have repeatedly attempted to use the prospect of a government shutdown or a debt default as leverage. A shutdown would furlough close to a million federal workers and cut off essential services for millions more Americans, while a default on U.S. debt, even according to Speaker John Boehner, could devastate the global economy. While the recent debate has focused on Obamacare, that is just the latest in a series of demands made by Republicans. The following is a list of things that have been, at various times, demanded by Republicans under threat of a government shutdown or default:
1. A balanced budget amendment [Link]
2. Approving Keystone XL [Link]
3. Eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood [Link]
4. Medicare privatization [Link]
5. Tax reform, as outlined by Paul Ryan [Link]
6. The REINS Act, which would require Congress to approve significant federal regulations [Link]
7. Means-testing Social Security [Link]
8. Defunding Obamacare [Link]
9. Allowing employers to eliminate insurance coverage for birth control [Link]
10. An expansion of off-shore drilling [Link]
11. Preserving all the Bush tax cuts [Link]
12. “Trillions” in budget cuts [Link]
13. Slashing funding for food stamps [Link]
14. Protecting mountaintop strip mining [Link]
15. Stripping the EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases [Link]
16. Loosening regulation on coal ash [Link]
17. Delaying Obamacare implementation by one year [Link]
18. Repealing a tax on medical devices [Link]
19. Eliminating Social Service Block Grants [Link]
20. Expanding drilling on federal lands [Link]
21. Restricting the child tax credit [Link]
In just over 2 years, Republicans have been successful in extracting around $1.7 trillion in budget cuts or 72% of the total deficit reduction over that period. Under President Bush the government never shut down and the debt limit was raised five times with bipartisan support and without conditions.

[justdrew]

arrest them all for treason and get their state's governors to appoint sane humans to the posts.

[seemslikeadream]

arrest them all for treason and get their state's governors to appoint sane humans to the posts.

I agree ...who the fuck do they think they are? Dumbasses

[seemslikeadream]

House Republicans Would Rather Kill US Economy Than Lose Opportunity to Fundraise


MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

As hard as it is to believe given the psychotic babble coming out of the mouths of House Republicans, the Affordable Care Act was the creation of a think tank revered by conservatives, the Heritage Institute, and promoted by Republicans in the early '90s as an alternative to "Hillarycare." Of course, none other than Mitt Romney made it his main legacy as governor of Massachusetts; i.e., that is to say before he retroactively denounced it to jump on the anti-Obamacare juggernaut in the GOP primaries.

Why did the Heritage Foundation promote what is more or less now the Affordable Care Act that the House Republcans are comparing to bubonic plague? Because of the individual mandate. Republicans just love individual responsibility as compared to corporate responsibility, right?

Heck, even Richard Nixon wanted to put the responsibility on employers, according to a Forbes article:

In addition, in those days, most proposals for universal health care that were to the right of government-run single-payer were based upon forcing employers to sponsor private-sector health coverage for all of their employees. For example, under the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan proposed by Richard Nixon in 1974, “every employer would be required to offer all full-time employees the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan. Additional benefits could then be added by mutual agreement.”

If Tricky Dick were alive, the House GOP would skin him alive and roast his flesh for dinner.

The Forbes article explains a bit more about the former GOP embrace of the Affordable Care Act concept:

In 1989, Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation proposed a plan he called “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.” Stuart’s plan included a provision to “mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance,” which he framed explicitly as a way to address the “free rider” problem and employer mandates....

It would seem that 1990s conservatives weren’t concerned with the constitutional implications of allowing Congress to force people to buy a private product. “I don’t remember that being raised at all,” Mark Pauly told Ezra Klein last year. “The way it was viewed by the Congressional Budget Office in 1994 was, effectively, as a tax…So I’ve been surprised by that argument.”

But the Republicans long ago decided to make Obamacare something akin to the lower dredges of an outhouse injected with brain eating amoeba (which ironically might explain what happened to the brains of the GOP Tea Party-racist economic arsonists in the House). Attacking the Affordable Care Act is a golden goose for fundraising and by calling it Obamacare (which the White House seemed to play into by also referring to it as Obamacare at times), it turned into a fundraising bonanza for getting checks from the white tribalist crowd and neo-Confederate right-to-be-as-dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks contingent. Toss in the Koch brothers libertarian/John Birch Society cabal and you have a frenzied Tea Party that has pressed the self-destruct button on the American economy.

Some scientists argue that the human being is still 99 percent similar to our ancestors who emerged with opposable thumbs and started our species. It's the one percent of development in our mental skills, they contend, that differentiates us from the great apes.

But in the Republican dominated House of Representatives, you can pretty much take away that one percent of brain power except for the ability to speak incendiary rhetoric to raise money.

If you go to the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, as BuzzFlash at Truthout has reported via interviews with Charles Pierce, you can find dinosaurs with saddles. When you see the primordial GOP House members orating like hyenas with their tails on fire, you start believing that some of them did ride dinosaurs.

[justdrew]

Just look at EVERY SINGLE THING they "want" - all bullshit.