The Official End to Ted Cruz's Presidential Aspirations

Beating up on Trayvon Martin’s mom:

During a Senate hearing on "stand your ground" laws and public safety, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tried to dismiss claims that such laws had racial implications. Because many black people are victims of violent crime and need to defend themselves, Cruz said, "the notion that 'stand your ground' laws are some form of veiled racism may be a convenient political attack, but it is not borne out by the fact remotely." The chair of the subcommittee, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, offered a quick and biting rebuttal. Sitting in front of the two was Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother.

The hearing stemmed from the 2012 shooting of Martin, the Florida teenager shot to death while walking back from the convenience store after being confronted by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. That case prompted new consideration of the type of self-defense law that, at first, allowed Zimmerman to go free without criminal charges.

[…]Speaking directly to Martin's mother, Cruz suggested that the family was "simply the mourning the loss of your son," while "other players" sought "to do a great deal more based on what happened that Florida night." But Sybrina Fulton was not there simply to mourn the loss of her son.

Durbin’s rebuttal?

Let me be very specific when I say this. Don't take my word for it. Take the testimony of Hillary Shelton, director of the NAACP, Washington Bureau, in which he states — and it's part of this record — "Few issues have caused as much angst and raised as many deeply held concerns among our members and the communities we serve as 'stand your ground' laws. These laws and their applications have sadly resulted in no less than the murder of people who were doing nothing more than walking down the street."

Sybrina’s Fulton, Trayvon’s mother, was even more pointed:

"I just wanted to come here to...let you know how important it is that we amend this 'stand your ground' because it certainly did not work in my case," Fulton said, speaking without consulting prepared remarks. "The person that shot and killed my son is walking the streets today. This law does not work."

Go back to Canadistan where you came from, Ted.

 

Not Wrong, But Not Right

Atmospheric scientists have a really tough job: predicting weather. This year, 2013, has seen a hurricane season that lived up to predictions, and yet, did not:

In August of 2011, Tropical Storm Irene became the worst storm to hit New York since 1972. A year later, Hurricane Sandy made Irene look like a drizzle, and Governor Andrew Cuomo referred to the danger posed by the massive storms as the "new normal." So it was hardly comforting for New York, still largely unprepared for another Sandy, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted in May that there was a 70 percent chance this year's hurricane season would be more active than normal, with three to six major (category three or higher) storms.

Then ... nothing happened. With the season winding down, there have been twelve named storms, two hurricanes, and not a single major hurricane to date. On the surface, it seems kind of embarrassing. But one of the lead scientists behind the NOAA forecast says that it is just proof that you shouldn't pay attention to hurricane projections anyway.

[…]Consequently, while the number of storms predicted was on target, "They just didn’t find an environment that was conducive to go on and become strong," Franklin says. "So we had lots of weak systems that didn't last very long."

What may have happened, scientists speculate, is a phenomenon called “sinking air”.

When air rises, it carries moisture from the surface, especially the ocean, to upper levels of the atmosphere. This creates instability and instability breeds thunderstorms and thunderstorms seed hurricanes.

When the opposite happens, when air sinks, it brings drier air down, and basically soaks up any thunderstorms. They’ll still form but they get short-circuited.

This is important because of the human propensity to a short attention span.

It’s one year since Superstorm Sandy hit New York City, and we’re still digging out. We can take preventative steps, but there’s nothing like being prepared.

If This Doesn't Persuade You We Need Immigration Reform STAT, Nothing Will

We hear an awful lot – too much, in my book – about the shiftless, lazy welfare-grubbing, taxpayer mooching undocumented workers flooding our nation, and overwhelming our social services.

And then there’s this guy, who I believe is far more representative of the average immigrant who comes to this nation:

They are busboys, dishwashers, construction workers. They are on their feet at enervating jobs all day and often all night. Many do not have health insurance. Most find it difficult to afford the increasingly hefty fees New York Road Runners charges for its races, especially the marathon, which now costs at least $227.

For [Julio] Sauce, that is half a week’s paycheck. 

Sauce finishes first in his age group, 40-49, regularly, despite working ten hours a day as a cook. Recently, he worked from 2:30PM to 12:30AM on a Saturday evening, and grabbed three hours’s sleep before winning a half-marathon in Central Park, a good hour’s ride from his home on Coney Island. Chew on that for a bit: he works 60 and 70 hour weeks (we presume he’s not bound by union regulations) and still manages to find time to train to win races in one of the most athletic and competitive cities on the planet.

I ride my bike a lot in the wee hours of the morning (not as wee now as just a few weeks ago, admittedly). The neighborhoods I most worry about riding through?

Not the wealthy or upper-middle class neighborhoods. Those folks are soundly asleep and I’m white, so the private security guards wave and smile and go back to napping.

No, it’s the immigrant neighborhoods: the Asians, the Latinos, the Caribbean folk. Those neighborhoods are bustling with folks rushing to work, even on Sundays. The buses run frequently, livery cabs zip in and away from the curbs, men and women with backpacks and earphones jaywalk to the subway station across the street. I have to be vigilant, especially in the dark.

Folks work hard. Folks get hurt and sometimes they have to go to the ER, and even Ronald Reagan felt it was necessary for any ER to treat any patient, no matter what the cost and no matter whether they could afford it or not.

Of course, Reagan also inaugurated the whole “welfare queen” lie, by making up an anecdote.

We can all come up with anecdotes about lazy shiftless immigrants. It’s called “stereotyping” or worse. Facts, fortunately, have a liberal bias.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Conservative heads to assplode in 3….2….1….

2) I understand and even support animal rights activists in this, but to be fair, a bit of Olde New York charm resides in those horses and the carriages. It is a must-do for any tourist who comes to New York.

3) Dude, that’s col-l-l-l-l-d.

4) NSA, meet KARMA

5) I wanted to say something about this, but now I forget…

6) Now that President Obama has admitted that healthcare.gov is a mess, what is his honeymoon? Keep in mind that when Massachussetts implemented this same program, they too had major glitches but were able to resolve them before the last-minute deluge of applications, likely to happen here, as well.

7) I don’t know if you happened to catch the premiere of Blackfish on CNN last night, but you really should see it to understand how wrong it is to keep these beautiful animals penned up.

8) Once again, Europe leads the way.

9) Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I think I’d rather die young, if it’s all the same.

10) Actual Texas science curriculum

The Orcs Are In Trouble

Gee, you think the shutdown was a good idea for the GOP? I suppose you could if you think a permanent Democratic majority is a good idea:

Washington (CNN) -- In a sign of the political hangover congressional Republicans are suffering in the wake of the government shutdown, three-quarters of Americans in a new national poll say that most GOP members of Congress don't deserve to be re-elected.

A CNN/ORC International survey released Monday also found a majority saying that the Republicans' policies are too extreme. And according to the poll, Democrats have an 8-point advantage over the Republicans in an early indicator in the battle for control of Congress. But with more than a year to go until the 2014 midterm elections, there's plenty of time for these numbers to change.

Normally, numbers like this are meaningless, but here’s an interesting statistic out of the study:

[…]nearly four in 10 saying even their own representative doesn't deserve a return ticket to Washington next year. Both figures are hovering around all-time highs in CNN polling.

See, the conventional wisdom goes that everyone hates Congress, and the people who infest it, but Congress has a 95-98% re-election rate.

Which means everyone hates everybody else’s Congresscritter. Except now, suddenly, people are waking up that the only way to clean house is to clean house.

Unfortunately, we don’t get state-by-state numbers, but the underlying data based on self-identifying political views seems to suggest that even conservatives states (PDF) are taking a very close look at their individual members of Congress with an eye towards replacing them. The question there becomes, are they thinking they should be more moderate and willing to work with Democrats and the President, or even more strident and obstinate? The jury is still out on that one, but it is safe to say that the current make-up of the House of Representatives is in play, and that the Democrats could steal enough moderate seats to claim a majority next year.

The party which occupies the White House for a second term rarely if ever has gained seats in the Congress in the mid-term elections. It could happen next year. It has a very good chance.

Unlikely

There’s this whole foofaraw this week about the US intelligence community gathering 70 million private phone calls in a month. In France.

US intelligence chief James Clapper has denied reports that US spies recorded data from 70 million phone calls in France in a single 30-day period.

The director of national intelligence said the report in Le Monde newspaper contained "misleading information".

In a separate story, the newspaper said the US bugged French diplomats and used the information to sway a key UN vote.

Both reports were based on leaks from fugitive ex-US intelligence worker Edward Snowden.

This seems really unlikely and a fairly ludicrous postulate. Not that it couldn’t physically happen, but there’s a few key elements to this story that would discount it immediately in my book.

Most significant of them is this:

The document quotes America's former UN envoy Susan Rice as saying the NSA's information helped the US "keep one step ahead in the negotiations".

Admittedly, it’s not impossible that Susan Rice would be given clearance for knowledge of this supersecret spying program, but really? No administration would trust its United-frikkin’-Nations envoy with a clearance that would put her above everyone in the food chain except, perhaps, Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

It strains credulity, and calls into question whether Edward Snowden has been snow-jobbing us all along and is merely now trying to see what he can get away with.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Snowden is responsible for this little gem that’s starting its journey around the nutcase far right.

Do I think the government does what every other stinking government on this planet does and spies on other nations, particularly their diplomats? Yes. Do I think the NSA grepped 70 million phone calls in a month to sift through for some…what? Data, I assume? No.

Not Wrong

Jonathan Chait is not wrong.

Writing in this week’s New York Magazine, he posits the following:

Pragmatic conservatives warned their tea-party brethren that shutting down the government would not harm Obamacare and would instead harm the Republican Party. And lo, both halves of the prophecy have now come to pass. New polls by CNN and the Washington Post measure the damage. Both polls show Democrats taking an 8-point lead in the generic ballot for Congress — a result that, if it held up, would likely depose the Republican majority. The election is a year away, and everybody expects the damage to subside. But deeper reputation damage can be detected. CNN asks voters if they consider each party “too extreme” or “generally mainstream.” By a 52 percent to 42 percent margin, they deem the Democrats generally mainstream. By a 56 percent to 37 percent margin, they call Republicans too extreme. The shutdown may not have been an act of suicide — there’s plenty of time to recover — but it was surely a suicidal gesture.

In the wake of the debacle, reporters and mortified Republican pragmatists alike have attempted to reconstruct the erroneous thinking that led the GOP to undertake a doomed strategy. There certainly were elements of legitimate miscalculation at play. (The simplest and least appreciated is that many of them initially believed shutting down the government would halt Obamacare, and by the time they learned otherwise, they had already printed up the T-shirts.)

In the most important ways, though, the tea party’s strategy was not a strategy at all. On the surface, demanding an end to Obamacare in return for reopening the federal government was an insane negotiating strategy. Attempting to analyze these demands in strategic terms misses the point. It’s not a plan to achieve a defined legislative end. It’s a demonstration of dissent from a political faction that has no chance of winning through regular political channels. The problem they are attempting to solve in each case is not “how do we achieve this policy objective?” but “how can we express our outrage?”

When put in this context, there is an undeniable internal logic – I said “internal” – to the shutdown. Some people like to blow shit up just for the sake of watching it burn. In this context, Ted Cruz makes sense. In this context, shutting the government down to protest a law you don’t like is the ultimate rebellion.

And yes, it is a tantrum. And now it makes perfect sense.

For future reference, if you want to distinguish between something with internal logic and something with external logic, ask yourself this simple question: what happens next? Let’s say the Teabaggers got  their way and somehow, Obamacare was repealed. What happens next? They still don’t grow the caucus, they still don’t become a bona fide political movement and they’ve still managed to incapacitate their own party worse than the nation.

What still has to be worked out is why 22 Representatives would be so treasonous to…nevermind the country…their own party as to blow it up now, and why Weaker Boener would let them?

It was a no-win situation for Boehner but it was an even bigger no-win situation for the Teabag caucus.

Chait hints at the motivation for this bizarre psychotic episode later on in his piece:

This reflects the deep vein of pessimism that has run through the right since the Obama era. I tried to capture it in my story a year ago, “2012 or Never,” which analyzed the widespread conservative belief that the last election represented a final chance for the old Reagan coalition to hold back Barack Obama’s America — which they imagined, in a distorted but not altogether false way, as racially polyglot and addicted to the spoils of redistribution.

The implications of this are staggering: it explains why the push to infest state & local legislatures with conservatives, right down to school boards. It’s a scorched earth policy that tries to ensure that whatever bounty the nation has put in place will be unavailable to future generations.

It’s the ultimate “I had mine, go fuck yourself,” conservative elitist commentary. It explains why infrastructure doesn’t get maintained. It explains why, in the face of thirty years of evidence to the contrary, conservatives still talk of tax cuts for the rich benefitting us all.

Mostly, It explains how Mitt Romney, an inconsequential man of Silly Putty values, could be selected as a national candidate against one of the most dynamic and beloved political figures of this century. They knew they’d lose. They were merely sewing salt in the planting fields.

A Novel Come to Life

If you ask 100 people to name a book about a modern dystopian society, 100 of them would probably talk about 1984, the George Orwell novel about centralized government dominating a nation so much that “Big Brother is Watching You”.

Those folks are sheeple. The book that really reveals our modern century dystopia far better is by a near-contemporary and predecessor of Orwell named Aldous Huxley: Brave New World.

Although the books deal with the degradation of the individual, they come at it from different approaches and different causes. Let me let Neil Postman handle this bit:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

The Roman Empire collapsed amidst bread and circuses, while the monarchy bled the nation dry. Distract the people, the thinking goes, and you can pick their pockets at will.

This was not the message of 1984, to be sure. Orwell had a distinctly unfun society to place his story in. Huxley’s book predicts the Kardashians. Orwell posits a centralized authority figure ruling and micromanaging the very sex lives of its citizenry, and while many of the trappings of his society are pretty apparent in the modern West, he discounts the ability of private enterprise to lay behind this totalitarian form of government, or rather, opts to ignore it as it would have given comfort to the very society he was trying to mock, the Soviet Socialist republics.

One must not criticize capitalism if one is to attack its chief rival.

Huxley writes from a different and more valid place: his dislike of American society just after the turn of the 20^th Century. He incorporates wide-spread happy pills (like Prozac), wide-spread licentiousness (OK, here he was very wrong morally but not wrong observationally), and emerging eugenics (like genetic counseling. And worse.)

It’s no coincidence that Huxley sets his piece in the year 632 AF—“After Ford” – after reading Henry Ford’s seminal book My Life and Work and seeing its principles in place across America: a faster-paced lifestyle with entertaining diversions, an orientation towards youth and the loss of individual identity from the workplace factory lines to the nameless faceless mobs of the cities.

Yes, that’s right: you were once one of those “kids these days” no matter how old you are.

In Huxley’s world, we are each from birth inculcated with the command to consume, that money has value only for what it buys, and that you should know your place and do your job while those who employ you are free to move about as they see fit, even if that means taking your job away from you and giving it to someone else.

I’m re-reading this book now, and I get the eerie sensation that the reason 1984 is dropped into the national dialogue so often is not that it’s a valid comparison, except superficially, to modern day America, but that this distracts us from reading a really predictive look at America.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Not News: Racist Republican candidate is racist. News: He’s running for mayor of New York.

2) Sabre-tooths are among us.

3) John Boehner, Weaker Boener, doesn’t seem to feel the knife in his back.

4) The stress of closing then re-opening the government got to a lot of people. Some more than others.

5) Our long national nightmare is over.

6) Stephen Colbert was on fire last night at the Al Smith dinner. Many of those jokes are inside Noo Yawk stuff, but you’ll enjoy them.

7) If only Chuck Todd had the balls to say this to Ted Cruz’s face. I’d have respect for him.

8) SASQUATCH ISREAL!

9) The Teabaggers may be the death of the Republican party. PARTAY!

10) If you believe this, he has a bridge to sell you.

Cruz-in' for a Bruisin'

So, you know who else besides Weaker Boener stepped on his dick with the shut-down? This guy:

WASHINGTON — It might be time for Ted Cruz to get a dog.

Because as the saying goes, if you want a friend in Washington, that’s what you do. And by the time Cruz’s crusade to defund Obamacare finally crashed to a halt Wednesday, the Texas senator had precious few friends left.

The government shutdown alienated colleagues in both parties. It generated fresh animosity toward the tea party and a flurry of recriminations toward Cruz. Voter support for the Republican Party plunged.

And the health care law survived unscathed.

It’s clear this entire sordid stinking episode was about his 2016 ambitions. It’s also clear that he stands zero chance of being the Republican nominee in 2016.

Either Cruz grossly miscalculated his strength here or he had something else in mind than running as the Republican candidate. After all, he managed to push Rand Paul into a centrist position here (Paul came out grudgingly against a shutdown) while firmly establishing himself as the head of the congressional Teabagger caucus. This positions himself nicely as an alternative conservative candidate for a Tea “Party” should the corporatists decide they’ve sucked enough lifeblood out of the GOP. It would present an image of Cruz as an outsider for a rabble that desperately craves a change in DC, while never truly straying from a Republican platform of hate and exploitation, something the corporatists at FreedomWorks and The Heritage Foundation would insist upon.

Cruz ain’t bright enough to have thought of this nuance on his own, but for sure, someone like a Sheldon Adelson or even Dick Armey could have persuaded this idiot to pull this stunt with this endgame in mind. Check Ted’s butthole. Someone’s hand is up there. For Cruz’s part, he made a major gaffe in challenging the authority of a former professor of Constitutional law who must have been painfully – maybe “joyfully” is the more correct word – aware of the implications of capitulation not only on his immediate prospects as President, but longer term to the office itself.

Obama stood toe-to-toe. Cruz and the Teabaggers flinched. We can see that the entire caucus flinched since just a single change to the Affordable Care Act was put into the Continuing Resolution, and even that (a means test for the income subsidy for low income Americans) makes sense as a precaution. I’m surprised it wasn’t in the original bill. Perhaps Obama out-thought us even years ago.

It will be hard for Cruz to come back from this: his 21 hour filibuster-lite stunt ensured that his name would be associated with the shutdown in perpetuity. Indeed, had he not made that speechification, the Republicans might have had a far easier time of painting President Obama as the obstructionist.

“Might”, not “would”, but certainly the pasty, flop-and-gin-sweated face of Ted Cruz on the Senate floor negated any possibility of that, Sam I Am. And engendered the mockery of a nation (really dumb stunt, reading to your kids, Senator) and the ire of his fellow Senators. When Rand Paul – who also knew he had a finite time – filibustered-lite, he at least stayed on topic and then some. This isn’t the old days when you didn’t have a C-Span camera sitting in your face. You’re going to have to provide dramatic and non-mockable sustenance to the audience.

I suspect this is why Harry Reid has been reluctant to alter the filibuster rules from the get-go because one day he, too, might have to read to his grandchildren from the pit.

The End Times. I Mean, Games

Weaker Boehner has had it.

WASHINGTON — A frantic day of legislative maneuvering ended in futility for Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday, as the most conservative members of the House refused to back his proposed compromise to end the standoff over the federal budget.

The failure leaves a bipartisan Senate plan negotiated by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as the sole way out of a stalemate that risks a U.S. default on its bills and huge economic disruptions.

A bill that passed the Senate would receive Democratic support in the House, guaranteeing a majority if Boehner were willing to bring it to the floor even without the backing of most Republicans. He is widely expected to do so, however, having run out of time for other options.

The blinking. It happens. I can’t see how 20 members of a minority part – as in they don’t control the Senate or the White House – stands a chance in hell of blocking the budget agreement.

While I’m glad this is happening (my 401k finally started to show a profit since 2008), part of me is evil enough to wish Reid had basically said to McConnell “This is on you. You fix this problem. I have bigger fish to fry.”

And then went off and fixed the filibuster rules to prevent Ted Cruz from making an ass out of himself, his party, and the nation.

Things have reached such an impasse that China, among our largest foreign creditors, is sounding an alarm. Not “criticizing,” panicking. That’s on Boehner, too. He created this crisis, whether it was through a drunken negligence or his own deviant planning, and he has to own its consequences.

I can’t see how he survives as Speaker at the end of the next term (if indeed he makes it that far.) He’s managed to piss off the radical reactionary racists AND the moderate centrists of a party that has over the past thirty years watched itself tear asunder, held together only by the soft glue of Ronald Reagan’s falsified resume.

In truth, the only saving grace the Republican party has for the 2014 elections is, apart from gerrymandering, the short attention span of Americans. If I’m Obama, I’m praying for a one year budget agreement that raises at least the shadow of default next October.

“Full faith and credit,” Teabaggers. That’s in the Constitution, too.

The Saving Grace of Saving Face

Comes the salvage operation for the House Republican caucus:

House Republicans, increasingly isolated from even some of their strongest supporters more than a week into a government shutdown, began on Wednesday to consider a path out of the fiscal impasse that would raise the debt ceiling for a few weeks as they press for a broader deficit reduction deal.

That approach could possibly set aside the fight over the new health care law, which prompted the shutdown and which some Republicans will be reluctant to abandon.

In a meeting with the most ardent House conservatives, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, laid out a package focused on an overhaul of Medicare and a path toward a comprehensive simplification of the tax code.

Somebody blinked, in other words.

The biggest loser in all this, not surprisingly, is House majority leader Eric Cantor. It was his very vocal support from the Teabagger wing of Congress that instigated this shutdown, that continued it beyond a symbolic gesture (and made me out to be wrong, something I will not tolerate, Congresscritter!) and embarrassed the mainstream majority of the Republican party, who must now fight for its very relevance while finding a way to shut up conservatives.

John Boehner found a path out and while he was not left untouched by the idiocracy, he deflected the bulk of the contempt off him while sniping from behind the cover of the Dark Side.

So what happened? Harry Reid happened.

In the meantime, Koch Industries accused Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, on Wednesday of spreading “false information” about the company by suggesting it was behind the move to tie a demand to keep the government open only if financing was eliminated for Mr. Obama’s health care law.

“Koch believes that Obamacare will increase deficits, lead to an overall lowering of the standard of health care and raise taxes,” Philip Ellender, the company’s chief spokesman, wrote in a letter to senators. “However, Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding Obamacare, nor have we lobbied on legislative programs defunding Obamacare.”

To be honest, this was probably the single most brilliant piece of subversion I’ve seen in many years. Reid is to be applauded for dragging this out into the light. As we say in fencing, le coup de grace, the final blow was when the Koch brothers found out that there's a price to be paid when Americans are paying attention carefully.

But do a quick thought experiment. Imagine being in that meeting where Ryan unveils the exit strategy. How nasty and spiteful are things going to get?

Waning Boehner

We’re starting to see the last throes of a desperate man at the head of a desperate caucus:

Boehner, responding to President Obama’s hourlong news conference, said he remained "disappointed" that Obama refused to consider talks centered on House-passed spending measures that included provisions tied to the healthcare law and that would "provide fairness" to Americans.

He also insisted that any action to raise the nation’s debt limit should be in concert with steps to limit future borrowing.

"There is going to be a negotiation here," Boehner told reporters. "It's time to have that conversation, not next week, not next month; the conversation ought to start today."

Translation: "You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!"

Foot-stomping and holding your breath until you turn….well, a normal white person would turn blue but someone of your hue would be more gray, I suppose…is the clearest sign of desperation you’ve shown so far, Weaker Boener. It all but cries out, “Look at me! I’m still relevant! I’m still relevant, dammit!”

The take-away from this quote is that President Obama has uncovered an endgame that circles around Boener and the Teabaggers, one that either Boener did not expect or was unprepared for.

It starts with this, however:

President Barack Obama has invited the House of Representatives Democratic caucus to a meeting at the White House to discuss the budget crisis and the looming debt limit deadline, a White House official said on Wednesday.

Other caucuses will be invited in coming days, the official said. The meeting Wednesday will take place at 4:30 p.m.

We’ll likely see a proposal cobbled together today, possibly kept private, until the President can meet with Boener and present it as a done deal, take it or leave it. I suspect the protocol will be House Democrats, Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans, House Republicans, with the last two possibly being invited simultaneously to prevent attempts to subvert the deal.

Lest anyone think that President Obama has any reason to be patient with Weaker Boener, I will merely mention two words: Grand Bargain. He couldn’t deliver his caucus despite a handshake with the President. Why should Obama pay him any courtesy now?

Newtered

In every crisis, there is a watershed moment where the solution – or at least, the denouement – appears. Thus endeth the shutdown:

Senate Democrats could introduce a bill to raise the debt limit this week, according to a Democratic aide. Considering the procedural roadblocks the measure could face, aides said they have to get the legislation rolling well before Oct. 17, when Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has said the government will run out of borrowing authority.

It was uncertain whether Democrats can muster the 60 votes they would need to push a debt ceiling bill, with no strings attached, through the Senate. The measure would likely run into opposition from Senate Republicans such as Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has been leading the drive to make delaying Obama's healthcare law a condition for raising the debt ceiling.

I disagree with the Tribune in one respect: I think it will be fairly easy to get 60 votes, despite the grandstanding of Cruz. Even Rand Paul has signaled that he wants negotiations to begin in earnest to re-open the government, even if he lies and even if he clearly helped plan it. He has, I think, seen the writing on the wall, and he has to differentiate himself from Ted Cruz if he wants to make a dent in the GOP primary season in 2016. Showing himself as reasonable could garner him a lot of kudos, even as he maintains his nutcase caucus.

Meanwhile, the House Republicans continue to pass jigsaw puzzle funding of programs they like, which Harry Reid continues to ignore. This is an altogether proper way to treat little babies: let them cry themselves to sleep.

Weaker Boener continues to show himself as an ineffectual and ineffective leader, and he’s pissing off both wings of his caucus: the right and the far right. I have no doubt that come January 2015 (if not before) he’ll either be forced to resign or he’ll suffer the ignominy of being voted out as Speaker…assuming the Republicans hold onto the House, not a guarantee.

And it won’t be Teabaggers voted out. Most of them won by clear majorities, not pluralities, over centrist and even conservative Democrats in their districts. It will be moderates, and this will likely shift the House to a more liberal make up.

Ironic, then, that Karl Rove’s strategy of creating a permanent Republican majority in Congress by gerrymandering districts at the state level and polarizing election and Congressional districts could backfire so badly that the Republican party itself becomes wholly irrelevant in a very short time.

Why Is Weaker Boener Killing Children?

There are more than enough votes to put a clean continuing resolution (CR) up for a vote.

So why won’t Weaker Boener do it?

He’s Speaker of the House, and can destroy any member of his caucus who opposes him (oh, for the days of a real Speaker who could wrangle his people back into line!)

He has enough evidence that the shutdown is playing as a deeply unpopular Republican strategy. Even among conservatives!

And he’s already signaled that he will bring the debt ceiling to a vote next week and expects it to be raised, so he clearly has some stroke still.

So what’s he waiting for? The attempt to paint the shutdown as Obama’s doing, the attempt to smear the President as unwilling to compromise, has flown about as well as a three year old’s excuse that he didn’t stuff all that toilet paper down the drain, that somebody snuck in the house and did it.

Indeed, Boener is facing a major leadership crisis in the House as Democrats and moderate Republicans seek to bypass him and force a vote on a clean CR. He must know the clock is ticking. Is he determined to destroy the US – and by the extension, the world’s – economy? Is it possible he’s thrown up his hands and decided that the Teabaggers need to learn a lesson…at the expense of 7 billion other people on this planet, including 330 million Americans?

If there was ever a time to stop drinking and start thinking, Mr. Weaker Boener, that time has come.

Everyone's All a-Twitter

But I don’t buy this for a moment:

Twitter Inc.’s user growth is slowing and it shows no sign of turning a profit. Some fund managers say that’s not going to stop the microblogging service’s $12.8 billion valuation from treading higher. Much higher.

The $12.8 billion figure is derived from the fair value that Twitter put on its shares in an initial public offering filing last week. Ironfire Capital LLC and Gamco Investors Inc. (GBL) project the San Francisco-based company could be worth $15 billion to $20 billion once it begins trading.

Twitters expect to offer its initial shares at around $20 ps. I think that’s overpriced for a firm that’s never shown a profit, and makes it way too easy to dismiss advertising from your feed, and has some serious liability exposures on the horizon, from harassment suits to slander and libel claims.

Unlike Facebook, which actually had some commercial potential (and I called that one last year, saying the stock would linger in the $20s for a long time, which it did, from October until July of this year. I still think it’s overpriced now.) I don’t see where Twitter can sell products. I’d be guessing here, but my sense is a majority of users tweet from their phones now, and it’s hard to load a website while staying on the Tweeter.

My money would be on it hitting $8 a share before it ever shows a profit and starts to climb up, but also, keep in mind that the 1990s saw a lot of IPOs for vaporware stocks that ended up crashing the economy in a show of irrational exuberance on the part of investors.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The tragedy in Washington DC is obviously a big topic to ponder this morning. So many questions: Were the cops justified in shooting a mom with a baby in the backseat? (I think yes, but I can be persuaded.) Why did she crack? What pushed her over the edge?
The irony, though, is that DC is shut down over a healthcare package that, had it been in place years ago, may have encouraged her to seek the kind of treatment that may have prevented this tragedy.

2) Also, my thoughts are with her family, especially her daughter.

3) Speaking of the shutdown, please notice that FEMA is recalling a boatload of furloughed workers in anticipation of Hurricane Karen hitting the very states that most staunchly support the shutdown. I wish I wasn’t such a forgiving Christian, so I could say let ‘em drown. But then, that’s what those bastards are relying on.

4) Imagine if a busload of Mexicans were horribly killed trying to sneak across the border. Do you think America would have a day of mourning? This is what civilization looks like.

5) She’s laced up her pink sneakers! Run, Wendy, run! Somewhere, Ann Richards and Molly Ivins are smiling in heaven.

6) Ever wonder what “Siri” looks like?

7) Comet ISON is still on track for a spectacular year-end show.

8) Finally, a commute I can handle and enjoy.

9) Mike Bloomberg, destroyer of cities.

10) And last, SASQUATCH ISREAL!

The Marching Morons

Apocryphal or not, the image of lemmings committing mass suicide is ingrained in our culture, so much so that we may borrow it to describe the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives:

As the shutdown lingers, some Republican moderates are openly frustrated that tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas appears to be calling the shots on what House Republicans do next. Cruz was one of the first to suggest passing narrow bills that fund those government agencies or functions that generate any public backlash.

"I think the leadership is committed to play the Cruz strategy all the way out," California Rep. Devin Nunes told reporters, before adding "if you can call it a strategy."

For two days, GOP leaders have pushed through a series of piecemeal spending bills for floor votes that would fund things like veterans affairs, national parks and medical research. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Wednesday they plan to continue doing this.

"We've got ways to ease the pain on people," Cantor said. "We agree on a lot around here. We ought to fund that, and then we ought to sit down and talk about that which we don't."

Apparently, lemmings aren’t blind. They’re just wimps.

Congressman Cantor, you brought this upon yourself. No point in getting weak-kneed now that your own supporters, Teabaggers and fiscal conservatives, are feeling the pain. Hunting season is upon us, yet hunters out west can’t go into national parks legally. Poor children with cancer, many of them who live near toxic waste sites and other highly carcinogenic locales in red states where environmental regulations are “lax” to be polite, are without last hope now that the NIH is closed.

YOU ransomed the American people, the American economy and the American government for a cup of tea. Own that. Live with it.

We ought to find a group of liberals in the DC area – shouldn’t be too hard, should it? – to tape photos of every child who dies, every family who has to skip food for days, every house that gets foreclosed and family evicted, to the door of Weaker Boener and Mr. Can’t-or.

All this, because somewhere, poor people stand a chance of being healthy. Is it too much to ask, given the hardships they have to go through on a daily basis, to allow them this smidge of human kindness? They are humiliated minute by minute in a society where wealth and fame are valued above anything else. As a poor working mom walks past an ad for the latest iPhone ($600), the latest Lexus ($40,000+), the newest condominium ($1,000,000), on her way to a job where she breaks her back to make minimum wage, with no sick pay, and no paid vacations, a half hour for lunch, and an hour long bus ride back to her hovel to feed her kids whatever cheap food she can buy on her budget, supplemented by the (now suspended) SNAP stipend she gets that’s barely enough to provide milk, bread and a carton of eggs for her family.

Are the rich Congressmen and –women of the Republican party that jealous over the fact that Jesus singles out the poor to obtain the inheritance of the earth?

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Day 2 of the Republican temper tantrum, but the end is in sight.

No, there’s no secret backroom negotiations. It’s merely the will of the American people being exercised.

You see, nobody expected the volume of people who wanted – no, needed – to sign up for health insurance. “Needed,” because under the old system insurance was unaffordable, healthcare doubly so.

This is an initiative that is wildly popular, despite polling you may have seen, precious few of which segregate people who don’t like Obamacare because they don’t like Obama from liberals who don’t like Obamacare because it doesn’t go far enough.

Here’s one that approaches the initiative from the perspective of people who really don’t want national health insurance. As you can see, about a third of the nation supports repealing the bill, as flawed as it is. So when you read that “47% of people oppose Obamacare,” keep in mind that about 15% of that wishes it went further. Add them to the consistent 45% that support Obamacare, and you have a grand 58% near-supermajority.

Or about as many people as voted for President Obama in the past two elections.

About a fifth of the House of Representatives is in statistically safe districts, but numbers like these have to be terrifying the more moderate Republicans like, yes, Boehner. This would explain why some unusual suspects from the GOP have pushed back against the extremists, like Peter King of Long Island.

Normally a right-wing crackpot, particularly when it comes to terrorism (unless its initials are “IRA,” of course), King is facing an electorate at home that has seen jobs float off in the breeze of the 2008 fiscal crisis, and pushed farther by the winds of Superstorm Sandy. These folks have to scrape by to feed their families and try to hold onto their houses, and the last thing they need is a $7,000 insurance bill each year.

King is in real trouble at home if he postures on this.

He has to balance this with his announced run for the 2016 Republican nomination. Shades of Rudy Giuliani, but this man is in for a rude awakening.

Still, between the overloaded servers showing the unbridled enthusiasm of the American people – even in states that refused to lift a finger to implement Obamacare – will give Teabaggers pause. And a clear sense of how out of touch they really are. It is settled law, debated in Congress, in elections and in the courts. Eat it raw, suckers!

Welcome to socialism, rightwingers! This is what democracy looks like.

Welcome, Comrades!

Is Obamacare. Vary nice! We are all socialists now, no? After all, that’s what we’ve been warned about since the bill was proposed. And passed. And affirmed by the SCOTUS. So get your little red book of the sayings of Chairman Mao out of the box you stashed it in back in the early 80s, put up your poster of Joe Stalin, and get ready to stand in line for bread and toilet paper!

Oh, and the government is shut down. So yes, really, get ready to stand in lines.

Or to quote John Boehner: "The House has voted to keep the government open but we also want basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare."

Huh? “Basic fairness”? Isn’t that what healthcare reform provides? A lowering of medical costs? A lowering of premiums as competition is introduced into the marketplace? How is anything other than what we had NOT FAIRER????

By the way, socialism is coming to America, and the red states will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20^th Century.

Here’s why: