Actually, the National Hurricane Center (the relevant part of NOAA) is up and running.
The sad thing is that the laid-off workers will most likely be paid anyway. It’s the people who require their services who will be impacted.
Worse for the workers is the sequester, which is still ongoing and may well go for years. 40-hour weeks cut to 25 or 15 hours, with no end in sight. I see it in long lines at the Social Security office, but I’m sure there are much worse effects.
It has become ideology in the Grand Old Party that regulation is bad. A shutdown allows them to pay regulators not to regulate. American business interests can take this opportunity to do maximum damage with an eye to long-term profits.
A timely example: It has just been established and well-publicized that colony collapse disorder, which is wiping out pollinator insects in North America, is caused by neo-nicotinoid pesticides. Meanwhile, engineers at one of our prestige universities have been working on mini pollinator robots to save American agriculture in the event of the extinction of pollinator insects. Even without a shutdown, the chance of a strong ban on neo-nicotinoids passing this Congress is close to zero. But during the shutdown, while there is no active Environmental Protection Agency, USA business interests will try to poison as much of the North American honeybee population as possible, so that an enormous amount of agricultural expenditure will have to be made for the foreseeable future on synthetic, patented, buggy, pollinator robots. This will become a revenue stream for American corporate capitalism.
It sounds nuts, but as a Yank, I believe that yes, this is exactly what they would do. While I have no direct evidence of it, I can tell you from past behavior that I expect that is happening right now on a grand scale. Even if five of six farmers decide sanely to switch away from neo-nicotinoids, there will be someone out there working hard to make sure to kill all the bees they can kill.
American capitalism is all about destroying the public, the common, and the unowned, including most especially the natural world, in favor of that which has intellectual property protection.
OK, I’m sorry, I got off track with the conspiracy theory stuff there (but coming from GOP-friendly agriculture country, I think that’s a scarily credible expectation).
The thing is, with the sequester, we’ve already been putting up with this for months. I had a friend tell me last week that after all the whining, people realized that they were doing just fine with the sequester, and we didn’t need all that, and they’d more or less realize that about the shutdown too. “They spend too much money anyway,” he said. And that guy is pretty typical of the electorate in GOP districts. The kid I saw at the Social Security office Friday who couldn’t get a Social Security card because the service that prints them is shut down, he might disagree.
I think they will.
This morning I watched ABC’s This Week (which slants right-of-center) and CBS’s Face the Nation (the slant of which is often just whatever Bob Schieffer is–sort of a cranky old fogey who understandably thinks the kids running Washington today are cuckoo?).
Schieffer was hard on the Treasury Secretary when he was on, then hard on a GOP Senator when he was on. That’s fair enough.
But This Week had a lot of noise to the effect that Obama should just negotiate with the TEA Party, because if the crazy guy is going to walk you off the cliff, you have to get away from the cliff by any means necessary. That was scary. Even Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal (who I didn’t think was that mad before) was standing up for Speaker Boehner’s position. I think four of the six panelists there weren’t quite saying Obama should capitulate, but they let it slide from the other two. I think a lot of people are scared that we don’t have a good option under the constitution.
That said, Obama is understandably done negotiating with people who insist they will metaphorically light themselves on fire along with everyone else if we don’t renegotiate a law they refused to negotiate on when it was a bill. Yeah, them.
Whatever happens, default or not, US politics is going to have to change massively after this. Realignment? Defacto constitutional revision? I don’t know.
Neither side can/will risk it. Both sides have far too much invested in their own jobs and skins to allow for a full route. This will continue to die by way of a thousand tiny cuts rather than a wholesale realignment of any kind. This is why the Tea Party loons are in the best of all positions. They have very little to lose and much to gain.
I am “meh” about the government shutdown. I am not “meh” about the debt limit crisis coming up. It’s true that it is not a default, since the interest payments on debt are small enough that they are easily covered from incoming revenues, but it will spook the markets, IMO, something fierce. To the tune of 15%-25%.
So after looking at this and figuring that the Republicans cannot cave because if they do without getting something they are politically finished, and Democrats are more interested in destroying Republicans than in economic health of the country, I am moving from stocks to cash starting tomorrow. Will take me a couple of days to do so. If I am wrong, the most I can lose is a missed 5-10% gain. If I am right, it’s 15-25% loss. Since think the chances of debt limit law NOT being passed in time is 50-50, it’s a no-brainer.
This gives a good framework for thinking about what is happening:
http://www1.american.edu/ia/cdem/pdfs/linz_perils_presidencialism.pdf
Not gold and non-hybrid seeds?
I don’t expect apocalypse. If we go past the debt limit deadline, I see a significant market correction. I prefer to ride it out in cash.
(my emphasis)
I’m trying really hard to read for comprehension, but, I’m coming up with a blank. How is part 1 of your sentence not contradicted by part 2 of your sentence? You’re saying they’re not the same, but they’re both attention-whores? If they’re both attention-whores, aren’t they the same? 
I think you are doing the prudent thing, but my reasons are different. I think the Democrats CAN’T cave in to the Republicans, however much they might WANT to, and they do love to cave, because if they do they will lose all power to the House of Representatives. If the House can use shutdowns and debt limit negotiations to determine which laws will get funded and which won’t, then the Senate and the Presidency have no power, they’re just vestigial organs with the House of Representatives holding all the power in American federal government. Since vending power is what the Senate DOES, and to a lesser extent the White House, they lose all relevance and more to the point, financial support. Big money does not contribute to people who can do them no good. It will all go to the House.
With the Republicans I see a different dynamic in play. It’s true that the Tea Partiers sitting in safe House seats, the so-called suicide squad, have nothing to lose and everything to gain here, their motivations are clear. But they don’t have the numbers to run the House. However, many right wing Republicans who are in less safe seats have been living in fear of being primaried by candidates on the screaming batshit insane right, i.e., the Tea Party right, as happened several times in the most recent elections. This has given the Tea Party influence far beyond their numbers, because the standard electoral calculus has been that there is little to lose and a lot to gain from moving to the right whenever challenged on any issue, so they have. It is the Tea Partiers plus the frightened conservative Republicans that have been pulling Boehner’s strings.
But the government shutdown and the threat of defaulting on America’s debt have NOT gone over well with the general populace. Even worse, it has NOT gone over with the big money boys on Wall Street. Such Wall Street lapdogs as Grover Norquist have been warning the House Republicans to back down, and of course the Teapublicans have been ignoring them. But the frightened conservative Republicans now have a new worry: the prospect of being primaried from the center right by Big Money candidates.
As far as individual Congressmen are concerned, it does not matter if they are put out of office by a center right Republican or a Democrat or a Teapublican, they are out of office in each instance. So now they have to be wondering if this government shutdown will lead to the same kind of electoral bitch slapping the Republicans got after New Gingrich’s ill-fated shutdown. If they decide they face more peril from the center right than the Teapublicans, they will fold, fastly and furiously.
The question is, which concern will bother the frightened Republicans more? And how long will it take them to decide it’s a well-funded center-right challenger, if that is the conclusion they reach?
I think the most recent electoral cycle is much stronger in their memories than the Gingrich shutdown debacle, so it will take a while for them to shift their perspectives, though the current polls must have them adjusting their optics furiously. So … yes, you are doing the prudent thing. Prudent. Yes, indeed.
You’re forgetting one thing. All this stuff may have been relevant before the shutdown. After the shutdown the dynamic changes. Sitting Republicans cannot go into elections with the image of “we forced the shutdown, we held it for a couple of weeks, then we folded like Democrats’ little bitches and got absolutely nothing in return” attached to them. That’s a political death sentence. So - as long as Democrats insist on “no negotiations” I don’t expect any caving from Republicans.
New Zealand.
More sheep than people. A New Zealand farmer was asked if he was shearing his sheep. His answer was “I’m not shearing my sheep with anyone!”.
In the “Is there a country about which no bad jokes exist?” then no, you’re right, there probably right. But in the sense Dr. Drake means (ie a country that is respected internationally and not known for doing intentionally stupid things or making itself appear foolish in public) then New Zealand would fit the bill, IMHO.
You misunderstand. The Republicans have put the Democrats in an untenable position. The Dems already agreed to the sequester, and they agreed to Republican spending levels. And yet the threats have kept coming.
We’ve seen this movie before. If the Dems agree to the device tax, the Republicans would come back with yet another demand. Maybe it would be a delayed individual mandate - which anybody with a passing familiarity of HCR knows could create an adverse selection death spiral for the insurance companies. Maybe it would be a Keystone pipeline. Medicare means testing. Rolling back Dodd-Frank financial reform.
Whatever. The point is that the CR lasts about 6 weeks. This tells you that the Republicans aren’t negotiating in good faith: it’s silly to expect a rolling set of concessions every month and a half. The only way to deal with extortionists is to stand up to them. If the tea party caucus were reasonable, they would take the thwap of the cluestick and move on. But admittedly they are not.
Just remember the fundamentals of high level politics and diplomacy: forget about the pissing contests. Don’t be like Johnson during Vietnam. Be like Reagan. Be breezy.
Remember, all this could be settled if the Hastert Rule were set aside and a conventional CR bill was put to the floor. The votes exist. But Boehner doesn’t care.
The Republicans. Unfit to negotiate. Unfit to govern.
It is if that is how voters see it. If they see it as “averting disaster after doing their damnedest to make the Democrats negotiate” then it’s maybe not a death sentence.
With all due respect to New Zealand, nobody pokes fun at Micronesia either. New Zealand’s international media presence isn’t exactly up there.
But I’ll grant you that foreigner I can’t really recall an episode in which NZ’s government made themselves look like a bunch of monkeys trying to fuck a watermelon, as the Greatest Democracy in the World is sort of doing right now :).
I would have gone with Germany, myself. The only smirk-worthy thing about German politics is that Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to only have one suit, albeit a miraculously polychromatic one. That’s it. Their political satirists must be an extremely depressed and chronically underfed bunch. I’m sure there’s a Jon Stewart + Holocaust joke in there somewhere.
Having one attribute that is the same is hardly an indicator of a whole that is different. Drawing a larger parallel between two things based on a single attribute that is the same is a fallacy. It’s a common debating tactic, though: give a strawman extrapolated to the extremes which are easily refuted due to absurdity.
Let’s put it this way: Jim and Bob aren’t the same and they both have brown hair. Jim and Bob’s personalities, looks, etc could be very different…but they have one attribute that is the same. That doesn’t equate to them being identical in every way and the second statement doesn’t contradict the first, except in a literal-only interpretation.
I’m honestly trying to follow this, and I just can’t make it work; why is the situation significant, and America’s reputation on the line, now?
I want to put myself in the shoes of a foreigner who used to think America was the tits and is now going tits up; wouldn’t such folks have seen us the same way in the '90s and '00s, when equally unimportant partial shutdowns under Clinton were promptly followed by Congress impeaching the Prez over a blowjob, followed by us electing the Dan-Quayle-est President ever to sit in the White House, calling to mind the just-as-meaningless partial shutdown under Bush Senior? Wouldn’t they have seen us the same way in the '70s and '80s, when we followed up a loss in Vietnam and a pardon for Nixon with a dozen such oh-so-minor partial shutdowns while a Bedtime-For-Bonzo actor declined into memory lapses and the Japanese were buying up everything?
Shouldn’t we have already been living with the “laughingstock” consequences for some forty years by now?