Comment: #2 (against Sowell article)

Comment: #2
Posted by: morgan
Sat Oct 5, 2013 12:38 PM

Sowell says: Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who if anybody "wants to shut down the government." But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to.
 
We don't have to read minds, we can watch the videos of 2010 where the Republican campaign slogan was "we'll shut down the government" or we can read the articles by googling "shut down the gov 2010" and find out which Reps were glad handing each other with that rallying cry.
 
As to the rest of your preposterous column, two parties--the Senate Democrats and the House Republicans -- each passed divergent budgets earlier this year. The latter, propelled by a very small yet ideologically rigid minority of its members, made the calculated decision from the start not to negotiate.
 
Democrats made 18 requests since April to go to conference and compromise on a budget bill; Republicans blocked every single one of them. And now they are using a manufactured crisis to extract policy concessions on duly passed legislation they don't like and cannot repeal through the normal democratic processes: elections, legislative votes, and litigation. Republicans now have the votes to end the shutdown immediately by putting a clean resolution on the House floor with no riders or conditions. Such a bill certainly would pass, and 800,000 Americans could return to work tomorrow, but Boehner doesn't do it. All the evidence indicates the GOP intentionally put these workers out of a job by using a historically routine budget resolution to undo the outcome of three lost elections. And they now have the hubris to demand Senate Democrats and President Obama negotiate with that extremist position. As Republicans continually shift the political goal posts ever further to the hard right, negotiating now requires meeting them somewhere between extreme and preposterously irrational. Democrats justifiably have declined to do so here.
 
This an attempt at extortion from a small fanatical element of the Republican party baggers that was prevented.

The issue isn't the immediate or long term effects of govt shut down. Ask any reasonable Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian, the issue is the cancer within the Republican party which none seem to know how or have the will to shut down or deal with and the mudstirring media which continues to give these fanatics airtime or print space..

Comment: #7 (against Sowell article)

Comment: #7
Posted by: morgan
Sun Oct 6, 2013 11:28 AM

The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.
 
The debt ceiling turns out to be an unexploded ordinance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president's powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress's. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic.

But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends.

Making enemies of blacks, Latinos, Gays, school teachers, scientists, union members, women, and environmentalists wasn't good enough for Republicans. So now they have found a way to alienate the rest of America too.
God speed in your quest to be the most hated people in the nation.