Welcome to the non-government shutdown
Last night, after the House of Representatives passed its latest continuing resolution, this time funding the federal government through November 15th while also delaying the individual mandate for a year and cutting Obamacare subsidies for congressional staff, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced he would not name any conferees to negotiate a short-term funding bill.Minutes later, President Obama's budget director Sylvia Matthews Burwell, directed all federal agencies to implement their govenrment shutdown plans. But that doesn't mean all, let alone much, of the federal government will actually shutdown.
First of all, late Monday night, Obama signed a bill exempting all military pay, and even some pay for Defense civilians and contractors, from the government shutdown.
Second, Obama and the Democrats wisely stashed away over $1 billion in various Department of Health and Human Services slush funds to keep Obamacare implementation running uninterrupted. So despite the fact that 52 percent of HHS employees will be furloughed, the shutdown will not touch Obamacare.
Also, federal airport security personnel will all report to work under the shutdown, as will every federal employee who secures our borders. FBI agents will also report to work, although no new agents will be trained, and the Department of Justice will continue criminal cases but not civil ones.
Federal parks will be closed, the National Zoo's panda cam will be turned off, and NASA will be shutdown almost entirely, but the mail will still be delivered on time, federal prisoners will still be imprisoned, and most Head Start and food assistance programs will continue as scheduled.
Outside of Washington DC, very few Americans will even notice the "shutdown" is going on.
The story is quite different when it comes to the impending cash crunch at the Treasury Department due to the debt limit.
According to both the Congressional Budget Office and the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Treasury Department will only have $30 billion cash on hand to pay the federal governments financial obligations as of October 17.
Then, on October 23, Treasury is scheduled to make a $12 billion payment to Social Security beneficiaries followed by a $6 billion interest payment to bond holders on October 31. That should leave Treasury with around $12 billion.
But then on November 1, Treasury must $18 billion to Medicare providers and another $25 billion to Social Security beneficiaries.
That is when the real pain kicks in.
Sometime before November 1st the debt limit will be raised, the government will be funded for another fiscal year, and Republicans will extract some concession from Obama on Obamacare.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/conncarroll/2013/10/01/welcome-to-the-nongovernment-shutdown-n1714148
What You’re Missing Today
The TV news has wall-to-wall coverage of what is affected by the shutdown of the federal government, but it’s far from comprehensive. Here are just a few of the federal agencies whose services we’ll have to manage without until Congress acts:* Broadcasting Board of Governors
* Chief Human Capital Officers Council
* Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee
* Foreign Agricultural Service
* Office of Fossil Energy
* Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control Office
* Indian Arts and Crafts Board
* Interagency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group
* Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries
* Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies
* Marine Mammal Commission
* Office of Refugee Resettlement
* Office of the Pardon Attorney
* Railroad Retirement Board
* Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation
* Tax Court
* U.S. Arctic Research Commission
* U.S. Board on Geographic Names
* Weights and Measures Division
And a bit of good news amid the gloom: it appears the government will hang on to the Federal Helium Reserve a little while longer.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/01/what-youre-missing-today/
Obama: "I Shouldn't Have to Offer Anything"
We have come a long way from the days when Candidate Obama promises to be the leading light of capital bipartisanship.
Can't get the video to post, but here it is, in all its pathetic splendor.
When did childish petulance become an acceptable substitute for leadership?
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolplattliebau/2013/09/30/obama-i-shouldnt-have-to-offer-anything-n1713775
The president's astonishing declaration that "I shouldn't have to offer anything." Thus did the American public get a very candid glimpse of the president whose contempt for duly elected Republican opponents is exceeded only by his fecklessness in the face of America's enemies abroad. To Putin and the Iranians come offers of all sorts. To the Speaker of the House, only ultimatums.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi also had spectacularly bad days for anyone who was watching. Some pundits don't think Harry's gracelessness and Nancy's strident incoherence don't matter, but they are wrong. Americans notice everything, even if they say very little. They are consumers, making up their minds over time.
We forget just how lousy the Big Three Ds are when it comes to communicating, and today's series of pratfalls should remind every Republican why there is great hope for winning the public opinion battle decisively in the days and weeks ahead, and ultimately for 2014.
As I explained over and over on Monday's show, this week's drama over the shutdown is just one chapter in a book titled "November, 2014." We won't know for a long time if the chapter will be pivotal to the end of the story, but we do know that the chapter's title --"I shouldn't have to offer anything"-- is a great ROI for the first day's effort. The president's stunning display of arrogance in his NPR interview is certain to repeat itself again and again if the House GOP holds the line against the combined forces of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite and a handful of GOP pundits who have talked themselves into believing that all the polls about Obamcare will somehow be magically reversed because 4,000 workers at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration don't report for work Tuesday.
I have long been an opponent of a purposeful shutdown strategy and have been predicting for weeks that this is what the president wanted, especially after the Syrian fiasco exposed him as a bumbler abroad as well as at home. Everything he has touched this year has turned to mud, and his hopes for retaking the House in 2014 are all but gone. Many Republicans including me didn't want any strategy that risked losing the political momentum that the president's ineptitude has created.
But Senator Ted Cruz's speech last week turned my view around. He made a very good argument --not perfect, but very, very good-- and the electric reaction to it, pro and con,underscored that Cruz had done the rarest of things: Captured America's attention. That collective attention is so hard to capture that it usually takes a Super Bowl or an Olympics Opening Ceremony, and only presidential debates or election night specials come close to being mega-events in the political category.
You want mega-events when you have an argument to make, and especially when your debate opponent is as inept as the president is. Today Congressman Tom Cotton of Arkansas and a candidate for that state's Senate seat next year appeared on my show three times with updates on the events in the House, and all three times the calls and emails confirmed that he was making points the audience wanted to hear made. Cotton was rallying opinion. He was carrying on the fight the listeners wanted, and this is a great and necessary thing in a country that needs vibrant political parties, not collections of drones doing the bidding of Beltway elites. The Beltway party should follow the wishes of the rank-and-file and if there is one thing that the commentariat can agree on it is that conservative activists want this fight. That may change, but it hasn't changed yet. The Speaker should persist, and he and his team should continue to listen. It is very easy to see political costs inflicted on the GOPers that break ranks, especially if that choice is perceived as having been made to appease opinion elites.
I am not happy with the decision of the House leadership not to send the Senate "single-subject" CRs since it makes the messaging and record-building harder to accomplish. I would love to see a single subject CR on the Medical Device Tax, for example, as a Senate vote to table that would make it impossible for Senate Democrats who claimed to be against the tax in a non-binding vote in the spring to avoid the flip flop charge if they voted against repeal now. When the tax repeal vote is combined with a delay vote, however, an out is given those same Senate Democrats that will surface in 12 months. So much of this week's events is about a year from now that my lens is adjusted for that time span. Some folks care about next week's polling. I care about next year's, and single subject CRs would help. Perhaps the House leadership will unveil them Tuesday.
However the tactics unfold, the strategy of indelibly defining both the GOP and the Democrats for 2014 must be front and center. Some very smart people like the Washington Post's Jen Rubin think this series of events is defining the GOP negatively. Perhaps she is right and the GOP is deeply injuring itself. I confess I thought the same of the Panama Canal fight in 1978 when I was just leaving college. Then-candidate Ronald Reagan knew better. He was building a movement by being right on an issue at the same time as being visible on an issue. That battle from 35 years ago is a very good example to keep in mind this week, especially when the GOPers genuinely concerned about hurting the chances of retaining the majority in 2014 set sail to their fears.
What is unfortunate about this debate is that the GOP critics of having it feel there is mileage in attacking GOPrs with whom they disagree, often in intensely personal terms. As I noted in a tweet early in the day, if breaking the 11th Commandment required going to Confession, the line would be long indeed. But it doesn't, and indeed there is some small award in some small attention being paid to the uber-critics of Cruz et al.
This will be short-lived satisfaction. Attacking the people attacking Obamacare with everything the various pundits have got is not good politics. It is certainly not statesmanlike. Sticking with the Party is what is necessary now, the same message I will deliver to anyone disappointed with the end game. You only get one quarterback at a time. If they don't win, you can change the QB. There is no upside in turning on him mid-game.
The QB right now is John Boehner. He gave a very good speech on the floor in the early evening on Monday. Good for him. Many others made excellent remarks. Good for them as well. Many folks think the GOP is behind in the debate and in the overall chain of events, but like John Kerry's "I was for the war before I was against it" pratfall, the key moments in this very important debate won't be clear for a long time, though the president's "I shouldn't have to offer anything" homage to absolutism is certain to be among them.
The president, Harry and Nancy are hanging themselves as we speak, nailing their colors to the mast of Obamacare. Let the government stay shuttered for a week and that message sink in. Only good will come of it. But if the House GOP breaks and runs, well, there will be Hell to pay.
http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2013/10/01/i-shouldnt-have-to-offer-anything-the-gops-secret-weapons-president-obama-harry-reid-and-nancy-pelosi-n1714041/page/full
Extremely Extreme Extremists
Just checked the backyard. No pieces of fallen sky yet. Hours into the partial federal government shutdown and it's difficult to tell there is one. Save for the humorous desperation of TV folks trying to find something, anything that could be labeled calamity and blamed on those political toads in D.C..
So far, the great partial government shutdown of 2013 looks like a full bust. Like that Y2K apocalypse that didn't happen. Or President Obama's dire sequester warnings that went Poof!
This faux crisis really has little to do with spending. Or even the train wreck called ObamaCare, which continues today too.
It has to do with Obama trying to thwart history and win the 2014 midterm elections 13 months from now. And that non-strategy is based on him keeping most Americans fighting with each other so much that they don't notice the only thing that this "president" is doing is talking. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. "Please be seated." "I love you back." "I am absolutely confident that..."
Talk himself into trouble on Syria. Talk himself into trouble on attacking Syria. Talk himself into trouble on ObamaCare. Talk himself into trouble on the deficit. According to this guy, the country's budget deficits are falling faster than in decades. Of course, after four unprecedented years of $1 trillion-plus deficits, they can't go much higher and have farther to fall.
And he's mute on the national debt. Treasury Secy. Jack Lew warns the country will run out of money later this month. Actually, that's another lie. The country ran out of money $17 trillion ago. It's all borrowed since then, much of it by this administration.
Obama is off on another expensive Asian trip in a few days. That's how much of a "crisis" this fiscal year showdown is. Not that it might matter. Obama, who has been negotiating with Russia and Iran of all places, has refused to negotiate with the U.S. Congress like the true leader he isn't. Instead of pulling people together as he promised in 2007-08, Obama went golfing last weekend.
And most of the media covers for him. Remember how Obama's two most recent Defense secretaries -- Panetta and Gates -- lambasted him just the other day for showing weakness to the world and having no strategy on Syria?
You probably don't remember, unless you read it here at Investors.com. The MSM decided that wasn't newsworthy. Think the decision to ignore would have been the same if the president was George W. Bush?
Can't get the video to post, but here it is, in all its pathetic splendor.
When did childish petulance become an acceptable substitute for leadership?
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolplattliebau/2013/09/30/obama-i-shouldnt-have-to-offer-anything-n1713775
"I Shouldn't Have To Offer Anything": The GOP's Secret Weapons --President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi
The memorable line from Monday's debate about Obamacare?The president's astonishing declaration that "I shouldn't have to offer anything." Thus did the American public get a very candid glimpse of the president whose contempt for duly elected Republican opponents is exceeded only by his fecklessness in the face of America's enemies abroad. To Putin and the Iranians come offers of all sorts. To the Speaker of the House, only ultimatums.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi also had spectacularly bad days for anyone who was watching. Some pundits don't think Harry's gracelessness and Nancy's strident incoherence don't matter, but they are wrong. Americans notice everything, even if they say very little. They are consumers, making up their minds over time.
We forget just how lousy the Big Three Ds are when it comes to communicating, and today's series of pratfalls should remind every Republican why there is great hope for winning the public opinion battle decisively in the days and weeks ahead, and ultimately for 2014.
As I explained over and over on Monday's show, this week's drama over the shutdown is just one chapter in a book titled "November, 2014." We won't know for a long time if the chapter will be pivotal to the end of the story, but we do know that the chapter's title --"I shouldn't have to offer anything"-- is a great ROI for the first day's effort. The president's stunning display of arrogance in his NPR interview is certain to repeat itself again and again if the House GOP holds the line against the combined forces of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite and a handful of GOP pundits who have talked themselves into believing that all the polls about Obamcare will somehow be magically reversed because 4,000 workers at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration don't report for work Tuesday.
I have long been an opponent of a purposeful shutdown strategy and have been predicting for weeks that this is what the president wanted, especially after the Syrian fiasco exposed him as a bumbler abroad as well as at home. Everything he has touched this year has turned to mud, and his hopes for retaking the House in 2014 are all but gone. Many Republicans including me didn't want any strategy that risked losing the political momentum that the president's ineptitude has created.
But Senator Ted Cruz's speech last week turned my view around. He made a very good argument --not perfect, but very, very good-- and the electric reaction to it, pro and con,underscored that Cruz had done the rarest of things: Captured America's attention. That collective attention is so hard to capture that it usually takes a Super Bowl or an Olympics Opening Ceremony, and only presidential debates or election night specials come close to being mega-events in the political category.
You want mega-events when you have an argument to make, and especially when your debate opponent is as inept as the president is. Today Congressman Tom Cotton of Arkansas and a candidate for that state's Senate seat next year appeared on my show three times with updates on the events in the House, and all three times the calls and emails confirmed that he was making points the audience wanted to hear made. Cotton was rallying opinion. He was carrying on the fight the listeners wanted, and this is a great and necessary thing in a country that needs vibrant political parties, not collections of drones doing the bidding of Beltway elites. The Beltway party should follow the wishes of the rank-and-file and if there is one thing that the commentariat can agree on it is that conservative activists want this fight. That may change, but it hasn't changed yet. The Speaker should persist, and he and his team should continue to listen. It is very easy to see political costs inflicted on the GOPers that break ranks, especially if that choice is perceived as having been made to appease opinion elites.
I am not happy with the decision of the House leadership not to send the Senate "single-subject" CRs since it makes the messaging and record-building harder to accomplish. I would love to see a single subject CR on the Medical Device Tax, for example, as a Senate vote to table that would make it impossible for Senate Democrats who claimed to be against the tax in a non-binding vote in the spring to avoid the flip flop charge if they voted against repeal now. When the tax repeal vote is combined with a delay vote, however, an out is given those same Senate Democrats that will surface in 12 months. So much of this week's events is about a year from now that my lens is adjusted for that time span. Some folks care about next week's polling. I care about next year's, and single subject CRs would help. Perhaps the House leadership will unveil them Tuesday.
However the tactics unfold, the strategy of indelibly defining both the GOP and the Democrats for 2014 must be front and center. Some very smart people like the Washington Post's Jen Rubin think this series of events is defining the GOP negatively. Perhaps she is right and the GOP is deeply injuring itself. I confess I thought the same of the Panama Canal fight in 1978 when I was just leaving college. Then-candidate Ronald Reagan knew better. He was building a movement by being right on an issue at the same time as being visible on an issue. That battle from 35 years ago is a very good example to keep in mind this week, especially when the GOPers genuinely concerned about hurting the chances of retaining the majority in 2014 set sail to their fears.
What is unfortunate about this debate is that the GOP critics of having it feel there is mileage in attacking GOPrs with whom they disagree, often in intensely personal terms. As I noted in a tweet early in the day, if breaking the 11th Commandment required going to Confession, the line would be long indeed. But it doesn't, and indeed there is some small award in some small attention being paid to the uber-critics of Cruz et al.
This will be short-lived satisfaction. Attacking the people attacking Obamacare with everything the various pundits have got is not good politics. It is certainly not statesmanlike. Sticking with the Party is what is necessary now, the same message I will deliver to anyone disappointed with the end game. You only get one quarterback at a time. If they don't win, you can change the QB. There is no upside in turning on him mid-game.
The QB right now is John Boehner. He gave a very good speech on the floor in the early evening on Monday. Good for him. Many others made excellent remarks. Good for them as well. Many folks think the GOP is behind in the debate and in the overall chain of events, but like John Kerry's "I was for the war before I was against it" pratfall, the key moments in this very important debate won't be clear for a long time, though the president's "I shouldn't have to offer anything" homage to absolutism is certain to be among them.
The president, Harry and Nancy are hanging themselves as we speak, nailing their colors to the mast of Obamacare. Let the government stay shuttered for a week and that message sink in. Only good will come of it. But if the House GOP breaks and runs, well, there will be Hell to pay.
http://townhall.com/columnists/hughhewitt/2013/10/01/i-shouldnt-have-to-offer-anything-the-gops-secret-weapons-president-obama-harry-reid-and-nancy-pelosi-n1714041/page/full
Extremely Extreme Extremists
Liberal “shutdown” rhetoric ignores the irresponsibility of Democrats.
Democrats and their media allies have spent the past week
labeling Republicans “anarchists,” “fanatics,” “radicals,” and
“terrorists” who are wholly to blame for the situation that we are
told will soon lead to a government shutdown. And if all you know
about this situation is what you get from the media, you might
actually believe that this is a crisis created by Texas Sen. Ted
Cruz and his fellow conservatives who sought to use the vote on a
short-term spending bill as a means of preventing implementation of
the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.
Here’s a simple question: Why are we currently funding the federal government through a series of short-term measures known as “continuing resolutions”?
The answer is that the budgeting process has completely broken down in recent years, and the two men most responsible for that breakdown are President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For three consecutive years — 2010, 2011, and 2012 — the Democrat-controlled Senate did not pass a budget bill because Reid knew that it would be a political liability to do so. Passing a budget that detailed the Democrats’ plans for spending and revenue as official policy would have exposed the “something for nothing” swindle that Reid and his colleagues are perpetrating on the American people. Republican challengers campaigning against Democrat senators could have cited their votes for the budget bill, saying that the incumbent voted for this, that, or the other unpopular component of the measure.
Reid and the Democrats knew this. They knew very well that the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, that there was not enough tax revenue to pay the mushrooming cost of entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera), and certainly there wasn’t enough revenue to pay for all the boondoggles and giveaways the Democrats voted for in the name of “stimulus.” Adding to this, there was not enough revenue to pay the cost of Obamacare, which Democrats rammed through Congress in March 2010 on a party-line vote. Passing an actual budget would have made clear the unsustainable fiscal nightmare into which Democrat policies have plunged the nation during the Obama Age, and so Harry Reid simply didn’t pass a budget for three years.
Inevitably, there will be serious fiscal and economic consequences for what has been done in Washington since 2009. Democrats, however, cared less about such real-world matters than they did about the short-term political gain to be had by promoting the pleasant fiction that liberal “generosity” with taxpayer money (including trillions of dollars in deficit spending) had no real cost. The political project of electing and re-electing Democrats required this exercise in fiscal unreality, and so began Reid’s policy of avoiding the painful choices inherent in the budget process. As a direct result of Reid’s irresponsible policy, Americans are now faced with what is being described by many in the media as a “budget” battle, but is in fact about the short-term alternative to an actual budget, a continuing resolution which would authorize the government to keep spending more money than it has, by borrowing billions of dollars it has no feasible plan to repay.
You wouldn’t know any of this from media coverage of what is being portrayed as a Republican-induced crisis for which conservatives like Ted Cruz are to blame. Contrasting this misleading coverage against the actual facts of the situation, we might imagine Barack Obama and Harry Reid are sitting in the newsrooms of America’s newspapers and TV networks, dictating the story line to reporters and commentators. No such dictation is necessary, however, because our nation’s news organizations are overwhelmingly staffed by partisan Democrats. Readers will please excuse a slight digression here. As Rush Limbaugh has often remarked, media bias is so pervasive that if all he wanted to do was to complain about it, he could fill the airwaves 15 hours a week with nothing else. Yet the current showdown in Washington is a perfect example of how harmful this bias is.
If America’s journalists had ever told the truth about what Barack Obama and Harry Reid have done, neither of them would be in office now. Only a fool would claim that electing Mitt Romney to the White House and putting Mitch McConnell in charge of the Senate would have magically solved the federal government’s fiscal problems. A $17 trillion national debt is not amenable to quick fixes. However, the defeat of Obama and Reid would have ended the pathetic political charade that is now being played out in Washington, where the Democrats are depicted as the voices of responsible leadership, while Cruz and other conservative foes of Obamacare are excoriated as reckless demagogues. This false portrayal of the current situation is the exact opposite of truth, but it is widely believed because the journalists who did so much to re-elect Obama (and to defend Reid’s Democrat Senate majority) have continued to act as partisan propagandists. Often, the prevailing prejudices of the press corps are described as “liberal bias”; explaining this as a matter of ideology or philosophy, however, is unnecessary to describing the basic political allegiance of news industry personnel to the Democrat Party. Every study of the voting habits of American journalists shows an overwhelming preference for Democrats. The Media Research Center has compiled an exhaustive collection of such studies, some showing that reporters are eight times more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans.
This disproportionate partisan tilt has significant consequences, including the bizarre unreality of how conflicts between Republicans and Democrats are portrayed. Democrats, having come to expect favorable treatment from the media, are permitted to act and speak irresponsibly, knowing that they will be depicted as heroes in the media narrative, while their Republican opponents will be depicted as villains, merely for being Republicans. (The only “good” Republicans, of course, are those who echo liberal denunciations of such conservatives as Cruz.) It is only within this warped funhouse-mirror view that anyone could believe the things Democrats have been saying in the current crisis, much less take them seriously.
“We’re not going to bow to tea party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law,” Harry Reid said last week. “We will not bow to tea party anarchists who refuse to accept that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional…. Obamacare is the law of the land and will remain the law of the land as long as Barack Obama is president of the United States and as long as I’m Senate majority leader.” Never mind, of course, exactly how Obamacare became law. Never mind Nancy Pelosi’s memorable claim that Congress would “have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” Never mind the 34 House Democrats who joined Republicans in voting against it. Never mind how, in the mid-term elections eight months after that vote, Republicans won a historic landslide, gaining 63 House seats to obtain a majority even larger than Newt Gingrich won in 1994.
The history of Obamacare must be forgotten in order to suppose that Reid’s defense of this controversial and unpopular measure is more reasonable than the opposition of the Republican conservatives whom Reid labeled “tea party anarchists.” Of course, when it comes to real anarchists like the deranged mob that emerged two years ago as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, Democrats were far more understanding. The media didn’t point that out to Harry Reid, however, nor did anyone in the press corps seem to note the irony when White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer compared Republicans to terrorists: “What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest.” You can insert your favorite Bill Ayers joke here, but the president’s avowed refusal to negotiate with his domestic opponents could also be contrasted with his foreign policy, as I remarked on Twitter: “Maybe if the Republican Party would change its name to ‘Iran,’ Obama would be willing to negotiate with them.”
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don’t have a secret nuclear weapons program, nor are conservatives “anarchists,” and this week’s elaborate government shutdown drama is an exercise in political kabuki theater, made possible only because Democrats know that the media won’t inform the electorate what this is really all about. Instead, the media echo and amplify Democrats who blame the crisis on “extremists” in the GOP, distracting from Democrat Party failures that are the actual cause of the crisis. The federal government is $17 trillion in debt, and every day must borrow nearly $2 billion more just to keep going. Barack Obama has offered no detailed plan to fix that problem, and neither have Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or anyone else in the Democrat party. So in order to continue their fiscal irresponsibility, Democrats demand that Congress pass a short-term spending measure — without any GOP additions that would hinder implementation of Obamacare — and expect their allies in the press corps to assist them in misrepresenting this situation as entirely the fault of Republicans.
People who unquestioningly accept the media’s pro-Democrat propaganda are “mainstream.” And people who insist on telling the truth are extremely extreme extremists.
Here’s a simple question: Why are we currently funding the federal government through a series of short-term measures known as “continuing resolutions”?
The answer is that the budgeting process has completely broken down in recent years, and the two men most responsible for that breakdown are President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For three consecutive years — 2010, 2011, and 2012 — the Democrat-controlled Senate did not pass a budget bill because Reid knew that it would be a political liability to do so. Passing a budget that detailed the Democrats’ plans for spending and revenue as official policy would have exposed the “something for nothing” swindle that Reid and his colleagues are perpetrating on the American people. Republican challengers campaigning against Democrat senators could have cited their votes for the budget bill, saying that the incumbent voted for this, that, or the other unpopular component of the measure.
Reid and the Democrats knew this. They knew very well that the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, that there was not enough tax revenue to pay the mushrooming cost of entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, et cetera), and certainly there wasn’t enough revenue to pay for all the boondoggles and giveaways the Democrats voted for in the name of “stimulus.” Adding to this, there was not enough revenue to pay the cost of Obamacare, which Democrats rammed through Congress in March 2010 on a party-line vote. Passing an actual budget would have made clear the unsustainable fiscal nightmare into which Democrat policies have plunged the nation during the Obama Age, and so Harry Reid simply didn’t pass a budget for three years.
Inevitably, there will be serious fiscal and economic consequences for what has been done in Washington since 2009. Democrats, however, cared less about such real-world matters than they did about the short-term political gain to be had by promoting the pleasant fiction that liberal “generosity” with taxpayer money (including trillions of dollars in deficit spending) had no real cost. The political project of electing and re-electing Democrats required this exercise in fiscal unreality, and so began Reid’s policy of avoiding the painful choices inherent in the budget process. As a direct result of Reid’s irresponsible policy, Americans are now faced with what is being described by many in the media as a “budget” battle, but is in fact about the short-term alternative to an actual budget, a continuing resolution which would authorize the government to keep spending more money than it has, by borrowing billions of dollars it has no feasible plan to repay.
You wouldn’t know any of this from media coverage of what is being portrayed as a Republican-induced crisis for which conservatives like Ted Cruz are to blame. Contrasting this misleading coverage against the actual facts of the situation, we might imagine Barack Obama and Harry Reid are sitting in the newsrooms of America’s newspapers and TV networks, dictating the story line to reporters and commentators. No such dictation is necessary, however, because our nation’s news organizations are overwhelmingly staffed by partisan Democrats. Readers will please excuse a slight digression here. As Rush Limbaugh has often remarked, media bias is so pervasive that if all he wanted to do was to complain about it, he could fill the airwaves 15 hours a week with nothing else. Yet the current showdown in Washington is a perfect example of how harmful this bias is.
If America’s journalists had ever told the truth about what Barack Obama and Harry Reid have done, neither of them would be in office now. Only a fool would claim that electing Mitt Romney to the White House and putting Mitch McConnell in charge of the Senate would have magically solved the federal government’s fiscal problems. A $17 trillion national debt is not amenable to quick fixes. However, the defeat of Obama and Reid would have ended the pathetic political charade that is now being played out in Washington, where the Democrats are depicted as the voices of responsible leadership, while Cruz and other conservative foes of Obamacare are excoriated as reckless demagogues. This false portrayal of the current situation is the exact opposite of truth, but it is widely believed because the journalists who did so much to re-elect Obama (and to defend Reid’s Democrat Senate majority) have continued to act as partisan propagandists. Often, the prevailing prejudices of the press corps are described as “liberal bias”; explaining this as a matter of ideology or philosophy, however, is unnecessary to describing the basic political allegiance of news industry personnel to the Democrat Party. Every study of the voting habits of American journalists shows an overwhelming preference for Democrats. The Media Research Center has compiled an exhaustive collection of such studies, some showing that reporters are eight times more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans.
This disproportionate partisan tilt has significant consequences, including the bizarre unreality of how conflicts between Republicans and Democrats are portrayed. Democrats, having come to expect favorable treatment from the media, are permitted to act and speak irresponsibly, knowing that they will be depicted as heroes in the media narrative, while their Republican opponents will be depicted as villains, merely for being Republicans. (The only “good” Republicans, of course, are those who echo liberal denunciations of such conservatives as Cruz.) It is only within this warped funhouse-mirror view that anyone could believe the things Democrats have been saying in the current crisis, much less take them seriously.
“We’re not going to bow to tea party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law,” Harry Reid said last week. “We will not bow to tea party anarchists who refuse to accept that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional…. Obamacare is the law of the land and will remain the law of the land as long as Barack Obama is president of the United States and as long as I’m Senate majority leader.” Never mind, of course, exactly how Obamacare became law. Never mind Nancy Pelosi’s memorable claim that Congress would “have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” Never mind the 34 House Democrats who joined Republicans in voting against it. Never mind how, in the mid-term elections eight months after that vote, Republicans won a historic landslide, gaining 63 House seats to obtain a majority even larger than Newt Gingrich won in 1994.
The history of Obamacare must be forgotten in order to suppose that Reid’s defense of this controversial and unpopular measure is more reasonable than the opposition of the Republican conservatives whom Reid labeled “tea party anarchists.” Of course, when it comes to real anarchists like the deranged mob that emerged two years ago as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, Democrats were far more understanding. The media didn’t point that out to Harry Reid, however, nor did anyone in the press corps seem to note the irony when White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer compared Republicans to terrorists: “What we’re not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest.” You can insert your favorite Bill Ayers joke here, but the president’s avowed refusal to negotiate with his domestic opponents could also be contrasted with his foreign policy, as I remarked on Twitter: “Maybe if the Republican Party would change its name to ‘Iran,’ Obama would be willing to negotiate with them.”
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don’t have a secret nuclear weapons program, nor are conservatives “anarchists,” and this week’s elaborate government shutdown drama is an exercise in political kabuki theater, made possible only because Democrats know that the media won’t inform the electorate what this is really all about. Instead, the media echo and amplify Democrats who blame the crisis on “extremists” in the GOP, distracting from Democrat Party failures that are the actual cause of the crisis. The federal government is $17 trillion in debt, and every day must borrow nearly $2 billion more just to keep going. Barack Obama has offered no detailed plan to fix that problem, and neither have Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or anyone else in the Democrat party. So in order to continue their fiscal irresponsibility, Democrats demand that Congress pass a short-term spending measure — without any GOP additions that would hinder implementation of Obamacare — and expect their allies in the press corps to assist them in misrepresenting this situation as entirely the fault of Republicans.
People who unquestioningly accept the media’s pro-Democrat propaganda are “mainstream.” And people who insist on telling the truth are extremely extreme extremists.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/30/extremely-extreme-extremists
If 900,000 federal workers can be furloughed as 'non-essential,' why employ them?
So far, so good.Just checked the backyard. No pieces of fallen sky yet. Hours into the partial federal government shutdown and it's difficult to tell there is one. Save for the humorous desperation of TV folks trying to find something, anything that could be labeled calamity and blamed on those political toads in D.C..
So far, the great partial government shutdown of 2013 looks like a full bust. Like that Y2K apocalypse that didn't happen. Or President Obama's dire sequester warnings that went Poof!
This faux crisis really has little to do with spending. Or even the train wreck called ObamaCare, which continues today too.
It has to do with Obama trying to thwart history and win the 2014 midterm elections 13 months from now. And that non-strategy is based on him keeping most Americans fighting with each other so much that they don't notice the only thing that this "president" is doing is talking. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. "Please be seated." "I love you back." "I am absolutely confident that..."
Talk himself into trouble on Syria. Talk himself into trouble on attacking Syria. Talk himself into trouble on ObamaCare. Talk himself into trouble on the deficit. According to this guy, the country's budget deficits are falling faster than in decades. Of course, after four unprecedented years of $1 trillion-plus deficits, they can't go much higher and have farther to fall.
And he's mute on the national debt. Treasury Secy. Jack Lew warns the country will run out of money later this month. Actually, that's another lie. The country ran out of money $17 trillion ago. It's all borrowed since then, much of it by this administration.
Obama is off on another expensive Asian trip in a few days. That's how much of a "crisis" this fiscal year showdown is. Not that it might matter. Obama, who has been negotiating with Russia and Iran of all places, has refused to negotiate with the U.S. Congress like the true leader he isn't. Instead of pulling people together as he promised in 2007-08, Obama went golfing last weekend.
And most of the media covers for him. Remember how Obama's two most recent Defense secretaries -- Panetta and Gates -- lambasted him just the other day for showing weakness to the world and having no strategy on Syria?
You probably don't remember, unless you read it here at Investors.com. The MSM decided that wasn't newsworthy. Think the decision to ignore would have been the same if the president was George W. Bush?
Diplomacy
and military action not so much. But Obama's always got a political
strategy. He's counting on that tacit media support continuing, as Brit Hume so precisely detailed Monday.
American voters opted in 2010 for a divided government.
They put the House strongly in Republican hands, left the Senate barely in Democrat hands and then last year re-elected Mrs. Robinson's son-in-law by about seven million fewer votes than the first time.
They've also turned over governing of 30 states to Republicans where, it seems, the economy and jobs are now growing the fastest.
What a coincidence!
According to historical patterns, next year those same voters will send a few more Republicans to the House and the Senate, which could make Happy Harry Reid a former majority leader. And Obama will still be promising that creating new middle-class jobs is his top priority.
Unless Obama can pin the blame on the GOP or, as he's now re-packaged it, an extreme far-right faction of the GOP. This is the radical GOP that wants to cancel the special exemption from ObamaCare for all of Congress and the White House.
A new Gallup Poll released this morning indicates Obama may place too much store in a shutdown backlash. The study shows there's no long-term impact on voters' views of the U.S. or a shutdown's protagonists.
But there's another serious problem for the Chicagoan. What if an intransigent Obama forced a partial government shutdown, the 18th in recent decades? And what people noticed was that things actually seemed to run pretty well with nearly 900,000 "non-essential" federal workers furloughed from Obama's bloated workforce of 2.2 million?
Why should American taxpayers pay for any non-essential workers?
If we can do without nearly 900,000 "non-essential" personnel today with all their costly benefits and accruing pensions, why not tomorrow? And next week? And next year? Which is the smaller government argument that so many conservatives will make in advance of Nov. 4, 2014.
Now just 399 days away.
I talked with one of the most vocal of the defund/delay advocates, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, on Friday night, as she waited to hear what path the House Republican leadership would take. It’s safe to say her views reflected those of many of her conservative colleagues, and her reasoning was this: One, Obamacare as a policy is so far-reaching, so consequential, and so damaging that members of Congress should do everything they can — everything — to stop it before it fully goes into effect. Two, lesser measures to fight Obamacare — repealing the medical device tax or making Congress purchase coverage through the exchanges without special subsidies — are just not big enough to address the problem. And three, there have been government shutdowns in the past over far less urgent reasons that did not result in doom for Republicans.
“There is a very large group of us who believe that this is it, this isn’t just another year, this isn’t just another CR fight,” Bachmann told me. “This is historic, and it’s a historic shift that’s about to happen, and if we’re going to fight, we need to fight now.”
“This isn’t just another bill,” Bachmann continued. “This isn’t load limits on turnip trucks that we’re talking about. This is consequential. And I think the reason why you’ve come to this flash point is that this is an extremely consequential bill that will impact every American, and that’s why you have such passionate opinions. And we’re not giving up and we’re not caving in that easily.”
For Bachmann and many of her colleagues, the enormity of the issue serves to highlight the problem with less extensive anti-Obamacare measures. “The Vitter Amendment isn’t going to help real people,” Bachmann told me. “It’s going to be a political move, but it’s not going to help real people. Obamacare will continue to destroy the economy. Now, repealing the medical device tax does help the economy. Here in the Beltway, we get the medical device tax issue. And in my state of Minnesota, we get the medical device tax issue. That’s our industry. And I’m all for [repealing] it, but for most Americans, that is not something that they see that they want to get.”
And what about delaying just the individual mandate for a year, as opposed to all of Obamacare? “That’s worthless,” Bachmann said.
Bachmann pointed to a recent Washington Post article which included a long list of government shutdowns in the last 35 years. “We were there 17 times,” she said. “Five times under Jimmy Carter they did a government shutdown. Eight times under Reagan — twice in October before the 1984 landslide. And they didn’t worry about it, they just did it.”
“I was looking at some of the history,” Bachmann continued. “When the Republicans did the slowdown in ’95, they did two, one in November and then one in December. What they were fighting over, the first one, was getting the budget to balance in seven years. And the second one was over Bill Clinton trying to do a sleight of hand — he wanted to use Office of Management and Budget numbers versus Congressional Budget Office numbers. So the Republicans shut the joint down over using OMB numbers over the CBO. My, how times have changed. We’re considered radical to have a ten-year balance under Paul Ryan. We’re going to shut the government down under OMB versus CBO ? That’s what they did then. Now, in my opinion, I don’t think I’d be shutting the government down over that.”
But even then, House Republicans did not suffer terrible consequences, as Bachmann and others point out. After the shutdowns, the GOP was re-elected to control of the House in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004 before losing in 2006.
So Bachmann, and many other Republicans, remain unafraid as the clock ticks down. “I don’t get upset about brinksmanship,” she told me. “That’s what negotiation is. I was a federal tax lawyer. That’s all I did — negotiation. And in negotiation, you usually don’t get anywhere until the final five minutes, and then everybody realizes OK, we’re going to have to break and actually make this thing happen. That’s how negotiation works.”
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/30/from-michele-bachmann-a-persuasive-case-for-why-many-republicans-dont-fear-a-shutdown/
Plus, as an added bonus, the “supine media” will largely follow the White House’s lead in depicting the whole episode as as purely the fault of Republicans (because, as we all know, the new definition of “compromise” is Republicans giving in to whatever the president wants, or something), and shutdown stories will take up a lot of media space that would have been otherwise occupied by the ObamaCare rollout. Via RCP:
More disturbingly, why do so many Republicans and right-leaning commentators surrender before we’ve even begun to fight?
Do our moderates believe there is any position President Obama and the Democrats could take that would result in the public’s blaming Democrats, rather than Republicans, for a shutdown?
The moderates always cite polls that say Republicans will be blamed, but who decreed that polls are set in stone? Which Republicans, when they were campaigning for election, promised to govern according to the polls and not their principles?
But if we must discuss the polls, let me ask you to consider what would happen if the pollsters framed their questions as follows:
“Will you support efforts by congressional Republicans to defund Obamacare, even to the point of a government shutdown, because they believe it is the greatest destroyer of jobs today in America, it will reduce access to and the quality of health care, it will not ensure coverage or care for everyone, it will not allow people to keep their own doctors or their own plans, it will cost the government at least twice what Obama promised, it will not reduce the health care expenses of a typical family of four by $2,500 as Obama promised but increase them by some $7,400, it is such a legislative mess and so burdensome that many have demanded to be exempted from its various provisions and President Obama, in disregard of his own health care law and of the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, granted, by executive fiat, special exemptions and delays to some and not others, and that the Internal Revenue Service, which has been caught red-handed abusing its power against the administration’s political opponents, will be in charge of enforcing Obamacare?
“And, dear voter, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a bit unfair to conclude that Republicans are mainly at fault for shutting the government down when the Democratic Senate has continually ignored its legal duty to pass budgets, Senate Democrats have flat-out announced they won’t negotiate and have leaked their secret desire that the government shuts down so they can demonize the Republicans, and Republicans have, in fact, passed several budgets, which only exclude the funding or delay the implementation of Obamacare, a law that is very unpopular with the American people?”
Of course, we’ll never see poll questions so patently loaded, especially in favor of the Republican position. And we shouldn’t. But we do see slanted poll questions all the time, subtly nudging the participants toward a desired response. I’m sure that’s the case here.
But we shouldn’t be defeated by poll questions based on a snapshot in time and based on fixed assumptions that don’t allow for any change in public opinion based on future events and communications. Unless he is clairvoyant, no pollster can factor into his questions the precise unfolding of events leading to and after a shutdown, and the possibilities of how they’re communicated are endless.
Polls can’t possibly predict to any degree of reliability how the public would respond to a shutdown if Republicans finally united and articulated a compelling case to the public before and during a shutdown, including the points contained in my absurd hypothetical poll questions.
What if Republicans got together, instead of shooting one another in the backs, and made those points and also hammered Obama for refusing to come to the table on real spending and entitlement cuts?
Objectively speaking, Obama’s position all along has been indefensible. Almost nothing he’s said about Obamacare is true — and this can be easily demonstrated. He will not do anything about our short- and long-term spending problems, and he and his party are the ones who are absolutely refusing to negotiate in good faith, if at all, on these budgetary issues.
Though I respect my more moderate friends on the right and don’t wholly discount their position, I believe that their default defeatism and their friendly fire against principled conservatives such as Ted Cruz are damaging the GOP’s chances of convincing the public of the unreasonableness of Obama’s position and the reasonableness of their own.
I believe that if Republicans would finally draw a firm line in the sand and then go to the media with a united, 24/7 communications effort, they would — with their courage, their principled stand and their contagious patriotism — reignite the grass roots and inspire many others to recapture an optimistic spirit, a spirit that says that America is not yet dead and that there are still elected officeholders who are willing to stake their careers on saving this nation.
We’ve been following the moderates’ advice, and where has it gotten us? Where has it gotten the nation?
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/01/gop-youve-tried-surrender-lets-try-fighting/
Here's how it works. While the budget caps cover mostly discretionary spending, they include a few mandatory programs. The House bill moves $18 billion from those programs from 2014 and pushes them into future years. For example, the bill moves into 2015 $8.9 billion from the Justice Department's "crime victims fund" and $1.6 billion from the Justice and Treasury mandatory budgets, and another $800 million from the Department of Agriculture into 2015 and beyond.
This frees up $18 billion more for Congress to spend in fiscal 2014 on discretionary accounts like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting without technically violating the sequester caps. It's a classic shell game to let Congress spend more while pretending it doesn't. The Members are betting they'll make a deal before 2015 to break the caps, so they'll get to spend more this year and more in the future too.
"We're almost $36 billion over the caps," says GOP Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a rare spending whistleblower. Too bad no one is listening, least of all the Republicans who are beating their chests over a "defund ObamaCare" fight they have no chance to win. They are, however, losing leverage over spending.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579107450597866932.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
“In the Court's view endorsing the proposition that the executive may assert an unreviewable right to withhold materials from the legislature would offend the Constitution more than undertaking to resolve the specific dispute that has been presented here,” Jackson wrote in her ruling. "Neither legal nor prudential considerations support the dismissal of this action, the defendant’s motion to dismiss the action will be denied."
The lawsuit was filed shortly after Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over requested Fast and Furious documents to Congress and after President Obama asserted executive privilege over documents despite denying any involvement in the operation.
"This ruling is a repudiation of the Obama Justice Department and Congressional Democrats who argued the courts should have no role in the dispute over President Obama's improper assertion of executive privilege to protect an attempted Justice Department cover-up of Operation Fast and Furious,” Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa said in a statement. “I remain confident in the merits of the House's decision to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt; this ruling is an important step toward the transparency and accountability the Obama Administration has refused to provide."
Senator Chuck Grassley, who has been investigating Operation Fast and Furious since early 2011, also released a statement.
“This is an important step toward ensuring that Congress’ constitutional responsibility to provide oversight of the executive branch is vindicated. The President’s sweeping assertion of executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents is completely contrary to the transparent government that he promised and beyond any valid claim of privilege under the law," Grassley said. "The documents subpoenaed by the House of Representatives are essential to gaining a full understanding of the gunwalking program that led to the tragic death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and the efforts to keep the truth about it from Congress and the American people. Given that its refusal to comply with the subpoena is unlikely to survive legal scrutiny, I fully expect the Obama administration to continue to put up procedural roadblocks to resolving this dispute. However, I look forward to the court finally deciding the case on the merits.”
At this point, there has not been a ruling from Jackson about whether Obama's executive privilege will stand. A ruling on whether executive privilege applies to the Fast and Furious documents in question is expected within the next two weeks.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/10/01/judge-slaps-down-eric-holders-request-for-fast-and-furious-lawsuit-to-be-dismissed-n1713760
“I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the prayer breakfast,” Carson told an audience that at the annual Business
Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner, according to a report from Cliff Sims of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Yellowhammer News
Carson’s February speech February made him a conservative darling for criticizing President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care reform law, while Obama was sitting just a few feet away.
During the event, which also featured former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Carson spoke about the potential presidential candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. relations with Russia and the Environmental Protection Agency.
They put the House strongly in Republican hands, left the Senate barely in Democrat hands and then last year re-elected Mrs. Robinson's son-in-law by about seven million fewer votes than the first time.
They've also turned over governing of 30 states to Republicans where, it seems, the economy and jobs are now growing the fastest.
What a coincidence!
According to historical patterns, next year those same voters will send a few more Republicans to the House and the Senate, which could make Happy Harry Reid a former majority leader. And Obama will still be promising that creating new middle-class jobs is his top priority.
Unless Obama can pin the blame on the GOP or, as he's now re-packaged it, an extreme far-right faction of the GOP. This is the radical GOP that wants to cancel the special exemption from ObamaCare for all of Congress and the White House.
A new Gallup Poll released this morning indicates Obama may place too much store in a shutdown backlash. The study shows there's no long-term impact on voters' views of the U.S. or a shutdown's protagonists.
But there's another serious problem for the Chicagoan. What if an intransigent Obama forced a partial government shutdown, the 18th in recent decades? And what people noticed was that things actually seemed to run pretty well with nearly 900,000 "non-essential" federal workers furloughed from Obama's bloated workforce of 2.2 million?
Why should American taxpayers pay for any non-essential workers?
If we can do without nearly 900,000 "non-essential" personnel today with all their costly benefits and accruing pensions, why not tomorrow? And next week? And next year? Which is the smaller government argument that so many conservatives will make in advance of Nov. 4, 2014.
Now just 399 days away.
From Michele Bachmann, a persuasive case for why many Republicans don’t fear a shutdown
Why have House Republicans pursued their effort to defund, and now to delay, Obamacare so relentlessly, even though they have almost zero chance of success in the face of a rapidly-approaching deadline for shutting down the government? And why have they done so when many in their party have warned that a shutdown would be suicidal for the GOP?I talked with one of the most vocal of the defund/delay advocates, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, on Friday night, as she waited to hear what path the House Republican leadership would take. It’s safe to say her views reflected those of many of her conservative colleagues, and her reasoning was this: One, Obamacare as a policy is so far-reaching, so consequential, and so damaging that members of Congress should do everything they can — everything — to stop it before it fully goes into effect. Two, lesser measures to fight Obamacare — repealing the medical device tax or making Congress purchase coverage through the exchanges without special subsidies — are just not big enough to address the problem. And three, there have been government shutdowns in the past over far less urgent reasons that did not result in doom for Republicans.
“There is a very large group of us who believe that this is it, this isn’t just another year, this isn’t just another CR fight,” Bachmann told me. “This is historic, and it’s a historic shift that’s about to happen, and if we’re going to fight, we need to fight now.”
“This isn’t just another bill,” Bachmann continued. “This isn’t load limits on turnip trucks that we’re talking about. This is consequential. And I think the reason why you’ve come to this flash point is that this is an extremely consequential bill that will impact every American, and that’s why you have such passionate opinions. And we’re not giving up and we’re not caving in that easily.”
For Bachmann and many of her colleagues, the enormity of the issue serves to highlight the problem with less extensive anti-Obamacare measures. “The Vitter Amendment isn’t going to help real people,” Bachmann told me. “It’s going to be a political move, but it’s not going to help real people. Obamacare will continue to destroy the economy. Now, repealing the medical device tax does help the economy. Here in the Beltway, we get the medical device tax issue. And in my state of Minnesota, we get the medical device tax issue. That’s our industry. And I’m all for [repealing] it, but for most Americans, that is not something that they see that they want to get.”
And what about delaying just the individual mandate for a year, as opposed to all of Obamacare? “That’s worthless,” Bachmann said.
Bachmann pointed to a recent Washington Post article which included a long list of government shutdowns in the last 35 years. “We were there 17 times,” she said. “Five times under Jimmy Carter they did a government shutdown. Eight times under Reagan — twice in October before the 1984 landslide. And they didn’t worry about it, they just did it.”
“I was looking at some of the history,” Bachmann continued. “When the Republicans did the slowdown in ’95, they did two, one in November and then one in December. What they were fighting over, the first one, was getting the budget to balance in seven years. And the second one was over Bill Clinton trying to do a sleight of hand — he wanted to use Office of Management and Budget numbers versus Congressional Budget Office numbers. So the Republicans shut the joint down over using OMB numbers over the CBO. My, how times have changed. We’re considered radical to have a ten-year balance under Paul Ryan. We’re going to shut the government down under OMB versus CBO ? That’s what they did then. Now, in my opinion, I don’t think I’d be shutting the government down over that.”
But even then, House Republicans did not suffer terrible consequences, as Bachmann and others point out. After the shutdowns, the GOP was re-elected to control of the House in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004 before losing in 2006.
So Bachmann, and many other Republicans, remain unafraid as the clock ticks down. “I don’t get upset about brinksmanship,” she told me. “That’s what negotiation is. I was a federal tax lawyer. That’s all I did — negotiation. And in negotiation, you usually don’t get anywhere until the final five minutes, and then everybody realizes OK, we’re going to have to break and actually make this thing happen. That’s how negotiation works.”
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/30/from-michele-bachmann-a-persuasive-case-for-why-many-republicans-dont-fear-a-shutdown/
Krauthammer: This shutdown is pretty much a lifeline for a drowning administration
Krauthammer had some solid points on O’Reilly last night concerning the question of whether or not a government shutdown is actually helpful or hurtful to the Obama administration’s overall image as well as to their grand opening of the health care law; President Obama’s second term has not been going particularly well by any means, and the shutdown gives him something very tangible with which he can easily revert to the ol’ reliable “spiteful, obstructionist, uncompromising Republicans” tack that’s worked so well in the past.Plus, as an added bonus, the “supine media” will largely follow the White House’s lead in depicting the whole episode as as purely the fault of Republicans (because, as we all know, the new definition of “compromise” is Republicans giving in to whatever the president wants, or something), and shutdown stories will take up a lot of media space that would have been otherwise occupied by the ObamaCare rollout. Via RCP:
He is not going to give in because this is not going to give him political advantage. This is a lifeline for an administration that’s drowning. His numbers are low, the administration is in disarray, humiliated abroad, an economy stuck in the mud at home. He really has got nowhere to go. I think they have been hoping for a shutdown because Obama then gets to go on the stage and to give all that stuff that you showed in your introduction. ‘This is a law of the land, I’m upholding the law,’ except for one thing: It’s completely lawless. He unilaterally changed about 17 provisions in the law after it was passed. … You are not allowed to do that under our system. And then he says that the Republicans are the ones who are being unreasonable because they want to amend another provision. And as you pointed out, Obama already suspended it for the big guys, for big business you get a year of grace, but if you are a little individual, you don’t get anything. … The strategy I would have chosen would have been to do nothing right now. Allow it to go into effect. The stories in the press tomorrow instead of being about the glitches, the disasters, the people who can’t sign up, all the contradictions as you said — the honor system that you have to rely on, computers that cannot calculate what your premium is, what your subsidy is. Instead of the story being about how unwieldy and impossible is the bill, it’s going to be all about a shutdown, about the panda cam at the National Zoo shutdown over the government shutdown. It’s the wrong story.http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/01/krauthammer-this-shutdown-is-pretty-much-a-lifeline-for-a-drowning-administration/
John McCain and Ted Cruz Offer Drastically Different Advice to House Republicans as Shutdown Nears
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ted
Cruz (R-Texas) may belong to the same political party, but their
approaches to the current Obamacare battle are drastically different.
McCain on Monday night called on the U.S. House to pass a “clean” continuing resolution
and send it back to the Senate. In other words, the Arizona Republican
wants exactly what the Democrats want: A continuing resolution that
leaves Obamacare untouched and funds the government.
“That will happen sooner or later,” McCain said, adding that the Republicans “can’t win.”
On the other hand, Sen. Cruz urged his fellow Republicans to stand strong against the uncompromising Democrats in the Senate.
“#DontBlink,” Cruz wrote on Twitter Monday night.
Cruz’s advice was very short and to the point, but it’s meaning is clear.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/30/john-mccain-and-ted-cruz-offer-drastically-different-advice-to-house-republicans-as-shutdown-nears/
New York Times Correspondent’s Revealing Insight Into D.C.: It’s an ‘Insider Class’ Made up of ‘Political Careerists’ With a ‘Disease’
Mark Leibovich, the chief national
correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, says that at a time when
select parts of the federal government are shut down over partisan
feuds, there isn’t a real difference between Democrats and Republicans
in Washington anymore.
The author of “This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital,” Leibovich believes members of both parties make up a “huge” political “insider class” made up of “political careerists.”
The author appeared on the Glenn Beck Program Monday to discuss the lack of gridlock in Washington.
“These are all people who might be
yelling at each other on the House floor or on cable or something, but
they’re cutting deals in the green room,” Leibovich said. “They’re
going out and giving speeches and doing these dog and pony shows about,
‘Oh we disagree’ — it’s one big kabuki.”
He summarized the situation: “What
you’re seeing here is not a [capitol] that’s hopelessly divided — it’s
hopelessly interconnected.”
Leibovich said that when people go to Washington, they get a “disease” and become “institutionalized, to some degree.”
“50% of all U.S. Senators, after they’re
kicked out of office, now stay and become lobbyists,” he explained. “If
they lose the election, they’re going to be fine. They are set for
life. They are institutionalized in the political system. ‘This Town’ is
about what that system looks like.”
Leibovich said the media is also part
of that system, and he’s not too popular at the moment for revealing the
inner dealings in Washington.
“Part of the critique against me is,
look, he’s violated the unwritten rule that people on the inside are not
supposed to speak critically about other people on the inside,” he remarked.
But Leibovich also said he’s not too concerned about his popularity, and that it’s an important topic to write about.
Beck turned to the audience, saying
Leibovich’s book, ‘This Town,’ is currently “neck in neck” with a
biography about former President Woodrow Wilson.
“Please, for everything that
is good and sacred — I don’t care if you use it as a doorstop — just
please don’t make the Woodrow Wilson thing number one,” Beck, a fierce
critic of the 28th president, remarked. “Please, buy this book. Please,
I beg of you.”
Beck added that ‘This Town’ is also
“one of the first stories where you actually hear the truth, because
[Leibovich takes] everybody apart.”
“Oh yeah, this is not a Democrat or
Republican book. There’s no such thing as Democrats and Republicans
anymore,” Leibovich responded simply.
The only solution, the author said, is
for people to “keep telling the truth,” because the “bull crap” in
Washington “is not sustainable.”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/10/01/new-york-times-correspondents-revealing-insight-into-d-c-its-an-insider-class-made-up-of-political-careerists-with-a-disease/
GOP, you’ve tried surrender; let’s try fighting
By David Limbaugh
Why is it just assumed Republicans will automatically be blamed for
any government shutdown over a budgetary impasse between Obama and his
Democratic Party and Republicans?More disturbingly, why do so many Republicans and right-leaning commentators surrender before we’ve even begun to fight?
Do our moderates believe there is any position President Obama and the Democrats could take that would result in the public’s blaming Democrats, rather than Republicans, for a shutdown?
The moderates always cite polls that say Republicans will be blamed, but who decreed that polls are set in stone? Which Republicans, when they were campaigning for election, promised to govern according to the polls and not their principles?
But if we must discuss the polls, let me ask you to consider what would happen if the pollsters framed their questions as follows:
“Will you support efforts by congressional Republicans to defund Obamacare, even to the point of a government shutdown, because they believe it is the greatest destroyer of jobs today in America, it will reduce access to and the quality of health care, it will not ensure coverage or care for everyone, it will not allow people to keep their own doctors or their own plans, it will cost the government at least twice what Obama promised, it will not reduce the health care expenses of a typical family of four by $2,500 as Obama promised but increase them by some $7,400, it is such a legislative mess and so burdensome that many have demanded to be exempted from its various provisions and President Obama, in disregard of his own health care law and of the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, granted, by executive fiat, special exemptions and delays to some and not others, and that the Internal Revenue Service, which has been caught red-handed abusing its power against the administration’s political opponents, will be in charge of enforcing Obamacare?
“And, dear voter, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a bit unfair to conclude that Republicans are mainly at fault for shutting the government down when the Democratic Senate has continually ignored its legal duty to pass budgets, Senate Democrats have flat-out announced they won’t negotiate and have leaked their secret desire that the government shuts down so they can demonize the Republicans, and Republicans have, in fact, passed several budgets, which only exclude the funding or delay the implementation of Obamacare, a law that is very unpopular with the American people?”
Of course, we’ll never see poll questions so patently loaded, especially in favor of the Republican position. And we shouldn’t. But we do see slanted poll questions all the time, subtly nudging the participants toward a desired response. I’m sure that’s the case here.
But we shouldn’t be defeated by poll questions based on a snapshot in time and based on fixed assumptions that don’t allow for any change in public opinion based on future events and communications. Unless he is clairvoyant, no pollster can factor into his questions the precise unfolding of events leading to and after a shutdown, and the possibilities of how they’re communicated are endless.
Polls can’t possibly predict to any degree of reliability how the public would respond to a shutdown if Republicans finally united and articulated a compelling case to the public before and during a shutdown, including the points contained in my absurd hypothetical poll questions.
What if Republicans got together, instead of shooting one another in the backs, and made those points and also hammered Obama for refusing to come to the table on real spending and entitlement cuts?
Objectively speaking, Obama’s position all along has been indefensible. Almost nothing he’s said about Obamacare is true — and this can be easily demonstrated. He will not do anything about our short- and long-term spending problems, and he and his party are the ones who are absolutely refusing to negotiate in good faith, if at all, on these budgetary issues.
Though I respect my more moderate friends on the right and don’t wholly discount their position, I believe that their default defeatism and their friendly fire against principled conservatives such as Ted Cruz are damaging the GOP’s chances of convincing the public of the unreasonableness of Obama’s position and the reasonableness of their own.
I believe that if Republicans would finally draw a firm line in the sand and then go to the media with a united, 24/7 communications effort, they would — with their courage, their principled stand and their contagious patriotism — reignite the grass roots and inspire many others to recapture an optimistic spirit, a spirit that says that America is not yet dead and that there are still elected officeholders who are willing to stake their careers on saving this nation.
We’ve been following the moderates’ advice, and where has it gotten us? Where has it gotten the nation?
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/01/gop-youve-tried-surrender-lets-try-fighting/
Fiscal Monkey Business
Congress pulls another stunt to break the sequester spending caps.
As the budget histrionics continue, both parties are slyly doing what Congress does best—spend more money. We reported last week that the GOP House has already agreed with Senate Democrats to raise spending in 2014 by $19 billion over the Budget Control Act caps—to $986 billion from $967 billion. But now Senate budget experts have identified in the spending bill some $18 billion more of mostly phantom savings from "changes in mandatory spending programs," also known appropriately enough as Chimps.Here's how it works. While the budget caps cover mostly discretionary spending, they include a few mandatory programs. The House bill moves $18 billion from those programs from 2014 and pushes them into future years. For example, the bill moves into 2015 $8.9 billion from the Justice Department's "crime victims fund" and $1.6 billion from the Justice and Treasury mandatory budgets, and another $800 million from the Department of Agriculture into 2015 and beyond.
This frees up $18 billion more for Congress to spend in fiscal 2014 on discretionary accounts like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting without technically violating the sequester caps. It's a classic shell game to let Congress spend more while pretending it doesn't. The Members are betting they'll make a deal before 2015 to break the caps, so they'll get to spend more this year and more in the future too.
"We're almost $36 billion over the caps," says GOP Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a rare spending whistleblower. Too bad no one is listening, least of all the Republicans who are beating their chests over a "defund ObamaCare" fight they have no chance to win. They are, however, losing leverage over spending.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579107450597866932.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Judge Slaps Down Eric Holder's Request For Fast and Furious Lawsuit to be Dismissed
Late Monday night, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson denied a Department of Justice request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the House Oversight Committee last summer over Operation Fast and Furious documents.“In the Court's view endorsing the proposition that the executive may assert an unreviewable right to withhold materials from the legislature would offend the Constitution more than undertaking to resolve the specific dispute that has been presented here,” Jackson wrote in her ruling. "Neither legal nor prudential considerations support the dismissal of this action, the defendant’s motion to dismiss the action will be denied."
The lawsuit was filed shortly after Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over requested Fast and Furious documents to Congress and after President Obama asserted executive privilege over documents despite denying any involvement in the operation.
"This ruling is a repudiation of the Obama Justice Department and Congressional Democrats who argued the courts should have no role in the dispute over President Obama's improper assertion of executive privilege to protect an attempted Justice Department cover-up of Operation Fast and Furious,” Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa said in a statement. “I remain confident in the merits of the House's decision to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt; this ruling is an important step toward the transparency and accountability the Obama Administration has refused to provide."
Senator Chuck Grassley, who has been investigating Operation Fast and Furious since early 2011, also released a statement.
“This is an important step toward ensuring that Congress’ constitutional responsibility to provide oversight of the executive branch is vindicated. The President’s sweeping assertion of executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents is completely contrary to the transparent government that he promised and beyond any valid claim of privilege under the law," Grassley said. "The documents subpoenaed by the House of Representatives are essential to gaining a full understanding of the gunwalking program that led to the tragic death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and the efforts to keep the truth about it from Congress and the American people. Given that its refusal to comply with the subpoena is unlikely to survive legal scrutiny, I fully expect the Obama administration to continue to put up procedural roadblocks to resolving this dispute. However, I look forward to the court finally deciding the case on the merits.”
At this point, there has not been a ruling from Jackson about whether Obama's executive privilege will stand. A ruling on whether executive privilege applies to the Fast and Furious documents in question is expected within the next two weeks.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/10/01/judge-slaps-down-eric-holders-request-for-fast-and-furious-lawsuit-to-be-dismissed-n1713760
Dr. Ben Carson: ‘I had my first encounter with the IRS’ after challenging Obama
At an event in Birmingham, Ala. Monday night, former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson revealed that he had received a visit from the Internal Revenue Service following his much-noted remarks at a National Prayer Breakfast earlier this year.“I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the prayer breakfast,” Carson told an audience that at the annual Business
Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner, according to a report from Cliff Sims of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Yellowhammer NewsCarson’s February speech February made him a conservative darling for criticizing President Barack Obama’s
2010 health care reform law, while Obama was sitting just a few feet away.During the event, which also featured former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Carson spoke about the potential presidential candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. relations with Russia and the Environmental Protection
Agency.
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