Who's to blame?

Our President was not happy to learn he had to cancel his $100,00 per couple party celebrating his first year in office.  He sincerely was looking forward to hearing a pack of fat cats tell him how great he is, but alas, that was not to be.  Just the same, I'm willing to bet he kept the money.

A major problem with using a partial government shutdown as a political bargaining tool is that most Americans don't notice it happening.  The current shutdown has distracted media attention from other matters, like payoffs to porn stars, for example, but given that chaos is what America has come to expect over the past year, a little thing like failure to fund the government for a while is unlikely to have much lasting political impact.

I suppose it's interesting to see the Democrats take a stand on something that resembles principle — even though saving DACA currently is more of an excuse for a fight than an ideological imperative to party leadership.  Most important is to demonstrate that Democrats can be just as obstructionist as Republicans were under Obama.  What we have now is a political power struggle, pure and simple.

Of course, this particular battle could have been averted had the President displayed any consistency in the positions he took regarding immigration policy over the past week — or any of his self-proclaimed genius for negotiation.  Sadly, Tr*mp's pathetic need to please empowers whoever last occupied his brief attention span — and Stephen Miller effectively ensures that those people always will be conservative extremists.

Idiocy

Please try to explain this one: after closing down the government and furloughing 800,000 "non-essential" workers (now down to around 500,000 because Chuck Hagel redefined "essential" for the Defense Department), the House Republicans voted to pay those furloughed workers for the time they are not working.

Huh?

If government is bloated and overfunded, why in the hell would they want to pay people for work they haven't done?  Yes, it makes perfect sense to give the "essential" workers, slogging on without paychecks during the shutdown, back pay when the idiotic "crisis" is over — but why do they want to pay, say, the labor statistics people who were unable to produce a report for September, or the food inspectors who aren't finding the bacterial infections that might be in our lettuce?  Isn't that kind of like — umm — welfare?

Okay, it looks like a debt default will be pushed back by six weeks — but goddamn it, they're still idiots.

. . . . .

(By the way, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and even the Koch brothers are feeling the red-hot poker of Tea Party craziness sliding up their asses.  They really should have known better,  along with scores of other pro-business lobbyists, but they put anti-regulatory enthusiasm above common sense.  Too bad, assholes.  You were idiots too.)

The "Train Wreck"

John Boehner really, really, really wants to keep his job as Speaker.  He's not stupid, and I'm sure he doesn't want to shut down the government, but he had to go along with the radical crazies in his caucus for fear of losing his job.  That's why he supported the House bill to defund Obamacare, referring to the ACA as a "train wreck."

The real train wreck will come at the end of the month, when government shuts down.  Unlike the catastrophic Congress Clinton had to deal with back in the nineties, which had enacted a fair number of appropriations bills before digging in its heels, the current Congress had not passed any appropriations bills at all.

Not long after, of course, we come up against the debt ceiling.  Will the crazies carry through on their threat to let the USofA default on its debts?  Are they really that crazy?

I guess all we can do is wait and see.