Ezra Klein’s unanswered question

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by Doctor Science

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post’s Wonkblog just interviewed Robert Costa, Washington Editor of the conservative flagship National Review, about John Boehner’s strategy in the shutdown/Obamacare circus and why he doesn’t just ditch the hard right. Along the way, Costa said:

… many of these members [of Congress] now live in the conservative world of talk radio and tea party conventions and Fox News invitations. And so the conservative strategy of the moment, no matter how unrealistic it might be, catches fire. The members begin to believe they can achieve things in divided government that most objective observers would believe is impossible. Leaders are dealing with these expectations that wouldn’t exist in a normal environment.

This IMHO is one of the driving forces behind Reality Politics: the fact that it is broadcast, that it plays well — and continuously — on TV. Anyway, Ezra then asked the big question:

Why does that happen, though? It would absolutely be possible for liberal members to cocoon themselves in a network of liberal Web sites and liberal cable news shows and liberal activists. But in the end, liberal members of Congress end up agreeing to broadly conventional definitions of what is and isn’t politically realistic. So how do House Republicans end up convincing themselves of unrealistic plans, particularly when they’ve seen them fail before, and when respected voices in the Republican and even conservative establishment are warning against them?

Costa replied that “When you get the members off the talking points you come to a simple conclusion: They don’t face consequences for taking these hardline positions”, but this doesn’t actually answer Ezra’s question.

As Ezra said, liberals have our own cocoon, but that doesn’t drive Democratic Congresspeople into cycles of increasing wackiness. What is it about the Republican cocoon that *does*? And, very importantly for all of us, how do we get them to stop and focus on the actual job of government?

I’m thinking it’s a couple of things. First of all, conservative Reality Politics pays *really well*, much better than any liberal equivalent would. Fox News is extremely profitable; Air America went bankrupt. If you look at Amazon’s “Conservatism and Liberalism” best-sellers list, it’s mostly conservatives. As I write, Amazon’s overall best-sellers list is topped by Bill O’Reilly, with Rush Limbaugh’s children’s book (wtf) in 5th place.

I’ve just spent hours writing and deleting any number of theories about why the conservative bubble seems so hard to break out of, besides the money. It’s got to have something to do with the value conservatives place on in-group loyalty, but that’s probably not enough.

After the 2012 election, I argued that it should be comparatively easy for conservatives to change their policy goals because their information bubble is so centralized. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes

could get Republicans to change — not by saying “change”, of course, but by staking out a new position and saying over and over again that it’s what they believed all along. “We have always been worried about global warming”, “we have always wanted universal health care” — I don’t see why these should be any more difficult than “we have always been opposed to abortion” or “we have always liked MLK”.

But Ailes and Murdoch are in the bubble, themselves: they can’t focus on realistic policy goals any more than any other Republicans can, their information is no better.

I don’t have enough of a gut feel for how the conservative bubble works to see a way to pop it, at least from time to time — enough for even GOP Congresspeople to actually do some productive work.

America-not-shut-down-properly

One of the most popular shutdown tweets, from Chris Hall.

192 thoughts on “Ezra Klein’s unanswered question”

  1. But they are achieving their impossible goals. The sequester levels of funding are now the basis of a “clean continuing resolution” — the sequester is the new normal.
    The Rs are intransigent and lie and break procedural norms because it works for them, because it consistently allows them to achieve things they could not achieve otherwise (bluntly: without cheating). And because it’s rewarded in goals achieved, it’s reinforced.

  2. What joel hanes said.
    If one side plays by the unspoken rules and the other doesn’t and there is no direct way of retribution, that is to the rule breakers’ advantage, especially when slightly more than half of the referees were put in place by them.
    In Washington the GOP for the most part at least stays within the formal rules. They violate the spirit not (all too obviously) the letter. In the states the party has long stepped beyond that.

  3. “As Ezra said, liberals have our own cocoon, but that doesn’t drive Democratic Congresspeople into cycles of increasing wackiness.”
    No, actually it does. It just doesn’t look like that from inside that particular cocoon. You don’t see the cycles of wackiness because you’re taking part in them.

  5. Cocoon might not be the appropriate word. If I were properly cocooned, how is it that I wake up every morning and after checking some more important places on the internet, I retreat to my Obsidian Wings “cocoon” only to find Brett Bellmore snugly inside it.
    Not that I mind, mind you. 😉 It’s just that I had become so cocooned here after Moe Lane and the cast of dozens retreated to Erick Erickson’s high security cocoon with the watch towers, minefields, and machine gun implacements.
    co·coon
    kəˈko͞on/
    noun
    noun: cocoon; plural noun: cocoons
    1. a silky case spun by the larvae of many insects for protection in the pupal stage.
    a covering that prevents the corrosion of metal equipment.
    something that envelops or surrounds, esp. in a protective or comforting way.
    “the cocoon of her kimono”
    verb
    verb: cocoon; 3rd person present: cocoons; past tense: cocooned; past participle: cocooned; gerund or present participle: cocooning
    1. envelop or surround in a protective or comforting way.
    “we began to feel cold even though we were cocooned in our sleeping bags”
    synonyms: wrap, swathe, swaddle, muffle, cloak, enfold, envelop, cover, fold More
    “he cocooned her in a towel”
    protect, shield, shelter, screen, cushion, insulate, isolate, cloister
    “he was cocooned in the university”
    Now, if we really do mean cocoon, as in larval, pupal stage on the way to further stages, then what sort of god-awful carapaced, bejawed monsters are the Republicans hatching?
    The Gingrich bunch (and why does John Boehner get to cocoon twice, what is he, a cicada appearing every 18 years to sing our doom, as his fellow bug filth munch on the body politic?) might have been the worm stage. Then cocooning (were it de Kooning, at least we’d get some art out of it) until now, and these current hopeless romantics are what …. butterflies?
    Besides, the Confederacy cocooned restlessly for 85 years before giving forth with the biggest slaughter in U.S. domestic history.
    This current crop are this, (see my next comment) and they will evolve from sequel to sequel to our, uh detriment, unless we do what folks used to do during caterpillar infestations years ago .. get a big stick, knock the cocoon out of the tree, douse it with gasoline and place it in a metal barrel for safe immolation.

  7. IMO the simple answer to why the folks who voted to shut ‘er down did so is because their constituents wanted them to.
    They appear to be accurately representing their districts.
    I agree that a lot of folks live in a ‘cocoon’, in the sense of an insular, self-reinforcing network of the like-minded. I definitely agree that the fabric of the American conservative cocoon includes a for-profit opinion industry that dwarfs whatever ‘liberals’ are bringing to bear.
    But the irreducible heart of the matter is that a pretty large proportion of the population of the US are heartily in favor of the shutdown. Or, at least, find the shutdown preferable to the rollout of the ACA.
    Their reps are simply doing their will. Enthusiastically, yes, but nonetheless they’re not acting on their own.
    The biggest difference I see between American conservatives and basically everybody else is their willingness to pull the plug if they can’t prevail through normal political means.
    Folks anywhere to the left of, basically, Eisenhower have eaten an unending and nearly uninterrupted series of crap sandwiches since about 1980, and to my knowledge have not deliberately torn up the railbeds in protest.
    It doesn’t bode well.

  8. Liberal cycles of whackiness? What would those be?
    Oh yeah, complaints about WMD lies to get the US into Iraq. Man, it’s just unforgivable how the congressional Dems tried to shut down the government to prevent that war, at the behest of the loonie left.
    Or do you mean how Obama and congress TOTALLY CAVED to the Occupy demands that Wall Street be put into a regulatory straight jacket, and that tax rates on dividends and “carried interest” be jacked up so that the 0.001% pay their share?

  9. “Their reps are simply doing their will. Enthusiastically, yes, but nonetheless they’re not acting on their own.”
    “Folks anywhere to the left of, basically, Eisenhower have eaten an unending and nearly uninterrupted series of crap sandwiches since about 1980, and to my knowledge have not deliberately torn up the railbeds in protest.”
    Yes, we only have a little time left to stem the tide:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md6Dvxdr0AQ

  10. Too late Erskine:
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/debt-default-catastrophic-erskine-bowles-121604007.html
    Erskine could start tearing up the railbeds by putting a bullet in this guy’s head:
    http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/republicans-hostages-over-debt-ceiling-u-won-t-122234134.html
    Stockman is such a cute pupae. At least he uses the language of terrorist subhuman Republican filth -“hostages”.
    My vision of tearing up the railbeds envisions no hostages.

  11. Republican philosophy, such as it is, comes down to “I got mine. You can’t get yours or I will have less, so screw you.” It’s a philosophy of keeping access to power in the hands of those already powerful, and any attempts to use government to increase a access to power for those who don’t currently have it is viewed as a threat.
    So you have selfish fearful politicians who use hate-mongering and fear-mongering messages to get elected by appealing to those voters who are susceptible to such messages.
    It isn’t surprising to me that we witness ruthlessly selfish behavior from people who have already demonstrated a pattern of ruthlessly selfish behavior rooted in a political philosophy that rationalizes selfishness. The starting point–government for me and not for thee–starts off the whole cycle.
    How to break out of that cycle? I don’t know if Republican politicians can. After all, the Tea Party is different in degree from the rest of the party, not in kind.

  13. Brett:
    By “cycles of increasing whackiness” I was referring to only what Ezra is talking about: politicians clinging to things that are *politically* impractical. As he says, liberal members of Congress end up agreeing to broadly conventional definitions of what is and isn’t politically realistic.
    So we’re not talking about liberals in general, but about liberal Congresspeople — who aren’t a particularly liberal group of liberals. And they do, in fact, stay quite conventional in their definitions of political realism.
    For instance, probably a majority of the Democratic hard-core base wanted Obama’s starting point for health care reform to be single-payer. But we were prepared to be negotiated down from that, we didn’t go into the process expecting to get everything we asked for.
    When Obama started with Romneycare instead, we were disappointed, but we didn’t scream BETRAYAL! — or at least, not enough to impede the process of actually getting something passed. We were prepared to accept the argument that “single-payer isn’t politically feasible”, and that Obama had to make these calculations.
    It’s the inability of Republican politicians to make political calculations that Ezra and I are talking about.

  15. The reason for the cocoon is simple: right-wing thinkers automatically reject whatever the MSM (main-stream media) say. They have convinced themselves that anybody NOT of the bubble is deliberately and systematically lying to them, and therefore can be ignored.

  16. “Liberal cycles of whackiness? What would those be?”
    Your obsession with gun control comes to mind. It’s a cause liberals have pursued for years without any real empirical basis for thinking you’d accomplish anything good, and at huge political cost to yourselves. Seriously, if at any time in the last thirty years you’d genuinely abandoned that particular obsession, the GOP would have been toast.

  17. russell:
    Those representatives are doing the will of constituents who are stuck in that same echo chamber. Those voters are sending people to Washington — hiring them, in effect — who are actively opposed to doing a job, who are just there to perform. But it’s the infotainment bubble that’s given the voters the idea that performing is a congressdude’s most important job.
    Several people — including Costa, in this interview — say getting rid of earmarks is part of what’s causing the trouble. The earmark system was corrupt, of course, but it gave low-ranking Congresspeople something to bring back to the district as an accomplishment, to show that they’re doing their job.
    Without earmarks, it’s much harder for the party leadership to keep the back bench in line — they have less to trade — and back benchers have nothing to show for their time, if they don’t grandstand.

  18. Your obsession with gun control comes to mind.
    I started a comment to rebut, and realized that yet another thread was on the verge of going down another gun-shaped rabbit hole.
    As a mental exercise, let’s all imagine 248 comments about guns.
    OK, done?
    Thank you.
    Now, with all of our previously held opinions still firmly in place, let’s return to our previously scheduled programming.

  19. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Shutdown_Blues
    Pierce is on a roll.
    He doesn’t see a way out, though. No wave election to get rid of the Republican extremists. There is a wider corruption that works to support the Republican party: the anti-intellectualism of much of our punditry. The corporate media has been covering for the Republican party for years and will continue to do so with “he said/she said” and “both sides do it” and horse race coverage so that the non-crazy but busy voter will not be able to connect the dots.
    Many societies have degenerated in the past. I don’t know why I have always assumed that ours would have a gradual upward curve with slow but real improvements, improvements always resisted by conservatives of course because that’s what conservatives do. To a conservative, life is a zero-sum game. If someone else gets access to a job or a raise or health insurance or a grant to go to college or the right to vote or marry, somehow that has to be taking away from the conservative and must be resisted!. Of course, after years of fighting to keep other people down, conservatives will forget and deny their role in the past while continuing to fight against their fellow Americans in the present. There’s an amazing Youtube of Reagan speechifying against Medicare back in the sixties. Did you know that Medicare was socialized medicine and would lead to the end of democracy? Social Security, Medicaid, Voting Rights, gay marriage, all considered an existential threats to conservatives until the conservatives moved on to claiming something else was an existential threat. Now it’s the end of the world if their fellow Americans get health insurance.

  20. I want no gun control.
    I want guns and ammo and clips and superb optic sights. I want target silhouettes of every Republican politician Republican media vermin, and each and every individual among the 27% base (a good name for the basest of the reptilian instincts) at the gun range for practice.
    That’s my liberal whackiness getting the best of me, because I’m saving the worst of me for Republicans, motherf*ckers.
    Meanwhile, here’s Charles Pierce of Esquire, via Balloon Juice, in answer to Doctor Science and Ezra Klein who, among others, wish to reason their way through Republican behavior:
    ” … In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court…
    This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains….”
    What we have here is one big happy cocoon.

  23. Your obsession with gun control comes to mind.
    The lack of government shutdowns or impeachments or even filibusters also comes to mind. It isn’t bringing things to a grinding fncking halt. The zeal with which the GOP pursues unrealistic things is a crucial part of the phenomenon being discussed. (That, and the motivation behind gun control, overly idealistic or naive as you may think it is, is to prevent lots of people from being shot.)

  24. That’d be 251 and countmeing:
    http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/02/guns-do-kill-people/
    Contra the cited article, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh (children’ book author, sort of a pop-up, large print mash-up of Atlas Shrugged, the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, the pamphlets of the John Birch Society, and Mein Kampf) and Michelle Bachmann (so many choices) will be dispatched with some slow, surgical scissors work.

  26. The key paragraphs:
    Obama has accused Republicans of hostage taking. Let’s be clear: I’m all for taking hostages. Both sides do it all the time. But one of the first things they teach you in Hostage Taking 101 is that you have to choose a hostage the other side cares about saving. Obama and the Democrats don’t care about stopping a government shutdown. With a shutdown, Republicans are essentially putting a gun to their own heads and threatening to pull the trigger if the Democrats don’t capitulate. Not surprisingly, it’s not working.
    Some congressional Republicans can’t seem to get it though their heads: When it comes to a government shutdown they . . . have . . . no . . . leverage. By contrast, when it comes to the debt-limit showdown, they do have leverage; while Obama can let the government close and blame the GOP, he cannot allow the United States to default.
    See? He says it right out: Democrats care about protecting the nation from the effects of default and Republican politicians don’t. There for the blackmail used to keep people from getting health insurance should be the threat to trash the economy of the whole nation.

  27. I actually agree, no point in going there: The very nature of a conceptual blind spot is that you can’t see it. I can’t see mine, and you can’t see yours. At most we can reason that, being falible humans, we have them, and not be so lacking in humility as to pretend otherwise.

  28. Although I can appreciate a good sniper rifle, I personally prefer axes and maces. But to set an example trampling by rogue elephants should be the means of choice here (plus stoning to death with live gerbils for selected cases).

  30. With a shutdown, Republicans are essentially putting a gun to their own heads and threatening to pull the trigger

    Which, God help me, sent me right into Blazing Saddles.

  31. Problem is, the GOP head will not slow down enough the large calibre bullet going through it. It will inevitably hit a lot of bystanders (btw, this is also known as Cossack musket testing).

  32. The Republicans, many of them anyway, reason that, as the ‘shutdown’ (Barely a slowdown, actually.) continues, more an more people will notice that it isn’t troubling them. Perhaps this won’t happen, perhaps Obama can manage the shutdown to maximize the pain, but that’s what many of them expect: That the average person will barely notice the government “shutting down”, and after a while, wonder, if this is a government shutdown, whether they really need the government all that much.

  33. “The very nature of a conceptual blind spot is that you can’t see it.”
    So we’re shutting down the government, defaulting on the debt, and sending millions of Americans into an economic maelstrom, in which some of them will die, over something you can’t even see?
    The ACA was passed by both Houses of Congress as the Constitution stipulates, and declared Constitutional by the U.S Supreme Court — tally: five blind spots to four blind spots, as the Constitution specifies.
    Average person? We’re appealing now to just the average? Talk about the tyranny of low expectations.
    What does the exceptional person’s blind spot say, invisibly and I presume, silently?
    I had a huge blind spot long ago.
    I saw it. It was so huge that I kept catching in my peripheral vision. I thought it was a very large retinal floater or maybe I was coming down with glaucoma or macular degeneration, both genetic susceptibilities in my family, and presumably not covered in the future if I lose my health insurance under current Republican terrorist hostage tactics, so my other blind spot about not using big honking weaponry against people who mean to harm me will require night vision goggles, an exploding guide dog, and indiscriminate discharges of ammo.
    Then I changed my voter registration from Republican to the smaller and more manageable blind spots of the Democratic Party.

  34. That the average person will barely notice the government “shutting down”, and after a while, wonder, if this is a government shutdown, whether they really need the government all that much.
    In the short term, the “average” (or, maybe, “representative of the aggregate”) person might not need the government. But the longer it goes on, the more and more people will come to notice that they do, in fact, need the government. So the average aggregated person will notice more and more as time goes on. In the short term, there are a few people who might actually suffer material harm, not enough to significant alter the aggregate person, assuming most people don’t care about anyone but themselves, of course.
    I have a project at work that’s being affected already, what with the FCC partly shut down. But that’s just me. You probably don’t care.

  35. Laura skrev :
    Pierce is on a roll.
    driftglass has covered that particular territory of angst and despair with considerable brilliance for eight or nine years now, and achieves incandescence about as frequently as the estimable Pierce. He deserves to be better read.

  36. Your obsession with gun control comes to mind.
    No one has yet suggested that we shutdown the government, or refuse to pay the governments’s bills, over gun control.
    It’s a policy dispute, and you may think that Democrats, or liberals, simply don’t understand it. OK. You are not alone. But the actions that have been taken – trying to pass relevant legislation, mostly – are well within the scope of normal political behavior, rather than the GOP lunacy over ACA.

  37. “The very nature of a conceptual blind spot is that you can’t see it.”
    Which is why we need people like Brett to point them out. But so far all he’s been able to do is come up with ONE r/w talking point of dubious value.
    Now, when exactly did the Dems bend to the will of extreme leftists, and threaten things like government shutdowns to pass gun control measures? (Note: ‘submitting a bill for a vote in Congress’ != unprecedented extreme measures)
    I guess that was after Obama put gun-control as a high priority on his 1st and 2nd re-election campaigns. Or after the Democrats took over both houses of congress in 2006.
    If Brett can’t come up with an actual “blind spot”, perhaps he has the same one.

  38. As it turns out I’m an average person, unlike the elite terrorist squads Brett is referring to.
    For your “entertainment” pleasure ..
    A few minutes ago I called the National Finance Center, part of a Federal agency which processes my health insurance premiums through the Federal Employees Health Benefits system, a Group insurance system, passing them on each month to my private health insurance provider.
    Although I am not a Federal employee at the now, though i have been for short periods in the past, this arrangement is a product of a negotiated Court-ordered divorce settlement you know, rule of law, with my former wife, who still works for the Federal Government.
    As an aside, my 23 year old son, who has a pre-existing condition that could be construed as unisurable under the Republican Death Panel provisions, is covered as well for now as a result of the ACA.
    I pay the full premium each month, the full individual rate under the group plan, NOT the subsidized rate (the federal government pays approximately 75% of federal employees health benefits; this includes Mitch McConnell’s, John Boehner’s, and all of the other little Cantor death merchants’ health benefits in the House of Representatives; many health plans run by employers in the private sector subsidize their employee’s plans as well, as if all of you don’t know that because of blind spots).
    The NFC, through a recording, informed me that as a result of the furloughs, they are deeply understaffed and will not be able to answer any questions about the disposition of my insurance payments.
    Furthermore, and this doesn’t affect me but does affect untold other spouses (mostly housewives who don’t work or are underemployed I expect and too old to wade into the crocodile-infested river of individual private insurance) and dependents of Federal employees who have been recently divorced and are just now, because of Court orders, applying for this program are going to be sh*t out of luck because the Personnel Departments of the agencies their former spouses worked for must approve and process the paperwork first before sending it on to the NFC.
    Many of those Personnel Departments are on furlough as well, apparently indefinitely and maybe forever because your average white c*cksucker, who make up roughly 27% of the eminently killable c*cksucker Republican base thinks they can get along with an increasingly large blind spot.
    I’m not eliciting sympathy, anyone who believes I am can shove it where the sun shine, but do you know what is coming into view in MY blind spot right about now, as filth try to harm me?
    The photos of what I now see in my blind spot are provided in the other thread on some fixed links.
    I’m 62 years old.
    Fuck the Republican Party.
    Hurt them. Hurt their children.

  40. Too late, big business:
    You are on the f*cking list, by which I mean the “rat” list compiled by the hateful vermin in the Republican Party on a daily basis.
    Sit over here with the rest of us hostages and shut your f*cking yaps.
    Here’s what the Republican Party sadistic remnant are going to do to YOU big business, as you puss out at the last minute on the Republican killing fields”
    Let’s call you “Bats”, for short:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTEImx8BLs
    You have plenty of company alongside blacks, gays, immigrants, wetbacks, the sick, the poor, all liberals, foreigners, the uninsured, the about-to-be uninsured, gay foreigners, gay sick foreigners, gay sick foreign uninsured blacks with wet backs, RINOs, gay RINOs, gay rhinoceri, RINOS who suffer uninsured from the Rhinovirus, straight RINOs with wide stances, women, pregnant women, women pregnant with gay fetuses, Connecticut elementary school children, Navy shipyard employees regardless of sexual orientation ……
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/with-traditional-gop-allies-defecting-big-business-leaders-take-sides-with-obama
    But, now big business leaders, you adorable Dr. Frankensteins, who created and funded this monster, you’re on my list too.
    You don’t want to be on my f*cking list either.

  41. Those representatives are doing the will of constituents who are stuck in that same echo chamber.
    I understand what you’re saying. It’s just not all that clear to me that the folks who live in the deep-red districts highlighted on the map hold the opinions they do solely or even primarily because they are stuck in an echo chamber.
    More specifically, being in that echo chamber isn’t something that just happened to them, if they are there it’s because that’s where they want to be.
    If they’re listening to Rush on the radio, they could just as easily listen to NPR, or the BBC.
    If they’re watching Bill O’Reilly or Beck or whoever the heck else is out there these days, they could just as easily watch Maddow or John Stewart.
    If they’re reading RedState, they could just as easily read Kos, or TPM, or whoever.
    It’s just a click away.
    To the degree that they’re in an echo chamber, they are there because it’s where they choose to be. And they choose to be there because what they hear there is, to them, congenial.
    Everybody’s prone to it, not just folks in the deep red zones.
    I agree with your sense that conservative interests have a much larger and better-funded megaphone, but the left-wing one exists too. Stewart, Maddow, McClatchey (and all 1,328 people who read it!), ProPublica (who show up in lots of places, actually), etc etc etc.
    Folks who watch Maddow aren’t watching a lot of Fox, except maybe to make fun or stoke up their personal sense of indignation. And, vice versa.
    The opinions of folks in the deep-red zones are not a product of a conservative media industry. By and large, they believed the things they believe before Fox ever went on the air.
    The country isn’t united. People believe wildly different things, want wildly different things, and think wildly different things are valuable and important.
    There’s a sort of notional common ground, but IMO a lot of that is basically semantic collision. I.e., people say the same things, but mean different things by them.
    Freedom, liberty, family values, community, society. Ask me what those words mean, and how they are expressed in my life, and ask the same of somebody from south-eastern MO (to pick an arbitrary example), and you will get different answers.
    I have no idea how to proceed from where we are at the moment. The country is becoming ungovernable.

  42. IMO, it isn’t becoming ungovernable, it was always ungovernable. It’s just that, previously, nobody was trying this hard to govern it as a unit.
    This is the point, after all, of federalism: You unite on those things you can’t avoid having to do together, like not being invaded, and leave the local stuff local, so that people don’t HAVE to agree to live under the same government.
    The more you insist that the over-arching government takes on issues we disagree on, the harder it gets to hold things together.

  43. I’m now ungovernable, for one.
    For those still in an “entertainment” reality show mode, in which the fantasy lives on that satire will somehow kill the Republican menace, as if the Republican Party party was the Ice Capades, watch the first 8 minutes or so of Jon Stewart last night.
    Have a few last chuckles (it was funny) as satire is holstered and the reality firepower is unsheathed.
    It wasn’t Spike Jones’ musical satire of the Fuhrer during World War II that brought down the Third Reich.
    It was violence.

  45. “The more you insist that the over-arching government takes on issues we disagree on, the harder it gets to hold things together.”
    That statement nullifies every law passed in this country since 1776.
    The same words were uttered as threats for two decades leading up to the Civil War.
    Fine.
    I disagree, therefore the only thing for it is to blow up the country.

  46. Well, thanks for clarifying that; Given your usual writing style, I’d assumed your ‘eliminationist rhetoric’ was just some kind of parody.
    So, essentially what you’re saying is, forget federalism, you’re willing to kill for the right to impose your values on people who disagree with you?
    Please correct me if I’m wrong about this, I sometimes find your writing hard to correctly parse.

  47. Attitude-wise, I think precisely as you do, Brett.
    Gentleman (someone run out and find me some gentleman).
    I want my way or my militia will force my way.
    Two blind spots meet and darkness ensues for everyone.
    Too late for sane talk from you, Brett, and your touching, albeit fake, concern about eliminationist rhetoric.
    I learned to mimic the right’s eliminationist rhetoric on the Internet and the broadcast media, by reading T-shirt and lapel button rhetoric on sale at gun shows and Republican hate-fetes, by standing outside Democratic political town-meetings and getting a load of the hateful filth spewed by those outside, some of them armed.
    I’ll let YOU know when mimicry stops and the real item starts.
    Very touching comment, though, Brett.
    And I do wish you the best of health with what is coming.
    I know you can fend for yourself.

  48. The Republicans, many of them anyway, reason that, as the ‘shutdown’ (Barely a slowdown, actually.) continues, more an more people will notice that it isn’t troubling them.
    Well then many, if not most, Republicans are idiots. The longer the shutdown goes, the worse it will get. When the feds cancel (i.e., stop paying for) ongoing contracts, throw hundreds of thousands into the unemployment lines, and shut down just about all but the barest minimum of defense related activity the groundswell of revulsion could cast the GOP into a dark place they have not experienced since 1936.
    Sometimes, in wacky moments, I wish the GOP delusion makes them hold out until that point is reached. But I know the harm that will result. It’s not worth it. Even from here on the far (but not farthest) left fringe…………….
    <...the cycles of wackiness>
    I voted for George McGovern in ’72 and Walt Mondale when he promised to raise taxes. Other than that, I got nothing in the wackiness department.
    With all due respect to the humility induced by my not seen by me blind spots.

  49. This is the point, after all, of federalism
    No. It absolutely is not. The blood of the 600,000 or so dead during this thing called the “civil war” stands as a rebuke to your gilbertarian ahistoricism.

  50. Eliminationist actions, not just rhetoric, from the top Federal down, despite the Federalist nature of the program in question here, in which funds are distributed to the States to be applied as they deem, which by the way, is exactly as you described just the other day right here how food is distributed to the poor, instead of “forcing” grocery stores to sell cheaply to those who can’t afford it.
    http://money.msn.com/family-money/9-million-moms-babies-at-risk-as-wic-program-halts
    I counsel those who are going to be denied food and other items under this program to go to your local grocery store and shoplift everything you need.
    Don’t forget to bring your weapons.
    Mimicry or the real thing?
    Inquiring really don’t want to find out.

  51. “minds” would have included in that last sentence, but why use words that don’t apply to the enemy.

  53. A corollary of who is going to notice what as the shutdown continues and the Nation defaults, is that the Republican Party KNOWS that their armed 27% base will blame this debacle on the nigger in the White House, and no doubt they’ll pick up a few percentage points along the way among the closest racists.
    Those are the vandals the Republican Party is “entertaining” with this tap dance in exploding tap shoes.

  54. The blood of the 600,000 or so dead during this thing called the “civil war” stands as a rebuke to your gilbertarian ahistoricism.
    Not ahistorical, I think.
    Just rehashing an old argument.
    Nothing new about any of this.

  55. Been a while since I got beat up by you guys. I’ll put my conservative hat on for this. (I’m a hawkish libertarian by and large, so the conservative hat fits better than the liberal one does anyway.)
    In re. “wackiness”: Legislative minorities are much more prone to wackiness than majorities are. The Dems during the Bush years were not as wacky as the GOP is right now, but they were pretty wacky, and were perfectly happy to erode congressional customs (e.g. filibustering on appointments) when it suited their purposes. I’m not sure that the Republican wackiness isn’t anything more than an evolution of a trend that began in the mid-90’s.
    Rather than ask why the GOP has gotten so wacky, I think the better question to ask is why there’s a negative zone of possible agreement. Usually you create a positive ZOPA by packaging different sets of goodies together until everybody can hold their nose and shake hands. That requires skilled negotiation, which appears to be totally absent from all three parties involved. I don’t think that that’s so much a systemic problem as a simple lack of talent–it happens sometimes.
    For another major contributor to the negative ZOPA, you omitted the most important quote from the Klein/Costa interview, though:

    What we’re seeing is the collapse of institutional Republican power. It’s not so much about Boehner. It’s things like the end of earmarks. They move away from Tom DeLay and they think they’re improving the House, but now they have nothing to offer their members.

    All the usual tools of negotiation have been stripped away. (I’ll leave my rant for why John McCain is possibly the single most destructive individual in modern congressional history for another day…) If you had those tools, then the “cocoon” would have considerably less influence.
    On to the cocoon: Let’s define “mainstream media” to mean all of the media organs that existed before 1995: network news, newspapers, broadcast and movie entertainment complexes. Remember that the conservative media started as a reaction against the MSM and what the conservative media perceives as liberal bias. It is correct to perceive it that way.
    While all the rotten fruit is still in mid-flight, let me take a stab at the reason why there’s such a huge disconnect on this between conservatives and liberals. It isn’t so much that the MSM covers conservative stories negatively and liberal stories positively. Rather, the MSM chooses not to cover at all a lot of stories that conservatives are interested in. Some of these are left uncovered because the editorial boards view them as illegitimate; others are neglected because the members of the media really do skew liberal and they can’t understand why anybody would be interested in the story.
    The genius of Ailes wasn’t ideological; it was a pure marketing play. He found a set of consumers that weren’t getting the product they didn’t yet know that they wanted, and he provided it to them. The early days at Fox weren’t different because of how the obvious stories were covered. They were different because the editorial selection of stories skewed conservative. I’d argue that this is still largely true, but things have definitely taken a turn for the weird in the last five years, as Fox has had to compete with other, shriller, conservative outlets.
    The toughness of the conservative cocoon comes from the fact that the MSM still stubbornly refuses to cover the stories that conservatives want to hear about, not because they’re biased in the ones that they do cover. They’re probably correct from a Journalism 101 “don’t give crazy people a megaphone” standpoint, but they’re doing themselves and the public a disservice for several reasons:

    1. Most of the issues not covered aren’t crazy; they’re simply of interest to a different market, and that market is used to having them presented using an odd set of rhetorical tools.
    2. They’re aggravating the polarization because they can’t engage, much less attract, a bipartisan set of readers.
    3. They’ve perpetuated the “liberal MSM” meme, which gives the conservative media the ability to hunker down and coin its own jargon and buzzwords unchallenged, and that’s leading to two completely different narrative streams.

    This last effect is something that liberals and conservatives react to very differently. Liberals seriously damaged their brand in the mid-60’s to mid-80’s, and their rhetorical tools got damaged at the same time. As a result liberals have been very careful to couch their arguments in pragmatic rhetoric. Conservatives, whose brand was still ascendant when they started building their own media system, were perfectly comfortable with their rhetoric, which has allowed it to become more and more extreme. A big reason why Republicans sound crazy is because their quotes sound crazy. There are obviously major substantive differences, too, but I’ll bet they’d look a lot less dramatic if they had a Democratic PR firm rewrite them but preserve the content.
    Now that conservatives have damaged their own brand, my guess is that the rhetoric will moderate, or at least the buzzwords will sound a little less crazy. I suspect that that moderation will be significantly impeded by the toughness of the cocoon, but the odds of a total repudiation in 2014 are going up awfully fast. What they’re doing is unsustainable, and when something can’t go on forever, it will stop. (Something we should all remember in the next entitlement fight.)

  56. That’s pretty good, TheRadicalModerate, I must say.
    Too bad that news and healthcare are treated as commodities like any other … tin, hay, and lion fur and poppies.

  57. That requires skilled negotiation, which appears to be totally absent from all three parties involved
    I don’t think so.
    I think that any President, regardless of party, has to refuse to negotiate over the debt ceilling. No matter what. Obama is refusing to negotiate, but any other President would do the exact same thing.
    If you cut any kind of deal over this sort of hostage taking at all, even just once, then hostage taking will be used again in the future. Sooner or later, someone is going to miscalculate and we’re going to end up destroying the economy.
    Yglesias explained it pretty well a few days ago.
    It is correct to perceive it that way.
    Your point would be improved by citing evidence.
    the MSM chooses not to cover at all a lot of stories that conservatives are interested in.
    OK, let’s put this to the test: give me five serious non-BS stories that the MSM has refused to cover (i.e., I shouldn’t be able to find them in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times) that Rush Limbaugh has talked about in the last 30 days.
    Now that conservatives have damaged their own brand, my guess is that the rhetoric will moderate, or at least the buzzwords will sound a little less crazy.
    Couldn’t you have said exactly the same thing in 2006 when they lost the House or 2008 or 2012? If the branding hypothesis keeps being disproved by reality, then…maybe it is not a good hypothesis?

  58. Hey look, bending over backwards to offer the American people more choices, including NOT signing up for Obamacare if they wish to and incur a small fine (as opposed to the Republican plan to offer 50 or 60 million uninsured people no choice whatsoever except the emergency room and penury) might not be a sound marketing plan.
    They might want fewer choices:
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/an-overloooked-obamacare-flaw–too-many-choices-181716002.html
    These Americans, they say one thing and do the other.

  59. It is a good, thoughtful read. Thank you. Not surprisingly, since I’m a liberal, I don’t buy some hunks of it.
    The MSM is not liberal. Really the case can’t be made for that. Maybe it does leave out stories of concern to conservatives, but all you have to do is compare the MSM to truly liberal outlets and you can see that they also leave out stories of concern to the left. Where are the stories about fracking, about Idle No More, about the effecs of natural gas development on public lands? Where are the stories about the attacks on Planned Parenthood? Where are the stories about voter suppression?
    The MSM is nearly contentless. Not liberal, not conservative, just cowardly and content-free.
    Heck Chuck Todd admitted as much when he said that the was not obliged to correct a politicians who was asserting falsehoods.
    Stenography, horse race reporting, he said/she said, false equivalence.
    I also think you are being a bit naïve when you see current conservative rhetoric as crazy in word choice or phraseology, but not content. I think the crazy word choice is an honest expression of content. The problem, as I see it, is the old Republican party, Eisenhower’s party, has been replaced by people who really are religious fanatics or Ayn Rand fanatics or Rove/Koch-style Social Darwinists. Having them replace their honest craziness with more appealing rhetoric won’t make them less dangerous to the rest of us.
    I would love it if the Republican party went back to being the party of Eisenhower. It wasn’t a perfect party, (Red Scare), but no party is. I used to vote for Republicans every now and then at the state level. I voted for Governor Spellman of Washington, for example.
    But I don’t think the Republican party can restore itself without its voters facing up to how extremist the party has become. There needs to be a rebellion within the party, a rebellion not against crazy rhetoric, but against crazy beliefs. All the Republicans I know have either quit the party, driven out by the crazy people, or are themselves part of the problem because they believe crazy stuff.

  60. I fear there is no money in mitigating the extreme rhetorics. They will not stop before they have their own domestic Rwanda to account for. School shootings or the like* by fanatic O’Reilly/Beck/Coulter/etc. fans had only one effect until now: Those that were explicitly named by the killers as inspiration claim for a single day to be shocked and not responsible for any nutcases and go back to justify the act through the backdoor the very next day (‘they had it coming’). Even blaming gays for 9/11 led to only a short time backlash to Fawell (or was it Robertson?).
    Let me be very cynic for a moment: I think right now Boehner is in greater danger of getting murdered by a RW nutcase than Obama. The perceived ‘traitors’ in one’s own party are often the first victims before the violence gets fully unleashed against the other side.
    *alternatively attempts to kill assumed liberals while being unable to hitch a ride to DC

  61. Where are the stories about fracking, about Idle No More, about the effecs of natural gas development on public lands? Where are the stories about the attacks on Planned Parenthood? Where are the stories about voter suppression?
    The MSM is nearly contentless. Not liberal, not conservative, just cowardly and content-free.
    That’s my take also, speaking as basically a leftist. And Laura’s list doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, as far as I’m concerned.
    I don’t see anyone, at all, in anything you might call “main stream media” who aruges for me or my interests.
    But I also have no interest in having some kind of weird shrieking left-wing pundit industry spring up, a la Fox and it’s ilk.
    Not that it would, there’s no money in it.

  62. I recall a Rush Limbaugh TV show (I think it was called “Train Wrecks You Don’t Want To Miss”) on network TV (what network was it; FOX didn’t exist at the time) back in the 1980’s of which I caught one episode, of the few that made it before Limbaugh quit ….
    ….. after he carried a microphone, Phil Donahue-style, into the studio audience and made the mistake of putting it in front of a lesbian’s face, who proceeded to yell at him for a few minutes, during which rant he turned puce and, fat jelloing from one side to the other, hot foot it back down the steps to the stage and behind the safety of his demagogue’s podium, where he stammered and introduced the next segment of the show “Toilets: How Mandatory Flushing is a Liberal Plot To Make My Sh*t Disappear Before I Can Fling It”
    The show was off the air in a trice and he took cover back in the radio studio with an audience filmed from below, in profile, to make them appear like the stars of a Leni Riefenstahl documentary, until he then had a comedy TV show somewhere (FOX, maybe) from 1992 to 1996 in which he dropped trow like Milton Berle and nobody laughed at the swastikas emblazoned on his boxer shorts except for some guy named Godwin, who I believe was later fired as Andrew Dice Clay’s comedy writer.

  63. Yes, the media, the part that is termed leftist, is all about “who is going to blink first”.
    Blinking as a non-partisan endeavor.
    Not blinking … as in what a guy does first after hearing his health insurance has been canceled AND the ACA defunded.
    And they certainly don’t talk about how, after blinking, the guy pulls himself together and runs out and buys guns ammo, but then it’s too late for blinking.

  64. The Dems during the Bush years were not as wacky as the GOP is right now, but they were pretty wacky
    This is pure crap. They filibustered a few really “out there” conservative judicial appointees. You really going to make the case that Janet Rogers Brown is not on the political extreme (truncated US political version)? They filibustered a nutcase with a moustache for UN ambassador who opined the UN was just bunk. They came nowhere, NOWHERE near to filibustering or placing holds on nearly every executive branch appointment. I also missed the part where they voted to defund the stupidity in Iraq or threaten to shut the government down.
    Naturally, this colored my reading of the rest of your little essay….
    As to the so-called MSM. Read Eric Alterman’s “What Liberal Media?” and get back to me.
    Your ending ‘graf was going along nicely until you snuck in the part about unsustainable entitlements.
    You, sir/madam, are not a moderate, radical or otherwise. You, too, have partaken of the Kool-Aid and Pete Petersen fiscal crackpottery. Put down that glass and back away slowly. Keep you hands high and make no sudden movements.
    Regards,

  65. Turb–

    I think that any President, regardless of party, has to refuse to negotiate over the debt ceilling.

    Last time I looked, the government shut down over the CR, not the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a somewhat different animal. The good news: the shutdown makes a single deal on both the CR and the debt ceiling more likely.
    Meanwhile, if they are using procedures that are both legal and in order, then by definition, members of the House of Representatives are not terrorists–which is why Yglesias’s post was pretty weak.
    The law ought to be changed. Next time the Democrats are in power, they should do that. Meanwhile, Obama should be judged as harshly if he refuses to acknowledge reality as the GOP should.

    OK, let’s put this to the test: give me five serious non-BS stories that the MSM has refused to cover (i.e., I shouldn’t be able to find them in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times)…

    Not quite the right metric, because tempo and intensity count, too. Benghazi and IRS got covered as one-week stories in the MSM but are now covered as largely resolved issues, while the the conservative media (the CM?) are still making editorial choices that frame them as ongoing investigations. There was the Gosnell thing that didn’t get covered at all until the MSM realized that the CM had managed to raise a ruckus, and then was covered perfunctorily at best. There’s three, and I’m too tired to think up any more. I guess I could add the varying levels of the Climategate coverage a couple of years ago, but you’d claim it was a BS story.
    And that’s kind of the problem. It may or may not be a BS story, but failure to give it even a little bit of intensity in the MSM looks biased to people who listen to the CM.
    Again, this is to a large extent a market segmentation exercise that’s gone horribly wrong. With an ordinary product, ignoring a chunk of the market is a way to add focus to the the part you care about and, more importantly, capture and secure that segment. In the news biz, “capturing and securing” one audience at the expense of driving off another one is polarizing. Remember, I’m offering a hypothesis on why the CM cocoon is so hard to penetrate. If you view that as a public policy problem (and you should), then the prescription is to cover stories–with the best journalism you can provide–at the same level of intensity as the CM.
    Here’s a little gedanken experiment: Suppose the NYT starts running a series on something that the WaPo had passed on covering. Think that the WaPo will change course and give the story more editorial time? Sure they will, because they believe they’re competing with the NYT. But if Fox runs something, neither the NYT nor WaPo care that much whether they cover it or not, because Fox is kinda “the other” to them. That’s a dangerous attitude to take.

    Couldn’t you have said exactly the same thing in 2006 when they lost the House or 2008 or 2012?

    Yeah, but you’ve got 2010 as a huge win in the middle of the streak. The rhetoric changes when the money dries up. The money has hung in there because of 2010, and the fact that the money will settle for a lower economic burden if they can’t get patronage goodies. (Of course, getting both is the brass ring.)

  66. Now that What The Mainstream Media Don’t Cover has become a sub-topic here, I get to tell a favorite story again:
    Many years ago, on a C-SPAN morning gabfest, the guest was the (now) late Lars-Erik Nelson, then D.C. Bureau Chief for the New York Daily News. A irate caller spewed on for a while about all sorts of then-current Clinton scandals like Whitewater that the media don’t report about.
    When the caller took a breath, Nelson asked: “You seem very well informed about these things. How did you hear about them? Do you have your own independent sources of information doing their own reporting?” The caller sputtered a while longer, and then was put out of his misery.
    Twenty-odd years later, even with Faux News and the internet, it still hasn’t changed. All those stories wingnuts first learn about somewhere else? Rush didn’t dig them up, the MSM did. Whitewater, to take something the original caller was spuuttering about, was almost entirely created by the reporting — the somewhat overwrought reporting, as it turned out — of the New York Times.

  68. The more you insist that the over-arching government takes on issues we disagree on, the harder it gets to hold things together.
    I’ve been pondering this. It’s not a new idea to me, and in fact it’s an idea that I’m generally not opposed to. I don’t have a big problem in general with devolving responsibility for things to the state level.
    My issue with it is this.
    What we’re seeing now is not a principled attempt to move responsibility for healthcare to the states. What we’re seeing is people who failed to prevail politically, and who are now responding to that failure by refusing to carry out the most basic responsibilities of government.
    Present a budget. Pay the bills.
    What makes government *at any level* function is the willingness of all parties involved to play by the rules.
    I can assure you that there is nothing like consensus in my dinky little town about how much money to spend, or on what. We don’t even agree about how many chickens you can keep in your yard. We don’t agree about whether you should be able to use a leaf blower, or if you can, during what days of the week, or what hours of the day.
    You wouldn’t believe the penny ante BS that comes before town meeting.
    And this is a polity of about 20,000 people, with a government consisting of five part-time unpaid selectmen.
    But we sort it out. And when things don’t go our own personal way, we suck it up and carry on.
    I’m not sure you could even “devolve” things down to the level of my own block — maybe there are a dozen houses on it — and find anything like consensus. There is, for instance, me, and there is, for instance, the guy at the other end of the block who flies his Gadsden flag on all national holidays.
    The question is not whether you can get the unit of government down to a level that evens out all of the differences, because that unit of government would comprise a population counted in single digits, max.
    The question is:
    What do you do when you don’t get your way?
    The (R) response to not getting their way is to pull the plug.
    The ACA passed. It was signed into law, and it passed SCOTUS muster as to constitutionality.
    Do we all agree with how that all played out? No.
    But that’s our process.
    The House (R)’s don’t like it, so they won’t present a budget that funds it. They will likely not authorize raising the debt ceiling.
    So, the federal government shuts down, and we may default on our financial obligations.
    All of which will put hundreds of thousands of folks out of work, deprive probably an order of magnitude more people of essential services of one kind of another, and likely tie a nice fresh bag of rocks around the neck of a global economy that is still treading water after the economic adventures of five years ago.
    IMO there is no deep political analysis needed here. IMO the House (R)’s are bunch of childish soreheads. It’s as simple as that.
    Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. When you lose, you lick your wounds, figure out how to improve your game, and come back the next day.
    You don’t burn the f***ing ball field down.
    I’m sick of them. Not because of their political point of view, but because they’re a bunch of flaming @ssholes.

  69. There’s three, and I’m too tired to think up any more.
    Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and Climategate?
    I am no doubt simply reinforcing the walls of the cocoon when I say this, but if this is the kind of stuff conservative media spends its time on, I’m happy to leave it in its own little world.
    I must be running out of whatever psychic energy is needed to see the other guy’s point of view, because I’m increasingly convinced that what folks who spend time consuming conservative media really need is a binky and a nap.

  70. I feel something very like hate for Congressional Republicans. It took me a long time to get here. I used to think of Republicans as people who cared more about money and were more fearful of The Communist Threat than me, but basically people who were open and willing to talk and find common ground. It seemed like Republicans were pretty practical when it came to things like paving the streets and funding the schools. Like I said, I even voted for some at the city and state level.
    Not no more. They’ll spend gazillions of dollars on special interests in their own districts but prefer idiotology to infrastructure and hate education. And when their cut taxes and keep on spending budget plan doesn’t work, well that’s all the fault of the poors.
    My husband just checked our state exchange. he can get insurance for one hundred forty dollars a month for the equivalent of his current plan. A friend of mine who has no insurance and is a cancer survivor is trying for the expanded Medicaid coverage.
    To them, this is worth shutting down the government over: to prevent People getting affordable health insurance. Because of some fucking principle those assholes supposedly have.
    Meanwhile Food Stamps got cut.
    And the party is rife with global warming deniers.
    I hate the Congressional Republicans. I mean it.

  71. The Republicans, many of them anyway, reason that, as the ‘shutdown’ (Barely a slowdown, actually.) continues, more an more people will notice that it isn’t troubling them.
    Maybe, but with the caveat that they immediately want to rescind the shutdown for all sorts of things that do affect people. Until the shutdown, such as it is, morphs into “cut some social insurance programs”. Which I agree would be popular in some quarters and unpopular in others. But then, I don’t think anyone needs a demonstration of how when you’re not on Social Security, you don’t get Social Security checks, and therefore cutting them off doesn’t affect you very much.
    But if cutting these programs was, in general, popular enough to win elections, then they’d be used to win elections, not shut down the government by virtue of (gerrymandered) control of one half of one branch of government.

  73. Laura, Russell–
    I’ll be happy to amend “the MSM is liberal” to “the MSM is more liberal than the conservative media”. That was kind of the context in which I’d framed things, I think. (BTW, yes, I know that the term “MSM” is a conservative buzzword but it’s easy to type and everybody knows what it means.)
    In the tech biz, we used to talk about not “believing our own BS”. What that ultimately came down to was ensuring that the products we were making were serving the market we thought they were serving. Let me try out these statements on you:
    1) The conservative media (CM) thinks its market is center-right to extreme right, and its editors are properly generating stories of interest to that segment.
    2) The true leftist media (LM?) thinks its market is center-left to extreme left, and its editors are properly generating stories of interest to that segment. (Based on recent history, that segment may be unsustainably small. Hey, I’m entitled to a little snark, OK?)
    3) The MSM thinks its market is universal, but its editors are actually generating stories of interest to centrist to center-left audiences. They’re having a problem with believing their own BS.
    The problem is that a healthy polity actually needs a genuinely universal media, but media can only stay in business if they have an audience that’s interested in their stories. I guess the question ultimately comes down to whether the MSM can successfully compete for CM audiences without driving away the left-ish chunks of their audience. Right now, they’re simply not trying.
    Again, this isn’t about slant; it’s about coverage.

  74. “I am no doubt simply reinforcing the walls of the cocoon when I say this, but if this is the kind of stuff conservative media spends its time on, I’m happy to leave it in its own little world.”
    Yup. The walls of your cocoon.

  75. 3) The MSM thinks its market is universal, but its editors are actually generating stories of interest to centrist to center-left audiences. They’re having a problem with believing their own BS.
    This is not even remotely true, and boils down to argument by assertion. The fact that the MSM has not conducted ‘extended coverage’ of your 3 examples, for example, is this: There is no “there” there. One could reasonably surmise that the well funded right wing media would dig into these issues deeply and find something, anything.
    They have not succeeded. Nonetheless, the ‘coverage’ goes on until the desired political response is no longer elicited. That is their gold standard.
    Dean Baker comments endlessly on the right wing slant of the so-called MSM, especially the Washington Post and its crusade against “entitlements”.

  76. That’s the point: The MSM doesn’t much cover issues where liberals, and ONLY liberals, think there’s no “there” there. Which is, of course, much easier to believe if you’ve got your own media avoiding covering the stories.

  78. What the MSM definitely do is suck up to the powers that be. Those are:
    1.Their owners (major shareholders (corporations with specific interests that stand in opposition to ‘real’ journalism once it interferes with their biottom line or image)
    2.Politicians (those control the prime currency of ‘journalists’ these days: ACCESS)
    Crossing the former can get you sacked and crossing the latter will get you excluded from the ‘serious people’ and the ‘off the record’ information (or propaganda disguised as it) that seems to be the only stuff that still counts as ‘news’.
    But there is bit of a difference depending on who is in power in DC at the moment. Dems will normally put up with a lot from the media while the GOP has demonstrated that it will mercilessly go after critical voices (with enough examples of GOPsters personally calling the owners demanding that the impertinent asker of actual questions be sacked and blacklisted immediately or there would be dire consequences*).
    The NYT sat for 10 months on material that would very likely have cost G.W.Bush the reelection and publshed it only afterwards (with the lame excuse that to tell the public that the president authorized hanging offenses would have been meddling in elections in favor of the other party). They admitted that they had been asked by the WH to keep their mouths shut.
    *I have no link but I think I remember an occasion where an interviewee on MSNBC made such a call within minutes after the end of the interview. The host made it a theme the next day on his/her show

  79. It is also telling that during the Bush years many switched to foreign media for info because the media in the US, esp. the MSM could not be trusted anymore on important things (in an analogy to the Soviet proverb that there are no news in Izvestiya and no truth in Pravda). That included both liberals and conservatives. I know people that began to read the Torygraph, most went for the Guardian though, few if any for the diverse Murdoch rags.

  81. Don’t hate them, they want to be hated by you.
    It’s a hot reaction.
    Despise them, loathe them instead.
    That’s cold.

  82. “3) The MSM thinks its market is universal, but its editors are actually generating stories of interest to centrist to center-left audiences. They’re having a problem with believing their own BS.”
    I don’t think so. I think the MSM editors, pundits and CEOs are insular in a well-off, protected cocoon of moderate wealth and have no idea what the real world is like. Remember David Brooks listening to the real America at the salad bar at Applyby’s? They tend to perceive the rest of the country of being like they are: center right.
    But more than that, they want to have a product that does not offend their advertisers–meaning the CEOs of their advertisers. So they don’t want to piss off a bunch of corporate types who are almost certainly right of center in their politics. As for viewers? They don’t want to offend them either so the coverage is designed to re-enforce whatever narrative they think already exists out in the public. Of course they have no real idea what those narratives might be. They just work off assumptions. So they assume us yokels want horse race coverage, or panty sniffing about the sex lives of politicians, or no more than ten seconds of “in-depth” coverage of any issue, no matter how important.

  83. That’s the point: The MSM doesn’t much cover issues where liberals, and ONLY liberals, think there’s no “there” there.
    Not true. Left centerists, centerists, and right centerists (terms not as yet defined, but that’s how we’re rollin’ here) most likely would agree with me, and not you. You don’t read Counterpunch I take it. We have our share of “not there’s” too. Bengazi alone has gotten more coverage in the MSM than everything written in that publication over the last, oh say, 20 years.
    Pity.

  84. The move away from journalism to center-right pap is the result of media consolidation. Too few corporations controlling too many media outlets.
    The “need” for a special rightwing media probably does relate to an interest in stories that others aren’t interested in, but I think it mostly arises from the need to believe the earth is flat.

  86. Despise them, loathe them instead.
    Let’s save a little loathing for the idiots who vote the clowns into office, shall we?
    The “MSM” is defined by its pretense that it’s Tea Party Congressmen, not teabagger voters, who are to blame for the current circus. The Rushbos, Coulters, and O’Reillys are not-MSM precisely because they are willing to call liberal voters “pinheads”, “traitors”, and so forth. In that respect, they don’t have counterparts on the Left.
    Except me.
    –TP

  87. But if Fox runs something, neither the NYT nor WaPo care that much whether they cover it or not, because Fox is kinda “the other” to them. That’s a dangerous attitude to take.
    Wrong again. I give you the annual FOX “war on Christmas”.
    QED

  88. “the MSM is more liberal than the conservative media”.
    Yes, I think this is so.
    Basically, I think the MSM is about two and half clicks left of center, whatever the “center” is.
    On a scale of about 1,000 clicks.
    The MSM doesn’t much cover issues where liberals, and ONLY liberals, think there’s no “there” there.
    Something to consider: the stuff that conservative media fixates on is, in fact, batsh*t insane.
    Maybe that’s why only folks predisposed to believe it pay any attention to it, at all.
    Just a thought. Do with it what you will.

  89. I think the “radical moderate’s” views are an example of the cult of the center–I used to think I was being really original in noticing the existence of such a thing, but now it’s become so obvious everyone in my cocoon talks about it. Joe Nocera’s column the other day was an example of centrist cultism. After writing a perfectly sensible denunciation of Republican insanity, he was overcome by the desire to show how balanced he was by comparing Republicans today with the Democratic Party of Mondale and Dukakis.
    If one actually wishes to find something equivalent to Tea Party crackpotism on the left you can find it, but you’ll have to look harder. You can find it on really far, far left blogs or in their comments, where everything is a government “false flag” operation–not satisfied with criticizing the crimes the US has actually committed, some people have to imagine that 9/11 or this or that atrocity was really committed by the US. The paranoid style is similar to what you find on the far right, though the details of the bogeymen are different.
    Most self-styled centrists seem to think that Truth can be found at the exact center point between the center-left and the far right. This is why liberal Democrats seem to them to be the same as rightwing crazies.

  90. And, I should point out, the extreme left crazies have no traction. Hell, even when they happen to be right about a particular issue they have no traction. You have to be crazy in the right way (pun almost intended, but it’s not that funny, so no, it’s not) to have real impact in the US.

  91. Most self-styled centrists seem to think that Truth can be found at the exact center point between the center-left and the far right.
    The first blog I read and commented on, probably starting about a decade ago, was the Centrist Coalition/Centrist Forum. (If I remember correctly, wj, who comments here, used to hang out there as well.) The idea that both sides were at least partly wrong and that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle (or just somewhere else) appealed to me.
    I think part of it was that I hoped for a “Third Way,” because I found politics as it had been playing out to be annoying and lame, but started paying attention because I finally had to admit that it was just too important to ignore. But I still didn’t want it going down the way it had been.
    That, and I had heard so much liberal bashing that I had a hard time thinking of myself as a liberal, which is what I was by that point. I had outgrown my libertarian phase, after gaining a functional degree of humanity or empathy or just sense about life and abandoning social Darwinism and some degree of macho militarism (USA!!!).
    At any rate, I was a self-styled centrist for a short while, and my later interactions with some of the people I was involved with at the time, the ones who still clung to that cult of the middle, proved very frustrating. It was like arguing with my past self, frozen in time and unable to progress beyond a fanciful abstract notion that was ultimately a sort of weak, relativistic nihilism.
    For whatever that’s worth.

  93. A small business owner and entrepreneur is enabled by Obamacare (via a commenter at Balloon Juice)
    “[A] colleague…has wanted to start her own business for a while but wasn’t willing to risk going without insurance and couldn’t find a decent price on the market before. She signed up yesterday with the intention of burning through her vacation in the next 3 months to set up her business and then resigning in Dec if everything goes well. She will pay about what our employee contribution now is (after subsidy assuming she earns a comparable salary in the new business). She’s really excited and scared, but says that this was key to her trying it. Her mom went through a bout with cancer and it basically bankrupted the family because she had no insurance.”

  94. I demand that her mother have another bout of cancer and die uninsured and bankrupt or I’m going to shut down the government and default on the national debt.
    I want the Keystone Pipeline built through her grave or I’m going to shut down the government and default on the national debt.

  95. the Media is a Corporate owned entity and it exists only to make MONEY. to presume we have ever had a LIBERAL media is anothe one of those lies teh Rigth has successfully sold to America. and Profit mightitly well they did. Fox is proof you don’t need any counterparts to prove how profitable selling Right wing BS has been. the whole Media has moved so completely Right as a result of the Profit Motive/Money aka Fox, the idea that we have any LIberal media Companies out of the 6 major Corporations. Such blathering nonsense! such biased unfounded accusation that remain uncontested by facts, not opinions.
    name me one Liberal Media Corporations of that 6 that pushes anything even closely Left of Center! It doesn’t sell in America. there is no Media Market for LIberal Media in America. Even Government funded NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) wouldn’t dare say Torture during the Iraq war, that i purposely remember!
    such BS, such continual uncontested BS by the Right, like that fair damsel in distress BS. BS. all BS. God i wish there was a HEll so Republicans could go there after they die. Guaranteed by their actions to the rest of us HUMANS.
    all these Frigging lies for all these years by the Media and not a single effectual counterpush from the Left. Disgusting and out Right Evil. Quislings like Reid, Pelosi,et al., only feed into the cancer that we see today in DC.
    but that is not new. just reading teh farsical words of those who say there is a supposed “Liberal Mainstream Media”. just shows how much BS these “people” have bought or want to believe the lies of the Right. i especially love the continuing “War on Christmas” that returns every holiday season. like clockwork!
    and no, the Government isn’t yours to shut down just because Obamacare aka Romneycare is a law the Right doesn’t like. if that were so, i would expect and demand all the damn Military Industrial Complex, aka Defense Contractors would have been shut down for stealing Americans blind through their desire to keep spending HALF of our Governmetn Budget on Tanks, Cruise Missles, Carriers, Helicopters adn the infamous Fighter planes taht keep the MIlitary industrial Complex going. that’s my demands for keeping YOUR Government functioning.
    Cause i want that part of Government shut down yesterday.
    such Effing ingrates. to say My way or the HIghway. I’ve had to watch and put up with Ronald Reagan destroying this Country. and being made a Saint. EVIL unmitigated, St. Reagan. There definitely is no God that’d allow such filth like Reagan or Thatcher to exist, much less effect the lives of others. Such Vermin being made Heroes by the Right for such evil despicable actions.
    as they say. the evil men does lives after them. the Good is interred with their bones. except Reagan had nothing Good about him.
    no. I detest Republicans. they need to go to Somalia with their Guns and Hatred of the Other and the all-consuming Fears and their endless Greed. God such ilk. such unmitigated tripe!

  96. I am seldom impressed with Andrew Sullivan, but in the current impasse, it seems to me that has gotten it exactly right. He specially calls out the “both sides do it” lickspittles as part of the problem.
    And if the Rs have completely lost Sully, I think they may be in for a rather hard landing.

  97. They haven’t just lost Sully, they seem to have lost their minds…
    “We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
    Brett may be able to rationalise that, but I can’t.

  98. some people have to imagine that 9/11 or this or that atrocity was really committed by the US

    9/11 trutherism is, I think, one of those places where the left-wing and right-wing fringes commingle. Because I know both varieties.

  99. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.
    What a clown.
    Stutzman is the rep from IN-3, basically northeast IN. Fort Wayne and environs. He’s a farmer, his family also runs a trucking company. He was in the IN house and senate for a few years, and has been the IN-3 rep since 2010, when he won a special election. The special was called because the former guy resigned when he was caught screwing one of his aides.
    So – three years in the House. On a couple of committees, has introduced some legislation, mostly to get rid of stuff he doesn’t like. Here is his govtrack page.
    What I want to know is:
    What has Marlin Stutzman done that requires my respect?
    How has he earned whatever the “something” is that he “has to” get out of this?
    He’s going to hold his breath until that guy over there turns blue, and he’s not going to stop until he gets “something”, which he cannot even name.
    What a childish, entitled, moronic clown.
    Go do something constructive, Marlin, and then we can discuss what you should “get out of this”. Maybe by then you will have discovered what, exactly, “this” is.

  100. Due to being unpleasantly swamped at work, I’ve followed this entire drama via ObWi posts and comments, which I can read surrepticiously on my I-phone while in court or in deposition.
    Folks are pretty stirred up and talking past each other as never before. There is a ton of mind-reading and the conversation is not civil.
    That a wing of the Repubs would hold the country hostage to the beloved ACA is so beyond shocking to the left and middle that, well, words fail.
    What we are seeing today is the counter to the means, manner and method by which ACA was passed. Few on the left will buy this, but as a conservative who was completely disgusted with the excesses, secrecy, etc required to secure its passage–not to mention the outright lies we suspected then but have now confirmed(no taxes, you get to keep your doctor, if you like your insurance, you get to keep that too and much other BS that was untrue and known to be untrue), I can see where a radicalized conservative movement would come together and, if given the legislative opportunity, would fight what they saw as fire with their own brand of it.
    To add just a bit more to this,from a completely different angle, if the OWS movement had managed to achieve the same electoral success as the Tea Party, we well might be having a very differnt, yet very similar conversation.

  101. Few on the left will buy this
    I don’t buy it.
    I’ve seen horsesh*t more than comparable to whatever shenanigans were involved in passing the ACA, including John Freaking Boehner literally handing out checks on the House floor at vote time.
    For example.
    And the (D)’s have not, at any point, responded by trying to shut the damned government down. Or, by threatening to default on paying the damned bills.
    This (the tactics of the tea party (R)’s, not your comment here) is utter BS.
    There’s no end to the ugliness involved in getting stuff passed, and neither side is any stranger to it. But for good or ill, our process is our process.
    If you don’t want to play, stay home. If you want to play, you have to accept the fact that you don’t always win.
    If you don’t win, you don’t get to turn the board over and set fire to the pieces.
    I thoroughly disagree with your point here.

  102. Maybe the Dems should have staged a shut down over the prescription coverage shit the R’s pulled. Or over Iraq? Yes? No? After all if there is some glimmer of justification for the Republican sabotage of America because their fee fees got hurt over how the ACA was made, shouldn’t the Dems have sabotaged us all over how the decision to something far more reprehensible was made?
    I think it is quite likely that an OWs representative would propose unrealistic legislation, but that’s not an excuse for rightwing fanatics shutting down the economy. It isn’t even a mitigation.
    And rightwing fanatics wouldn’t be in that position to do the harm they are doing if it wasn’t for the people who enable them.

  104. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-building-a-permanent-republican-minority/2013/10/01/bde96d78-2ac7-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html
    Congressional Republicans are sabotaging the economy and the legislative process because their fee fees got hurt over how ACA was passed. They are throwing a temper tantrum because they represent a minority of entitled fringers in the population–people whose views are outside the mainstream and thus can’t be imposed on the rest of us through the normal use of the federal legislative process.

  106. Folks are pretty stirred up and talking past each other as never before.
    And you blow right in here to talk past us…how, er, refreshing.
    Few on the left will buy this…
    Actually, none will, because what followed was nothing short of a pack of lies and misrepresentations.
    Obviously you are quite busy, because you were really quite far off your game here.
    What we are seeing here is the minority party throwing an ill-tempered hissy fit accompanied by what can only be seen as political blackmail. Uncivil? Really?
    The GOP started this, and I believe when all is said and done Obama will have hung them out to dry.

  107. “What we are seeing today is the counter to the means, manner and method by which ACA was passed.”
    THAT sums up Republicans perfectly. You know WHY the ACA passed in the way it did? BECAUSE YOU LOST! Your side lost the election which HAS CONSEQUENCES! The fact that your political opponents WON means the decisions they make are LEGITIMATE! And that legitimacy seems to be what ALL of ‘your side’ FAILS TO RECOGNIZE.
    YOU ARE BREAKING THE BEST REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD BECAUSE YOU DON’T AGREE THAT YOUR OPPONENTS ARE REAL PEOPLE.

  109. There’s a pretty strong correlation between the way Republican politicians and tacticians think and the way bullies function.
    Bullies have difficulty conceptualizing the legitimacy of decisions made by anyone but themselves. They feel entitled to be the decision makers and respect decision making processes only when it results in them getting their way. They confabulate being heard with being agreed with–they can’t understand that someone might hear their views but not agree. They are more likely to harm other people to get their way than the other personality types because of their sense of being entitled to get their way. They always see themselves as victims of unfair treatment. Either that, or they blame the real victim, the target of their abuse, as being a person who deserves to be hurt by others.
    That’s how a lot of two years olds function, too. Maybe bullies and Congressional Republicans are just people who never matured beyond the two year old level.

  110. Maybe bullies and Congressional Republicans are just people who never matured beyond the two year old level.
    In a sense, politically, a lot of congressional Republicans, particularly House Republicans, are two-year-olds. They haven’t been at it for very long don’t understand how the sausage gets made. Shame on the guys who do know for being too timid to get the kids in line. They need political-adult supervision, especially when they can shut down, even partially, the freakin’ Federal Government of the United States of America.
    Sheesh…

  111. Caps-lock problems…Meh
    Can’t fix it anyway, so…I meant it to be like that. Yeah..that’s the ticket.
    As for all congressional Republicans being bullies? Maybe, but not all of them and that doesn’t explain the overall point of view of the conservatives in American that vote for them.
    Somewhere along the line the tribalism on the right has gotten out of control. Instead of seeing Democrats as fellow Americans they seem to see them as ‘the other’. As ‘other’ as they see say the Russians. When you hear things like ‘I want my country back’, it indicates they think that the only truly legitimate source of political activity runs through them and ONLY them.
    They can be for blackmail like the House is pulling because the ‘other side’ didn’t legitimately earn their right to exert power. Filibustering nearly everything possible to filibuster is okay because the ‘other side’ doesn’t deserve an actual hearing.

  112. I find nothing shocking in the psychopathic behavior of the hostage-takers.
    It is merely confirmational.
    Wasn’t it Newt Gingrich’s hurt fee-fees over airline seating that precipitated the last shutdown in the 1990’s? I forget now.
    Interesting that both the middle and the left are implicated in this shock-effect.
    That can’t be good.
    I’d like a link to a single far-Right hostage taker in the dead letter that is the U.S. Congress or in the “media” who has cited hurt fee-fees over the manner of the passage of the ACA as motivation for shutting down the government and defaulting on the national debt.
    I haven’t heard a peep about that line of reaso….. uh, bullsh*t.
    I would seek out legislative secrecy, bullying, lying, dick-s*cking, and malfeasance in instances noted above wherein Republican majorities f*cked-up the sausage-making, but I’m bored now.
    If the completely ineffective and camping-obsessed OWS ever does make electoral inroads (Elizabeth Warren? Please. She has the pluck to take full credit for her electoral success with the half percent of the OWS vote she might have garnered against centerfold and arms merchant, what’s his dead face), I hope they are as armed or more so than the Tea Party.
    Unfortunately, nearly all of them seemed to be pacifists of one stripe or another.
    Big mistake.
    And speaking of Warren, I hope she is making a list of the massive sections of government she wants shut down or she will shut down the government and default on the national debt.
    My demand is that I want the government shut down and the debt defaulted on or I will shut down the government and default on the debt, hopefully wiping out Rick Perry’s money market holdings.
    Meanwhile, arm coyotes.
    Last night I was enjoying a cheap meal in a restaurant and there was guy a few tables away who called his waitress over and started haranguing her about the fact that his chips and salsa has not arrived at the table in a timely manner and he objected to the secrecy with which the salsa had been prepared, seeing as how there was a wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
    The volume got pretty loud, and pretty soon, he threatened for all in earshot to hear that he was going to abolish the waitresses’ healthcare options, close down the government, and default on the national debt if he didn’t get HIS recipe for salsa delivered to his table, pronto.
    The waitress somehow managed to squeeze a question in: “What is your recipe, sir?” and the guy sputtered: “I don’t have one, beyond making sure that lump on your breast metastasizes free of health insurance.”
    At that point I got up and sauntered over to see I could facilitate some understanding, perchance to compromise, but once I got there the guy glared at me and was not particularly forthcoming and he made a sudden move with one hand under the table, could have been adjusting his napkin or checking his fly, not sure, but seeing as how I live in a concealed weapon state, I grabbed the back of his head and smashed his face into the bowl of salsa in question on the table in front of him and gave him a thorough salsa wash and rinse, and let him raise his head and then I shot him in the mouth for good measure, hoping the addition of a couple of quarts of his blood might have flavored the salsa to his liking.
    The surrounding patrons, mostly those who have a middling position when it comes to salsa, applauded the quick dispatch and threw tortilla chips at his corpse, which is probably still sitting there as a cautionary regarding etiquette, which was one of the reasons the concealed gun law was passed .. to create a more polite society.
    I took his two little kids home with me and I’m going to raise them to be in the middle in all things and if they don’t like that, I’ll just shut down the government and default on the debt and they may register their shock all day and see if I give a f*ck.

  113. Look, the ACA passed.
    If the (R)’s were unhappy with that, there were a number of remedies available to address that.
    They could attempt to repeal it. Depending on who’s counting, that was done 11, or 17, or 21, or 38, or 42 times. Long story short, that particular avenue was attempted and was unsuccessful.
    They could attempt to replace it’s champion in the White House by running a candidate who was explicitly against it. That was attempted, and was unsuccessful.
    They could challenge it on Constitutional grounds. That was attempted in numerous places, on various grounds, culminating in a SCOTUS case. Which the opponents of ACA lost.
    You could attempt to defund it by proposing a budget which doesn’t include money for it. That was attempted, and was rejected by the Senate. So, once again, the opponents of the ACA were unsuccessful.
    They lost. That’s all. It happens. Believe me when I say that people who hold political, economic, and social positions in the general neighborhood of mine are quite familiar with that phenomenon.
    What makes our form of government work AT ALL is the willingness of the folks who live under it to submit to the process. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t work.
    We are embarking into “doesn’t work” territory. To some folks, that is some sweet sweet music. To the vast majority of folks, it is going to suck, quite a lot.
    So, thanks for nothing, tea partiers. Hope they enjoy their 15 minutes.
    But they can kiss my behind if they think their tantrum has earned them some kind of quid pro quo.
    I hope Obama et al continue to tell them to pound sand. They wanted this, they can own it.

  114. …I can see where a radicalized conservative movement would come together and, if given the legislative opportunity, would fight what they saw as fire with their own brand of it.
    Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I do “buy it.” What am I buying – an explanation or a justification? Is this supposed to be why it happened, or is this supposed to be why it’s right?

  115. I wonder, whether Obama is just as (relatively) calm as he is now because he knows that he can pull an emergency break should the default actually happen. It’s not a nice option and may lead to a SCOTUS rebuke and/or impeachment but that would still be a less bad option than a full system crash. On the other side some GOPster strategists may hope that they can get Obama to pull that lever too early. In the former case he may be seen as sacrificing his presidency to save the state from the madmen, in the latter as callously breaking the constitution because he ran out of legal tools after getting outmaneuvred by his opponents and was not willing to admit defeat.
    This leaves out of course the still unanswered question whether POTUS has the right to do this or not. It has been discussed but due to lack of precedent not yet decided. Most would wish that precedent can be avoided again. Let’s not fool ourselves, this is as much about setting precedent (does the ultimate blackmail work or not?) as about the concrete budget fight.

  116. Shorter MckT, though I realize he’s doing a little pro bono internet fluffing for the defendant, or is it the plaintiff, who can tell?:
    “We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
    The “something” will be nothing, and if it is “something”, I want the government shut down, the debt defaulted on, and I want the United States to secede from Texas with the borders between the enemies embargoed and walled and I want of one our Navy fleets stationed along Texas’ southern coast to sink anything that moves.
    I don’t want the nuclear silos left in Texas decommissioned, but rather I’d like the missiles launched but with their trajectories reconfigured so they go straight up and right back down from whence they were launched like the anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon.
    I want Rick Perry and roughly 200 of the leading lights in the Texas Republican Party, and from what I hear about the Overton Window down there, we might have to include several dozen Democrats as well … where was I … spavined, disambiguated (that could be counted as a pre-existing condition), and their dead mouths filled with salt and then the remains transported to the new Smithsonian shooting range where Americans (that would be me) may take target practice with a rich arsenal of cool killing machines provided free, or …
    ….. I want the government shut down and the debt defaulted (I excluded that dangling preposition “on” as a cost-saving measure).
    I want both to happen, so start sucking on it, Rep. Stutzman.
    It is what it is.

  117. Charles Pierce answer to Stutzman:
    “Have a cookie, Marlin. Have a cookie and go play with your toes.”

  118. “And now, in the interest of equal time, here is a message from the National Institute of Pancakes: It reads, and I quote, “F*ck waffles.”
    George Carlin quote, lifted from Balloon Juice.

  119. I wonder, whether Obama is just as (relatively) calm as he is now because he knows that he can pull an emergency break should the default actually happen.
    Are you referring to the mega-coin, in the event the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised? (That option doesn’t solve a lack of appropriation.)

  120. The MSM doesn’t much cover issues where liberals, and ONLY liberals, think there’s no “there” there.
    This works out conveniently for you; when the MSM covers a conservative story it proves that it’s got some backing in reality, and when the MSM doesn’t cover a conservative story that proves nothing. Whereas for liberals, if the MSM covers a story that proves nothing (since they supposedly push baseless liberal stories) and if the MSM fails to cover a liberal story that means it’s clearly false.
    Im sure Id love to have a methodology of media analysis that ended with ‘you are always right big C, you da man’. Only, that particular cocoon seems a little to obvious for even me to inhabit.

  121. Ironically, when you show up at one of these parks, and it’s closed, you’ll blame the Republicans for it.
    BREAKING: White House Ordering Hundreds of Privately Run, Privately Funded Parks to Close
    These are privately run parks which are tennants on federal land. They not only take no money from the treasury, they pay rent to it. They’ve never been closed in any previous government shutdown, because they’re not the government.
    IOW, Obama is shutting down a revenue source to maximize pain from the shutdown.
    And I’m sure you’ll find some way to blame Republicans for this, rather than admit that Obama is managing the shutdown so as to cause as much pain as possible, even where he has to go out of his way to cause it.

  122. Federal Land?
    That’s my land.
    Get the F8ck off my land.
    So you like renters now?
    I thought you said renters do nothing but trash property.
    Fire at will. Evict at will.
    Your rules.

  124. What we are seeing today is the counter to the means, manner and method by which ACA was passed.
    Funny that this didn’t happen, say, after the ACA was passed. Or, say, after the 2010 election. If this was a reaction to *how* the ACA was passed and not the contents of the bill, Id expect action *at the time*, not 4 years on.
    Whereas, if I were a GOPer crapping my pants about a new entitlement that people are likely going to really like & not want to give up, this is *exactly* the moment Id expect a hissy fit to end all hissy fits.
    [Whereas if the GOP actually thought the ACA is going to be a train wreck, then this isn’t the last-ditch effort, because it’ll be easy to remove it once it reveals itself in all of its train-wreck glory].
    not to mention the outright lies we suspected then but have now confirmed(no taxes, you get to keep your doctor, if you like your insurance, you get to keep that too and much other BS that was untrue and known to be untrue)
    You suspected it then and have only now had it confirmed, but also knew it was untrue at the time? And yet, it’s a friggin law that’s written down, so &$^# me if I can figure out how you could not know what was in it.
    To add just a bit more to this,from a completely different angle, if the OWS movement had managed to achieve the same electoral success as the Tea Party, we well might be having a very differnt, yet very similar conversation.
    SHHHHH. Everyone, it’s the rarely seen “hypothetical tu quoque”- it’s unusual for such a fragile, unsupportable creature to appear in the wild like this. Oddly, this flimsy yet adorable organism can survive even the harshest conditions due to its infinite flexibility, yet it cannot stand a moment’s scrutiny without collapsing into a puddle of goo.

  125. Hsh, I was referring to the hypothetical that Obama could interprete a certain amendment to the constitution as giving him the authority to raise the debt ceiling on his own should the full faith and credit be questioned by congressional inaction or blockade. To my knowledge Obama has beeen evasive on this while Pelosi first answered ‘No’ and then went for evasion too. As said, there is no precedent to decide whether that is a legitimate emergency measure by the executive branch or a blatant breach of the constitution, and no sane person would wish to be the one to set that precedent.

  126. Ironically, when you show up at one of these parks, and it’s closed, you’ll blame the Republicans for it.
    Surprise!!
    When you shut down the government, it turns out to be a great big PITA for a lot of people.
    Who’d a thunk it?

  128. These are privately run parks which are tennants on federal land. They not only take no money from the treasury, they pay rent to it.
    otoh, operating a campground in a federal park where the park staff have been cut to a bare minimum seems to present an obvious law enforcement and safety hazard. I mean, I understand why the guy whose business this is wants to stay open, that’s how he makes money. But a little critical thinking seems called for here.

  129. Dead to rights, Brett has Obama:

    However, today, we have been told by senior member of the US Forest Service and Department of Agriculture that people “above the department”, which I presume means the White House, plan to order the Forest Service to needlessly and illegally (editorial: Really?) close all private operations. I can only assume their intention is to artificially increase the cost of the shutdown as some sort of political ploy.

  130. Rafael Cruz, let’s say, orders his murderous caucus to take hostages.
    He doesn’t have a plan for the endgame.
    Shame
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyPhsD1vHGk
    Too bad it’s all of us in the wood chipper, though I recognize that besocked foot upended into the machine in the video as a Republican appendage.
    Garbage in, garbage out.
    This “Fargo” meme is floating around today.
    “Dead to rights, Brett has Obama.”
    Good. I’m glad ruthlessness in kind is recognized for once.
    I’ll raise Brett three wood chippers.
    Watch your fingers.

  131. non-essential operations are closed down.
    the parks are non-essential operations. so, they are closed down.
    if you want to visit the park, you can’t.
    if you’re a tenant of the park, you don’t have access while the park is closed.
    yes, it’s stupid. yes, that means that revenue that might have been received from park visitors and tenants will not be realized. yes, that means a lot of people will be inconvenienced and perhaps even materially harmed.
    there will probably be a flood of lawsuits flowing from the whole thing.
    all true.
    and that’s just the park service.
    a reasonable person would look at all of that and say it’s a freaking stupid idea to shut down the non-essential operations of government.
    stupid, pointless, counter-productive.
    that is the conclusion a reasonable person would draw.

  132. I can only see one way that this ends with a minimum of damage:
    1) Somewhere around October 14, the Speaker lets the House vote on a bill which raises the debt ceiling. Nothing else, just that. It passes (and quickly passes the Senate and gets signed by the President).
    2) The Republican caucus revolts, and offers up a new Speaker. (Who maybe fails to get enough votes to be elected, but that’s a different discussion.)
    3) The shutdown continues for a couple of months. Eventually, enough Republican Congressmen’s constituents (specifically those who vote in Republican primaries) decide that the pain is simply not worth it. And a clean CR gets voted thru.
    Will this cause a lot of pain, and damage, to a lot of people? Yes. But the country as a whole can recover from that. (Unlike a default.) Then the Congress can start going thru the budget for next year, and trying to figure out what they will keep and cut in order to continue the reduction in the deficit which has been happening for the past several years.
    Note that this is the best (least damaging) end that I can see. There are lots of other possibilities which are more damaging, to the nation and all of us personally. Starting with Step 1 not happening.

  133. Words has it that all of the little Cantors shorted the stock market some days ago.
    Me too, using an ETF instrument. So far, profitable. Mostly a hedge at this point.
    When in America, think like an American cocksucking Republican.
    Step on the poor, kick them in the short ribs, and figure the vig.
    Shut the government down, default on the debt.
    This keeps up, I might be able to afford my health insurance and ammo for another year.
    This keeps up, I might be able to continue my health insurance for another year.

  134. Obama is shutting down a revenue source to maximize pain from the shutdown.
    from brett’s link:
    the Treasury could lose a few million dollars, in what is essentially free money to the government, over the course of the shutdown.
    really? a *few million dollars*?
    cue dr. evil.
    the federal budget is not quite $4 trillion. the loss of this guy’s tenant fees is not even a rounding error.
    there is no need for obama or anyone else to go through any kind of secret contortions to “maximize the pain” of the shutdown. shutting down government operations is *inherently* painful. and also stupid, wasteful, expensive, inefficient, and counter-productive.
    THAT IS WHY IT IS A BAD IDEA.
    this guy’s campground sad is not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
    this is what the tea partiers wanted, and now they have it.
    if it doesn’t suit you, call your rep.

  135. wj, see my comment on October 02, 2013 at 10:38 PM. Am I right in my recollection, or am I mixing you up with someone else? Just curious.

  136. I’m going to call the nearest Republican rep and demand a two-fer, reinstate the private campground owner’s access on my land and double funding for Obamacare, and, by the way, could you help me sign up for the exchange in my State?
    After I have those concessions, I will further want the government shut down and a catastrophic debt default in perpetuity.
    Rep Cantor projectiled-vomited and then covered his shorts as John Boehner, waist deep in the wood chipper, a few moments ago indicated flexibility on the debt ceiling and the Hastert Rule.
    Personally, I think Boehner just wanted to juke the market a little so he can establish his own short positions at slightly higher prices.
    That’s how lying filth work it.
    I’ll maintain my hedge for now because there is something about the prospect of profiting through others suffering that makes me feel exceptional.

  137. hsh, that was indeed me. (And I am in awe that you can remember who the other commenters were. My own memory for names is terrible!)
    My problem with the bashing of liberals is that so often it was not for the follies that they believe in. But for things that they believe that seemed at least arguable and frequently perfectly reasonable.
    It might have made me uncomfortable being a conservative (which I still am). But instead, it awakened me to the fact that the label “conservative” has been hijacked by radical reactionaries who have little or nothing in common with actual conservatism.

  138. Donald Johnson at 10/2 9:39PM–

    Most self-styled centrists seem to think that Truth can be found at the exact center point between the center-left and the far right. This is why liberal Democrats seem to them to be the same as rightwing crazies.

    Truth has very little to do with it. But if you want to actually pass legislation, the zone of possible agreement lies near the center. This doesn’t mean you have to hold centrist views. “Centrist views” sounds like an oxymoron to me; nobody has centrist views. Centrism is a governing strategy, not a political ideology. Centrism merely acknowledges that the place where enough legislators are not unhappy enough not to vote against something lies somewhere near the center.
    Does this mean that you should never take a principled stand and always compromise? Of course not. But you’d better understand that it’s a lot easier taking a stand against something. If you’re for something, you’ll need to win over the people who don’t like it. By default, no action will be taken.
    Centrism is stable. Using centrism, things that really need to get done get done and everything else doesn’t (which sounds terrific to me). Centrism tolerates a small amount of partisanship, but mostly punishes it, pushing things back toward the center. That’s a nice negative feedback regime.
    But too much partisanship breeds even more extreme partisanship. That’s a positive feedback regime, and it ends with complete polarization. We’re there now, and we’re there because centrism failed.
    You may not feel that centrism is very honest. It’s certainly not ideologically “pure”. But is it worse than what we have now?

  139. When do I and my family get our apology:
    http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/03/grandstand-of-the-day/
    Some Park Rangers are armed for a reason.
    That Republican vermin, who hasn’t apologized to 800,000 Federal employees, tens of thousands of private contractors, tens of thousands of food-stamp recipients, 50 million Americans who might require an option for affording health insurance, and for receiving his salary and healthcare while chewing out a furloughed fed employee who is not being paid, is a reason.
    That Republican vermin will be kissing the end of my dick at gunpoint when the troubles start.

  140. Centrism is dead, long live centrism.
    Say a few more words over centrism’s grave (the body has been in the grave since 1994, following a long illness.
    Then let’s get on with the war.

  141. hsh, that was indeed me. (And I am in awe that you can remember who the other commenters were. My own memory for names is terrible!)
    I think I remember you, specifically, because I ran into you at jrudkis’ blog, if I’m also right about that (and I’m not thinking of another commenter who went by mw). It was jrudkis’ blog through which I found Publius at Legal Fiction, and then followed Publius when he came here. Either way, you’re still the guy from way, way back.

  142. That Republican vermin will be kissing the end of my dick at gunpoint when the troubles start.
    i understand that this stuff can get under your skin, but maybe it’s time to re-calibrate the harsh-o-meter.
    just a thought.
    thanks count!

  143. The harsh-o-meter, as measuring the quoted sentence, is a bit too high, for sure. But despite my sometimes antagonistic rhetoric on ObWi, I don’t recall ever being so angry, in an almost over-the-top way, as I am now at Republicans. I rarely use the h word, but hate is something I’m pretty close to right now.
    I don’t see how this country can remain a peaceful place to live with what’s happening right now. The Republicans are bringing the country down. Expecting people to just relax and partake in popcorn is not realistic.

  144. RadicalModerate:
    “Centrist views” sounds like an oxymoron to me; nobody has centrist views. Centrism is a governing strategy, not a political ideology.
    We really do need to make a distinction here. “Centerism” is arguably a strategy. But moderation is, in fact, a political ideology with views. A moderate position may be nowhere near the “center” — especially if you define center as midway between the bulk of the two parties. But it is a very realand viable position when it comes to the issues.

  145. Expecting people to just relax and partake in popcorn is not realistic.
    I definitely get that, I just thought that threats of oral rape at gunpoint might be a bit beyond what was called for.
    We all cross the line now and then, I’m just asking that we try to remember that the lines are there.
    But yeah, stuff like this (the shutdown) pisses me off.

  147. I don’t see how this country can remain a peaceful place to live with what’s happening right now. The Republicans are bringing the country down.
    It is interesting to me that polling shows even non-TP Republicans are not excited about the shutdown. It’s important to remember that it’s not Republicans doing this, it’s a particular subset of Republicans with a specific batsh1t ideology.
    My medium-term hope is that all this nuttery drives enough of a wedge between the moderates and wingers on the right to temporarily break the GOP- whereupon it can be rebuilt, less deranged. So I want to underline that we’re receptive to the remaining GOP moderates (both in and out of Congress)- you don’t have to vote Dem forever or join a union, but if you want to end the suicidal madness of your party you may need to cross the line or start sitting elections out until sanity returns.

  148. And Count went WAY over the line.
    Historically, the kitty has held fire for a certain brand of over-the-top rhetoric. But I’ve never been a fan of that, I think it muddies the lines more than it adds to the conversation.
    Obviously, the kitty has a different opinion.

  149. “You may not feel that centrism is very honest. It’s certainly not ideologically “pure”. But is it worse than what we have now?”
    That misses the point. Yes, the centrism that we used to have when the Republican Party hadn’t gone completely insane was preferable to what we have now. And willingness to compromise is something that all smart politicians do when circumstances dictate, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. But most self-styled centrists think that serious people must demonstrate their seriousness by equating the two sides in every situation. It’s one thing to recognize the need to compromise in more normal situations. It’s another thing to pretend that liberal Democrats are as insane as the House Republicans who may refuse to raise the debt ceiling. There is no equivalence here. You have a party of people who want to take the world economy into uncharted territory by not raising the debt ceiling, who think that the ACA is something so dangerous they’re willing to do almost anything to stop it. These people are lunatics, and if it weren’t for the fact that we’re all in danger of going down the tubes with them I would take considerable satisfaction in the discomfort felt by the Wall Street types who have used and exploited these idiots and now find that it’s coming back to bite them.

  150. I’m guilty of false equivalency, I guess.
    The mellow range on my harsh-o-meter is broken.
    The Republican Party backed over it and then shot it.
    I’ll go into manual mode and try to approximate a mellowed level of harshness.
    Probably, I’ll just shut up for now, since my repetitive rhetoric has begun resemble the bullets injected into an automatic weapon by a 1000-round Ted Nugent machine gun clip.
    Thanks for the input.
    When does Rep. Neugebauer of Texas …. Christ! … get a little behavioral modification advice from his peers, because so far the feedback he received face to face was a little too tame to penetrate his bullet head.

  151. “non-essential operations are closed down.
    the parks are non-essential operations. so, they are closed down.”
    Non-essential federal government operations are shut down, to conserve money. The parks in question are privately run, and pay rent to the government. This is likely why they were never shut down in any previous government shutdown.
    This administration is actually spending extra money, and foregoing revenues, in order to maximize harm. They’ve taken the “Washington Monument” tactic to new levels in that regard.

  152. The parks in question are privately run, and pay rent to the government.
    The facilities in question are tenants on federal lands, which are now closed.
    Yes, that sucks for them.
    This is likely why they were never shut down in any previous government shutdown.
    In *the* previous government shutdown.
    This administration is actually spending extra money, and foregoing revenues, in order to maximize harm.
    It costs money to shut down federal operations.
    As is true of any operation larger than a lemonade stand.
    And, shutting down operations means that you forgo whatever revenues those operations would generate.
    As is true of any operation that generates revenue.
    These things come as an amazing surprise, a virtual epiphany, to some, although to most folks they are blindingly obvious.
    This is what the tea partiers wanted, and now they have it. Take it up with them.

  153. I congratulate the Count, who I remember under a different name even if I don’t remember the name, for going over the line.
    That is what lines are for. Calibratin,’so to speak.
    Since Count is reasting, I might leap in as a tag-team switch. I have some small reputation, tarnished and tired.
    But 12 years has passed, and I have lost my teeth, and now only spew vitriol somewhat indiscriminately, and then only if someone backwheels my chair and spins me.
    So “Exterminate the Brutes” will have to do. If felt truly sincerely, with all your heart, it should suffice.

  154. Capitol police aren’t being paid either, despite showing up for work (illegally, but “essentially”) just in time:
    http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/10/03/capitol-on-lockdown/
    The private park concessionaires should break the law and sneak onto federal land and man their concessions. Just as the 800,000 federal employees and private contractors who are furloughed without pay and who are forbidden to enter their places of employment or to use their email upon pain of prosecution should break the law, return to their desks by breaking and entering, and announce the civil disorder to Randy Neugebauer and company via email.
    No doubt he’ll have unpaid park rangers and capitol hill police right on it to form a protective cordon around his precious big mouth to protect his safety from all manner of harshometrics by the citizenry.

  155. The mellow range on my harsh-o-meter is broken.
    I feel you.
    I’ll go into manual mode and try to approximate a mellowed level of harshness.
    Thanks count.

  156. From what I hear the division that has to sniff out tax frauds and the like is also down to minimum staff. I somehow do not believe that this revenue creating service being inactive is seen as a bug by the cons (in both meanings of the term). as someone quippped the current GOP proposals amount to a step by step reopening of government until only EPA and IRS stay closed. He or she forgot the CFPB that was to be secretly fed a posion pill in the first or second ‘compromise’ proposal.

  157. I love how this unprecedented (cue scary music) closure of privately run parks is conclusive evidence of the administration maximizing the pain. I have to think you would expect minor differences between shutdowns (i.e. they wouldn’t all be exactly alike). But, you know, this park thing is just so huge, and all, that it could only be explained by The Evilness of Obama.
    Self-parody can be rather amusing in trying times such as these. So thanks, Brett.

  159. Brett,
    Keeping privately run campground open at the end of a (federally-operated, maintained, and patrolled) road, in the middle of a (federally policed) park with (federally patrolled and maintained) trails, etc is not necessarily a good idea.
    And maybe there’s a campground where this doesn’t hold true (where federal law enforcement isn’t used and no federal resources are needed to maintain the larger environment for users)- but it’s easy to imagine the Interior putting down a blanket rule rather than trying to judge this sort of thing on a case by case basis.
    Or could just assume it’s a gigantic plot by Obama. Yeah, that’s totally easier.

  160. Look, here are some obvious things that are going to happen, either immediately or as the shutdown progresses.
    Federal workers are not going to get paid. Some of them may not ever get paid for whatever time they lose. Some of them will have to find other jobs.
    WIC funds will dry up after about a week. Housing subsidies will dry up too, I don’t know how long that will take.
    At about two weeks, veterans’ disability and pension benefits will run out of money.
    No new SBA loans.
    No new disability claims will be processed.
    Student loan processing will slow down.
    Head start programs will shut down.
    Etc etc etc etc etc.
    And, whoever had planned to go camping with Brett’s guy will not get to go.
    It’s enormously disruptive to shut down federal government operations. That’s why folks thought it was a bad idea.
    The tea partiers wanted this, and now they have it. Take it up with them.

  161. wj–

    But moderation is, in fact, a political ideology with views. A moderate position may be nowhere near the “center” — especially if you define center as midway between the bulk of the two parties. But it is a very real and viable position when it comes to the issues.

    The temptation to talk about this in linear algebra metaphors is almost irresistible. Consider every possible political issue as a basis for a political space. The traditional left/right axis is a set of co-linear vectors in that space (pointing in opposite directions).
    Some people’s politics have a high correlation to the left/right axis. The question is, does a moderate have high or low correlation to the left/right vectors? People who equate moderation with centrism are asserting high correlation with small coefficients on the basis vectors.
    But if you equate moderation with, for example, pragmatism, then you could have low correlation but big coefficients (i.e. more extreme views). Such a moderate may still project onto the left/right axis as a pretty small vector, but be nothing like a centrist-style moderate.
    I’m rabidly laissez-faire and I think that big government only really benefits the entities that can use it to their advantage, i.e., big corporations, rich people, political insiders, and others with big legal staffs. I’m pro-choice (within limits) and believe that a rational welfare state is necessary, and will become even more necessary in the future as automation renders lots of people unemployable. I think entitlements shouldn’t be more than about 60% of outlays (they’re currently at about 70%), but I’m pretty sure that there’s something hardwired into American democracy that prevents the feds from collecting more than about 22% of GDP. I’m a foreign-policy hawk but think that the surveillance state is best countered with near-wikileaks levels of transparency. I think that climate change is real but would rather wait for better technology before committing anything to policy. I think federal R&D money is important. I think the ACA mandate + guaranteed issue + community rating tripod is a good start, but the law is so poorly implemented that I can’t support it. (I wouldn’t shut the government down over it.)
    If you project all that stuff onto left/right, you’ll get a vector that points right and is maybe 20% of the length of that of the ACA de-funders. But I can make common cause on a lot of things with people with left-projecting vectors. Does that make me a moderate? An independent? Or just confused?
    At the end of the day, issues get oversimplified, and for good or ill the main simplification is through projection onto the left/right axis. Because of that, you wind up having to vote for a Republican or a Democrat, and you can only pass centrist legislation. Maybe in the future, we’ll come up with political metaphors that will give us something more sophisticated to argue with.
    Got my geek on. Please excuse the length.

  162. I’m fascinated by Rep. Neugebauer’s “thinking” in all of this.
    He is for a heavily armed citizenry, including the stockpiling of the most lethal weapons and ammo ad infinitum in the service of watering the tree of liberty against government tyranny, like running the park system, AND, secondarily, so I don’t steal his stereo system, and then he goes out amongst them, these armed,, heat-packing citizenry, armed with his unwavering encouragement and spittle-flecked ideological threats of violence, and insults their intelligence and their jobs, after he has halted their livelihoods, to their faces, and he walks away unscathed.
    You know, I know of some rough bars where if you pop in, in natty attire with an American flag lapel pin, slam a rhetorical machete down on the bar, and scream that you want a drink and the bartender shouldn’t be expecting to be paid or tipped, or thanked, the one thing that WON’T happen to you … is a drink.
    It’s the American way.
    I’d like to get inside that tiny space this man, this little boy with the surly mouth, calls his brain and kind of poke around with a flame thrower and a buck knife and try to tease out his train of thought on this matter.
    I’d probably have to wear gumboots in there because of the sewage covering his brain pan.

  163. It’s important to remember that it’s not Republicans doing this, it’s a particular subset of Republicans with a specific batsh1t ideology.
    But don’t they all vote the same? I’m sure a bunch of conservative congressfolk talk about how the shutdown is stupid, but if they all vote against a clean CR, who cares what they say?
    I thought that only 2 Republican congressman voted against the current proposal (while another 4 voted against it because they thought it didn’t go far enough). It seems to me like the fundamental problem is that all Republican congressmen are terrified of tea party primaries, no matter what they think of the tea party, so in that sense, I don’t think there are good vs bad Republican congressman: everyone is responding to the same incentives and so they’re all acting the same, no matter what they believe.

  164. I think that big government only really benefits the entities that can use it to their advantage
    RM, I suppose that works, if you are careful to define “big government” as sstrictly those parts that can be gamed only (or at least particularly) by large entities such as corporations or unions. But I’m not sure I am willing to embrace that definition. So what about some specifics.
    Does “big government” include things like police and fire departments? Parks departments? Health departments? The military (at its current size)?
    What it actually seems to come down to, in my experience, is this: “Big Government is all the parts of the government which do things that I dislike, plus anything else which doesn’t (as far as I know) impact me at all, except for my taxes.”
    And that “as far as I know” caveat is important, because most of those railing against big government have little clue as to what impacts them and what does not. They aren’t all as clueless as the guy with the “Government hands off my Medicare” sign, of course. But a lot of them are not far from it.

  165. It is amazing to me how quickly the TPers want to switch positions (and then have the rest of us shove their old positions down the memory hole, or be labeled liberal apologists)- first, they want the shutdown, they’re bringin on the shutdown, they’re not afraid of the shutdown, shutdown will actually do us some good…
    And 48 hours into the shutdown, they’re running away from the concept so quickly it’s like a bomb went off. Apparently their only hope now is to turn it into Obama’s Shutdown, since owning this sh1tpile is toxic and defusing their own bomb is untenable.
    Brett’s commentary looks like a microcosm of this- first, conservatives *want* the shutdown because ordinary folk will realize they didnt need the Feds, and now it’s about how Obama is the real villain. No conservative paeans from Brett on the virtue of denying cancer treatments to children or shutting down the VA…

  166. But don’t they all vote the same? I’m sure a bunch of conservative congressfolk talk about how the shutdown is stupid, but if they all vote against a clean CR, who cares what they say?
    I thought that the issue was the Boehner wouldn’t bring a clear CR to the floor, since it would pass (with mostly Dems and some moderate GOPers). But he won’t, because Hastert Rule, and if he does then 30-40 TPers will call for a vote and not vote for him as Speaker.
    We have three parties in Congress right now, and two of them are operating in a very tenuous coalition.
    That is, they’ll vote for a CR + defund Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t vote for a clean CR.

  167. A brief note on centerism
    In days of yore, the Democratic Party coalition included some pretty corrupt urban political machines (Harry Truman and the Kansas City Pendergast machine, I’m lookin’ at you) and the descendants of the Civil War Democrats and their Jim Crow racial empire in the south. What these two had in common was a degree of economic populism (whites only). After the GOP ran the country into the ditch in 1929, these groups cooperated with other members of the coalition (unions, communists, socialists, do-gooders, and other assorted scum)to pass the New Deal.
    For a time THAT WAS THE CENTER.
    Those who claim most loudly to be the ‘center’ these days are more like the NE urban Republicans such as Jacob Javits and Edward Brooke on a bad LSD trip, i.e. lame brains like Evan Bayh. Folks like these have consistently advocated for the economic royalist policies that characterize the GOP in the roaring 20’s.
    Folks. That is not the center. That is thinly disguised extremism masquerading as reasonableness. Vectors be damned.

  168. ” I think that big government only really benefits the entities that can use it to their advantage”… ” I’m a foreign-policy hawk”
    These two positions, if not actually contradictory, don’t seem to go well together–nor does the description “libertarian hawk”. If you don’t trust the government to do a decent job on the domestic front, where at least those affected have some chance of registering their dissatisfaction at the ballot box, why would you think the government will blow up the right people overseas? If we make mistakes there, it only matters at the ballot box if there are enough body bags coming home or if people get tired of spending money on blowing up foreigners.
    On your more general point, yeah, the political system doesn’t give us real choices on most issues because everything gets bundled together into two big packages labeled “Democrat” and “Republican”. I don’t like voting for Democrats because I’m not happy with some of the stands they take. But given the realistic alternative, I vote for them without feeling in any way obligated to support them on all issues or even say nice things about them.
    But in the current situation, the Democrats are sane and the Republicans aren’t. That makes the choice easy.

  170. “It’s difficult,” the Ranger replied. “Well, it should be difficult,” scorned the congressman. “It is difficult,” the Ranger repeated. “I’m sorry, sir.”
    “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves,” said Neugebauer. “I’m not ashamed,” the Ranger retorted.
    “You should be,” sneered Neugebauer.
    Rep. Neugebuaer doing what Republican Congresspeople do.

  171. I don’t recall ever being so angry, in an almost over-the-top way, as I am now at Republicans.
    I am saying very little, because it’s difficult for me to read and respond to comments like Brett’s and McTex’s and keep a civil tongue. I treasure the (relative) civility of ObWi compared to the shoutfests in (say) every newspaper’s open comments. I remember how convincing I found “Suck it, Libtard” as a response to my own arguments, and do my best not ever to comment in that vein.
    However, I was _much_ _much_ angrier back in the days when many Republicans were defending or denying the torture of captives, including children, by our forces during our late and unlamented adventure in Iraq — said defenders being not just people I “know” online, but members of my family. That reduced me to spittle-flecked rage, and I’m sorry to say that I shouted at a couple people I love very much when they essayed such a defense.
    As for the Count, who has certainly gushed over the top on this thread: I remember hilzoy explaining that he had a certain license unavailable to most commenters, due to his history on the blog. I usually don’t much like it when he uses that license, even when he’s “on my side”.

  172. I thought that the issue was the Boehner wouldn’t bring a clear CR to the floor, since it would pass (with mostly Dems and some moderate GOPers). But he won’t, because Hastert Rule, and if he does then 30-40 TPers will call for a vote and not vote for him as Speaker.
    That is indeed the position on the board.
    It’s also true that some of the “moderates” are afraid to vote with the Dems for a “clean CR” because they’ll get primaried in the next election if they do. They must all hang together, or they’ll be picked off individually by their rabid base.
    At this point, they’re desperate just to find a way to save face; but Obama’s not offering one. Some weak-sister Dems are trying to put together a “bipartisan compromise” to allow the House insurgents to claim a mostly-symbolic win, but I hope Obama tells the Dems in that effort to pound sand.
    This hostage-taking needs to be dealt with the way Sherman dealt with Georgia.

  173. How does the country survive is one of our major political parties either is or only answers to, the rightmost crazy voices in our polity?
    Voices that want only one of two things. That everyone respect their authority or they’ll not only let everything burn but pour the gasoline themselves.

  174. At least the word ‘vermin’ should be avoided because of its connotations (Ungeziefer). I have no objection to the use of ‘scum’ though (Abschaum).
    Where I react especially sensitive is, when terms are used that were taken directly from the Nazi dictionary (which the count rarely does* but con pundits an politicians do regularly). Personally I think anyone using ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung) as a euphemism should instantly get his/her nose broken and a finger smashed for each repeated offense. And I do not mean that as hyperbole. I mean real bodily harm with the maximum of pain while not threatening the life or major bodily functions. And it should happen in public in front of unflinching cameras.
    *’vermin’ excepted

  175. Berial, I think the way this plays out, and the country survives, is this. Those Republicans not totally adrift from reality decide that they have to do what is right for the country, even if the get primaried. And some of them, maybe even a lot of them, do. THEN, the rabid right candidates who replace them lose the next election. See, for example, a couple of prominent examples in last election’s Senate races.
    Eventually, one hopes that the Republican primary voters figure out that nominating ever more radical candidates is mostly a way to enable more liberal Democrats to win.
    This may, admittedly, take a while. I note that in California, for example, Senator Boxer keeps getting re-elected, in spite of being substantially to the left of the California norm, simply because she keeps getting blessed with nut-cases and obvious incompetents for opponents. But can the majority of Republicans everywhere be as thick headed as ours are? (Or maybe they just prefer more liberal elected officials so as to be better able to feel unappreciated and disrespected….)

  176. “This hostage-taking needs to be dealt with the way Sherman dealt with Georgia.”
    I’m on your side.

  177. well teh right and Wall St. wouldn’t and didn’t allow OWS to exist. so lots of us live in a different world from the one the Republicans live in and want to say exists, but that hasn’t stopped them so far.
    If only it was just inconceiveable the Right would continue on with their game of “my way or the Highway, though, i don’t expect the Right to face a reality they choose not to.
    as Bush Co said, we create our own reality when you are trying to deal with the world as it is.
    that is in essence what the Repubicans/TP are about today. not dealing with the world the rest of us live in, but demanding we live in your TP Republican world.
    oh god how i wish i could. maybe if i had a lot of money, i could pretend too. and i am a white male so, i know where the Republicans are supposedly coming from
    the White Male Privilege is something i know exists just by being a white male. a given in the US. wouldn’t want to be a female or a person of color in the US today or since Reagan. i already know how white males feels and think about those “kind.”
    the Real world, where i expect something out of, but just don’t know what. Guess that means i’m ready to be a Republican in Congress.

  178. Some weak-sister Dems are trying to put together a “bipartisan compromise” to allow the House insurgents to claim a mostly-symbolic win, but I hope Obama tells the Dems in that effort to pound sand.
    The President has made it clear there will be no negotiations in exchange for a release of the hostage. Release the hostage first, he says. Like Syria, he has drawn a line in the sand, and he does wield the veto pen….don’t forget that.
    Maybe we need some U.N. inspectors…..

  179. It’s also true that some of the “moderates” are afraid to vote with the Dems for a “clean CR” because they’ll get primaried in the next election if they do. They must all hang together, or they’ll be picked off individually by their rabid base.
    Maybe they should have thought ahead before they saddled up the tiger.

  180. Say members of a political party and their voters calls entire groups of human beings “parasites”, seeking to humiliate and demonize the latter for 35 years in the former’s campaigns, on the air, and on their websites.
    Say, this political party seize power and fashion policies which punish those groups of human beings by denying them health insurance, refusing to permit the sick and poor on to Medicaid expansion and shaving 30 cents or so off their daily food allowance, even if folks targeted work for a living, and in addition they want to eliminate Medicare, Social Security and the rest of the safety net.
    Say they elevate one hack writer of overwrought prose who characterized throughout her professional career our aforementioned groups of people as “parasites” to a position in which her “theories” of parasitism and the punishments thereof are reflected in an overarching economic and political philosophy, applied to our governance.
    Well, you could in turn call the perpetrators of this blood libel — calling people parasites — by some other name, most of which are synonyms for parasites … say, algae, conferva, jackals, sea lentils, or ward heelers, which all have a certain music to them but don’t hit the mark.
    You could call them “parasites” in turn, but that could lead to confusion, not all of us can be parasites, can we, you don’t want to confuse brand names, so you look for another synomym from the sample list displayed below and you find the word “vermin”, to which you realize that Hitler and Company gave a reprehensible connotation, so you blanch a bit and look askance and lean toward being politically correct, the very notion of which the aforementioned members of our offending political party are vehemently opposed to, so you might settle for Republican as another synonym for parasite, cadger, henchman, lounge lizard, or stooge, but by using that term you realize you have just insulted Abraham Lincoln, your mother, some friends who are oblivious to the crimes of said name-calling, and other decent Republicans on the internet for example who might take things the right way, that is to say, wrongly applied to them, and they would be correct about that, one hopes.
    You need something equally as pungent and despicable as the word “”parasite and among the synonyms available, “vermin” fits the bill plus it was Hitler’s nickname used by everyone who came in contact with him, everyone including lice, cockroaches, heterophytes, the public, and crabs.
    I understand that word is fraught, so I’m willing to have a poll among our participants here and let them choose the synonym for “parasite” most applicable to our current coterie of hopeless romantics who are burning our civil government to the ground.
    Have at it. I’ll adhere to the choice in future.
    parasite
    Synonyms and related words:
    adherent, algae, appendage, attendance, attendant, autophyte, barnacle, bean, beat, bedbug, beggar, bloodsucker, body of retainers, bracken, brown algae, buff, bummer, cadger, cat flea, cavaliere servente, chigoe, climber, cockroach, cohort, conferva, confervoid, cortege, coupon clippers, court, courtier, crab, creeper, dangler, deadbeat, dependent, diatom, disciple, dog flea, drone, entourage, fan, fern, flea, flunky, follower, following, freeloader, fruits and vegetables, fucus, fungus, grapevine, grayback, green algae, gulfweed, hanger-on, henchman, herb, heterophyte, homme de cour, hyena, idle rich, idler, ivy, jackal, jigger, kelp, laze, leech, legume, leisure class, lentil, liana, lichen, liverwort, lounge lizard, louse, lumpen proletariat, mendicant, mite, mold, moocher, mosquito, moss, mushroom, nit, nonworker, panhandler, parasitic plant, parasitize, partisan, pea, perthophyte, phytoplankton, planktonic algae, plant families, public, puffball, pulse, pursuer, pursuivant, red algae, red bug, rentiers, retinue, roach, rockweed, rout, rust, sand flea, saprophyte, sargasso, sargassum, satellite, scrounge, scrounger, sea lentil, sea moss, sea wrack, seaweed, sectary, shadow, smell-feast, smut, spiv, sponge, sponger, stooge, successor, succulent, sucker, suite, supporter, tagtail, tail, the unemployable, the unemployed, tick, toadstool, train, trainbearer, vermin, vetch, vine, votary, ward heeler, weevil, wood tick, wort, wrack

  183. My dear Count,
    I humbly offer up the following for further consideration: Accomplice, acolyte, expropriator, fellow traveler, flatterer, lickspittle (my personal favorite), rat, scum, stooge, toady, true believer, useful idiot, and water carrier.
    Take it to the house. You have my support.

  184. I stand shoulder-to-… well, shoulder would not be correct because my shoulder does not reach that high; say shoulder-to-kneecap … with The Count.
    ObWi is valuable because the regulars here are articulate, not because they’re “polite”. It is entirely possible to be vicious while being “polite”. All it takes is the sort of literacy behind some wag’s line: “There goes a man that Reverend Spooner would have called a shining wit.
    The Count is more articulate than most, but he’s hardly more … imaginative … than some of the “conservatives” around here, whose fantasies about “liberals” are generally as fantastical as (and IMHO more vicious than) The Count’s homely parables about salsa.
    –TP

  185. I’m sorry I didn’t have time yesterday to check in here. Also, that I’ve been tending to skip over the Count’s rants, because they contribute little to my understanding of the conversation.
    Count:
    Please take the chill pill or beverage of your choice. Also, I STRONGLY recommend that you try making comments of no more than 3 paragraphs, and only one at a time, not 2-4 in a row.
    Savor the moment.

  186. The answer to the question in the original post is largely path dependence. In the 70s and 80s there really was an establishment liberal media. A conservative counter-media was created by various people at about the time of Reagan. Like most non racial ‘counter-culture’ movements, they tend to have an interesting mix of proselytizing and insularity (see for example both Communism and for much of its history Christianity–and in fact Christianity still operates that way in cultures where it is a minority, see China and India).
    The transition to the mainstream reach of Fox News came later, but the mindset hasn’t changed. This isn’t a function of the differences between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. You can see it for example in former college ‘radicals’ who are now oppressive college professors. It is a function of not changing your self understanding as you gain power.

  187. Ran across this from another discussion on the subject (this is a summary of an OMB memo from 2010, linky):
    The circular establishes two “policies” regarding the absence of
    appropriations: (1) a prohibition on incurring obligations unless the obligations are otherwise authorized by law and (2) permission to incur obligations “as necessary for orderly termination of an agency’s functions,”
    I read that as saying that money can be spent on shutting down operations in an orderly manner, but not on maintaining regularly (nonessential) operations even if the latter is cheaper. That is, the executive can’t just decide that keeping something open makes more sense in the long run and do so, it can only maintain activities deemed essential based on their function.
    [sidenote: I have no idea where the executive gets the power to spend money on ‘essential’ activities in the absence of Congressional action though.]

  189. I well recall the days when McManus and the Count’s earlier iteration roamed the place. It was a glorius time.
    So what if the years have made us all a bit rougher, excepting the current front pagers, who have hung on to an amazing state of grace.

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