Anyone want to discuss actual facts about the government shutdown?

Actual facts? Who could find them amid the political posturing, demagoguery and stupidity of all parties involved. I think there will be an agreement next week to reopen the government and raise the debt limit, but by then more damage will have been inflicted than anyone anticipated and certainly none of us needed. And then… we will then quickly lurch into the next crisis-of-the-day because sadly, that’s how the U.S. government now works, or rather, doesn’t work.

I only hope voters remember this episode next November.

Check out these facts.

Good anti-war rant but we have more problems than just our foreign policy. We are under attack on our economy as well. China and the middle east are killing us economically and we’re helping them. We are borrowing a $trillion/yr from China and others just so that we can send it back to them for their goods. And it’s resources and products that we already have. We just won’t use them we’d rather buy from others stimulating their economies and depressing our own. We are in the midst of an ideological war that will decide whether a free market or a managed economy will prevail. While we are deciding, the economy is in jeopardy of total collapse. Don’t miss understand, foreign policy is important but this is not the 60s. Our survival is at stake.

It’s actually a plan by the New World Order to begin their take over. They are well on the way.

The Republicans have gone on strike hoping that by bringing America Inc to its knees they will force management to concede to their unreasonable demands.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room Good answer, thanks for your input. I tried my best to come up with something in line with reality…

When it comes to involving Obamacare in this debacle about the debt ceiling, I think the Republicans are the only stupid party.

@mazingerz88 You’ll have to expound a little. Blaming one side makes no sense to me at all. I mean, it’s simply not the reality of the situation.

The only fact worth discussing is how irresponsible these elected officials are in allowing the country to suffer the negative consequences of their inability or unwillingness to work together.

@DWW25921 Blaming one side, putting them at fault, making people own the responsibility…that all make sense. What doesn’t make sense is when you blame both parties for the same thing when only one party was at fault. That does not make sense. Boehner already agreed not to involve Obamacare with the debt ceiling. He reneged. His stupid fault. Is that a helpful fact-? Maybe not. Because you can’t shame him enough using that so he can fix things. He already said on TV he changed his mind. But that’s a fact nonetheless.

And just curious @Jaxk, when you said ideological war, do you mean this government shutdown that the Republicans wanted-?

Anybody with a brain can see that the current Republican party wants to see the world burn just because they cannot have their way. Even many hardcore Conservatives are beginning to question the new extremism within the GOP. This shutdown is a dramatic enough event to separate the terrorists from those who merely disagree with Democrats.

Sadly, incumbents win most elections and voters tend to have short memories, so I don’t see our problems ending soon. In fact, I see utter collapse as more likely than recovery… unless we have a full-on revolution, which brings it’s own brand of instability.

@Jaxk While I agree that it’s an ideological war, you are deluded to think that we have a free economy or that those who oppose letting corporations run roughshod over the public want a Communist-style planned economy. The ideological divide really is which planned economy do we want; the unsustainable one that benefits the elite at the cost of turning us into a Third World nation, or the sustainable one that allows consumers and small business owners to survive despite the predations of the megacorps. And given that the latter has worked in many other nations, I know which I would prefer.

@mazingerz88 Both parties have allowed this country to get worse and worse over time regardless of who was in office. Looking at the big picture here, I’m sure you will agree that there is a chronic lack of communication and cooperation on both sides. This situation could have been avoided through communicative diplomacy that appears to have been absent.

@jerv “Anybody with a brain can see that the current Republican party wants to see the world burn just because they cannot have their way” I’ve also heard that exact same rhetoric used to describe the Democrats. So what, we have an impasse than? It’s always the other guy? As long as that attitude stands things will only get worse. It takes 2 to tango and there is no “good guy bad guy” here. There are only turds of a different stink in a bucket all owned by the same corporations.

@DWW25921 The Democrats pretty much are what they have always been. Will Rogers summed it up best when he said, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”. There usually isn’t much agreement amongst Democrats, though this time there is some uncharacteristic unity amongst them in facing the threat from across the aisle that threatens not just the nation, but the world economy.

The Democrats may want what others consider is bad, but they never took hostages and made ransom demands to the extent and degree that the Republicans are doing and have done REPEATEDLY in recent years. There is a difference between stalling a piece of legislation and shutting down the government.

What is different here is that the Republicans are currently split between the Jihadists who are the ones who actually follow the stereotype (“Fuck the poor, fuck the government, all praise God, guns, and the Free Market!”), and traditional Conservatives who are no longer conservative enough to belong in the current party who are considering at least temporarily joining forces against their rabid brethren.

Do we have an impasse? Yes! Many on the GOP side have said that compromise is weakness, that accepting less than 100% is unacceptable, and otherwise indicated that the only way they will allow anything to ever happen is if they get everything they want. No concession, no negotiation. Not EVER!.

Now, how do you deal with that? It’s either hand them total control and abandon the multi-party system, or allow an impasse. To be fair, a few on the Democrat side have made similar statements, but the Republicans now have it as their official platform and (aside from deserters like McCain) are following it in lock-step while the vast majority of Democrats are willing to negotiate and compromise. Well, except this time when it’s been made perfectly and explicitly clear that any attempt to do so will come to naught since any offer from the Dems other than utter concession to the Republicans will fall on deaf ears.

Will that make things worse? Well, compared to now maybe, but is that really worse than just capitulating to terrorist demands? As a pro-choice non-Christian who likes video games and human rights, who doesn’t have enough capital gains to lower my tax rate to less than half of what the middle class pays, and thinks gun registration and background checks are not a terrible idea, I would rather have perpetual stalemate than live in the sort of world it would take to get out of this deadlock.

@DWW25921 What exactly did the Democrats do that made this country worse-? You specifically asked a question about actual facts on the shutdown. I made the assertion that it’s Boehner’s fault not the Democrats. You are saying that the Dems also should be faulted, why is that-?

Just saying that these leaders should compromise or they are both turds is simply vague and useless. That’s why we have elections. We pass laws. We revise laws. So as not to be vague. What we should not do is shut down the government like what the Republicans did just because they can’t get what they want the way they should have gotten it. Working within a functioning government.

Well, I just watched the video. That guy wants to permanently shut down the government. Brilliant.~

I was trying to look at a website and it had a big us eagle on it and it said, sorry, this website is unavailable due to federal funding shortfalls’ or something wow was I surprised.

@jerv @mazingerz88 I’m in a bit of a time constraint this morning but I wanted to address your comments so I looked up “Republicans and Democrats are equally at fault” on Google and got 72m hits. I’m not going to sift through all that crap. Bear with me for a minute as I’m going in a different direction…

I understand that it’s ingrained into the mentality of every human to have an antagonist, “good guy bad guy” or “us and them” mentality. Although this is natural and normal I believe the polarized folks on both sides of the isle have taken this to extremes. I wanted to find an article on this but as I said before, I don’t feel like sifting through all the crap…

You both are vehemently anti-Republican and pro-Democrat. I find that unfortunate. Not because I could care less about the Republicans, but because polarization generally makes a person useless when it comes to diplomatic negotiations. This is the same mentality that caused the gridlock in the first place, on both sides.

It’s not worth it to me to defend ideas that will fall upon deaf ears. Honestly, I’m not willing to defend one side over the other as being an Independent I’ve chosen a different path altogether. There comes a point when you need to realize that this whole back and fourth tennis match of ideology is foolish and it has to stop. Denying there is any culpability on one side at all frankly confuses me and I really don’t know what to say to you…

In my mind, what I’ve said is so completely obvious that I’ve just taken it as fact and never bothered to outline a defense for it. I’ve never had to. I honestly don’t understand how both sides can come up with reasons why they are completely faultless. It literally blows my mind…

On to your comments, in order to explain how the Democrats are partially responsible I would invariably have to defend the Republicans and frankly, I’m not willing to do that. I’m also not willing to go after the Democrats as it’s just one side of the same coin. I really don’t know how to respond to you guys…

@DWW25921 Merely acknowledgement that my own position is more nuanced than, “Democrats good, Republicans bad!”. Nothing more.

I acknowledge that you’ve put more thought into it than I implied. ok?

@DWW25921 Good enough :)

Two big differences that I see 1) the Dems added “before the debt crisis is taken care of” but that seems to be conveniently forgotten in the sound bites. 2) No concession, no negotiation was the Rep starting point for this entire fiasco and was stated as such months in advance.

Here is an article from Jan 2013 with McConnell threatening default. Here is a paragraph from that article “Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., didn’t dismiss the idea of allowing a partial shutdown of government until an agreement can be reached. Texas Sen. John Cornyn and other Republicans have floated the idea of a shutdown as a way of winning deeper spending cuts.”

@rojo

That’s some pretty good spin you put out. The spending cuts have been a goal for a long time and Obama won’t negotiate on that. Now he’s saying he won’t negotiate during a crisis. That means he won’t negotiate at all. The Republicans have been negotiating all along. Problem is that they’ve been negotiating with themselves. This is all easily resolved but the Whitehouse expects congress to relent and give him exactly what he wants. The Wall Street Journel reported that a senior Whitehouse official said “We are winning…It doesn’t really matter to us” how long the shutdown lasts “because what matters is the end result.” That pretty much says it all.

But @Jaxk you cannot get out of the fact that this entire thing was premeditated, manufactured and implemented by the Reps. in my opinion because they truly thought that, when it came down to the nut cutting, the Dems would cave and they would get what they wanted and based on past actions that was a valid assumption but this time, for some reason, the Dems did not cave.
You are correct that this is, or was, easy to resolve even before it became an issue. Send and clean CR, get the gov. funded and go into negotiations. But they (the Reps) chose to go the other way. Their fault, their responsibility.

@rojo

If they were to give Obama what he wants in the way of a budget and raising the debt ceiling why would Obama negotiate anything. He hasn’t so far. Even the concessions you all believe were unwarranted were all the result of crisis negotiations. Other than crisis, he doesn’t even talk to the Republicans let alone negotiate. If there is any hope of getting government under control, of slowing the massive build up of debt, Obama will only talk about it under crisis conditions. The truth is he could easily find a compromise if he was so inclined. He’s not.

Note that there was never really much question about raising the debt ceiling before, nor have I found any precedent for extorting concessions to the extent we’ve seen during the Obama administration. What changed? One change is the radicalization of the GOP. Democrats becoming just as stubborn came later, after years of attempted negotiations with domestic terrorists failed.

Of course, after a few years of this, Democrats have started descending to the same level, and nothing good can come of that.

@Jaxk I’m a bit disappointed with your assertions. I’ve always found sound judgment in them but sadly not in this case. You make it sound like Obama is playing a child’s game. He doesn’t want to play or something. Get Obama care off the debt ceiling debacle. Not that difficult for Republicans to comprehend. Why can’t the Republicans do just that-? Bottomline reason-?

@mazingerz88

Obamacare is not on the debt ceiling argument, it’s on the CR. The debt ceiling is about spending cuts and if there is any good time to dispute spending it’s when they need to raise the debt ceiling.

You know that the CR is running into the debt ceiling debate and it is all becoming one big clusterfuck @Jaxk . I believe, by design. All part of a nefarious plot by the Tea Party Reps.

Yes, it’s about spending cuts… and they targeted certain spending to cut.

Yes, the Tea Parties. The most powerful group on earth. And who disguised as Clark Kent wages a never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American.

It only takes one with an explosive vest and here we have about a third of the republican party controlling the other two thirds with threats that, lo and behold, they are willing to follow through on.

@Jaxk That was how they started out. Hell, there was a time where I actually respected them. But something happened along the way, and now it’s no longer the noble movement it once was.

@rojo With luck, the majority will bang the brakes on the crazy train and we’ll be able to get back to the relatively benign sort of partisanship we had decades ago. I’m not holding my breath, but I like to think that that’s still a possibility.

I have been giving it a lot of thought lately; I even set aside an hour of meditation this morning for the sole purpose of contemplation and I have come to the conclusion that “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords” is as valid a basis for a system of government as the dysfunctional corporate whore system we presently utilize over here in the United States.

LOL I want my Excalibur @rojo. : )

@jerv

They didn’t go your way, huh.

@Jaxk They got rabies and went nuts.

Sorry I disappeared y’all I had a thing. Thanks to everyone for their insight on this. :)