Put simply, if the GOP doesn't stop listening exclusively to Rush, Beck, and FOX, et al, they will continue to misjudge reality and get crushed. This has been demonstrated so many times already. Remember how super-confident Romney and his team was of winning the Presidency? How many times does this thing have to happen until they wake the fuck up?
Are they really that stupid?
An Inadequate Offer From the House
Speaker John Boehner on Thursday said he was willing to delay briefly a disastrous default of the country’s financial obligations but was not willing to reopen the government. “I would hope that the president would look at this as an opportunity and a good-faith effort on our part to move halfway — halfway to what he’s demanded,” he said.
Postponing default by raising the debt ceiling for five or six weeks offers only momentary relief, and refusing to do so would have been unthinkable. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday that the public’s retirement savings and benefits were at serious risk if Republicans left the debt ceiling unchanged. Business leaders — the traditional constituency of the Republicans until the Tea Party muscled them out of the way — have been pressuring leaders to change course.
A default would roil the global bond market, push up interest rates, and almost certainly produce another recession. Although Mr. Boehner grandly pronounced the six-week delay to be a major concession, the same danger will stare Congress in the face before Thanksgiving.
If House Republicans were reasonable, they would have raised both the debt ceiling and passed a clean continuing resolution to end the shutdown. That would have immediately produced a willingness on the part of President Obama and Senate Democrats to begin negotiations on the budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
For now, House leaders seem to have dropped their demand to tie the reopening of government to ending health care reform. But as they shift back to the longer-running dispute over spending, they still want to use the continuing shutdown as their weapon to extract more cuts from the budget without any revenue increases.
Each day the shutdown continues, the lack of services grows more acute. Republicans know that they are hurting those most dependent on government assistance (who tend to be Democratic constituents). To cite just one example, many states are about to run out of federal nutrition aid to the poor. Michigan, along with other states, is close to shutting down its Women, Infant and Children feeding program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, school lunches, and food stamps
House leaders are still working on the details of their debt-ceiling proposal. But evenSenate Republicans have grown weary of the House’s confrontational tactics, and plan to include an end to the shutdown as part of any debt-ceiling bill that emerges from the House.
Asked whether any negotiations over the budget will take place if the government remains closed, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, on Thursday gave an answer that was firm and correct: “Not gonna happen.”
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