U.S. Government: Sorry, We're Closed

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U.S. Government: Sorry, We're Closed

Posted by Unknown on Monday September 30, 2013 @06:37PM from the that-time-of-year dept.

theodp writes "CNN reports that the U.S. government shut down at 12:01 a.m. EDT Tuesday after lawmakers in the House and the Senate could not agree on a spending bill to fund the government. Federal employees who are considered essential will continue working. But employees deemed non-essential — close to 800,000 — will be furloughed, and most of those are supposed to be out of their offices within four hours of the start of business Tuesday."

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Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 18:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

Do they do ANYTHING for the actual good of the country?
1. Re:Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 18:54 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  War on Afganistan
  War on Iraq
  War on terror
  War on drugs
  War on swear words
  War on nudity
2. Re:Fucking idiots by Bartles · 2013-09-30 18:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Passing a yearly budget would prevent this from happening. But then of course they would have to admit that they aren't actually passing budgets anymore.
3. Re:Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 19:09 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  War on it's own citizens
4. Re:Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 19:34 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  There is no middle ground anymore theres the far left and the far right and a giant gulf in the middle with a few real centrists mixed in..
  Far left? Far right? Which country are you exactly living in? You're mixing your political terms, you have to parties that are far right and bickering over who gets to have the scepter of power.
5. Re:Fucking idiots by N1AK · 2013-09-30 21:03 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Sure doesn't help when the president says I'll refuse to pass anything unless it's exactly what I want.
  The people elected Obama when a central part of his campaign was 'Obamacare'. They re-elected him. If congress want to repeal Obamacare then they could, and should, try and pass a bill doing so; instead they are using the budget and the massive harm not passing it causes the country to try and hold a gun to Obama's head. They have a legitimate means to try and change things, but because doing that is too hard they'd rather sacrifice the US economy for political point scoring.
  
  Would republican voters be happy if the next Republican president couldn't do anything the Democrats didn't like because the democrat led house or senate wouldn't pass a budget without demanding it be removed? Does anyone who has really thought about this want the budget to become a political nuclear weapon?
6. Re:Fucking idiots by sehryan · 2013-09-30 21:45 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Task: Fund the government
  House bill: Fund the government and defund ACA
  Senate bill: Fund the government
  House bill: Fund the government and delay ACA
  Senate bill: Fund the government
  The Senate (aka Democrats) seems to have no issues achieving said task. It is the House (aka Republicans) that continues to muddy the waters.
  If their constituents really want ACA gone, that is fine. But this task is neither the time nor the place. The House just put 800,000 workers temporarily out of a job. You think those 800,000 people are going to care about ACA when they don't get a paycheck this month?
  
  --
  The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
7. Re:Fucking idiots by drkim · 2013-09-30 21:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It doesn't cost nothing. It costs very very little but that isn't the same thing...
  I'm guessing it cost more to pay the I.T. guy to build this 'closed' page and set up the forwarding links than it cost to pay to just leave the functioning site and servers up.
  Come to think of it - they paid the IT guy AND are keeping the server up: just to keep this stupid 'closed' page up.
8. Re:Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 22:08 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  it takes two tango and the Democrats don't want to negotiate
  Um, why should they? The negotiations happened when the ACA was passed in a legitimate democratic act. What the Republicans are doing now is trying to hold a gun to the countries head in an entirely undemocratic move to kill the ACA. In other words, they are terrorists, and the President shouldn't negotiate with terrorists.
  
  Once they put on their big-boy pants and pick up their toys, perhaps they can get back to the task in hand and pass the budget.
9. Re:Fucking idiots by lordofthechia · 2013-09-30 22:08 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Oddly enough there is middle ground, the only problem is the democrats aren't listening to the people.
  A majority of the house of representatives could have passed a funding bill to keep the government going. But this bill won't see the floor. Why?
  Because the "Majority of the majority" doesn't support it. There's your "will of the people", it's second to the will of the majority party. There is no more compromise (Oh? 230/435 congress persons want to pass a bill? Pity only 70 of those are in our party. No vote for you!).
  So now our house of representatives can no longer represent the people. Only the whims of the majority party.
  This is why the government is shut down. The majority party refused to allow vote on a budget that had *majority* support in the house, just because it wasn't the bill their party wanted.
  And this is the overall issue. Representation in government has been co-opted by the political parties. They no longer represent the people in their districts, only their parties agenda.
  Read more about the Hastert rule and find out where the fault really lies and stop spreading talking points .
  
  --
  Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
10. Re:Fucking idiots by lordofthechia · 2013-09-30 22:13 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  If congress want to repeal Obamacare then they could, and should, try and pass a bill doing so
  
  They say the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.
  What is it called after you attempt the same thing fourty-two times ?
  I think I'll have to try this new tea party bargaining method. See I have the keys to the office. I can refuse to let anyone in the building unless *I* get a raise and they agree to get rid of the healthy snacks in the vending machines.
  
  --
  Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
11. Re:Fucking idiots by RabidReindeer · 2013-09-30 23:40 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The idea of tacking completely unrelated issues together on an up-or-down vote basis is one of the ugliest facets of the US legislative process. You take a bill, name it "The Homeless Puppies and Kittens Act", put in a token support for animal shelters, then festoon it with pork-barrel riders such as Interstate Highways to nowhere, covert espionage on citizens, etc., etc., etc. like lampreys on a whale. Now no one can vote against wasteful spending or violations of basic rights because if they do, they "hate puppies and kittens". And the puppies and kittens are hostages.
  If the Republican Party had any integrity, they'd stop attaching Obamacare to the budgetary process, get the darn thing passed, then do an honest frontal assault on Obamacare. But then, they can't win that, so intelligent people would regroup, plan for a more opportune time, and spend their resources on something that actually did the country some good, building some political capital that they could use for the next attack. But then again, intelligent and Congress never did go too well together.
12. Re: Fucking idiots by tburkhol · 2013-09-30 23:41 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I for one am happy that someone is willing to stand up and say current behaviors are driving our country toward an inevitable debt burden we can never hope to repay, regardless of whether the message is popular.
  
  The party out of the White House always says this. The Democrats abhorred the outrageous spending on military actions and Medicare expansion during the Bush years. The Republicans abhorred the outrageous spending on social programs during the Clinton years. "We spend to much and are dooming our children to poverty and economic collapse," has been a rallying cry since at least Reagan.
  Strangely, neither party, once in power, actually reduces spending. Neither party is especially interested in changing those programs that actually affect the budget. What we currently get from the GOP is "We need to cut $1000B from the $600B discretionary budget, so we can afford to reduce revenues by $200B."
  This tactic, of claiming the party in-power is destroying the country, while continuing exactly those same behaviors when the tables turn, is the partisan rhetoric that polarizes the people and prevents any rational compromise to solve actual problems.
13. Re:Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 23:54 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Does anyone who has really thought about this want the budget to become a political nuclear weapon?
  Yes it absolutely should be.
  
  I look forward to next February, when we can expect a cadre of politicians demanding that the NSA be defunded or they won't pass a CR. Followed, doubtless in March by demands that the Smithsonian be divested or they won't pay military salaries, and in April that NASA be defunded or they won't send out social security checks.
  Most of us think that, once you've passed a law, it's law. A segment of House republicans seem to think that you can cancel the law by refusing to pay for it, in exactly the same way they effectively cancelled the Dodd-Frank financial reform law by blocking appointment of the necessary administrators. If they think they really think the people want ACA repealed, then they should organize and get the votes to repeal it, not find sneaky ways to allow it to be 'technically the law, but we have no way to enforce or implement it."
14. Re:Fucking idiots by N1AK · 2013-09-30 23:58 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  They've tried 41 times [huffingtonpost.com] already. Attaching it to this "must-pass" spending bill was attempt 42.
  So what's your point. If you can't do something properly you should do whatever it takes instead? You can't ask someone you don't know 41 times to give you $1000 and if they refuse the 41st time tell them they need to give you the money or you'll key their car and then claim they are being unreasonable.
  
  There's a democratic president who got elected on a platform including this bill, there's a democratic senate and the majority of voters voted for democratic congresspeople. The Republicans can't do this legitimately because the voters chose not to give them the power to run the country so they're using economic vandalism to try and get their way instead.
15. Re:Fucking idiots by N1AK · 2013-10-01 00:04 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  They also re-elected a GOP majority in the House where funding bills start.
  Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats. If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
  
  ACA had to be passed into law and was. Republicans had the chance to stop it then and they have had the chance to stop it at any time since then. The budget should not be a matter of party politics because anything being funded should already have been accepted by the three branches of government.
  
  If the Republicans manage to this without the public siding against them (which I'm dubious about) then just wait till the situation is reversed and the Democrats realise they can use this to get what they want on gun control, abortion, welfare etc by doing the same thing.
16. Re: Fucking idiots by Anonymous Coward · 2013-10-01 01:36 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Utterly wrong on nearly all counts. After WWII federal spending as a percentage of GDP was 16%. During the next 50 years federal spending increased a measly 3%... Then Dubya:
  http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7M6Qk22TGko/UDMQywXhifI/AAAAAAAARVM/AUKK51HNBPM/s640/Governemnt+Spending+as+Percent+of+GDP+-+Federal.png
  If you want the true underlying reason for the deficit look no further than two unfunded wars and drastic cuts in revenues, largely to the mega wealthy.
17. Re:Fucking idiots by tgibbs · 2013-10-01 02:13 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Not exactly. The Republican Bill does not just do partial funding of ongoing business of government--it bundles funding in with a delay in the Affordable Care Act and a repeal of a portion of the Act (the medical device tax). Neither of these have anything to do with funding the ongoing business of government.
  Note that no Congressional action is necessary to fund Obamacare--it was previously funded by an Act of Congress, and its funding will continue.
18. Re:Fucking idiots by hairyfeet · 2013-10-01 02:47 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Read this passage, written in the 1930s by a Marine Corps General, and see if it doesn't sound EXACTLY like the shit we have been doing lately, just change the target and it could have been written last month...
  "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.â
  Folks think this kind of backroom bullshit has been only the last decade or two? try close to a century, probably longer. The blood of the poor paving the road to profit for a handful at the top, this has been going on for a loooong time. I'd say the ONLY difference between then and now? The uber rich have stopped giving a fuck about the kayfabe and even pretending they give a damn about any but the elite, for a perfect example watch that video of the RNC with the "let 'em die!" incident. All those rich cheering the thought of a poor person dying rather than costing them a dime? Perfectly summed up the kind of sociopath scumbags we see at the top.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
19. Re:Fucking idiots by Bite+The+Pillow · 2013-10-01 02:57 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You might have a point, if people knew where funding bills start. They don't, and campaigns do not remind people.
  Further, Fox did a study where people were asked if they supported ACA. Half the people saw it called Obamacare, half Affordable Care Act. All things being equal, people were in favour of affordable care and opposed to Obamacare.
  People don't understand what they are for or against today, or why. Regardless of where it originates.
20. Re: Fucking idiots by Pseudonym · 2013-10-01 03:16 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  While those incidents are certainly iconic, remember that there are a lot of "fervent anti-gay advocates" in the US. The null hypothesis is that the proportion of homophobes who are homosexual is no different from the proportion of homosexual people the general population. At the moment, there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
  
  --
  sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The Blame Game by aardvarkjoe · 2013-09-30 18:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

All the news stories have been about "which political party should we blame."
You want to know who to blame? All of the twits who have been cheering on "their team" while this has been going on, instead of pressuring their representatives to do their job. The members of Congress -- in both major parties -- feel no pressure to actually resolve the situation, because they've managed to trick their supporters in the media into giving them a pass while they wasted time instead of actually trying to come up with a solution that has a chance of working.

--

How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
1. Re:The Blame Game by Kryptonian+Jor-El · 2013-09-30 19:05 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Bullshit
  
  The Republicans are holding the budget hostage as a last resort to prevent a law that legally passed from taking hold (The Affordable HealthCare Act). They've been bitching and moaning for years about it, and now that its time for the majority of the law to go into effect, they decide that if they can't get their way (defunding the law) then NOBODY can have a budget
  
  --
  All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
2. Re:The Blame Game by nbauman · 2013-09-30 19:17 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Blaming both parties means blaming nobody. Open your damn eyes.
  That's what Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and NYT columnist says. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/opinion/krugman-rebels-without-a-clue.html He calls it "false equivalence."
  Its purpose is to make people feel cynical and hopeless, so that they won't participate in politics and the plutocrats with the big money can take over.
  The Democrats are pretty bad. The Republicans are fucking lunatics who are willing to destroy the country in order to serve their Koch brothers billionaires. They're even willing to destroy themselves, because they don't understand what they're doing. They're like the guy who saws off the tree limb he's sitting on.
3. Re:The Blame Game by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 20:36 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The R's are desperate to stop ObamaCare. If it was going to be a train wreck they would just let it go and reap the political benefits. They realize that once enough people start actually benefiting from it it will become politically impossible to do away with just like Social Security and Medicare. dfw
What a great way to run a country... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-30 18:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

'Murica! Where the government closes when they can't talk it out due to childish behavior from different parties.
Re:What happens to non-essential staff? by fahrbot-bot · 2013-09-30 19:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

Do they receive other benefits? Bummer being sent home in the run-up to the holiday season.
It's worth mentioning that House and Senate representatives and President - and perhaps at least some of their staff - are considered "essential" and will get paid through the shut down.

--
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Re:You know this makes America ... by Swampash · 2013-09-30 19:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

Italy has a government.
Re:That's weird... by thegarbz · 2013-09-30 20:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Oh thank god this comment is marked as informative and not insightful.
Actually you will feel something. It'll be like boiling a frog. At first it'll just be a few rich folks getting hammered on the stock market, then it will be questioning the credit rating of the country, then there's the knock on effects to the economy of not just taking 700000 people out of the workforce, but government contracts and other spending which underpins many businesses all over the world will be on hold too. Long term expect another recession.
Ultimately if it continues you WILL feel something. Either that or you have some kind of inability to feel anything in which case I take it all back and your comment deserves the informative mod point it got.
Re:Non Essential Employees by thegarbz · 2013-09-30 20:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

In the corporate world, after every merger or takeover I've seen, non essential employees are shown the door. If we can do without for a day, why not a week, why not a month, let's go for all year. The worst thing will be having to fondle yourself at the airport.
And that works out really well for corporate mergers where immediately after the sum value of the two companies typically drops. Then there is what non-essential means in the corporate world vs the government. This is more like outsourcing you engineering, IT. It works at first and then after a few months everything turns to shit.
Re:Priorities by niftydude · 2013-09-30 20:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

At some point you have to do a risk and cost benefit analysis. Sure I lock my door, but am I willing to spend >50% of my income on locks for my door?

--
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Re:You know this makes America ... by StoneyMahoney · 2013-09-30 20:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

Hey, us Europeans may have a bunch of culture clashes when it comes to lawmaking, but we never had half the parliament take their ball and go home.
Re:Whole Federal Gov is non essential by gtall · 2013-09-30 22:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

Really? Air traffic control, we could leave that to the airlines, right? Or maybe you'd like 50 different collections of rules. How about NIH, anyone in your family get a really nasty disease lately? Surely your state will fund and coordinate that research. How about the CDC? You like plagues like salmonella raging across the land with no agency in charge of nailing down the culprit so more people don't die. How about EPA? What do you need clean air and water for. How about Social Security, Grandma can come and live with you, right? Medicare? You'll be happy to afford her medications so she'll live to ripe old age under your tender loving care. NTSB ring a bell? They are the folks that figure out how companies managed to kill of your mother by not paying attention to safety.
The list goes on, but shut it all down because they are "non-essential" and "counterproductive". Your motto must be, "I don't think, therefore I am not".
Re:Whole Federal Gov is non essential by BlueStrat · 2013-09-30 23:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

The whole US government is non-essential.

Not just non-essential, a counterproductive drain.
Add "dangerous" to that list.
Not just to stability in the ME and to US relationships with long-time allies.
More dangerous by orders of magnitude to US citizens' lives and freedom than the "terrists", or even any other hostile country, could possibly be.
Violent crime in the US, including gun crime, is at historic multi-decade lows (despite increased gun ownership, but I digress) according to official stats, yet the number of people killed by police (particularly unarmed people) and the number of para-military "SWAT" raids has steadily and rapidly increased over the last few decades, along with the prison population.
"National Security"? Ha!
*Real* national security would necessitate, in part, dismantling and/or massively-downsizing much of the myriad of current alphabet-soup domestic security/intelligence/enforcement agencies and departments, like DHS, TSA, and NSA for just a few examples, and either eliminating them outright, or at the least, stripping them of all but the barest minimum of powers and capabilities/infrastructure, like no more giant domestic data centers and "USS Enterprise bridge"-styled data/surveillance "command centers" at taxpayer expense to satisfy out-of-control and delusional sociopathic megalomaniacs with God-complexes, who also just happen to be US Generals.
Speaking of Gen. "Make it so!" Alexander, back in my day they used to send two big hospital orderlies with a net, a straight-jacket, and an ambulance for such people and placed them in mental institutions.
These days they hold high US political and/or government/military/intelligence positions.
I vote we simply wall-off all of Washington D.C. with all Federal government political/lobbying denizens inside, and make it a giant mental asylum ala "Escape From New York" and then throw a nationwide month-long block-party in celebration, using just a tiny fraction of the savings to the entire country.
"..And nothing of value was lost..."
Strat

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Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Re:Trying the same thing over and over by Anonymous Coward · 2013-10-01 01:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

There have been fewer votes on federal gun control (for *or* against) in the past decade than there have been attempts to kill the ACA ('Obamacare') in the past year. This, despite it being virtually identical to the plan proposed by Republicans while Bush was in office.
There have, likewise, been fewer votes on the death penalty, abortion access, segregation, pot use, and same-sex marriage *combined* (again, for or against) in the past decade, than attempts to repeal the ACA in the past year.
Democracy isn't about throwing a fit and refusing to do your damned job (passing a budget) because the *other guy* got something you didn't like.