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Are Shuttered Gov't Sites Actually Saving Money?
Lots of U.S. government agencies' websites are partly or fully shut down, many of them with messages like this one, from the front page of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: "Effective 7 p.m. EDT, Friday, 4 October 2013, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) temporarily suspended all US operations because of the US Federal government shutdown. All NRAO facilities and buildings are closed; NRAO personnel, other than a skeleton crew, are on furlough and cannot respond to emails or phone calls." Brian Doherty argues at Reason that many of these shutterings don't actually seem to make any financial sense, and that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence. If you're involved with running an organizational web site (government-funded or not), do you agree?
Since when does the majority of the actions of the US Government make "financial sense"? This is about what is required, not what is saving money. I've heard from various news sources that the shutdown, itself, *costs* millions per day. By that logic, "financial sense" would have been to not shutdown in the first place.
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done. For the last 20 or 30 years we've been hammered with a 'Gov't is Evil' message. Never mind that it was the Federal Gov't that did away with Child Labor, Slavery and Segregation, created Superfund sites for cleanup of the messes made by private business and made them stop poisoning ground water.
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I imagine it costs less to defend against and clean up after DDoS or XSS attacks on a static page, than it does against an active web site.
Does anyone really believe the facilities they shut down are due to lack of funds?
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It's very, very expensive to move out of your home and then back in again, even to the same home. But if you don't -- for whatever reason -- have the money to pay the rent, that may well be your only choice.
If you're expecting to have the money but your boss's accounting department is simply incompetent, you might be able to plead with your landlord. Or maybe not.
But whether staying at home or moving out is cheaper is irrelevant to the question when the rent check comes due.
That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down. It's the fault of the Republicans who're holding the entire country hostage in a blatantly un-Constitutional attempt to repeal majority-supported legislation. They've tried dozens of times to repeal the legislation through the normal legislative process and failed miserably each time; now, they're determined to wreck the national economy (with the shutdown) and possibly even the global economy (with the default) if the majority doesn't give in to their demands. They've shot multiple prisoners already (don't forget the ongoing sequester!) and are now threatening to blow up the whole building.
In a modern democracy, their actions would long ago have resulted in the dissolution of the government and a new round of elections. And the Obama administration's support for the NSA wiretapping would also have triggered elections. Such a shame we live in a place that's rested so much on its laurels and is now so far behind the times.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
And now Congress is considering legislation to assure that furloughed workers get back pay for the vacation.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/04/obama-backs-backpay-furlough-shutdown/2923221/
The real loss is in having to work *around* the government shut down. I have logistics work out of the country that has >2x the cost of my stay because I've had to pick up the slack of other, more qualified workers.
Not complaining about where I am (I like the travel), just pointing out that the reimbursement for my work and the logistics I've had to line up as a contractor, in my case, have far exceeded the cost of keeping the people who are responsible and proficient at this work on for another few days. Ultimately, all of this will be coming out of taxpayer dollars. While a drop in the ocean, I like to keep high standards. I can only assume I'm not the only contractor having to take on additional roles.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
On the other hand, it is pretty damn callous to deny WWII vets a chance to visit their own memorial. I'm sure that even the officer can see the stupidity, she just can't make that sort of opinion known to the whole world.
There's no good reason that the memorial *has* to be closed, it's just a memorial, not dangerous park full of bears and wildlife. They're likely paying more for these extra patrols to *keep people out* than they would during a normal patrol of the national mall and surrounding areas when tourists are visiting.
Basically, the key point is *when* the money is spent. Leading up to a furlough, the guidance was very explicit. Do whatever it takes to assure things would be consistent during the lapse. For many employees, they were essentially required to piss more money away than the company would save on that employee being out because it was too complicated to sort out the case-by-case and the deterimination was that, on the whole, things would largely work out cheaper.
The quote he throws out is precisely that, the unreasonable expense was incurred prior to shutdown, to conceivably skip out on manpower maintenance. Some will take this sort of direction as being politically motivated to make GOP look worse, but it actually has some sense given the inherently illogical things that happen in Furlough for legal reasons. Some orgs interpreted it differently than others (some inserting a warning that data is not being updated, some deciding that meant, explictly, tell people that it is not working even though they could have left it up). There is certainly some degree of people guiding their decision in order to make a point about them being furloughed (I would guess in most cases it is more likely to feeling their own livelihood personally threatened than any sort of political allegience one way or another).
No.
And we have a sufficient number of republicans publically stating that they will vote in favor of a clean resolution to pass it were it to put to the vote.
speaking as a hosting engineer, the sites youre seeing are in 'static maintenance' meaning the original content is replaced with a banner. since each site has a banner page for a shutdown, for example usda.gov, its feasible to presume the shutdown sites were created ahead of time and are all hosted on one or two machines at government facilities that have not been shut down.
static maintenance pages arent saving cash in the form of hosting costs or electricity but they do mean your normal 'staff' of engineers and content creators for the sites can be sent home safely. you dont need to worry about content expiring, which if your the USDA or the FCC thats a good thing because you dont end up misleading people inadvertantly about advisories or notices because no one was around to remove expired content.
now, once the crisis ends and everyone goes back to work, im certain lifting the 'shutdown' banners and playing catchup with a few weeks of missed content and data is going to cost money. congressional staff are likely to begin filing their helpdesk tickets in a 'zerg rush' fashion, so anticipate their cost centers to accrue more charges than usual ( as a government IT worker, you often assign every minute of time to a department.) any unforseen outages or problems caused by say, two weeks of database updates or transactions, might be problematic and require more engineering time than had we not shut down the government. also for the static maintenance team (those guys in charge of the banner only) you'll need to start sending them backpay for their ongoing work and overtime for their miserable on-call rotations.
TL;DR: shutting down the government does not save money in the long term or short term in any appreciable amount.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There already are enough Republicans that would vote with the Dems on a clean CR to pass it. The problem in the Boehner won't let it come up for a vote because he's under pressure from the Tea Party not to.
Of course website shuttering is mostly posturing. And I'm no fan of Obama but look at the other guys: They're threatening to pull the trigger on their own government because they can't accept they lost one political battle. One single issue and they'd rather have no government than admit that for once the Democrats got to score. I'd say some posturing and showing the people that stuff is at stake seems called for.
captcha: crisis
lol
Honestly, how hard would it be for the Dems to recruit a handful of Republicans over to their side for a funding bill?
They already tried.
The 22 or so Republicans that said they'd vote for a "clean CR" to their constituents and the press in their home states .... didn't. They wouldn't sign the Discharge Petition, which would bypass the Speaker, to bring it to the floor.
So there you go.
--
BMO
Well, duh, it costs them basically no money to leave a web server running as long as the web server has no failures and is not attacked. But do you want a government server up and running when you know that there will be no one available to deal with any problems that may come up???
This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with spending money. This is a very important distinction as there is an old law that strictly prohibits spending money during a shutdown. If you spend money on something that isn't a critical you risk serious legal consequences. I am not defending the shutdown or either party.
That being said shutdowns do end up costing more money than they save by the time they ramp things back up. Minnesota had a shutdown a while back where the government shut down over a similar stubborn argument. The shutdown ended up costing millions of dollars more than it saved because it caused massive delays in road construction projects and the like. The construction companies (and others) sued for costing them money and the state paid out a hell of a lot of money.
The funding for NRAO comes from the National Science Foundation, which is funded by the federal government. When an appropriations bill was not passed, NSF did not get any money, so they could not give any money to NRAO to continue operating. The National Science Foundation could not authorize NRAO to continue operating without funding. So, in short, this isn't being done to save money, it's being done because there is no money.
Longer answers as to why:
1. As someone else mentioned, a simple static page is a lot less vulnerable to attack or disruption than a functional page.
2. Bandwidth costs are lower, since all you have are people hitting the site, seeing the shuttering, and going away again, rather than actually using it.
3. Anything behind the front page, such as databases, can and probably are shut down completely, saving on power and bandwidth.
4. Information provided on sites that aren't updated is likely to be inaccurate, which is worse than no information at all.
5. The cost to shutting them down can't have been all that high, since here's the process: (1) Have a developer make a static "We're not open for business" page, (2) have your admins configure front-end webservers with a mod_rewrite (or equivalent) to direct all traffic to that page, (3) shut down anything that's not a front-end webserver. Yes, it wasn't free, but my guess is whoever is coming up with the costs is factoring in paying the tech staff they already had on salary to do the work.
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing." It's sort of like the reaction if you are told to remove everything from a messy room and start throwing absolutely everything out.
I am officially gone from
So they just... give up? Try harder. If there is a car in your lane coming straight at you, you don't say, "Well, he's in the wrong lane, so I'm not moving!"
And this is without even considering why we are talking about failure to pass a last-second CR, when their job is to budget for the entire year and they have the whole freaking year to do it. No, this is a complete failure of Washington culture. I can't believe they got outsmarted by such a small minority.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Which has been subverted several times just this year.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why don't small government conservative types take this as an opportunity to open a private for profit wwii memorial free from government competition?
From which Hastert wants to distance himself...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/10/03/former-speaker-hastert-calls-the-hastert-rule-a-misnomer/
http://www.examiner.com/article/park-ranger-admits-being-told-to-make-life-as-difficult-for-people-as-possible
A federal Park Service Ranger admitted being ordered to make life as difficult as possible in order to make Americans feel the most pain as a result of the partial government shutdown ... Same happened at the beginning of the sequester..
And for a lot of these sites, I'd bet the server is already turned off and the DNS redirected to a server hosting only static pages.
So what, it's not really extortion if the mafia burns down your local pizza place for not paying protection money, as pizza isn't essential? Nothing about extortion requires it to be essential.
The guards probably keep all the tigers away from the monuments, too. It must be working - I don't see any tigers. Exactly how many Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks on monuments again?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Both parties are equally stupid and responsible - or rather irresponsible when it comes to this.
This is a result of the election system that the US has that is far from proportional - it is a "winner takes it all" system which works for the president, but not when you are going to get people representing the people. There is also another failure in the constitution - there's no obvious clause that takes care of things like the current situation.
Of course - the constitution was written in a different time, and they could probably never conceive the idea that the congress was working against the best of the country and instead resort to blackmail. Notice that the best of the country isn't necessarily the best of the people. Taxes come and go and if a decree doesn't work out - like Romney Obamacare it can be changed later.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So they just... give up?
It was fucking yesterday. It's 10:am on Saturday.
Give it your outrage a fucking rest already.
--
BMO
Whether he lives or dies, he's right.
Kythe
It's likely that a different HTTP server is handling the requests, just as DNS for a parked private-sector domain is pointed at a different server. The real server is probably shut off because a powered down server can't get 0wn3d.
It's a damned show for everyone. They aren't shutting down the things I'd like them to shut down. And they have even gone through the time and expense of shutting down Mt. Vernon... a PRIVATELY OWNED tourist location.
It's a big show and no one is convinced.
It's really easy for them to say that because they know it's not coming to a vote. Most House Republicans have decided that the Hastert Rule is appropriate for this mess, therefore Boehner cannot put it up for a vote until most House Republicans want it up for a vote, therefore it 20-30 House Republicans can get on TV loudly proclaiming none of this is their fault and jack-squat will happen.
Please read something about scaling and on demand instances in the cloud. This is how stuff is done at the moment. If you do not need to process much visitors, you can shut down some AWS instances, for example.
I'm a scientist and there's a conference going on right now at my institute. Researchers have already paid for everything in advance (weeks/months ago): meeting fees, food, accommodation. The total comes to around $2k. However, researchers from the NIH institute have been told that they can't attend because of the shutdown. Clearly this isn't about cost savings. One researcher was apparently planning on visiting relatives in the area after the meeting and asked if they could just go and do that instead (on their own dime) and they were told "no" and that it would be "bad if we found out that you went". So there you go. Makes little or no sense to me. Frankly, I find cordoning off memorials in DC to be similarly silly.
soylentnews.org
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
Most of the people being ordered to close off parks still aren't getting paid. They just aren't getting the paid days off that everyone "non-essential" is. But when the shutdown is over everyone is going to get back pay, regardless of whether they worked or not.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yes and no.
The so-called Hastert Rule has been broken in the sense that most Republicans ended up voting against a proposal on the floor, but it has not been broken in the sense that most House Republicans actually opposed bringing said proposals to a vote. Conservatives are quite happy to go on Fox bitching about how they opposed {inevitable policy} with every tool at their disposal, despite the fact that they clearly didn't. One tool at their disposal is firing Boehner, and they didn't firew Boehner.
They've furloughed IRS employees. Does *that* make financial sense? They've shut down FDA food inspection. Does *that* make financial sense, if we count the cost to the nation of food borne illness? This shutdown is about many things, but "financial sense" is not one of them.
We live in a country full of idiots who say things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare," without realizing that Medicare *is* a government program. Many more understand that things like the military or NIH cancer research are part of the gummint, but only on an intellectual level. On a visceral level they only associate the government with things they don't like, such as pollution regulation. The stuff they *do* like apparently just happens, as far as they're concerned.
So put yourself in the shoes of the zookeeper who has to take care of the pandas as the National Zoo. Pandas don't stop eating or shitting because Speaker of the House doesn't have the balls to bring a clean continuing resolution bill to the floor. So you've still got to show up to feed them and muck out their enclosure, only now you're not being paid. Your landlord still wants paying; the grocery store still wants paying, the daycare center you leave your kids at so you can go to this job still wants paying, but *you* don't get paid.
Wouldn't *you* pull the plug on the panda-cam? If you *don't*, people *will* say, "look, we shut the government down but things are still working." Yes they *are* that stupid. So you pull the plug so they'll understand that things like the pandas being cared for just don't "happen" on their own. Sure, people get pissed off, but they're not paying for the panda cam so they can lump it. Not seeing Mei Xiang and her cub isn't going to kill anyone. They weren't paying for panda cam anyway; that was paid for with a grant from corporate sponsorship, so if anyone has a beef with this, it'd be Ford Motor Company.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Boehner can bring it up for the vote whenever he wants. What in question is the political consequences of doing so. Blah, blah, blah, maybe it will cost him his speakership - but honestly, considering how much members of his own party have been willing to flout his leadership already, I'm not sure it would make that much of a difference. Do we have other digestible compromise candidates for the job in the wings?
It's petty, it's vengeance, and I've had enough... how about you?
I've certainly had enough. Enough of a certain party holding a gun to the head of the country to try and defund something they voted for then decided they didn't like, even after they already changed it completely from what it originally was.
And before you try to say I'm some crazy liberal, no. I voted for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 (Johnson in 2012). But I've come to the conclusion that the leadership of the Republican party in it's current form no longer cares about the good of the country. All they care about is brinkmanship and sticking it to Obama and Democrats. In all honesty I say recall every single Congressman (any party), bar them AND their staffers from ever serving in Congress again, and start over from scratch. The whole system needs a reboot.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The willful stupidity here is incredibly massive, and I have no sympathy at all for those propagating it.
What part of "shutdown" do the tea party types not understand? The Government operates at the pleasure of the Congress, as expressed in the yearly budget. If the Government has no budget, it cannot operate (except for a few pieces that run on fees or other direct income). Whether it makes financial sense to close any particular part in the absence of a budget is irrelevant.
There is this fiction, that everyone agrees to accept, that there are "essential" parts that have to keep going, such as much of the DOD, but, really, those should be shut too. What is essential is set by each agency well in advance of any shutdown; if the Congress does not like any particular agency's policy, in this or any other matter, they can and should hold hearings about it. What is of course really going on here is a fairly pathetic attempt to deflect the proper blame by bleating about parking lots being closed and other irrelevancies, when a simple open vote in the House would fix this within a single afternoon.
Seems like it would take more effort/time to replace the running sites with one stating they're down as part of the shutdown.
Yesterday I discovered I could visit NIST's NVD database, but clicking on external links didn't show a redirect warning as normal and instead showed the shutdown message.
Or maybe they're preventing Mr. Jefferson from getting a graffiti mustache.
It takes time for some things to start sucking. For instance, federal highways don't evaporate the moment you stop sending out repair and maintenance crews and most public schools have state and local money to pay staff with. But if you were looking for a passport, good luck. You can't get one until the government opens.
I'd have to agree there. Changing the home page to a "closed" sign does not take all that much effort and may be necessary to show that the interactive parts of the site are inactive.
Although I really don't know what is up with monuments and parks being closed down, if they were mostly unmanned to begin with. At that point, I think someone is just trying to make a statement, as opposed to showing the actual realistic result of a (so-far) short federal shutdown of non-essential services.
Of course, even open air parks need maintenance for some tourist facilities, so shutting down some of the parks will have an effect on safety eventually. That said, if they have money for armed patrols, you'd think they could patrol those areas and just cordon them off if the maintenance was compromised.
You don't seem yo understand how hard this is.
The reason we have a months-long budgeting process is that Congress is basically two Committees with more then 500 members, and they aren't run under Robert's Rules of Order. They are run under two different sets of rules, which are completely unique. When one of the Houses decides to delay things there isn't a lot you can do.
The issue in this case is that the Speaker is dictator of what the House of Representatives gets to vote on. He can only be over-ridden by a) firing him, or b) get a lar ge proportion of the House to sign a Discharge Petition. But discharge petitions on bills you just wrote on Monday, because you were convinced that nobody would shut the government down, CAN'T be considered until 30 days after Monday. Discharge petitions on older bills are possible, but when the Democrats tried one the 20 or so Republicans who claimed they'd support a "clean bill" decreed that this discharge petition didn't count as a clean bill.
The problem seems to be the GOP members are convinced that if they don't support the Speaker in every way that matters the Tea Party will murder them in the next primary. Since ethics rules exist, Obama can't just say "Dude, if you vote for this bill Apple board member Al Gore will totally take care of you."
Moreover most of them actually believe that shutting the government down is the Right Thing to do because a) they actually believe ObamaCare is Evil, and b) they actually think that they'll convince enough Democrats to support a delay of ObamaCare to delay ObamaCare. To them trading a few months of government services for a delay of ObamaCare is just common sense.. OTOH the Democrats are equally adamant that ObamaCare is a Great Thing Which Will Save America, that delaying it is Evil, and that getting no government for three months in exchange for not delaying ObamaCare for a year is a great idea. And if anybody was willing to give on either of these points he wouldn't have made it through a Primary.
Byrd died like 3 years ago. He fought tooth and nail to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from passing, which would have passed in the 1930's if it wasn't for people like him and the rest of the DNC at the time. Byrd was held up like a hero until he died and just yesterday Harry Reid made a speech talking about how much better it was when Byrd was in the Senate.
No, its not 148 years ago, it was yesterday.
If the sysadmins have to go home, then hell yes, shuttering the sites is absolutely the right thing to do.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Citation please. It is illegal for gov't employees to engage in political activities while on duty.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The shutdown is not an attempt to save money. It's a result of the Federal departments and agencies lacking the _authority_ to spend the money that they have. Congress grants the Executive (and Judicial, and its own) branch the _authority_ to spend money on an annual basis (there are exceptions). Congress has also set the boundaries on how money may (and must) be spent during a lapse in appropriations. The Executive branch is (pretty much) just following the legal instructions that Congress has set out.
The Treasury has said that the cash reserves will run out on October 17th. You will at that point (actually, beforehand) see some symbolic attempts to save money. Interestingly, I believe that even if the government is still shutdown come October 17th, the Treasury will _still_ not have enough cash to pay all of the bills. Again, this is because the Executive branch is (pretty much) just following the legal instructions that Congress has set out.
Signed, a Federal worker with time on his hands.
this stupid stunt that politicians pulling by shutting down the federal government is foolish at best.
when can we hold elections to replace those that have caused this shutdown?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The anti-deficiency act requires that an agency cannot expend funds unless it has been appropriated by Congress.
In our case the agency must power the servers and air-conditioners to keep the web services going. We cannot buy electrical power without funding. Even if we did leave the machines on, if the AC fails then there is a high likelihood of damage to the infrastructure (with no staff to take action). For contracted (cloud) services the contractor can continue to provide service (and is obliged to do so) if the contract was made using appropriated funds but when those funds are used up they must cease. The Government is prohibited from receiving 'free' service even if the provider were to offer it.
It might cost more in the future, but the law says we can't spend what has not been appropriated.
Watch this.
Of the 70 or so Dixicrats, 3 ended up in the GOP and the remaining 67 went back to the DNC. See I can say smack too, but the difference between me and you is I can cite a fact to back me up.
Posting anon because I've been directed ... This is only a political stunt. All public facing web sites are contracted out. The contracts don't fall on the end of hte FY because that's a bad time to try to get things on contract. This will cost just as much as leaving the sites up because the contractors will file a REA in response to the stop work orders they've been given. Every one of the sites that have been shut down is payed for with FY13 money right now. This is nothing other than a crass political move.
Are these government shutdowns and "hostage crises" the new normal for our federal government? With the increasing polarization of Congress, it seems to be the case. People overwhelmingly do not like it (Congress has something like 10% approval rate), yet cannot resolve it through the normal election process. What can we do about it?
I don't know where you are but in my neck of the woods there are plenty of people willing to die to defend their rights (of way).
You could try calling him...but his aide won't be working and he won't know how to answer the phone without the aide...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Give it your outrage a fucking rest already.
You are writing as if they didn't have a whole goddamn year to do this. You want me to "rest" because they are finally doing the inevitable? These people are not competent to do their jobs, even if they are simply responding to the incentives we have set up. We need to seriously reconsider how we handle electing these clowns.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Has anyone found a answer to why https://www.healthcare.gov/ is the only US federal government web page that is not shut down?
It's not extortion to you, it's extortion to the pizza parlour owner.
Moreover they aren't threatening anybody with actual physical harm. Those WW2 vets were able to get to their memorial.
It's definitely emotional manipulation, but so is referring to something that involves no violence (ie: putting up a barrier that is easily bypassed by disabled octogenarians) as "extortion."
You don't seem yo understand how hard this is.
All of what you said is true, and proof positive that the whole mess needs to be reformed. All of the nitwits in legislature need to go if they can't function together. We need to seriously rethink the incentives they operate under - they are actually raking in donations right now - we are rewarding them!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
When hasn't this happened you asked. The Lincoln Memorial the Washington Monument, etc. have NEVER been closed like this. This stunt is an Obama original. The democrats defunded Reagan three times. He didn't spend money closing parks. Clinton took a small step in this direction by furloughing park service employees, resulting in parks that had federal staff being closed. He didn't spend extra money closing open air landmarks.
While the worst that's ever happened.before was that federal employees were sent home, Obama has spent more money posting federal agents to block access to private businesses that happen to have a federal contract. No president before has come anywhere near this ludicrous stunt.
I'm OK with anything that stop pretending we aren't broke.
Even with the parliamentary system, you have two houses. The lower house is supreme in matters of funding. If the House of Commons were to reject funding for Program X (whether that be the UK's involvement in Afghanistan or whatever), that would be the end of the matter.
There'd be nothing the House of Lords could do about it.
Here, the lower house has rejected funding for a certain program, and the upper house is refusing to recognize the lower house's power of the purse.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Well, when they are essentially ballless freaks who care more about their re-election than the country, then there's no chance reasonableness will prevail.
This is pretty much the result of Dems and Repubs using the last census to redistrict and gerrymander their districts for easier re-elect. So now all republicans in congress are in fear of the tea party mounting primary challenges. A similar dynamic occurs on the Dem side. So we can expect more polarized politics for the next 10 years.
Keep in mind that your Congressman has more people in his district then live in any city in the country smaller then Boston (640k Bostonians vs. a congressional district of 750k). As an individual he simply does not have the time to deal with all the email he gets. Even most State Senators and State Reps (typical district: 100k) usually have staff answering emails.
Therefore the person who'd respond to you is probably some staffer, and the staffer isn't allowed to respond because he's not being paid.
Dude,
I don't know if you noticed but their "right" to visit a government facility was not denied. They were inconvenienced, because they had to go through this woman and take down a fence, but they got there.
OTOH millions of people will not be able to eat next month because food stamps will run out of money. That's callous, and you don't seem to care.
As for closing the park, who do you think mows the grass? Who do you think cleans up when some drunk breaks a bottle? How quick would the government be sued if some little kid got into a non-maintained park and cut himself on the bottle? Hows the kid supposed to know there's no maintenance if you don''t have a big old fence up?
Agreed. This is going to push me towards approval-based voting advocacy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"People would all move to the states that have [nice stuff]". Wouldn't that be horrible, if people lived in nice places.
California and Texas were of similar size, but opposite political policies. When the policies in California failed, people and businesses moved in droves out of California to Texas. California has seen that and very slowly started to implement policies more like the Texas approach that has worked. When different states try different things, people can move to states that do things that work well AND other states can emulate what works and avoid policies that haven't worked.
The alternative, with the federal government deciding things, is that the entire country is forced to try new policies which turn out to be disastrous. I'd much rather see one state experiment with something that fails than have the whole country failing as the feds force the country into each new experiment.
Food stamps run out in three weeks. Medicaid in DC has been shut down. Most military contractors aren't being paid, even if they're delivering goods. Social Security and Medicare are fine, but that's because they have their own budget not because they've been "deemed essential." So of the top three expense of the government one has been severely curtailed (Defense), Health has been affected (if only in DC), and Social Security alone remains unaffected. Lesser bills (like those pesky food stamps) have varying amounts of money in the budget, which will probably run out very soon.
For the monuments keep in mind that a) none of these guards is being paid, and b) basic maintenance cannot be done under a shutdown. Some idiot breaks a bottle and doesn't clean up after himself? The janitor's gone. If the Feds don't make it clear that they aren't maintaining these places they will be legally liable for the idiot who cuts himself on that bottle. Which means they have to have a fence up. That is actually an essential government service. They don't *have* to have cops out patrolling, but it's not like the cops have other jobs to go to when they ain't being paid by the Feds. They show up for work despite the shutdown and a) their boss loves them, and b) they might get paid eventually as part of the shutdown-ending deal.
When the TSA stops using clean gloves for the cavity searches, I'll be convinced.
Have gnu, will travel.
Every southern governor during the 1960s was a Democrat.
"148 years ago"?! Really?! Civil Rights Act of 1957 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1957): "Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an ardent segregationist, sustained the longest one-person filibuster in history in an attempt to keep the bill from becoming law."
"Try to keep up." For the past 48 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Amendments_of_1965), the Democrats have been perpetuating a 'nanny state' which feeds off the abject dependence upon "the state" for the basic necessities of life. For 2-3 generations, their failed policies have done little to actually improve the plight of the disadvantaged, and have done much to keep the masses beholden to their new "massahs".
In these modern times, the DNC is the major US party attacking the civil rights of everybody, regardless their ethnicity, gender, and religious affiliation.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- George Santayana
The last resolution passed in the house authorized everything except enforcement of the individual mandate but the Senate (Dems) wouldn't agree to that either. In other words, Obama exempted corporations from being punished for not providing qualifying health insurance to employees, but will push this "crisis" in order to make sure that individuals are still required to have health insurance and to penalize them if they don't. Exactly who is fighting for the citizen here.
Maybe because there is a perfectly good one that is already paid for? It is only being blocked as a political statement.
I think you do bring up a good point though - given that the federal government is becoming so ripe for abuse, its power in various areas should be diminished. This sort of arbitrary action just underscores that.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You are writing as if they didn't have a whole goddamn year to do this.
And you are writing as if the Republican Party hasn't chased after the "energy" of the Teabaggers for years, thinking they can control the derp. The "dog that finally caught the car" that was referenced yesterday by Rep. John Dingell is /not/ about the shutdown despite what he thinks and what the media is reporting. The "dog that finally caught the car" and is in terror are the "mainstream" Republicans like Boehner (you know, the Speaker) of the Republican Party who are now terrified of being primaried out by morons like Rand Paul and "Ted" Cruz in 2014. Because they're not obstructionist enough.
You should read the cheerleading comments by the barely literate on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Fucking scary, actually.
We need to seriously reconsider how we handle electing these clowns.
When you leave primary elections up to the people with too much time on their hands and not enough intelligence that vote for populist morons that pander to them, you get what you pay for. Clown shoes everywhere.
On a related note, the "clean CR" is based on the budget numbers that the Republicans themselves set, based on Paul Ryan's stuff. This "The Democrats Won't Negotiate" talking point is complete nonsense and anyone who pays attention for 5 minutes knows it. The Republicans are getting what they want with the budget with this CR, and that's what's hilarious about it. The Republicans could have claimed victory with the budget with this CR but they can't because they have to somehow save face with this shutdown that they let themselves get talked into over the ACA. Because the Mike Lees and Ted Cruzes (teabaggers to the core) of the House wanted to create as much pain as possible and hope that the public is dumb enough to blame anyone but them for this boneheaded "plan" they cooked up between themselves in their own little echo chamber and convinced their buddies that "this will work, this time, for sure."
That's not even getting into the debt-ceiling nonsense with the teabaggers. To hear a teabagger like Rand Paul talk, it's all "kitchen-table-economics" and a default is "no big deal." As if the US Government budget is like a household budget instead of the budget of a publicly-held large corporation. Imagine if Microsoft started defaulting on its debt. Look at what happened to Bear-Stearns when they defaulted. Yeah.
--
BMO
If Mount Vernon is privately owned and operated then the private owners and operators are the people you should complain to. They could have found alternate parking.
As for monument and foreign cemetery maintenance, I have a question for you:
If you were on a jury, and the case was somebody who walked up to one of these monuments, cut himself on a broken bottle, was then attack by a rat, the injury gets infected, and subsequently paid $150k in medical bills, how much would you say the Federal government owes him?
Under Michigan law it would be $450k plus triple his lost wages. It's their site, they are responsible for it's maintenance. Not making it clear that the site was no longer maintained by putting up a fence would mean he gets actual damages. Because putting up a fence is trivial, and the Feds clearly knew maintenance was necessary (or they would not have been doing it in the first place) the damages are tripled.
Now if there's a fence, the poor injured person has no recourse because the Feds clearly told him not to come there.
It is interesting to compare the treatment of the WW2 memorial versus the WW1 memorial.
WWII Memorial Barricade Wired Shut
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
There's no consensus on how much the shutdown is costing, but the estimates are in the order of hundreds of millions per day. A wide-scale disruption of services is about the costly cost-saving measure you could possibly conceive of.
Interestingly, the government isn't allowed to use tax money to lobby the public. And that's exactly what putting up these shutdown notices is.
Now that you have information and opinion from a non-Foxnews site, do you all believe?
This country is moving towards authoritarianism, and BOTH parties are guilty. This is what happens when politicians make a career out of holding office. They don't care about anything or anyone; all they care about is keeping their power and to hell with the citizens. The servants have become the masters.
Talk to Boehner and his Teahadist masters about it. RIGHT NOW all they have to do is bring a clean CR to the floor of the House and it would pass immediately. The government would be back in operation in a couple of hours.
But no, they are going use every possible mechanism of the government to force their minority view on the nation.
In the planning two years ago, we were told that the reason for shutting off servers was that we coudn't patch them while we were out ... and if they got hacked, we weren't allowed to go and fix them (or monitor to discover it happened) ... so it'd potentially leave someone with access during the length of the shutdown.
The resulting cleanup would be horrible for everyone involved, depending on the agency's security policies. (our are a wipe, and reinstall the OS from original media (which is much trickier these days due to how software gets distributed) ... then reinstall the software (can't simply install from a previous image).)
In my opinion, leaving servers on with a message is an absolutely horrible thing to do. GSA gave out bad advice in my opinion, as it's going to start getting cached by search engines the way they told people to do it. (302 redirections, not serve a 503 message).
And they just gave people a PNG to include ... which if people put it up directly without re-copying it all in alt-text, is a section 508 violation.
They *should* have done this with a static server per agency (or network), and some rules at the firewalls to redirect all port 80 traffic to it, other than those who had exemptions to keep running for whatever reason.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If the web site is down, the web master does not have to be paid to be on call. Moreover, nobody has to observe the logs daily for suspicious activity. If your e-commerce site on Linode was left unattended for a whole month, wouldn't you worry?
Enough of who?
The guys who tried to turn the entire Federal budget into a political pissing match over ObamaCare? I will remind you, not only has it been blessed as Constitutional by the Supreme Court, it's namesake was just re-elected, and the controversy is over a bit of it (the individual mandate) that has nothing to do with the budget.
Or the guy who said "OK. If you want to play the asshole-dick-measuring-contest-game we can play that game. Romney was twice the politician you losers are."
I can't believe they got outsmarted by such a small minority.
But that is not whats happening.
The 22 or so Republicans that said they'd vote for a "clean CR" to their constituents and the press in their home states .... didn't. They wouldn't sign the Discharge Petition, which would bypass the Speaker, to bring it to the floor.
So those mythical "moderate republicans" are lying.
They'll vote for a "clean CR" if it comes to a vote, but they won't help it come for a vote.
Scum.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Parent isn't insightful!
There is the business mentality that we can't just fully fund these things so we place usage fees and permits on them to provide some (or all) of the funding. You expect Disneyland to allow people in for free if they closed?
Would you like a bison head in your den? How about an endangered animal? Lets all pee in old faithful and put it on youtube or spray paint "God Hates Fags" on the Vietnam Memorial!
Your police dept covers your area with patrols and by being on call in case of emergency. They are not in everybody's yards (yet.)
The park services; a rather EXTREME example, have HUGE areas of empty land to manage with no hope of being everywhere all at once. They patrol routinely. Just like the police. The mere fact that they are paroling around (randomly unless you study their patterns) provides some degree of protection because people don't know if they are going to run into one and get caught. BTW, obvious tourist destinations are easy to patrol.
IF THE POLICE CLOSED DOWN, criminals would know nobody would be patrolling, nobody would be responding to reports of crimes. The park service is the same situation.
Have you even been around to the national parks? Idiot tourists are all over the place, throwing rocks at the bison, feeding the bears, dumping their trash (which blows around,) burning trash (no kidding, I've seen it,) driving off road, or walking off the board walks near the hot springs (making foot prints, if not holes where they fall to their death... all of which has happened and guess who has to clean it up to try to make it look all natural again so it is worth you going to see it? guess who warns and keeps people ON those paths?)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So basically, it's ok to hold the american people and federal workers hostage, until a clean resolution funding everything is passed by the house. Thanks for clearing that up. I now know that Reid and Obama's definition of compromise, is actually no compromise at all.
Congress has passed multiple budgets every year since 2010. The senate has repeatedly failed to live up to its statutory mandate.
The thing you've got to keep in mind is they aren't businesses maximizing profit. They're ideologues representing other ideologues. If you banned donations completely (which would be unconstitutional) they'd still fight battles like this because slightly more then half of them think their job is to represent the people who got creamed in the Presidential election. The donations are basically a way for them to tell that the people they think of as their bosses (ie: the Tea Party) are happy with them.
The solution that makes the most sense would be to move towards a more Parliamentary system, whereby if the President and Congress disagree on policy strongly there are new elections until the people select a Congress AND a President that don't hate each-other. There's a reason that every time we set up one of our lttle puppets (Japan, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) we try to make it Parliamentary.
The trick is convincing people brought up on the idea that Checks and Balances = freedom to give up their Checks and Balances, agree to a system where the President appoints some of Congress, etc.
I believe the compromise candidate is John Boehner. The problem dealing with the GOP in DC today is that almost all of them see any compromise with Obama as flawed. If Obama's agreeing to it a) it must be a bad idea, or b) you probably could have gotten more out of deal. Since the thing they hate most about Obama is that he managed to pass universal healthcare they aren't gonna give up a chance to stop that shit without fighting so hard even the most hardened partisan tells them to back off. And this is pretty much everybody in the entire GOP.
If Boehner got the 20 liberalest Republicans to vote for him, and managed to get Pelosi to support him, that could work; and it has actualy happened at the state level several times. But Boehner would be a fool to agree to that because traditionally minority-party Speakers don't have much power and then when the next election happens (in about 13 months for US House) everyone votes against them.
Please, if you are going to post a link to the administration's goatse guy, warn us beforehand.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
And requiring companies of a certain size to provide it for their employees was supposedly the way to guarantee that the previous landscape of most people having employer provided coverage didn't change. The Democrats removed the employer mandate on their own simply by writing a rule to ignore the law. The republicans are simply saying that if the Democrats are going to allow companies to stop providing what they used to provide that we should not then penalize the employee again. But sure, ignore that aspect as it doesn't fit your reality.
Well, we've known that for a long time. Or, even worse, their definition of compromise is for the Republicans to cave to made-up public anger, and Obama throws a few symbolic victims under the bus. Of course, that's after they are no longer useful to him.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I don't have the time to waste guarding it from you in case you don't respect MY wishes... so I will hire somebody do to that for me. I shall call them "Park Rangers." Rather clever name don't you think? Gee, I'm clever.
Do you see what I'm doing here? Do you see what the "I have a right to use my public land anytime and in anyway I want" people are doing?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So, by that measure, the Senate's response CR must not be clean either, since it apparently cut funding in other areas.
Get used to the fact that 'your side' is not always going to get everything it wants. The president was an idiot for saying he "won't compromise", and the people know it.
Better yet, get over the us-vs-them mentality, and look at what all the national parties and their politicians are doing to us. Vote all of them out, vote in people who can not only vote their conscience, but who can understand reality, and then we can get shit done. But of course that's not going to happen, and we are on the quick train to collapse.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The government has ceased operation, and IT assets and physical locations have been placed into any unattended/closed status.
Did you know that every "day use area" in the NPS is "closed" at night, even though there aren't barricades or armed guards from sundown to sunup? You're not allowed to be there, for your safety, for the safety of the park, for the preservation of assets.
Think of it like this: when an amusement park "closes" they lock the gates and bar you from even parking in their parking lots. They still have bare bones staff, but they are closed. They don't let you walk around the park when it's closed, even if you don't plan on riding the rides or playing with the stuff there. They are Closed.
The same thing has happened with the federal government. Quit bitching and tell your congressman to re-open the country's assets and fight their grievances on their own merits.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, and then the Dixiecrats changed parties and became Republicans because the Democratic national party wouldn't cow-tow to their racism like the Republican Party has since 1968.
Again, try to keep up.
This isn't a cost saving measure. It's not even about what the cost is to run these things.
The government is shut down because the congress has not passed a budget which allows the government to operate. The reason for this impasse has nothing to do with the cost of running the government, only a specific law which a minority of the House of Representatives finds objectionable. I know it's a minority because they have voted 40 times to reverse the law and have not yet obtained a majority vote. They have decided that the only way to enforce their will is o attempt to block operation of the country until they get their way, not unlike a child throwing a tantrum and sitting on the floor, unwilling to move. It has nothing to do with cost or savings.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's all about punishing people as much as possible for the shutdown, thinking that they will get angry at the GOP and vote them out in 2014.
Everything this administration does is motivated purely by an "us vs. them" mentality and an obsession with power that it doesn't have anymore.
If you banned donations completely (which would be unconstitutional) they'd still fight battles like this because slightly more then half of them think their job is to represent the people who got creamed in the Presidential election.
I wouldn't go after individual donations, though I would go after corporate donations. I agree that they are doing the bidding of their constituents.
The solution that makes the most sense would be to move towards a more Parliamentary system
I think that more subtle reforms could do the trick:
First, I'd stop gerrymandering. It might mean less minority representation, but oh well. If it really gets pushed, we could let the redistricting algorithm take race into account.
Second, switch to approval voting. Check the boxes of all of the candidates you like and let the computer figure out the candidate that the most people wouldn't object to. This plurality-winner garbage has got to go.
Third, end the feedback cycle of corporate and union money flowing back to the federal government. Strip them of their ability to get involved politically. Make it so that if you want to be involved politically, you have to be a political party - corporations are for economic activity. I'm not talking about Citizen's United - I'm talking about donations and lobbying. I'm not smart enough to have figured out how to solve the problem of free press, but fixing the problem created by Citizens United. I'm all ears :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Picking out one event in an entire fiscal year is not really fair. The whole congress is to blame. Obama is not being helpful, but he also hasn't actually vetoed anything so I won't be too harsh other than to say it feels like he needs to be a little less aloof.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So what, yes there was a time when the Republican party was the progressive party, so what, it changed. the republican's decided they wanted the south and implemented the southern strategy.
When you actively court the racists you lose the right to claim the high ground.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
actually it did nothing of the sort, it did nothing to change the funding of Obamacare, what the amendment did was delay the individual mandate for a year. SO no it was not a "clean" CR.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
This "The Democrats Won't Negotiate" talking point is complete nonsense
No it isn't. Neither side has done enough negotiation, and so we are at a stalemate. I am 100% certain that the Democrats could lure the moderate Republicans over without hitting Obamacare, they just don't want to be seen to "cave". That is a ridiculous position when you only control half of the congress.
Don't take this as a defense of Republicans - they are living in dreamland if they think they can damage Obamacare. That is a ridiculous demand and they deserve the blame that they are getting - but the Dems deserve blame as well. They don't seem to understand their opponent's position. The Tea Party is already winning as far as their base is concerned, so I'm not sure why the Dems are acting as if they will back away from that position. The only way out is to give something to the moderate Republicans, IMHO. And I don't mean a 6-week implementation of a small part of Paul Ryan's budget.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
But the sad thing is the Democrats have been compromising. Since the beginning of Obama's presidency, even when they had a majority in both houses they wanted bipartisan support. During the budget talks, when John Boehner made his famous quote "I got 98% of what I wanted" yet they still wouldn't play ball. So can we stop the ridiculous talk about how the left needs compromise with the minority right, we have been, but it's hard to deal with a side that thinks compromise is getting 100% of what they want 100% of the time.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Generally in legislation you get give-and-take. What the GOP's done is link it's demand on a proposal that was finished in 2010 to proposals necessary to run the government in 2013. It did this at the last minute.
I really don't want to live in a country where the Democrats routinely stop the entire government because they lost a vote three and a half years ago. Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
Both sides compromised - that's why taxes went up last year and federal government spending (if we ignore entitlements) went down.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Are you high? It's clearly not the administration.
You really have to be delusional to think that.
Some pubs don't like a law of the land, and they will shut it all down to get that law changed. Had the pubs presented a clean bill, nothing would have been shut down.
"“We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”" Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind
Pubs are filibustering their OWN bills.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In a two-party system approval voting is identical to plurality voting. To get what you want we'd have to amend the Constitution. Under current case-law you can't do a lot of electoral reforms because parties have a right to exist, and they have a right to pick their candidate. Their one candidate if that's what they want. And since a political party's ideology is determined by the people who show up to it's meetings those parties tend to be incredibly extremist.
Political contributions require another amendment.
Gerrymandering would help, but not as much as people think. Modern Americans choose to live by their partisan brethren, which means most American counties swing at least 20 points one way or the other, and are surrounded by counties that agree with them. The GOP actually gets a slight edge in fair maps because Democratic voters are concentrated in cities. For example lets a state is one big City, about the size of a Congressional, district, and a countryside. The state as a whole gets three districts and is 55% Democratic so three districts democratic totals should 165%. The City is probably 80% Dem, which leaves 42.5% Democrats in each rural district. This state, whose population is largely Democrats, will be represented in the House by two Republicans.
And you still haven't actually fixed the problem. Most Republicans honestly believe that they have a duty to resist Obama. As long as checks and balances exist, they have the political strength to use them, and Obama remains President, we will get BS like this shutdown.
The first CR the House passed defunded Obamacare, the second one delayed the individual mandate.
Which is still immaterial to the use of the term "clean". The House is who sets the tone on spending, not the Senate or President.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Would you be saying the same thing when the sites were vandalized because looking at the rest of the country I can only guess how long it would take for the tagging to begin.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Do you have any idea when the President will submit a budget as required by law?
You should read the news before posting.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The shutdown by the Grinch was expensive as well. But what really matters is that congress thinks it knows better than the people. If the government is closed, we have nowhere to address our petitions. But that is a First Amendment Right put in place to deter tyranny. You don't know if you have the consent of the governed if you are refusing to hear them. So, now were are deprived of that Right and tyrants rule. http://slashdot.org/journal/527327/shutting-down-the-right-to-petition
That's not a report that's an editorial. Nice try though. Try finding something not right wing biased that refers to this anonymous park ranger. No reputable news source has picked up this story.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Mount Vernon is Open.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
There have been several spending bills passed to the Senate that would keep the government running. If keeping the country running was the priority, the Senate could pass any of them in 5 minutes.
If keeping the ENTIRE COUNTRY'S GOVERNMENT shut down to protect a piece of legislation that was rammed through during a brief mono-party majority (which was then ejected at the next electoin), then by all means, keep the government shuttered.
-Styopa
n a two-party system approval voting is identical to plurality voting.
We don't have a two-party system, though - we just have two successful parties. Every election I've ever voted in had third parties on the ballot, but they get few votes. Third party candidates don't get votes now because the vote is "wasted", but with approval voting there is no harm in casting both your strategic vote (the one "against" the guy you hate) and your third-party vote. It would also be easier for third parties to stay on the ballot since they would likely get more votes each cycle. Once you have other parties getting some significant portion of the vote, the current GOP-Dem bickering is unsustainable.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It did this at the last minute.
GOP, and especially Tea Party, resistance to Obamacare has been consistent.
Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
You act as if congress has the same makeup as it did then. Elections took the guys out of power who implemented Obamacare. I understand why the Dems want to protect it, but why pretend it won't be expensive to protect? They are no longer in charge of 100% of congress, and they are going to have to pay dearly if they want to protect their pet programs. Obamacare was enacted by a law, and can be changed by law - it's not magic or special in any way. I happen to think that it replaces a terrible system. It may not be great, but repealing it without another solution is a terrible idea. Going back to our unfunded socialism is the Tea Party's plan and I oppose it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Good point.
It may be rebublican/deomcrat/green/libertarian/occupy party doctrine that all Federal workers will get backpay, I think the point is, that history has been that they have gotten backpay.
There have been 18 government shutdowns since 1976, if you include this one.
What insane notion has you believing that this one is going to be like the other 17, and pay back pay.
Oh, wait. Never mind.
Hence "other" digestible compromise candidates :-)
You're being logical. Actually it is not as pragmatic as you think; they are still allowed to spend money on law enforcement. They're just not allowed to take out the trash. And they can't offer non-emergency services without an appropriation. Anything with buildings has to be closed for sure. Anything with gated access has to be closed. Anything with rules establishing some level of services that are provided when they are open, have to be closed. Things like the National Forest outside of parks, campgrounds, and recreation areas are still open, because there are no services - except for law enforcement.
So the Forest Service aren't allowed to sell me a commercial mushroom permit, but they're allowed to arrest me for not having one.
Oh, I'm disappointed by the Dems on this too. They have "played fair" and capitulated on enough of things to embolden the teabaggers since the beginning of the 2009 Congress, which is where the Ted Cruzes get their courage from. "Oh, hey, they'll fold again! No problem!"
And now when they want to actually use their testicular fortitude, finally, in this pissing match, we get... this.
That is a ridiculous position when you only control half of the congress.
And the Republicans don't want to be seen as "caving" by their "base" either, and they also only control half of congress.
The only way out is to give something to the moderate Republicans, IMHO.
Which the moderate Republicans aren't agreeing to because that would be "caving" when viewed by the teabagger cabal which is stronger than ever because they've let them steer the party rather than keep the freshmen in their places. And in a congress controlled by moderate Republicans, we wouldn't be seeing any of this. We'd have an actual budget, not a string of insane CRs, or is that an insane string of CRs?
I think the worst word in the world for the past 20 years, politically, is RINO. Barry Goldwater would be called a RINO, and so would Reagan these days. It's like when William F. Buckley died, the Republicans lost their mind.
I'm betting saner heads will prevail with the potential default. The McCains (who has also disappointed me greatly as a moderate) and the rest will not go along with the teabaggers on that. NFW.
Note, I use "teabaggers" because that's what they used when they started before someone told them what it meant. Then it was the "Tea Party" and I used that term and after years of listening to just dumb things coming out of the mouths of so-called "Tea Partiers" and my eventual disgust, I'm back to calling them "teabaggers"
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BMO
And the Republicans don't want to be seen as "caving" by their "base" either, and they also only control half of congress.
Exactly! They both just... suck. But at the same time, I can't really fault them - they are all just responding rationally to the incentives put in front of them.
It's like when William F. Buckley died, the Republicans lost their mind.
I agree. I've never felt really comfy with the social conservatism part. Bush made me feel even less of an affinity. But this recent detachment from reality has really made me feel detached. It sucks because while I tend to vote for both Democrats and Republicans, I can't align myself with the Democratic Party either. I can't even figure out what their platform is.
because that's what they used when they started
No need to defend the use - it is pretty funny. But I don't think this is true. They are clearly referencing the Boston Tea Party, and I don't see how that would shorten to "teabagger" unless someone is being funny.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
it was never about a lack of funds, you would know that if you bothered to listen to anyone not on talk radio
To the jerk at the NIST who decided to take down dlmf.nist.gov, I have only this to say: The day you need to accelerate the convergence of a power series, I hope some jerk comes along and shuts down your resource website too so you know how irritating this is.
To everyone else, I say: Use the archive:
DLMF: Wayback Machine.
May the Maths Be with you!
OTOH millions of people will not be able to eat next month because food stamps will run out of money. That's callous, and you don't seem to care.
No, we don't care. We're tired of caring. Sadly, in this brilliantly "free" and "democratic" society we live in, I have no say or choice when it comes to what I can and can not care for using the tax money I have earned, and supposedly "voluntarily" given to the government to use for good on my behalf.
Guilt, and the subsequent charity that follows it are nothing but addictions.
Since ever slur out of your banter seems focused on sucking someone ball sack, I'm sure you'll have excellent advise on how to implement that dictatorship you're advocating.
I can't say I agree with everything you've listed. However, if the California Teacher's Association was banned from bribing politicians, particularly those that continue to block making sexual assault against children a firing offense from teaching, I'd be all for your summary.
Is that you, Cindy Sheehan? I miss the faux funerals you held in front of the Bush 43's ranch everyday with every single new agency staging the event.
It's a poor mind indeed that cannot accept a fact because they do not like who is stating it.
Rational people absorb and ponder on words and facts as they are, not discarding information because of internal biases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing."
No, they meant EVERYTHING, knowing what that meant.
INSTEAD what we get is "that, and that but not that". We get guarded parks but not letting people inside even though they are still paying the people who would protect the park anyway! We get the government spending money on barricading things that normally have NO staff!
A government shutdown should mean that, a SHUTDOWN. Instead what we get is what you described - the White House cherry-picking just what delectable services shall remain open and what shall not.
The shut down is total farce.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But I don't think this is true
I believe it was a freeper thing.
Notice the sign on the first picture:
http://washingtonindependent.com/31868/scenes-from-the-new-american-tea-party (and only a month after Obama's inauguation)
Wikipedia says "teabagger" refers to tea partiers. The talk page for disambiguation is funny. For some people.
As for both parties sucking....
I agree. But the Republicans seem more wild-eyed and mean-spirited about it. "Food stamps are BAD!" I mean come on, guys...
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BMO
I agree. But the Republicans seem more wild-eyed and mean-spirited about it. "Food stamps are BAD!" I mean come on, guys...
I'm torn. I mean, I disagree with them on more things than I thought possible, but on the other hand I at least know what I'm voting for. I never would have guessed that Obama would be Bush II on almost any issue that matters.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That is a pretty hard position to defend isn't it? LOL.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
California is seeing a bit of an exodus because too many people moved their driving up real estate prices to unreasonable levels. Their policies are working fairly well except for some lame brain tax rules put in place by Republicans that make it easy to cut taxes and hard to raise them. Also, most, if not nearly all, of the last 10 years worth of consumer protection laws exists because of California. Like knowing when your Credit Card #s get leaked? That was California. How about when there's carcinogens in your food? Also California.
Texas is running a race to the bottom funded by a modest oil boom that's wreaking their environment. Even if you don't believe fracking destroys ground water the fact is it's using it up so fast that towns are going dry.
Also, you can attract businesses all day long with slave labor wages. China does it. But is that the sort of world you want to live in? If the answer is 'yes' you're either a psychopath or just plain naive. Here's a hint: you're not free is someone controls your access to basic needs like food and shelter. You'll do exactly what they say. The phrase 'wage slave' isn't hyperbole.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If the Feds don't make it clear that they aren't maintaining these places they will be legally liable for the idiot who cuts himself on that bottle
Its been said before, but you cant sue the federal government without their permission.
A "Clean CR" is code word for "our demands are more reasonable than yours and you should cave to them".
Id note that republicans have passed several bills that would fund various parts of the government, and those were shot down because signing them would cost the dems the leverage to demand what they want.
Suppose everything you said is correct . Unquestionably, Texas produces a lot of presidents and presidential candidates. Just recently, Bush I, Bush II, Perry, and Ron Paul. So the next president may very well be a Texan. Do you think it's better for the next president to set policy for California, or for Californians to decide their own policies?
Ps - it is true California is often "ahead of the curve". They try new things. Some of the new things they try work out well. Some turn out horribly. Right now, gas costs 50% more in California because California does things their own way. Texas sits is less experimental - they'll watchto see if tthe new approach works in California before they make a law requiring whatever.
It's funny to see all the time and thought(?) you're spending on a small side effect (the administration, I agree, is making it clearer what the shutdown means), and not complaining about the radical republicans who started this mess by attempting to blackmail the president into killing his own law, the ACA.
Oh, monuments closed to a couple of hundred vets, that's very sad. But the republicans' shutdown is affecting Meals on Wheels, which serves tens of thousands of elderly, including veterans. Here's one small piece of that - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=228551347
Oh, and WIC assistance is also shut down. Good thing Fox is calling this a government "slimdown" - those women, infants, and children could probably stand to lose a few pounds.
Why are you paying attention to the sideshow instead of the real problem?
"I'm voting for. I never would have guessed that Obama would be Bush II on almost any issue that matters."
When Obama took Single-Payer off the table straight away, I was.... livid. That and continuing the wars as he has done to the point where we almost invaded Syria.
But under Romney, we would have been in Iran a month after inauguration.
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BMO
To be fair, Obama did expand single payer to 1/3 of the uninsured population. But then, Bush expanded Medicare as well, so it isn't really a difference between them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
attempting to blackmail the president
What, were they threatening to reveal his secret past as a hitman? Do you even know what that word means? Pretty sure they'd be being locked away as we speak if they'd even attempted blackmail.
Putting aside your attempt to invigorate your argument through emotive phraseology at the expense of accuracy, you do know this shutdown is just a small taste of things to come if your government doesn't get it's spending under control right? Look at Europe if you want an object lesson.
Like I said in another thread, I'm not an American, and definitely not a Republican partisan. I personally think the first thing you should be thinking about doing to reduce the budget is ditching some of your "defence" budget - like, say, those oh-so-very defensive carrier groups, that are only useful for projecting force, and of which you have more than the rest of the world put together.
That said, the Tea Party people have a point in trying to force a reduction in government spending. Yes, going after the ACA is partisan crap, but then, so is 80% of your politics, on a good day. But when it comes down to it, your debt is soaring. You're getting away with it now, because interest rates are so low. But if interest rates return to historic levels, the cost of servicing it will increase between 200-300%. There's a lot of pork and wastage that. IMO, would be a higher priority to eliminate than the ACA, but something will have to give eventually.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
>To be fair, Obama did expand single payer to 1/3 of the uninsured population.
That he did.
>Bush expanded Medicare
That he did too.
But it wasn't enough, IMO. After experiencing the Canadian healthcare system as a furriner and being entirely satisfied with the results, the concerns that you hear on this side of the border are so overblown. My Canadian friends get horrified when I tell them what we pay for health insurance and where we rank in overall results (we pay 2x per capita, and 6 steps below them, at 37'th place, typically). One of my Canadian friends who now lives in a Great Plains state, never had the problems north of the border that she's had here trying to get ins companies to pay out. (Ontario, fer instance, has OHIP, the single insurer for the province paid for out of taxes).
With single payer, there could be massive cost-savings, as the Canadian system makes an effort to keep prices from being out of control. My asthma meds north of the border, out of pocket, cash, uninsured, are the same as my co-pay here. Office visits, cash, uninsured, are likewise affordable.
And United Health (for-profit, US based health ins) was almost useless when I had to get them to pay for a hospital admission in Lindsay, Ontario. Fuckers.
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BMO
It did this at the last minute.
GOP, and especially Tea Party, resistance to Obamacare has been consistent.
And the Democrats were equally opposed to numerous Bush priorities in 2006. Yet those priorities were passed, so they didn't shut down the entire government to force (for example) a hike in taxes or an end to GitMo. I would have supported both proposals, and am partisan hackey enough that if Pelosi had actually shut down the government in 2007 on the basis that GitMo had to be fixed I probably would have backed her. But in retrospect it's a very good thing she treated the budget a s a separate issue from all these other issues.
And, for the record, while the GOP strongly opposed ObamaCare numerous times it did not link ObamaCare to shutting down the entire government until very very recently.
Why would I want to live in a country where the GOP does it?
You act as if congress has the same makeup as it did then. Elections took the guys out of power who implemented Obamacare. I understand why the Dems want to protect it, but why pretend it won't be expensive to protect? They are no longer in charge of 100% of congress, and they are going to have to pay dearly if they want to protect their pet programs. Obamacare was enacted by a law, and can be changed by law - it's not magic or special in any way. I happen to think that it replaces a terrible system. It may not be great, but repealing it without another solution is a terrible idea. Going back to our unfunded socialism is the Tea Party's plan and I oppose it.
This line of reasoning terrifies me.
The American people tend to pick a President and a House that disagree, they also have a strong tendency to create parties that strongly disagree on trivial points (ie: 35% top income tax rate vs. 39.6%; an individual mandate that 85% of the country already complies with and most of the remaining 15% would gladly comply with if they had access to the subsidies in ObamaCare). Combine that with our tendency to admire the dude on a doomed, lonely fight, and you end you end up with a recipe for the FBI being sent home every time the Congressional majority changes it's mind on how much Salmon fishing the EPA should allow.
That's possible.
It's just as likely nobody would vote for the third parties because they aren't exactly good at coalition-building.
What's most likely is that average voters would not realize anything changed, so that third parties would still be considered spoilers. Nader in particular taught a lot of people the hard lesson that voting Green is suicide, and they ain't gonna unlearn that lesson until somebody a) implements a new voting system, and b) spend a lot of money explaining to people that the new voting system exists.
I suspect that two things will have to happen before third parties become viable. First we'll have to go to some form of proportional representation at the State Level, and second a lot of ambitious people who are actually good at politics will have to join them. Everyone who thought for a second and paid attention politics, for example, knew that the Green/Libertarian parties would never have a better chance to win a Gubernatorial election then this year in Virginia. But the Greens don't have a candidate, and the Libertarians did their traditional "guy with no political skills who showed up," so instead of having an interesting race about Virginia's future we're stuck with arguing over Sleazy McSleazeball is worse then Crazy Cooch.
Right now third parties attract a lot of people who have proven incompetent in the big leagues, and a lot of other people who are really good at convincing the faithful they are the most pious, but pretty much nobody who can convince people of anything. If you're good at that you join a big party and try to change it.
If the Feds don't make it clear that they aren't maintaining these places they will be legally liable for the idiot who cuts himself on that bottle
Its been said before, but you cant sue the federal government without their permission.
And when's the last time the Feds (or a state) refused to give permission to a valid lawsuit?
It seems I was mistaken, Clinton started this sophomoric stunt, not Obama. This AC then demonstrated the vitriol borne of envy and self hatred that has become the hallmark of today's Democrat party.
second a lot of ambitious people who are actually good at politics will have to join them.
I suspect moderate Republicans might make that jump if they had a realistic 3rd party option - especially in the Northeast.
Right now third parties attract a lot of people who have proven incompetent in the big leagues
I'll go even further than that - they tend to be nutballs. When I lived in NYC, all of the third party candidates were calling for investigations into 9/11. "Truthers".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
so they didn't shut down the entire government
One difference is that a government "shutdown" is a lot closer to the ideal Tea Party role of government than to the Democratic ideal. In other words, the Tea Party would actually like the Federal Government to stay shut down forever. It's not the horrible end game to them that it is to the Democrats.
a hike in taxes or an end to GitMo.
Might this have anything to do with the fact that, even when in charge, they kept GitMo open and kept renewing the Bush tax cuts? They only became an issue again when the Republicans retook the House, and even now we still have most (half?) of the Bush tax cuts.
shutting down the entire government until very very recently.
They were catching a lot of flak for their "symbolic" votes. Their constituency demanded action. Their constituency doesn't like big government and might even welcome a default. You have to be very careful with these people - they are pretty extreme. One can only hope that the moderates will finally jump ship - which I give even odds prior to a default. But if I were the Democrats I would not be comfortable with those odds.
This line of reasoning terrifies me.
It's not really "reasoning" - it's just plain facts. Congress can change Obamacare at any time they like, and you can make judgements about playing dirty, but that doesn't help the ground war. If the Democrats want to keep Obamacare and they want the government open, it might have to be at the expense of something else. That's just the way it is. I certainly wouldn't mind some compromise that closes the deficit - at least something should come out of this.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
With single payer, there could be massive cost-savings,
Indeed. One of my largest objections to Bush's expansion was the government paying essentially full retail price for drugs. What a waste. I don't know if Obamacare addresses this or not.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Nope, it's still illegal for the medicare and medicaid to bargain with the drug manufacturers.
Because the "magic hand of the free market solves everything"
The "magic hand" also gives a UFIA.
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BMO
Northeastern Conservatives say that, but there's nothing stopping them from forming a third party. Legally it's pretty easy in that region. Lieberman made his own party on like two weeks notice after he lost the Democratic primary, Maine has a fairly successful third party movement, the Senator from Vermont is technically independent (altho he caucuses with Democrats and refers to himself as a Socialist), and New York State has that weird system where everyone is the nominee of at least three parties. Northeastern Republicans'd rather be relevant in DC, as Obama's gettable Republican vote, then win state-wide elections.
In Michigan and Ohio third parties tend to be equally weird. You get a lot of people who want the prestige of being the Gubernatorial candidate, but don't want to put in years of work building relationships with thousands of party activists. You get a lot of people who can't mentally subordinate their personal goals to the goals of an organization, and therefore prefer a Party that's so small they are the entire party in their town to a party that has a couple people regularly show up at meetings. You also get people who won't moderate themselves at all, for any reason.
My point on GitMo and taxes was precisely that the Dems didn't insist Bush change those policies or else. They decided they'd lost that fight because he had a veto, therefore they didn't fight the fight. They voted to continue the Appropriations for GitMo, and didn't hold the entire budget hostage to tax demands.
I understand the GOP's political logic. I even understand how a principled person could come to the conclusion that fighting ObamaCare is worth closing the government for weeks.
What terrifies the fuck out of me is that the way our government is designed there are lots of opportunities for a principled person to bring everything to a halt. If the principled thing to do when you disagree with the President is halt everything then everything is gonna halt a whole lot of the time. Frequently our legislature gets compared to the Polish Sejm of the late 18th century, where all decisions had to be unanimous, any decision could be overturned by one guy changing his mind, and the inevitable result was that strong Poland dominating Central Europe of the 1630s was gone by 1800.
Shutting down a government website, taking it offline, may have a negative effect on SEO. If the websites are off the internet for quite a while, search engines may penalize the site and when it returns to the internet, it may have lost its ranking for keyword queries.
And all the Dems care about is making sure the Reps lose. If that fucks over We The People, well, so long as the Dems win and the Reps lose, they don't care.
I think this attitude has a lot to do with the Reps now wanting to stick it to the Dems.
Same suit, different tie.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The magic hand with a government-granted monopoly, LOL.
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They decided they'd lost that fight because he had a veto, therefore they didn't fight the fight.
If I pretend for a minute that the Dems wanted to close GitMo, then they could not have shut the government down because that would make the Tea Party happy. A better analogy would be if the doves in the House stopped funding for the Iraqi war. I don't think such a thing was possible, since there were probably enough Democratic hawks to side with the Republicans, but that would be similar to what the Tea Party is doing now.
What terrifies the fuck out of me is that the way our government is designed there are lots of opportunities for a principled person to bring everything to a halt.
Well, it's not really a halt... in fact, even "shut down", the government is spending more than in takes in. I actually find that terrifying, because it illustrates how badly out of balance our expectations are for government with what we are willing to pay.
I share your coincern for "minority" rule, but at the same time I'm glad that a significant minority position is protected... even when I disagree with their stance. I have to admit that I'm not sure there would be any fiscal discussion at all without the Tea Party, so they do play a role - even if they are totally nuts.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
All those people can't afford to buy anything now, great move republicans. (yet, most people will blame this on Democrats).
Great way to throw away your economy...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I keep seeing this opinion stated over and over. But in the case of the parks, when they are open, search and rescue goes into action 11 times a day on average.
I guess some of the non-wilderness stuff like the D.C. things could be purely to make the shut down feel worse (I don't know), but some of the closures, like the national parks, happened for real reasons.
And honestly, I wish more of it shut down. Enough to get people really angry with congress. These manufactured crisis situations are no way to govern.
302 is a 'We've moved somewhere else'.
At the very least if they were going to use a redirect, they should've recommended a 307 ('We're at some other place, but check back later')
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.