You had one f-ing job.....

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Uh, red team, wtf? You've allowed these tea party freaks drive to the car into a ditch. That's the plan?

“We’re very excited,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). “It’s exactly what we wanted, and we got it.”

Well, yay for hurting people IRL?

TIM MURPHY: Well, the short answer is about 20 percent of the federal government, 800,000 federal workers, will show up to work today and be sent home, and that includes 400,000 civilian workers from the Department of the Defense. That’s the department that probably gets the most cuts from this. The longer answer is, you know, pretty much various things that you use in your everyday life will no longer be open to you. People applying for mortgages will have trouble getting that from the federal government. People trying to fill out their taxes will no longer be able to call the IRS to ask basic questions. The Coast Guard is cutting back some of its navigation assistance. Auto—new automobile inspections will be curtailed. The EPA is closing 94 percent of its responsibilities for the foreseeable future. You know, there’s kind of this perception that the shutdown mostly just affects Washington, D.C., and it really does affect Washington, D.C., but it goes much broader than that.

Yay, shut down the EPA, bring back acid rain!!!. NRC has slashed planned nuke plant inspections! NOAA is slashing. EPA is really fucked. NASA Voyager, fucked. Mars Rover is fucked Kids being kicked out of cancer treatments:

"At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed. One result: director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center into clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said."

Awwww hell yeah! Who needs to regulate pesticides, amirite? No more monitoring beef for ecoli, meat eaters. The CDC wont be able to monitor outbreaks or even create a proper flu vaccine - you could have millions of deaths on your hands. Way to stick it to those sciences, red team! Yee haw for hee haw! Gun sale permits are also going to be hampered, opps!!!! Families of American soldiers slain in Afghanistan will be denied death benefits. You shut down the panda cam too dammit:

the deal with the shutdown is it essentially gets worse the longer it goes on. And in 1995 and 1996 it went on for 28 days and ended up costing the U.S., I think, about $2 billion in economic losses, just because people don’t have money and they’re not spending it. So you have the 800,000 workers who will be furloughed, and they’ll be furloughed without pay. And when the shutdown eventually ends, they’ll get that pay. But in the meantime, you know, they’re trying to make ends meet. The government did pass an emergency measure to continue paying members of the armed services last night, so they’ll still work and they’ll still get their pay. But families whose, you know, loved ones die in Afghanistan will not get death benefits in that period. You know, civilian contractors will not, by and large, be showing up to work. The EPA will shut down almost all of its services. The National Zoo will close. Even the panda cam that lets you watch, you know, the pandas on a live stream 24 hours a day will shut down. NASA, I think, is furloughing about 97 percent of its staff. You know, people who depend on the federal government for funding for WIC food assistance will not get that. It’s up to their state whether they’ll get that going forward. Some states have obligations to do that; some states could probably care less. Heating assistance as the weather gets colder is something that is now up in the air. You know, there’s just kind of this wide range of government programs. Head Start, which is a program that has already been kind of really hammered by the sequestration cuts over the last seven months, is going to get further cuts over the next couple of weeks if the shutdown persists, as grants are now put on hold. So, you know, whether you have kids, whether you’re a college student relying on federal student loans or Pell Grants, whether you’re a senior citizen, whether you’re living in a cold region without heat, this shutdown will affect you.

All these self inflicted wounds because they hate a bill that was passed by congress, signed by a president who basically was elected on the issue, and ruled constitutional by the Supreme court. The bastard child of the Heritage foundation, RomneyObamacare aka the Affordable Care Act. Gawd forbid birth control be covered.



This woman is far more eloquent than I could be on the issue, so here:

I have a pre-existing condition and I stand to lower my premium, my deductible, and my prescription costs. I promise to return the money I save to the economy quite promptly, I'm good at that part. Just lower your gun and stop hurting people. Pretty please?

To quote Lincoln: "What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum."

Comments

[cheezyfish.livejournal.com]

ou blame, not the political party who shut the government down and blocked their access to treatment, but the political party refusing to give in to this hostage taking

I blame everyone. You are projecting that I just blame Democrats. I don't. I blame Congress. Not just one party.

What comes to mind for me is the great 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham 123.
Your analogy is even dumber than the one before. Why use analogies? Use the truth. Why is that so hard? I mean, do you disagree with what I wrote? Is that not what's happening?

[paft.livejournal.com]

Analogies are very useful when confronted with the sheer irrationality of "arguments" like yours.

The truth is that the Republicans shut down the government because they don't like a law that has been voted, on, passed, and supported by the Supreme Court. Attempting to portray their government shut down as a shut down by the Democrats is irrational beyond belief, given the Republicans and right wingers cheering on the shut down, and the paper trail left by Republicans as they plotted it.

[cheezyfish.livejournal.com]

Republicans: 'shutdown the government.'

Democrats: 'look, you can't get into national parks, kids are dying of cancer, the VA will fall apart, and it's all the Republicans fault!,'

Republicans: 'lets fund those separately to help limit the pain of the shutdown!'

Democrats: "We need to veto the shit outta that, because we wanna be able to blame them for it so we can pressure them to get a full CR through and discourage future attempts like this"


Is this an accurate portrayal of what is happening? If not, what are the Democrat's objective with refusing funding of the NIH. Are they not trying to discourage future attempts like this? Are they not trying to get a clean CR passed? If they are, why would denying sick children with cancer and denying disabled vets their disability checks help those aims?

[paft.livejournal.com]

cf: Is this an accurate portrayal of what is happening?

No. It is not.

I suspect that like most of the rest of the country, the Democrats absolutely do not want this tactic of the Republicans to succeed in any way because they don't want it to be used every time the Tea Party crowd sees a law passed that they don't like.

[cheezyfish.livejournal.com]

First off, you didn't say anything contrary to what I said, so saying "No, it is not." is a bit confusing. Anyways...

So, Democrats are refusing to pay for cancer treatment because... they don't want these Republican tactics to work. How is that different than

Democrats: "We need to veto the shit outta that, because we wanna be able to blame them for it so we can pressure them to get a full CR through and discourage future attempts like this"

Are you confused? You didn't explain how it was wrong at all. You basically typed the same thing with a small part missing. WTF?

[paft.livejournal.com]

c: So, Democrats are refusing to pay for cancer treatment because... they don't want these Republican tactics to work. How is that different than

Democrats: "We need to veto the shit outta that, because we wanna be able to blame them for it so we can pressure them to get a full CR through and discourage future attempts like this"

A more accurate representation would be "We can't give in to the Tea Party Republicans on this tactic because if we do, governing is going to be impossible in the future. Every time a law is passed they dislike, they'll shut down the government, and business of -- not only providing healthcare to people who desperately need it -- but offering any other government service at all not on their terms, will become next to impossible."

The embarrassingly obvious callousness of the Republican party is not a plot by the Democrats to make the Republicans look bad.

c: Are you confused?

No, though I suspect strongly that's your intent. See, I went back and looked over some of our past conversations, and a certain pattern emerged in your approach to "debate." You rely heavily on obfuscation, with a healthy dash of histrionics and the occasional false equivalence. Once that pattern becomes evident, your attempt to muddy the waters in the course of a discussion becomes much less effective.

[cheezyfish.livejournal.com]

Okay, so Obama saying he will veto cancer treatment for children is because we can't allow Republicans to get away with a shutdown? How does that work? How is that giving in to the tea party? How does that stop them from doing a shutdown in the future?

I get what you are saying Paft, but you are leaving out the mechanisms in why refusing kids cancer treatment, even though Republicans would fund it no strings attached, works to discourage government shutdowns in the future.

[paft.livejournal.com]

ch: Okay, so Obama saying he will veto cancer treatment for children is because we can't allow Republicans to get away with a shutdown?

Another obfuscating tactic of yours -- attempting to reframe another person's arguments and demanding that your reframing be the basis upon which the debate takes place.

No, it's not just "we can't allow the Republicans to get way with shutdown," as if it were merely Democratic pique at a one-off tactic by the Republicans. It's "we can't reward the use of a tactic that would derail any future governance." If this succeeds as a tactic for the Republicans negotiating cuts in other programs that they wanted anyway, there's no reason to believe it won't be done by the Republicans again, and again, and again. The rest of Obama's presidency -- and for that matter, any future governance by a Democrat the Tea Party contingent dislikes -- would be paralyzed. And no, this piecemeal approach to funding, even without strings attached, is no way to run a government.

ch: I get what you are saying Paft, but you are leaving out the mechanisms in why refusing kids cancer treatment....

Reframe, reframe, reframe... Sorry Cheezy, but I'm going to have to insist on the discussion sticking to what's actually going on here. First of all, it's the Republicans shutting down the government that has blocked these kids from cancer treatment, so let's stop pretending it's the Democrats who caused them to be turned away. Second, whether or not the Republicans have strings attached to that particular funding is beside the point. They are trying to fundamentally and radically change the way this country is run. That has to be stopped.