THE WATERING HOLE: Wednesday, October 16, 2013: Anticipation…

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10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…we have ignition…2…1…we have lift-off.

Anticipation. That time between ignition and lift-off when an irreversable process has begun, but its effects are not yet felt. Like being in the front car on a rollercoaster ride as it crests that first big hill and you’re looking at the long drop ahead…there’s no stopping now. All you can do is scream.

That’s where we’re at now. It’s already too late to stop the economic train-wreck caused by those who want smaller government. They’re going to get what they wanted.

An article on FoxNews.com, of all places, mapped out the timeline for getting something through the Senate and House, and it looks like, barring unanimous consent in the Senate, the soonest something could get to President Obama’s desk is October 23, and then ONLY if Boehner lets it go to a vote. But by then, we will have defaulted.

But even if something gets rammed through in a day, damage is already being done. Stocks are down. Our borrowing costs will go up, just for having gone through another round of fiscal attempted suicide.

How did we get to this point?

By design. The founding fathers wanted to restrict the powers of the Executive, they’d had enough of living under a King.

The Senate was the house of the Aristocracy. Senators were originally elected by their respective State Legislatures – products of the political class. Only later did the people actually get to vote for their Senators directly.

The House was the People’s House. And to the House, to the people’s Representatives, the founding fathers gave the power of the purse. Now, a bit more than 200 years later, the People’s House is using that power to effect changes. This, then, is a part of the checks and balances built into the Constitutional design of a fragmented government – intentionally fragmented to ensure that the government answers to the people, not the aristocracy. And it was working, too. Until the Aristocracy figured out how to game the system.

The next few days will be interesting, to say the least.

But remember, in all of this, it is not about ObamaCare. It never was. It’s about power: the power to control other people. No matter what the cost.

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125 thoughts on “THE WATERING HOLE: Wednesday, October 16, 2013: Anticipation…”

  4. This will come to a head today. Boner can’t bring a bill to the floor without losing his speakership.
    His power trip is greater than his concern for the world economy.
    The tyranny of the minority is now the staple of our governmental process.
    The plane is on fire, filling up with smoke, and the teapartiers are laughing their asses off in the restrooms with the trash cans full of burning paper.

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    • And Sen Cruz (R-Cruzader) is pondering whether or not he will stop the Senate solution cold and casue the Full Monty singlehandedly ….. is his ego *that* big?

      You have to agree this is a better romance than Twilight though….

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  5. I hope yesterday’s antics in the House were the final spasm of a still-fresh GOP corpse, and its legitimacy as a political entity.

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    • Awesome new avatar, BMM….. was that Nathan Bedford Forrest there? (one of my old nom-de-blogs at TP 🙂 ).

      Will Sen Cruz (R-Bierkeller) blow it all up? Over on C&L they are watching Smoky Joe Barton (R-Pollution) sell all his stock – Smoky Joe thinks so.

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    • Oh wait no, it’s Slim Pickens on the ‘buhm’….. the effect is the same though….. got your pillow cases boys? Yee hah – let’s ride!!

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  7. Looks like the calmer heads in the Senate have reached a deal.
    Announcement coming in the next hour…Film at 11…House still picking its nose…
    Here’s an idiotic quote from one the House’s chief idiot, Steve King (TP – IA)
    Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a tea party favorite, said he was not worried about the prospect of a U.S. default.
    “We are going to service our debt,” he told CNN. “But I am concerned about all the rhetoric around this ….I’m concerned that it will scare the markets.”

    So, by not passing a bill that raises the debt limit and re-opening the federal gummint, you are going to service the debt how?
    Fumbduck.

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  12. QOTD:
    Carl Bernstein journalist & author
    “You have to go back to the party, the Democratic Party of segregation to find this kind of scorched-earth politics putting the national interests nowhere and putting ideology and ideology above all else,” Bernstein said. “The full faith and credit of the United States, our reputation abroad, our stability, our national security has been endangered by [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, by [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor, who have embraced and cowardly appeased these forces who are know-nothings.”

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  13. From the annals of “choot-spah”:

    “The problem is we have hucksters, shysters, and people ripping off the Republican Party for their own self-aggrandizement, for their own egos, to make money,” – Ann Coulter, appearing on Hannity to hawk her latest book.

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  15. QsOTD:

    “This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren’t going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren’t suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren’t going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn’t you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will.” — Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast

    I loved this quote from Congresswoman Jacqueline Speier:

    “This is like a pre school that’s gone awry. I’ve been in public office for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

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  16. Here’s Brit Hume last night rationalizing the Tea Party’s dead-end strategy at the expense of the nation and the world:

    ‘In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew.

    And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they’ll try anything to bring that about. And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.” ‘

    Dead-enders, indeed. We still haven’t hit bottom. It’s going to get worse.

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    • A long time ago in AZ . . . I ‘rescued’ a desert tortoise, one that was casually working on crossing the road a block from a church on a Sunday morning. Named ‘him’ Sebastian, and fed ‘him’ lettuce and cabbage for a couple of weeks. Then took ‘him’ back to the desert, released ‘him’ in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve a long way from both churches and roads. I hope ‘he’ is still enjoying his surround. ‘He’ was a truly cool and intelligent critter . . . clearly not a Republican.

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    • Who? Elvis? Michael Jackson? Miley Cyrus? Which star is it this time? …. maybe I should read the article……

      😉
      .

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  21. A majority of Republicans say that the United States can blow past the Oct. 17 debt ceiling deadline without “major economic problems,” a Pew Poll finds. But what’s revealing is that 52% of tea party Republicans don’t think we ever need to raise the ceiling.

    I think this is the moment we need to introduce the Dunning-Kruger Effect to Teatards, defined as:

    The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

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  23. Boner says:

    House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) just released a full statement on where he stands on the Senate’s compromise. In it, he promises to keep fighting against Obamacare:

    The House has fought with everything it has to convince the president of the United States to engage in bipartisan negotiations aimed at addressing our country’s debt and providing fairness for the American people under ObamaCare. That fight will continue. But blocking the bipartisan agreement reached today by the members of the Senate will not be a tactic for us. In addition to the risk of default, doing so would open the door for the Democratic majority in Washington to raise taxes again on the American people and undo the spending caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act without replacing them with better spending cuts. With our nation’s economy still struggling under years of the president’s policies, raising taxes is not a viable option. Our drive to stop the train wreck that is the president’s health care law will continue. We will rely on aggressive oversight that highlights the law’s massive flaws and smart, targeted strikes that split the legislative coalition the president has relied upon to force his health care law on the American people.

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    • Note: the president’s “health care law” that he ‘forced’ “on the American people” is the GOP/Wingnuttistanian 199? ‘solution’ to that preferred system, aka the ‘Universal Single Payer’ concept — the one that would really work.

      Maybe one day . . . if ONLY the R-fascist movement will die . . .

      Yeah. Right. Greed and lust die? Nah. No way.

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  25. Economic conditions provide exactly zero reasons to worry that the U.S. cannot service its debts. The danger in the current crisis, therefore, is not catastrophic economic collapse.

    Rather, the danger is that the House’s tea party Republicans, in their zeal to block President Barack Obama’s policies, especially on health care, have damaged investors’ long-term trust in the U.S. government. And by thwarting the principle of majority rule, they have demonstrated a disrupting power that they may wield into the next decade, causing further erosion in confidence.

    Trust is crucial to investment, economic growth, fiscal stability and the continuation of the tremendous benefits the U.S. gets from the dollar’s serving as the global reserve currency. Tea party Republicans undermine that trust by voicing wild claims that have little to no basis in fact, especially their absurd assertion that the federal government is going broke.

    http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/15/government-shutdowndefaultteapartyhouserepublicans.html

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  27. Happy Birthday, Oscar!

    America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
    Oscar Wilde

    By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
    Oscar Wilde

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  30. So, you might ask, how did the US House spend its day today after last night suffering a massive FAIL of its basic job? Berating National Park Services Director Jonathan Jarvis, of course.

    The New Republic puts this in context:

    “Whether or not the parks service did a flawless job implementing the shutdown (after furloughing over 20,000 of its roughly 23,000 employees), only in a funhouse-mirror version of reality should members of Congress be debating the functions of an agency that accounts for .0006 percent of the federal budget on the day before we may default on our national debt.”

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  32. Lemme get this straight. Republicans shut down the government costing us billions of dollars, and all they got out of it was an agreement for MORE GOVERNMENT REGULATION AND OVERSIGHT?????

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  38. Where is Snowbank Snooki? Certainly she wants to feel the glow of winning along side of her BFF Ralffie, while bashing the lamestream media for lying about their obvious VICTORY! 🙂

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  39. Reagun once called Portland, “Little Lebanon” because of the progressive political activity displayed against him on a visit here many moons ago. Many of us took pride in the name.
    So “Little Lebanon” is speaking again, albeit slow to come. Sometimes professional sports teams take up the proper stance. I’m proud to be one of their fans.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/16/portland-trailblazers-marriage-equality_n_4109662.html

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  41. Jesus H Christ….. pasty-faced English Ponce Piers Morgan allowed Ann Coulter who is flogging a book of her usual shite on to his program where she proceeded to spew here usual brand of turd for a full ten minutes…. . Friends don’t let friends watch Piers Morgan….. useless twat.

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  43. I wonder if there was stifled, muffled laughter…

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    • 70% of the American electorate say he’s too crazy. 30% say he’s not crazy enough. So? Teddy goes with the 1% of the Americans that say “kill ’em all” while remaining oblivious to the fact that he is one of the ones his fellow travelers would gleefully exterminate based on name and/or skin tone alone.

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  44. Please forgive me if in spite of the damage the tea folk, and the R’s who drank their bitter brew, have cause our country with their little hissy fit, I take this moment to perform a little dance and say “Ha Ha, you lose.”

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  45. The House of Representatives has approved legislation already passed by the Senate to reopen the government and avoid default; it now goes to President Obama for his signature.

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  46. The Dems keep on saying the polite thing — that this is not a time for celebration.

    I beg to differ! In your stupid fucking face, Raffy Cruz!! Fuck you, losers! We win! We win!!!!!

    *happy dance*

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  47. Talking a break from wrapping 245 bars of soap for the Harvest Fair this weekend. I’m about 2/3rds done.

    This is a two day event, and on the one hand, I want to sell loads and loads of soap — Duh! But if I sell too much on the first day, I’m stuck trying to wrap another load of soap Saturday night. Yikes.

    I guess I’ll be grateful for that sort of problem. 🙂

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  49. FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 550
    (Republicans in roman; Democrats in italic; Independents underlined)

    ……………………YEA……NAYS…..PRES…NV
    REPUBLICAN ..87…….144 ……………..1
    DEMOCRATIC..98………………………….2
    INDEPENDENT
    •TOTALS………..285….144……………….3

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  50. In a statement, the White House announced that the president will sign the bill into law tonight. In either case, he’ll address the nation at 10:35 a.m. on Thursday.

    Updates

    11:33 p.m (edt): Yosemite National Park will open tonight, according to park officials.

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  52. Thank you President Barack Obama, Ms. Pelosi, Harry Reid, and all Dems for standing firm. Now on to the process of destroying the Repug party.

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    • Now on to the process of destroying the Repug party.

      They may just implode making our task that much easier!
      (CrazyCruz is definitely ‘going down’)

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