Senate adjourned last night, government shut down.
A senior GOP House aide sent this email to Axios‘ Jonathan Swan with the subject line, “Our future”:
• “The largest country in the world, with global responsibilities, shutting down the government over a squabble … 100% for short-term political gain.”
• “The post-World War II world we have been living in for 7 decades was largely created — and certainly sustained and defended — by American power. … Since 2001, we’ve experienced almost nothing but reverses overseas, much of it truly major and permanent. And our relative power — the power to compel and protect — is shrinking as other countries rise.”
• “And domestically, our decision-making system has become locked in a destructive, inward-turned focus. The emphasis on an unending political struggle for its own sake.”
• “Our enemies didn’t do this to us. Virtually all of it is a product of our own decisions.”
• “It isn’t sustainable. We’re well into a period of increasing internal chaos and decline overseas. We’ve gotten used to it but I’ll just say it for the sheer disbelief of it — the government of the United States just shut down.”
• “In your discussions with the great and the good around town, do you see any recognition of this inevitable scenario? I don’t. Do you know anyone with responsibility for making decisions for the country with any concrete, realistic plan to do anything about it? I don’t.”
• “They’re focused on battling one another, drilling holes in the boat, as we head for the falls. A child can see it coming. Do people really believe all of this is self-sustaining, that it won’t just cave in? I don’t.”
Third day of shutdown is the important one. Some of my co-workers and I go to the office to turn in our computers and phones. There we will say goodbye to other co-workers who are required to work without pay. I don’t get paid to sit by the phone waiting to be called back to work.
The Senate is going to vote today on a CR. So what? Nothing has been mentioned about the House voting on anything. Until the head of the House says anything I will continue to plan on sitting around waiting for a call.
And most of these usual suspects will be reelected. We get the government we deserve. Who’s really to blame? We hire these guys. #VoterShutdown
Commie Plot: Commie Plot
I know it sounds a bit bizarre
But in Commie Plot: Commie Plot
That’s how conditions are
The trains never go due to rundown
By eight, the media fog must appear
In short, there’s simply not a congenial spot
For unhappily ever after here in Commie Plot
my apologies to alan jay lerner and frederick loewe for above travesty
is this still an accurate description of the plan today?
from slate
At around 8:50 p.m. on Sunday night, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came out to the throng of reporters spending their weekend in the corridors of the Capitol and announced that McConnell would be speaking on the floor shortly. It was the white smoke no one was quite sure would come. All day, McConnell had been taking meetings with an impeccably dressed Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and a shabbily dressed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who had taken it upon themselves to act as liaisons between the Democratic and Republican leaders.
There was no deal to announce, but an offer had been extended from Republicans, leaving Democrats to ponder whether to capitulate, or further entrench their risky position before a noon vote on Monday.
The announcement read by McConnell was one that Flake and Graham had been negotiating all day. If Democrats reopened the government on the bill under consideration, which would fund the government until Feb. 8, and there was no breakthrough on an immigration deal before then, it would be McConnell’s “intention” to open debate on immigration and, as Texas Sen. John Cornyn said afterwards, allow “the Senate to work its will.” In other words, the Senate would take up a shell bill and various immigration proposals, like the bipartisan legislation Flake and Graham have introduced, or more partisan alternatives, could be called up as amendments. House Speaker Paul Ryan, however, has made no commitments that he would call up the winner of the Senate process for a vote in the House.
and this version from fox news:
The Senate adjourned Sunday without reaching an agreement to end the government shutdown as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for both parties to “step back from the brink.”
“The shutdown should stop today,” McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor Sunday evening. “And we’ll soon have a vote that will allow us to do that.”
However, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he and McConnell “have yet to reach an agreement on a path forward” to re-opening the government.
[….continues…]
Ah, 1850’s America redux.
Wow, here’s hoping the 1860s are bright & sunny!
Unfortunately we have no Lincolns …… either Party ….. any Party …. but a gracious plenty of John Browns, James Buchanans, Andrew Johnsons, George McClellans.
North Korea is making major PR points with a women’s hockey team & a few cheerleaders. They’re savvy enough to know which buttons to push.
Patd
I didn’t catch your marvelous piece on Sen Duckworth’s evaluation of Cadet Bonespur’s presidency.
I really don’t know whole lot about continuing resolutions, but I thought a continuing resolution kept the government funded at the same level that it was funded before to allow Congress to consider and vote on a new budget that changes the existing budget priorities. What they’re calling a continuing resolution is actually a change in budget priorities of the existing budget, which runs counter to everything I have ever known or believed about budget deals. Poobah, am I wrong about this?
And yes, that weasel Ryan has got to get on board with allowing a vote on the DACA compromise bill before dems should agree on the CR that’s before them when they vote at noon today.
Oh, and Pence is a Lying SOS.
Just my musings.
Has there ever been a study about Government Shutdowns, workers being told they are “non-essential” & the rate of suicides/suicide attempts among said workers?
Incidental note: The final broadcast of Imus in the Morning will take place March 29, 2018.
It was on the Imus show that I first heard one Craig Crawford, incidentally.
Me, too, Sturg. Capturing the I-Man here since he left national TeeVee has been more of a challenge than I needed, so MJ has been my regular fare.
Yes, always loved the broad topics of discussion between Craig & Imus. (I first saw him with KO & Dee Dee Meyer, as they were sitting outside the GOP convention in NYC.)
patd – Loved your “commie plot,” but I think it needs to be rewritten as capitalist pigs. This is about staying in power and continuing to feed off of the teets of the Koch Bros and who-knows-what foreign entities who have set up companies to funnel money to campaigns.
If the money gets stripped from the mix, both the money to get elected and the lobbying jobs for family & friends that follow, we would not get into these CMs (continuing messes).
Im tired of both sides. Plus, this so-called “blue wave” that has emboldened Dems will not be the widespread tsunami they think.
The Year of the Dog ends in two weeks, but the Year of the Pig begins.
on one hand, liberals want a country of racial and sexual equality where everyone has health care, but on the other hand conservatives want a racist police state with no social services. gotta tell both sides.
9:26 AM – 21 Jan 2018
Oliver Willis………….
Jon Meacham was on the 0600 segment of Morning Joe this am. He has such a good philosophical mind. I checked to see if he is completely separated from the ministry; he’s still listed on the roles of the Episcopal Church.
Here is a very interesting Ascension Day sermon that he present at New York’s Trinity Church (the one on Wall Street) not too many (2016) years ago. He’s my kind of thinker.
It was in 76 or 77 I met Imus and Fred down at their Lone Star Cafe at 13th and 5th…..I’d come over from Staten Island and was looking for some Country music when I saw The Lone Star in a phone book…..called them up and it was actually Fred who answered, I asks if they had a band…….yep…….how long you gonna be open? He says, “Well, we hope we make it to February”. It’s on fifth avenue so I ask if they have a dress code. Fred says, “Ummm, you better wear shoes, cause there’s a lot of busted glass on the floor.”
didn’t take me long to get there.
Howie has a new book out…wonder how it will affect his faux gnus gig
wapo: ‘Defiance Disorder’: Another new book describes chaos in Trump’s White House
In late July, the White House had just finished an official policy review on transgender individuals serving in the military and President Trump and his then-chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had agreed to meet in the Oval Office to discuss the four options awaiting the president in a decision memo.
But then Trump unexpectedly preempted the conversation and sent his entire administration scrambling, by tweeting out his own decision — that the government would not allow transgender individuals to serve — just moments later.
“ ‘Oh my God, he just tweeted this,’ ” Priebus said, according to a new book by Howard Kurtz, who hosts Fox News’s “Media Buzz.” There was, Kurtz writes, “no longer a need for the meeting.”
The White House — and the politerati diaspora — has just barely stopped reeling from author Michael Wolff’s account of life in Trump’s West Wing, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and now another life-in-the-White-House book is about to drop, this one from Kurtz.
Like the books that came before it, and almost certainly like the ones still to come, Kurtz’s book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth,” offers a portrait of a White House riven by chaos, with aides scrambling to respond to the president’s impulses and writing policy to fit his tweets, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.
Kurtz, who worked at The Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.
[…]
While Kurtz at times seems to offer a more flattering portrayal of the West Wing staff than some other media accounts, he also captures a White House struggling to perform basic tasks and advisers reacting to the whims of a hard-to-control president.
[….]
In the excerpts, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway emerges as one of the few calming presences on Trump. When, on his first full day as president, Trump wanted to send Sean Spicer, then the White House press secretary, out to attack the media for correctly reporting the crowd size, Conway initially tried to talk him out of it.
“She invoked a line that she often employed when Trump was exercised over some slight,” Kurtz writes. “ ‘You’re really big,’ she said. ‘That’s really small.’ ”
But ultimately, Spicer did attack the media at Trump’s behest, undermining his own credibility in his first official White House news conference and prompting a crowd-size debate that distracted from Trump’s first days in the White House.
Only then, Kurtz writes, did Trump make “a rare admission” — he had been wrong. “You were right,” he told aides, according to the book’s account. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
[…continues…]
That’s a neat story, Sturg. What were you doing in the City? Dodgers had already moved.
I’m glad Wolff beat him to the punch, his book will sell bupkis…..
“…it needs to be rewritten as capitalist pigs”
bid, thanks for the praise and for the advice. will look for suitable song to parody, but can I substitute “greedy” for “capitalist” since the pigs of whom you speak are more seekers of gov’t welfare than l’aissez-faire
In the USA we have already had the year of the pig
I was living on Staten, an old navy buddy having put me to work as Groundman with his two-man tree cutting biz……we cut down trees all over the place and sold firewood in the city…..
sturge, love that word. thanks for thinking of it…. and I agree Howie is too late with too little.
“bupkis” according to bupkis.org:
Bupkis is a Yiddish word, which is literally translated as “beans” and is derived from a Slavic word for “goat droppings.” Apparently goat droppings look like beans, although I’ve never actually seen any goat droppings.
However just to make things confusing, it’s not used as a reference to something edible (beans), or something inedible (goat droppings), but as something worthless (a bean isn’t worth much, and goat droppings even less)
To make things even more confusing, it’s traditionally used as part of a double-negative in an insult: “You haven’t got bupkis!” which meaning “You don’t have anything!” or “This isn’t worth bupkis!” which means that something is worth less than nothing.
Goat droppings do indeed look like pyramidal stack of black beans.
This I know from 1962 when somebody bought a miniature white goat to be our company mascot in Korea. At least the poor critter didn’t have diarrhea from the cigarettes that people insisted on feeding him, but he laid deposits everywhere. And those deposits had to be cleansed by us lower ranking swine. Needless to say, the goat vanished.
My buddy’s brother was an actor/tree-cutter out in Hollywood…….one of his roles was in the Mike Myers/Dana Carvey movie…….billed as “The Bad Actor” where they interrupted the movie and sent him out to be replaced by Charlton Heston………guy had a million stories……
Their sister was a vogue model ……
“The goat vanished….”
he was very good with mustard……..
The Bad Actor
Interesting discussions, folks. Well, we’re what, an hour and a half, more or less, from a vote on the CR? I’m no expert on DC, but it strikes me that everything is Washington is a negotiation and everything is connected to everything else. Clean bill, what’s that? It seems to me that all that has to be done to end this stalemate is have McMertle and Lyin’ Ryan agree to bring the bipartisan DACA bill to a vote in each chamber before the end of the CR and have SFB agree he’ll sign it. SFB gets his wall funding, military spending and border security, dems get DACA and CHIP, the government is funded and everything goes on as it should.
Not sure Charleton Heston did anything worth a shit after Midway.
Or as my ex-boyfriend exclaimed when he saw goat droppings, “Look, Raisinettes”!
patd – “Greedy” works, too. Pigs are intelligent beings. It’s kind of a shame to compare them with Critters.
pogo – Clean DACA is keeping dreamers, but no wall/border security.
There was a news clip of some Dem Critter bullying other Dems into “clean DACA.”
Lesson for Dems: GOP leveraged their loss in 2013 shutdown for a massive Midterm victory. Martyrdom is a powerful thing.
Dems have trouble learning political lessons Poobah.
I may live in a red state, but when the local, Sunday shows have had Dem candidates on this month, none of them can articulate what they are FOR. They’re gonna need more, big rallies around Labor Day to keep the momentum, or the blue wave might just fizzle at the shoreline on Election Day.
NEW THREAD