Yes, the start date of the Heritage Foundation's insurance industry payoff, the House shuts down all possible parts of governance, aside from itself.
As expected, members distinguish themselves—
Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) told a local television station that she would not be deferring her pay during the government shutdown, as some other members have done.On the October 4 Majority Report, Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter got pretty much everything in.
"I need my paycheck. That's the bottom line," Ellmers told WTVD in Raleigh, N.C. "I understand that there may be some other members who are deferring their paychecks, and I think that's admirable. I'm not in that position."
According to Ellmers's official website, she was a registered nurse for 21 years before being elected to Congress. Her husband Brent, the website says, is a general surgeon.
That there are 800,000 furloughed workers losing (at the very minimum) one week of pay; another 1.2 million are working without pay.
That children are deprived of Head start and mothers left without food for babies, thanks to Congresspeople who claim to be "pro-life."
That there will be losses to scientific research, since experiments can't be stopped and re-started on whims.
The damage relates to what Sam presented as the problem of investment. If people don't see an immediate, direct benefit to themselves—and have been told to hate public expenditures—then science, like the general public good, is easily undermined.
It's not as if we have a responsible media to explain why investment matters. Since Reagan, and, as Cliff put it, "the death of news as a public service," the public is led on about "public spending = welfare queens get something I don't."
Of the Republicans' tantrum—shutting down the government over not having been able to overturn "Obamacare," and now "needing something" for their trouble—Sam suggested there might be some offering to ease their hurt feelings; perhaps, "ritual bloodletting of poor people on the floor of Congress."
A long, but interesting post by aimai: The Punishers Want To Run The Country or We Are All Tipped Waitstaff Now, with Republicans as "the dissatisfied and angry diners at the table of life."
Since the Supreme Court's States Rights cleverness with the ACA, it's not hard for the NYT to find people treated this way. Real people, with names and stories, who are clearly being harmed. suffering; so oddly unlike those anonymous welfare queens of legend.
As Sam Seder says, "welfare reform" has been the Establishment's great legacy enhancer, as bestowed on Bill Clinton. In the form of cuts to "entitlements," Obama has begged the GOP to simply consent to its own prior agenda.
Charles Pierce just re-ran an old story, written in response to that earlier round of "welfare reform": the story of a very real family, and the gravely disabled child who died when support for his medical care needed "reform."
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