US Shutdown the $24 Billion Mistake

The great polarization racked our political system for 16 days in October 2013 and while it was a win for President Obama and Democrats, everybody shed some political blood, and S&P estimated the direct economic loss to the US was $24 Billion.

The GOP was unified by fear of the wrath of the extremist conservative Tea Party apparatus, mostly directed by the Heritage Action Fund, FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth organizations.  The organizations promised to oppose any Republican straying from the fold in the 2014 primaries.  87 Republicans felt safe enough in their districts to vote Yea on the final bill extending US funding through 2013 and into January 2014.  Oregon Rep Greg Walden is evidently feeling insecure, he voted Nay.

The influence of the extreme Right-Wing groups is based mostly on big money, Koch and other Right Wing supporters - the number of Republicans who say they are favorable to the Tea Party was once at 46%, but have fallen to 27% of Moderate Republicans and Independents according to CNN.

"The Tea Party’s favorability rating has fallen across most groups since June, but the decline has been particularly dramatic among moderate and liberal Republicans. In the current survey, just 27% of moderate and liberal Republicans have a favorable impression of the Tea Party, down from 46% in June," a release from the Pew Research Center said.
Cruz has become much more visible during the shutdown and the showdown leading up the shutdown. And the poll indicates Cruz's popularity among tea party Republicans has soared, from 47% in July to 74% now. But among those who say they are non-tea party Republicans, the freshman senator from Texas and possible 2016 GOP White House contender's unfavorable rating jumped from 16% to 31%.
The Pew Research Center poll was conducted October 9 to 13, with 1,504 adults nationwide - including 655 Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP - questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

 We  seem assured that this battle will rage again in early January 2014, who knows if we'll get another attempt to hold the debt limit and force a default?  The extremists seem willing to have another go at it.

US Shutdown Day 16, It Ain't Over Till It's Over

"Very Close to a Deal" has become the most over-used phrase in the headlines, and so far it has just been wishful thinking, but it looks like the House and Senate will actually pass legislation today to fund the government and raise the debt limit, but we will likely be going through the same song and dance in January, 2014.

We will soon see if Ted Cruz and the Tea Party will try to delay the bill even though they have no hope of stopping it, but they could still make the default happen if several things went wrong at once.

US Meltdown Day -2, Deal, Maybe

The stock markets seem almost euphoric, which may make for a brutal awakening if this nail biter doesn't go down perfectly.  The "close to a deal" phrase has been overused since late last week, before the House deal unraveled.  Whatever deal evolves still has to pass both House and Senate, seems like a lot of ifs driving the optimism.  The US may not default on Treasury Bonds, but it would have to default on something, like payments to government contractors, Social Security payments and who knows what else.

I think the hardliners will not hesitate to force us into the abyss, and we'll see if it even gets a vote in the Senate by Thursday.  Any single senator could block a vote for several days, and I'll bet Cruz does it, so we will probably go past the Oct 17 deadline before any vote.   President Obama may have to use the 14th Amendment to stave off disaster.

I hope voters remember this in elections to come, the Tea-Party creating a crisis plan is irresponsible, and a danger to us all.

US Shutdown Day 15, Senate May Deliver, But What About The House?

I found a NY Times article that detailed the forces behind the shutdown planning and execution, and no surprise that the Koch brothers are generous supporters.  In addition they are prepared to back ultra-conservative primary challenges to any moderate Republicans who stray from the hard line.  This will make it nearly impossible to get a deal through the House.  I am not nearly as optimistic as the newspaper headlines announcing "the Senate is very close to a deal".  I think the hardliners will not hesitate to force us into the abyss, and we'll see if it even gets a vote in the Senate.  Any single senator could block a vote for several days, and I'll bet Cruz does it, so we will probably go past the Oct 17 deadline before any vote.   President Obama may have to use the 14th Amendment to stave off disaster.

With agencies like the Judiciary running out of money to stay open, things are getting dire.  If hypothetically the courts run out of money (likely to happen by Thursday), will criminal cases have to be dropped?  They are already postponing all Civil cases due to being short-staffed, and some say they will work without pay if that comes to pass. 

This shutdown is tearing our society apart.

US Shutdown Day 14, Losing Our Grip?

While congress bickers, the agencies of the Federal government have largely ceased functioning, save for Defense spending, and congress is still being paid.  We seem to be at a historical turning point, but the question is whether the players are concerned with their personal agendas or the good of the nation.  What is the will of the people, and what does congress need to do to represent it?

We need some means of breaking the Democrat / Republican deadlock and get them both to move forward and provide stability as their first priority, we need congress to preserve our government, not tear it down.  The shutdown is currently considered small potatoes next to the debt limit, but the shutdown has put 800,000 Federal employees on the streets and its effects are rippling through all the states and the City of Washington DC.  This must end or we all suffer.

US Meltdown Day -4, Rough Ride Ahead

The news is bad and getting worse as we approach the day of possible default on the government debt.  If we don't get something going on Sunday, the stock market might finally speak loud enough for all to hear.  Lindsay Graham said today,

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on ABC's This Week that a Democratic proposal to increase spending beyond limits set by automatic budget cuts -- known as the sequester -- cannot be supported by Republicans.
He doesn't anticipate a deal by the Oct. 17 deadline.
"I don't see one," Graham said. "If you break spending caps you're not going to get any Republicans in the Senate."

The Democrats are just as pessimistic, but with such a fluid situation anything can happen.

David Plouffe, a former senior adviser to Obama, said the nation is dangerously close to default. "I think the notion that somehow this is going to be easily solved this week is completely false," Plouffe said on This Week.
Plouffe put the odds of a deal by Thursday at "no better than 50/50. And so I think the country needs to prepare that this could go on for a while."

US Shutdown Day 13, It Was a Fools Errand

The effort to negotiate in the House has collapsed with John Boehnor and House Republicans giving it up, and now Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell must put something together.  John McCain provided some color commentary on CBS News.

“I guess we can get lower in the polls,” McCain said. “We’re down to blood relatives and paid staffers now.   “I’m glad that negotiations are going on,” McCain said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” I’m disappointed that twice … we were close to a deal and the Democrats moved the goalposts, in light of the polling data.”
McCain said he was also “disappointed” that Obama “has not played a more active role in this, as Bill Clinton did in ‘95.”
“Maybe we need to get Joe Biden out of the witness protection program,” McCain said, noting the vice president’s lack of visibility in recent weeks and relationships with his former colleagues in the Senate.
McCain said it was time for Democrats to be “magnanimous and get things done.”
“I know what it’s like to be in the majority and in the minority, and it won’t be forgotten,” he added.
McCain called the effort to tie the shutdown to an effort to defund ObamaCare a “fool’s errand.”
“The irony of all this is the rollout is a fiasco,” he added.

Meanwhile the Shutdown grinds on, nobody is saying for how long.

Living in the Society the GOP wants?

It could be argued that the GOP (at least the more conservative faction) favors many of the things happening today.  They just don't like being subject to the howls of outrage it has produced.
They don't like giving away things to the little people, or "burdensome" regulations.  Because of the bad PR, they have proposed funding a few things, like National Parks, Armed Forces, Veterans' benefits, etc., but for a lot of people who rely on the safety net, things just get harder.

• The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program is suspended, it provides supplemental food vouchers and support to nearly 8.9 million people, mostly women and children under the age of five. Without it, they're going without food and formula.

•  Head Start funds serving low income programs have been suspended, although wealthy private donors are trying to keep some centers open.  Some of those same funds provide payments to seniors and low income families for paying heating and energy bills, and without that the victims will be a lot colder.  Meals for the elderly are also at risk.

• Federal courts, which have been using fees and other funds to operate since the shutdown began, will likely have enough money to operate until Oct. 17, and possibly Oct. 18.After that, the courts will run out of money and shut down all nonessential work.

• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut down most operations on Thursday. However, resident inspectors will remain on the job and any immediate safety or security matters will be handled.

• The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say they can handle recalls and high-risk foodborne outbreaks, but discovering them will be more difficult because many of the people who investigate outbreaks have been furloughed. Routine food safety inspections were suspended, so most food manufacturers won't have to worry about periodic visits from government inspectors. 

•  The National Transportation Safety Board is not investigating most transportation accidents, making an exception only if officials believe lives or property are in danger. The agency suspended 1,500 investigations that were underway before the shutdown. Nor has the board collected information on or sent investigators to the scene of 20 accidents involving U.S.-manufactured aircraft that have occurred around the globe since Sept. 30.

•  At the Environmental Protection Agency, the shutdown means the agency can no longer certify whether vehicles meet emissions standards, delaying some new models from reaching car lots. New pesticides and industrial chemicals are also in limbo because the EPA has halted reviews of their health and environmental effects. And the nation's environmental police are no longer checking to see if polluters are complying with agreements to reduce their pollution.

• New patients are generally not being accepted into clinical research at the National Institutes of Health, but current patients continue to receive care. NIH has made exceptions to allow 12 patients with immediately life-threatening illnesses — mostly cancer — into research studies at its renowned hospital. Normally, about 200 new patients every week enroll in studies at the NIH's research-only hospital, many of them after standard treatments have failed.

• Some borrowers are finding it harder to close on their mortgages. The delays could worsen if the shutdown continues and possibly undercut the nation's housing recovery. 

• Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have quietly told Congress that they likely won't have enough money to pay disability claims or make pension payments for veterans if a government shutdown lasts for more than two or three weeks. That could affect some 3.6 million veterans who receive these benefits.

• Every fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monitors the spread of flu and figures out how best to direct vaccine programs around the country. During the shutdown, however, the agency will be "unable to support the annual seasonal influenza program," according to a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services.

• During the shutdown, the Social Security administration won't have enough staff to schedule new hearings for those applying for disability benefits. And the Veterans Appeal Board will be closed, which means veterans appealing a decision on disability benefits will have to wait until the shutdown ends.

US Shutdown Day 12, A Lot of Talk, No Action

Before Friday nobody was talking, now everybody is talking and there's more than one deal under discussion and Obama seems to be shopping for the best deal.  Quite a change from what has been going on before. 

GOP lawmakers from both chambers are expressing confusion and frustration with how their colleagues across the Capitol are approaching talks with the White House, with many thinking their respective camp should be in the lead.

"There's plates spinning everywhere. Everybody's now trying to work on this," said Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of House GOP leadership. "It's just confusing to try to figure out what's the deal that's actually getting traction."  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the House has the right idea with its plan.

"I see the House is much more serious about putting together a package to open up the entire government and make changes to ObamaCare to lessen the pain," Graham said.

But other Senate Republicans expressed confusion more than anything else about the House approach, which saw multiple tweaked offers come over the last several days, and scant details about what they entailed.

Asked if she backed the House plan, Sen. Kelly Ayotte said she wasn't exactly sure what it was.

"I'm not sure what their plan is. I would need to know what it is," she said.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Friday he also was befuddled by the House GOP's strategy.

Late Friday, there was news that one of the positions put forth by the House wasn't going to fly.

President Obama is rejecting a key element of House Republicans’ latest proposal to extend the federal debt ceiling, opposing a linkage between a short-term increase and negotiations on the budget, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday.
Briefing reporters after financial markets closed for the week, Carney welcomed a “new willingness” among congressional Republicans to open the government and avoid default, but he said the president would not agree to tie budget negotiations to a six-week debt-limit extension.  “It is our view that we cannot have a situation where the debt ceiling is extended as part of a budget negotiation process for only six weeks, which would put us right back in the same position that we’re in now,” Carney said.

US Shutdown Day 11, OK Maybe We Won't Default

The White House and House Republicans have committed to talking about ways to avoid a default on U.S. debt, the first concrete sign of a potential compromise since the government shut down 11 days ago.  Boehner and the House Republicans are blamed by 70% of Americans for putting their ideological positions ahead of the good of the nation and they're squirming in the spotlight.

There are still debt crisis "deniers" in the House and Senate announcing that there is enough money to pay the interest on bonds, so what's the big deal.  They will fade into the woodwork once they realize they're prioritizing the Chinese (they hold about $1.2 trillion in government debt) ahead of things like Social Security recipients, Veterans' benefits,  disabled Americans, Prison Guards, Corporate Welfare, etc.  Their big money handlers via legions of lobbyists will soon set the idiots straight.  Maybe even Rand Paul will listen to them, but in his case I wouldn't make any bets, reality doesn't intrude on his ideology.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, both bastions of Republican support, sent letters to Congress on Tuesday urging action on the debt ceiling.

“Our nation has never defaulted in the past, and failing to raise the debt limit in a timely fashion will seriously disrupt our fragile economy and have a ripple effect throughout the world,” wrote Jay Timmons, the president of the manufacturers’ group.

But we digress, the government is still shut down and while that may be like comparing the Bubonic Plague to global thermonuclear war, the plague is still serious business.  I listed a few of the effects already, and those aren't going away any time soon.  Maybe the Federal Prison guards will just open up the cells and go home if they aren't paid.

So far despite all the hopeful press, there is no deal and Day 11 may just be another day of business as usual in Washington, but fear and anxiety for everyone else.

US Shutdown Day 10 The Heat is On

The NY Times reports Polls show "Growing Concerns About Shutdown".

Responding to an open-ended question, 33 percent of Americans said the nation’s most important problem was the government, politicians or Congress – up from 16 percent who said so last month, and the highest since Gallup began asking the question in 1939.  The Republican Party netted the worst ratings during the first week of the shutdown – just 28 percent of Americans now find it favorable, down 10 points from September, and the lowest rating for either party since Gallup started measuring party favorability in 1992. The Democratic Party is holding fairly steady, with a 43 percent favorable rating, compared with 47 percent last month. Gallup’s three-day rolling average of President Obama’s job approval has him at 44 percent, about the same as when the shutdown began.

The national media are starting to find evidence of collateral damage.
Veterans' Benefits are at Risk.
Federal fuel assistance shut off to tens of thousands of poor and elderly Massachusetts residents just as the heating season gets underway.
New beer brewery applications halted, affecting the creation of new small businesses.
National Parks shut down.  Lost visitors: 715,000 a day.  Lost spending: $76 million a day.  Lost revenue to the federal government, in the form of entrance fees and rentals: $450,000 a day.
Accident investigations halted.
Retail investors’ confidence in financial markets could fall to its lowest levels in seven years if the shutdown persists, even lower than in the midst of the most devastating financial crisis since the great depression.
Federal Bureau of Prisons workers aren't being paid, but about 36,000 of them still have to work.
Product Safety Recalls shut down.

The list goes on and on, this is destroying our country one day at a time.

US Shutdown Day 9 Ground Control to Major John

Boehner is holding his line, no negotiations, no vote.  The Republicans are still getting bashed worse than Democrats while both are held to be less preferable than Obamacare itself.  Rand Paul is holding forth with the Kool Aid induced notion that even if the debt limit isn't extended, the Government doesn't need to default on debt, just pay the principle and interest and not "lower priority items", presumably wages for federal workers.  Thanks Mr Paul for those pearls of wisdom.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and others have argued that the U.S. could still pay interest on its debt, even if the limit isn’t raised, by using existing revenue. The U.S. would still miss payments on lower priority items, but Paul says that action would avoid a technical default and wouldn’t roil the markets.

Most economists argue that not raising the debt ceiling would create havoc and possibly plunge the U.S. into a deep and unnecessary recession.

Sixty-two percent of respondents in the poll said Republicans in Congress bear “almost all responsibility” for the shutdown. Only 49 percent said the same about President Obama and Democrats in Congress.

It’s the latest in a string of polls to show the public is blaming Republicans for dysfunction in Washington more than Democrats.

Politicians on both sides are seeing their approval ratings plummet. Fifty-three percent said they disapprove of the job Obama is doing, against only 37 who said they approve. Congress’s approval rating sits at a dismal 5 percent.

The AP-GfK poll of 1,227 people was conducted between Oct. 3 and Oct. 7 and has a 3.4-percentage-point margin of error.

US Shutdown Day 8 Race to the Bottom

As the government poker game continues, everyone is keeping an eye on the poll results to see who might hit bottom first.

Republicans in Congress have seen disapproval of their handling of the shutdown negotiations spike from 63 percent at the end of last month to 70 percent in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Monday.
Republican handling of the fiscal showdown is the worst in Washington by far. Only 24 percent said they approve of how GOP lawmakers are handling the budget negotiations, down from 26 in the same poll from Sept. 29.

Democratic handling of the negotiations is also wildly unpopular. Thirty-five percent said they approve of Congressional Democrats, against 61 who disapprove. That’s up from 34 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval in September. While a majority of the public disapproves of the way President Obama has handled the fiscal negotiations, he’s seen his approval rating tick up. In September, only 41 percent said they approved of the job the president was doing, against 50 who disapprove. In the latest poll, 45 percent said they approve, against 51 who disapprove.

Former Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine), a centrist Republican who compiled a long record of working with both sides of the aisle, said most voters will view the Tea Party as responsible for the crisis.
But she said Obama and GOP leaders will also be held to account for not intervening to stave off what she called a “belligerent minority.” 
Snowe said it is not legitimate for Republicans to insist on using the stopgap spending measure or debt limit to make a major policy change, such as defunding or delaying ObamaCare.
“If they want to try it through the normal legislative process, then obviously that’s their right,” she said. “To condition it on the basis of the operations of government or on our full faith and credit as a nation at a time we’re beholden to foreign investors, it’s not even realistic.”

US Shutdown Day 7 No Progress

Nothing but finger pointing going on at the moment, but the Republicans must be the more nervous of the two, they are getting more relative credit for the impasse at the moment.

A default is widely regarded as a much bigger economic disaster than the shutdown of non-essential services. President Barack Obama has demanded that Congress raise the debt ceiling, and avoid default, without conditions.

But House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday there will be no debt limit increase, and no end to the partial shutdown, unless President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats negotiate with House Republicans. 

"There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR," the speaker said.

But Boehner also used his rare Sunday news show appearance to back away from insisting on repeal or delay of the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare," as a condition for ending the shutdown and raising the debt limit.

Instead, Boehner said, he wants spending cuts through entitlement reform.

US Shutdown Day 6 Taking the Day Off

The Legislators are taking a day off Sunday, to make time for TV appearances it seems.  The only progress, if it can be called that, is both sides have reiterated their positions.  The House Democrats tried to get a majority of House Members to sign a Discharge Petition to force a vote on a increasing the debt limit until Nov 15, but one of the Republicans they had hoped to help, Rep Peter King of NY, refused to sign it.  This seems to insure that we are at a stalemate until Oct 16, ten days away.

To recap house action the last week,

House Rejected the Senate response to H.J. Res. 59, a "Clean Funding CR".
H.J. Res. 70 Fund the National Parks and Smithsonian. 
H.J. Res. 71 Fund the City of Washington DC 
H.J. Res. 72  Fund Veterans Benefits 
H.J. Res. 73  Fund National Institutes of Health
H.J. Res. 75  Fund Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children
H.J. Res. 85  FEMA Funding
For the most part, all failed in the Senate, but a bill to pay federal workers for time lost due to the shutdown did pass both houses.  Here is some commentary on the standoff from the New York Magazine.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends. The only thing that limits the debt ceiling’s potency at the moment is the widespread suspicion that Boehner is too old school, too lacking in the Leninist will to power that fires his newer co-partisans, to actually carry out his threat. (He has suggested as much to some colleagues in private.) Boehner himself is thus the one weak link in the House Republicans’ ability to carry out a kind of rolling coup against the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Boehner’s control of his chamber is tenuous enough that, like the ailing monarch of a crumbling regime, it’s impossible to strike an agreement with him in full security it will be carried out.

US Shutdown Day 5 No End in Sight

There are no negotiations planned, no legislation in the works, no end in sight.  The Democrats say:

“Once the government reopens and we get the debt ceiling settled, we’ll be happy to talk to them about anything they want to talk about,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Friday afternoon.

Republicans want more than that and are holding everyone else hostage to their demands, and given their history of not yielding until a crisis is actually reached, the Oct 17 date when the government will default, indicates that we have another 12 days to go.

US Shutdown Day 4 Poliical Theater

Lawmakers spent the day pointing fingers, Boehner was reported to say he would not risk a government default, and at the same time the Republicans (at least a few of them) turned on a dime and abandoned the assualt on Obamacare, leaving that task to the tea party to carry on.

“This needs to be a big bipartisan deal,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a close Boehner ally, said as he emerged from a luncheon meeting in the speaker’s office Thursday. “This is much more about the debt ceiling and a larger budget agreement than it is about Obamacare.”

 “We do need to sit down. I’m happy to talk to them,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “But the government has to open up first.”

With one side proposing a deal and the other insisting on funding with no negotiation, it is still going to be tough to get things running again.  Meanwhile a deranged woman tried to bust into the White House and was killed by police, providing a grim metaphor for the other goings on.

At a noon leadership event, staff had blown up a poster featuring a quote from Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) in which he said the House GOP won’t be “disrespected” by the Senate. Reid and his leadership team took turns mock apologizing to Stutzman for hurting his feelings.

Meanwhile James Clapper tried to do his part in stopping the bickering.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate panel on Wednesday that the government shutdown — which forced the furlough of 70 percent of the CIA and NSA workforce — amounted to a "dreamland" of opportunity for foreign spy agencies.
Clapper, who appeared side by side with National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander, told a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee that failure to fund the government "is not just a Beltway issue. It affects our capability to support the military, diplomacy and our policymakers."
Alexander and Clapper said a core of counterterrorism staff was still working but a prolonged shutdown could damage intelligence efforts.

 Well maybe the upside is that everyone will realize how miniscule the actual danger of a terrorist attack really is, and NSA will be the last one funded, or deemed irrelevant.  Stay tuned.

US Shutdown Day 3 "This time's different"

President Obama had a meeting with Republican and Democrat leaders of the House and Senate which went nowhere.

Mr Boehner left the talks complaining the Democrats "will not negotiate".  Mr Obama said he would not set a precedent where "an extremist wing" of a party holds a government to ransom.  He told CNBC ahead of the meeting that he was "prepared to negotiate on anything" over the budget once Congress passes "a clean piece of legislation that reopens the government".

This theater is just Act 1 of the drama,  the Debt Limit will have to be raised in 2 weeks or the government will default of some payments and that's when the stuff really hits the fan, tarnishing the US credit rating and shutting down services to the most vulnerable in our country.

"This time's different"
So far the markets have yawned, but that will change soon.

Earlier Wednesday, Mr. Obama said that Wall Street should be worried about more serious consequences now that the government is closed for business and the debt limit deadline is just around the corner.
"This time's different," Mr. Obama said in an interview with CNBC that aired Wednesday afternoon. "I think they should be concerned."

The president told CNBC's John Harwood that he told the financial leaders "that it is not unusual for Democrats and Republicans to disagree -- that is the way our founders designed our government." However, he continued, "When you have a situation in which a faction [of Congress] is willing potentially to default on U.S. government obligations, then we are in trouble."

 More drama to come in Day 3 I'm sure.

EPA assualted by usual suspects

The folks beholden to Big Oil are making noise about a new EPA proposal to reduce sulfur content in gasoline, saving billions in future health costs, but of course Republicans screamed and Fox News is leading the charge.  Here is another less strident news story on the subject. 

"The proposal, released Friday morning, aims to reduce sulfur in gasoline by more than 60 percent in 2017. The agency claimed the change would save lives and cut down significantly on respiratory ailments by making the air cleaner. The so-called Tier 3 standards would reduce sulfur in gasoline by more than 60 percent and reduce nitrogen oxides by 80 percent, by expanding across the country a standard already in place in California. For states, the regulation will make it easier to comply with health-based standards for the main ingredient in smog and soot. For automakers, the regulation allows them to sell the same autos in all 50 states." 

The EPA estimated a penny / gallon price increase but the oil lobby has a different tune - "Increases in gas prices disproportionately hurt the nation's most vulnerable individuals and families -- with $4 dollar a gallon gas the norm in many parts of the country, we cannot afford policies that knowingly raises gas prices," Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in a statement. His puppet-masters at the American Petroleum Institute are big lobbyists (spent $7.3 Million in 2012 alone) and they said ""There is a tsunami of federal regulations coming out of the EPA that could put upward pressure on gasoline prices," American Petroleum Institute official Bob Greco said. The industry, as well as some in Congress, had urged a delay in the proposed rule.".  They have been crying wolf for years and Fact Check routinely has to debunk their hype.