Official 2013 Budget/Debt Limit/Obamacare Crisis Thread

Sweet Lou 4 2 · Oct 8, 2013

The "Obama won't negotiate" and isn't willing to compromise will go over well with the Republican constituents, but it will not fly with the general public.

I don't get their strategy. The general public knows what is going on here and they aren't happy with it. You would think that Republicans would not be so cynical as to believe they can disregard the will of the people and will retain power nonetheless.

That or the lobbying groups and money that has opened up in politics is so influential that the party has become truly an instrument of forces that care little about the economy.

Raven · Oct 8, 2013

I hope the GOP enjoys controlling one half of one branch of the Federal government, because it's not going to last much longer. Even 44% of Republicans believe the shut down is a mistake.

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institute...titute/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=1958

B-Bob · Oct 8, 2013

Echo chamber says hello, GOP. Hello, GOP. Hello, GOP.

otis thorpe · Oct 8, 2013

B-Bob said: ↑

Echo chamber says hello, GOP. Hello, GOP. Hello, GOP.
Click to expand...

More like citizen's united chamber

rimrocker · Oct 9, 2013

18 state salmonella outbreak anyone? Don't eat chicken until the government starts back up.

While the government is shut down, with food-safety personnel and disease detectives sent home and forbidden to work, a major foodborne-illness outbreak has begun. This evening, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture announced that “an estimated 278 illnesses … reported in 18 states” have been caused by chicken contaminated with Salmonella Heidelberg and possibly produced by the firm Foster Farms.

“FSIS is unable to link the illnesses to a specific product and a specific production period,” the agency said in an emailed alert. “The outbreak is continuing.”

This is the exact situation that CDC and other about-to-be-furloughed federal personnel warned about last week. As a reminder, a CDC staffer told me at the time:

"I know that we will not be conducting multi-state outbreak investigations. States may continue to find outbreaks, but we won’t be doing the cross-state consultation and laboratory work to link outbreaks that might cross state borders."

That means that the lab work and molecular detection that can link far-apart cases and define the size and seriousness of outbreaks are not happening. At the CDC, which operates the national foodborne-detection services FoodNet and PulseNet, scientists couldn’t work on this if they wanted to; they have been locked out of their offices, lab and emails. (At a conference I attended last week, 10 percent of the speakers did not show up because they were CDC personnel and risked being fired if they traveled even voluntarily.)

In case it seems like this is not a big deal (just 300 illnesses, just some raw chicken): foodborne illness can have lifelong consequences that range from arthritis to kidney trouble to heart disease. And: The number of illnesses that can be identified in any foodborne outbreak are almost always an under-estimate.

In its statement, FSIS said:

Raw products from the facilities in question bear one of the establishment numbers inside a USDA mark of inspection or elsewhere on the package:

“P6137”
“P6137A”
“P7632”

The products were mainly distributed to retail outlets in California, Oregon and Washington State.
Click to expand...

It is the second time this year that the firm at the center of this alert, Foster Farms, has been linked to a nationwide Salmonella outbreak. In July, according to the CDC, 134 people in 13 states were made ill by chicken linked to two Foster Farms slaughterhouses.

Taylor Dobbs, an excellent reporter at Vermont Public Radio, has identified the 18 states where cases have been found: Arizona, Arkansas, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin.

There were many other overnight and early-morning stories on this; I liked JoNel Aleccia‘s at NBC News.

Foster Farms, the company named yesterday by the USDA, has issued a press release. An interesting point, which I hope to follow up on: They refer in the first paragraph to the previous outbreak this summer as having affected their “Pacific Northwest operations earlier this year.” The alert yesterday referred to California operations. If that is not a miscommunication and there are in fact different plants involved, it raises the question of whether there is a common source for the various slaughterhouses/packing plants.

Food-safety attorney Bill Marler reminds me that two of the salmonella strains in the earlier outbreak this summer were antibiotic-resistant. The CDC’s original outbreak report describes them as “resistant to amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, ampicillin, cefoxitin, ceftiofur, and ceftriaxone. The two patients with resistant isolates both were aged <12 months and required hospitalization… Resistance to third-generation cephalosporins (e.g., ceftriaxone) is clinically important because extended-spectrum cephalosporins are commonly used for treatment of severe salmonellosis in children.”

If you’re curious why the CDC’s absence from this outbreak is so critical, this description of how the CDC works in multi-state outbreaks — by organizing the investigation and deploying lab resources that no other agency possesses — is helpful.

Finally, a number of commenters have asked why this outbreak is even an issue, assuming that people are only at risk if they undercook their chicken. That assumes that people are only becoming sick from their own actions and not, for instance, eating the chicken in someone else’s home or in a restaurant. It also fails to account for salmonella’s nimbleness at spreading off raw meat to other niches in professional or home kitchens — a cutting board, a counter, a towel, a sponge, the cook’s hands — and then from there in an undetected manner to other foods. And, finally, it fails to acknowledge that some members of the population — toddlers, elderly, people with immune systems weakened by various medical treatments — are more vulnerable than others. There’s no question people should behave self-protectively. But in our regulatory system, food safety is a shared responsibility, federal, commercial and individual — and it only works when every party in that chain works to the highest standard they can.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/shutdown-salmonella/
Click to expand...

Rockets2K · Oct 9, 2013

It's ok rimrocker....the free market will take care of that....dont need no steenkin goberment checking our food.

I'm sure it was Obama who put the salmonella in the chicken.

B-Bob · Oct 9, 2013

Rockets2K said: ↑

I'm sure it was Obama who put the salmonella in the chicken.
Click to expand...

Standard Kenyan trick. No surprises.

bongman · Oct 9, 2013

B-Bob said: ↑

Standard Kenyan trick. No surprises.
Click to expand...

I agree it's a conspiracy. Obama wanted to make people sick so the ones who are enrolled in the ACA can pronounce that the new health care system works

rimrocker · Oct 9, 2013

Say bye-bye to Antarctic research...

The federal government shutdown is reaching all the way down to the South Pole.

The National Science Foundation announced Tuesday that it is putting its three Antarctic scientific stations in deep freeze just as scientists are starting to arrive for the start of a new research season.

The NSF runs three stations in Antarctica spending just under $400 million a year there. It often takes weeks for some 1200 researchers who spend Antarctic spring and summer there to get to the southern continent by boat or plane.

"This is absurd, just absurd," said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation's largest science organization. "It's a very big logistical enterprise and this could jeopardize the entire research season for hundreds of important projects."

Researchers study astronomy, particle physics, climate change, and biology in the pristine continent, usually starting in October when the weather warms in the southern spring. The largest station is McMurdo but there are also stations at the South Pole and the Antarctic peninsula.

In a terse statement on its website, the NSF announced that "all field and research activities not essential to human safety and preservation of property will be suspended" because the agency runs out of money to operate the stations as of Oct. 14. The agency told its logistics contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., to move to "caretaker status" in which a skeletal crew will remain to protect property and safety.

If funding resumes, officials will try to resume some research. However, some studies cannot be restarted, the NSF said. NSF and Lockheed Martin officials did not respond to phone calls and email requests for comment.

A ship had been scheduled to arrive Wednesday with researchers, including those working on a long-term study that has tracked penguins and other creatures since 1990, said Brown University doctoral student Catherine Luria who was working with colleagues now there. That work, coordinated by Hugh Ducklow of Columbia University, relied on statistics and trend that need to be unbroken.

"If we miss a year, we'll never get it back again," said Ducklow, who has tracked a 95 percent drop in Adelie penguin population over the years. "It's pretty devastating for our project."

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher Sarah Das was in Antarctica the last time the federal government shutdown in 1995 and 1996 and said it didn't stop work then. She said the announcement "saddens and angers me."

Luria, who has spent nine months in Antarctica, said she can't imagine what it will be like for the handful of staff who have to remain: "It sounds truly lonely to me." The federal government shutdown is reaching all the way down to the South Pole.

The National Science Foundation announced Tuesday that it is putting its three Antarctic scientific stations in deep freeze just as scientists are starting to arrive for the start of a new research season.

The NSF runs three stations in Antarctica spending just under $400 million a year there. It often takes weeks for some 1200 researchers who spend Antarctic spring and summer there to get to the southern continent by boat or plane.

"This is absurd, just absurd," said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation's largest science organization. "It's a very big logistical enterprise and this could jeopardize the entire research season for hundreds of important projects."

Researchers study astronomy, particle physics, climate change, and biology in the pristine continent, usually starting in October when the weather warms in the southern spring. The largest station is McMurdo but there are also stations at the South Pole and the Antarctic peninsula.

In a terse statement on its website, the NSF announced that "all field and research activities not essential to human safety and preservation of property will be suspended" because the agency runs out of money to operate the stations as of Oct. 14. The agency told its logistics contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., to move to "caretaker status" in which a skeletal crew will remain to protect property and safety.

If funding resumes, officials will try to resume some research. However, some studies cannot be restarted, the NSF said. NSF and Lockheed Martin officials did not respond to phone calls and email requests for comment.

A ship had been scheduled to arrive Wednesday with researchers, including those working on a long-term study that has tracked penguins and other creatures since 1990, said Brown University doctoral student Catherine Luria who was working with colleagues now there. That work, coordinated by Hugh Ducklow of Columbia University, relied on statistics and trend that need to be unbroken.

"If we miss a year, we'll never get it back again," said Ducklow, who has tracked a 95 percent drop in Adelie penguin population over the years. "It's pretty devastating for our project."

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher Sarah Das was in Antarctica the last time the federal government shutdown in 1995 and 1996 and said it didn't stop work then. She said the announcement "saddens and angers me."

Luria, who has spent nine months in Antarctica, said she can't imagine what it will be like for the handful of staff who have to remain: "It sounds truly lonely to me."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/...-ant_n_4066252.html?utm_hp_ref=green&ir=Green
Click to expand...

rimrocker · Oct 9, 2013

Senator Rand Freud:

"We've got plenty of money to keep paying our interest. The president should cut it out, quit trying to scare the markets, and scare investors, and come forward, if he's a leader, and say "We will not default, we have never defaulted. America is proud compan— country, we will not default."

larsv8 · Oct 9, 2013

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/opini...acare-fantasy/index.html?sr=sharebar_facebook

Conservatives in a nutshell.

(CNN) -- Just one week ago Republicans were united, railing against the man-made evil known as Obamacare. They hated it so much, they said, they would tie the funding of the government to the defunding of the dread program. Sure, they had tried more than 40 times to get rid of the plan before, but they had never done this: Attach the plan to kill it to a must-pass piece of legislation.

It was an idea born of necessity, some now tell me. Republicans in the House had been hit over the head in their districts by ads run by conservative political action committees (paging Sen. Ted Cruz, who appeared in some). The rap against them: They had not worked hard enough to slay the evil dragon. The charge, having been plastered all over TV, was leveled against them at town hall meetings over the summer.

They came back to Washington very angry at Cruz and Company. And in survival mode.

So the plan to defund Obamacare -- and tie it to a measure to fund the government -- was hatched.

Never mind that House Speaker John Boehner was already on the record saying he didn't want to do that. He had no choice but to capitulate: If he didn't adopt the strategy, he would face a revolt. Who wants that when you're just back from summer vacation?

So defunding Obamacare became the new war cry. It passed the House, went to the Senate, where Cruz then promptly told reporters it would die. At that moment, Cruz morphed from the Pied Piper of House Republicans into the man on the Most Wanted sign. He had left them out on a limb. "He's a demagogue," one senior House Republican told me, then going on to detail how Cruz was shooting "his own team from behind" and other choice descriptions.

So Cruz had no choice but to mount his own faux-filibuster, which went nowhere. The Senate passed a clean bill to fund the government, and the rest is history.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the national stage: The president decided not to cave, and Republicans treated this as if it were shocking that he would not gut his single biggest legislative achievement.

But something else happened, too. The health care exchanges -- the heart of Obamacare -- came online, and it was a mess. The White House that had been lauded for its technical acumen suddenly looked like a bunch of Luddites. The system crashed, bobbed and frustrated. The White House refused to release reliable numbers so the public's level of participation could be gauged.
It landed with one big thud, which would have been a big problem for the administration, except for this: Nobody was talking about it, because the country was preoccupied with the shutdown.

So Republicans had accomplished the seemingly impossible: They trampled their own message on Obamacare. They finally had a great hook. But what were they doing instead? Scrambling to find ways to re-fund parts of the government to curb public outrage.

Oh, and by the way, we could wind up paying all of those furloughed workers. Sure, this isn't their fault. But look at it this way: A government drowning in red ink is paying people not to work.

All of which brings us up to date in this dysfunctional story. So Obamacare had a crashing start, the government is shut down, and the deadline to raise the debt ceiling is a week away. And the debt ceiling, as you know by now, is the bigger problem: no Social Security checks, no Medicare, high interest rates, and on and on. Everyone -- save for some debt ceiling deniers -- believes it can't happen. So what to do?

If you look closely here, you will see that something very profound has changed: Republicans seem to have pressed the delete key on talk of defunding Obamacare. They can't get it done. Their poll numbers are tanking. They're panicking. And some cooler heads I have spoken with are privately making the same point: Wasn't it always unfair to promise people something the Republicans knew they could never deliver (defunding Obamacare)?
So Boehner, no fool, carefully turned the page on all of this, moving to the terra firma he always wanted to be on in the first place: deficit reduction. Tie a package of spending cuts to raising the debt ceiling, he says. That's what has always been done. We are being reasonable about this.

No, says the president. You're not being reasonable. You tried to kill my health reform bill, so no negotiation until you fund the government and raise the debt ceiling without anything attached.

In the end, they will probably find a short-term way to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling and continue to argue over spending and taxes. But the House GOP scheme, abetted by Cruz and outside conservatives, will become a case for the civics classes. A study of the newly perverse politics of our time, and how a government was brought to its knees over a fight only a few wanted to wage -- that everyone secretly knew could never be won.
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mc mark · Oct 9, 2013

So happy to see the President final showing some backbone and standing up to the bullies in the republican caucus.

:grin:

CometsWin · Oct 9, 2013

Even the Taliban are clowning Republicans. bigtexxx falls in faint

Taliban mock US over government shutdown
http://news.yahoo.com/taliban-mock-us-over-government-shutdown-064323672.html

Kabul (AFP) - Taliban militants fighting US troops in Afghanistan taunted Washington over the government shutdown on Wednesday, accusing US politicians of "sucking the blood of their own people".

The Islamist militants issued a statement describing how US institutions were "paralysed", the Statue of Liberty was closed and a fall in tourist numbers had hit shops, restaurants and hotels in the capital.

"The American people should realise that their politicians play with their destinies as well as the destinies of other oppressed nations for the sake of their personal vested interests," the Taliban said.

The insurgents accused "selfish and empty-minded American leaders" of taking US citizens' money "earned with great difficulty" and then "lavishly spending the same money in shedding the blood of the innocent and oppressed people".

"Instead of sucking the blood of their own people... this money should be utilised for the sake of peace," they added.

The US embassy in Kabul has said that it expects "to function normally in the short term" due to the shutdown, though its Twitter feed would not be regularly updated.

Embassy press staff were not immediately available to comment on the rebels' statement.

The Taliban, who were ousted from power in a US-backed offensive in 2001, often use their website to issue colourful verbal attacks on Washington and the Kabul government.

About 57,000 US troops are deployed in Afghanistan, with most of them set to pull out by the end of the next year.

The US shutdown has seen hundreds of thousands of workers sent home without pay after Congress failed to pass a budget for the 2014 fiscal year that began October 1.

eddiewinslow · Oct 9, 2013

republicans just have brains to not live for the moment but worry about the debt our unborn grandchildren would have to pay. Dems only worry about keeping the poor happy with unsustainable programs today. Just like poor people, dems have no vision for the future, only stopgaps to keep the present failure going on.

mc mark · Oct 9, 2013

WOW!!!

Republicans are hated more now than even when they impeached Clinton.

BigBenito · Oct 9, 2013

Incoming: most of the republicans here are actually "independents" now, so the poll doesn't really matter to them.

mc mark · Oct 9, 2013

End the shutdown

Republicans shift focus away from Obamacare toward fiscal issues

In a shift some Republicans hope will strengthen their hand in the fight over the U.S. debt limit, some of the party's leaders in the House of Representatives are playing down demands to weaken "Obamacare" and focusing instead on calls to rein in deficits.

Sweet Lou 4 2 · Oct 9, 2013

eddiewinslow said: ↑

republicans just have brains to not live for the moment but worry about the debt our unborn grandchildren would have to pay. Dems only worry about keeping the poor happy with unsustainable programs today. Just like poor people, dems have no vision for the future, only stopgaps to keep the present failure going on.
Click to expand...

I find you very entertaining.

bobmarley · Oct 9, 2013

mc mark said: ↑

End the shutdown

Republicans shift focus away from Obamacare toward fiscal issues

In a shift some Republicans hope will strengthen their hand in the fight over the U.S. debt limit, some of the party's leaders in the House of Representatives are playing down demands to weaken "Obamacare" and focusing instead on calls to rein in deficits.
Click to expand...

SOME!

bigtexxx · Oct 9, 2013

Democratic infighting! A democrat shouting down Obama and talking over him. That's what happens to a weak leader. Do you think Putin gets talked over? snort

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...n-confronts-obama-on-d-c-budget-bill/?print=1

Eleanor Holmes Norton confronts Obama on D.C. budget bill
By Ed O'Keefe, Updated: October 9, 2013

Updated 9:30 p.m.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) had what some colleagues called "a heated exchange" and what she described as "a conversation" with President Obama during a White House meeting Wednesday afternoon regarding the District's budget constraints as a result of the partial government shutdown.

Norton attended the meeting in the White House East Room with nearly 200 House Democrats and was one of a handful given the opportunity to ask the president a question. When she was called upon, Norton pressed Obama to support a House-passed bill that would permit the District to use its locally raised tax funds to maintain operations until Dec. 15.

Democrats, including Obama, have held fast in opposition to such piecemeal funding bills, saying Republicans must come to a deal to fund the entire government, not just favored segments.

Making her point, Norton spoke over the president and refused to yield the microphone, according to a lawmaker who attended the event.

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