Live streaming video by Ustream
UPDATE: NBC News says the shooter was a woman with a child in the car.
Someone tried to ram White House gate, a Capitol police officer was shot. Everything else seems to be rumor.
Category: Politics As Usual
Boehner to GOP: Grand Bargain in the works
House Republicans tell me Speaker John Boehner wants to craft a “grand bargain” on fiscal issues as part of the debt-limit deliberations, and during a series of meetings on Wednesday, he urged colleagues to stick with him.
The revelation came quietly. Boehner called groups of members to his Capitol office all day, taking their temperature on the shutdown and the debt limit. It became clear, members say, that Boehner’s chief goal is conference unity as the debt limit nears, and he’s looking at potentially blending a government-spending deal and debt-limit agreement into a larger budget package.
“It’s the return of the grand bargain,” says one House Republican, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “There weren’t a lot of specifics discussed, and the meetings were mostly about just checking in. But he’s looking hard at the debt limit as a place where we can do something big.”
Beyond Boehner’s office, the leadership is sending out a similar message through its emissaries. The House GOP’s most influental fiscal strategists, Dave Camp and Paul Ryan, are privately reassuring nervous members that the shutdown may be painful in the short term, but a budget deal is in the works — and they should be enthused about what they’re cooking up.
“Ryan is selling this to everybody; he’s getting back to his sweet spot,” says a second House Republican who’s close with the Wisconsin congressman. “He and Camp are going to be Boehner’s guys. That’s why Boehner put them on the CR conference committee; he knows these guys are going to be his point men as this whole thing plays out.”
And during Wednesday huddles, Ryan and Camp, along with members who met with Boehner, talked openly about what kind of concessions they could potentially win from Democrats on the debt limit, should Republicans hang together. Per sources, entitlement reform, an elimination of the medical-device tax, and delays to parts of Obamacare are all on the table. Instead of fretting about the shutdown and getting mired in the press frenzy, the leadership and Ryan is working to help members accept a shutdown that may linger for weeks, but ultimately win policy reforms.
Ryan and his allies believe Democrats want a delay of aspects of sequestration and, of course, a clean CR and debt-limit extension. So, instead of making separate deals on each front, Ryan and now Boehner are looking at combining the different issues into a single pact.
Oh look, highly radioactive water from fracking!
See, this is why I love Gov. Corbett! Isn’t this great news?
In the state of Pennsylvania, home to the lucrative Marcellus Shale formation, 74 facilities treat wastewater from the process of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. “fracking”) for natural gas and release it into streams. There’s no national set of standards that guides this treatment process—the EPA notes that the Clean Water Act’s guidelines were developed before fracking even existed, and that many of the processing plants “are not properly equipped to treat this type of wastewater”—and scientists have conducted relatively little assessment of the wastewater to ensure it’s safe after being treated.
Recently, a group of Duke University scientists decided to do some testing. They contacted the owners of one treatment plant, the Josephine Brine Treatment Facility on Blacklick Creek in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, but, “when we tried to work with them, it was very difficult getting ahold of the right person,” says Avner Vengosh, an Earth scientist from Duke. “Eventually, we just went and tested water right from a public area downstream.”
Their analyses, made on water samples collected repeatedly over the course of two years, were even more concerning than we’d feared. As published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, they found high concentrations of of the element radium, a highly radioactive substance. The concentrations were roughly 200 times higher than background levels. In addition, amounts of chloride and bromide in the water were two to ten times greater than normal.
“Even if, today, you completely stopped disposal of the wastewater,” Vengosh says, there’s enough contamination built up that”you’d still end up with a place that the U.S. would consider a radioactive waste site.”
They’ve already won
Charlie Pierce on the shutdown:
Let’s just spitball a bit here. Right now, even if their campaign of public vandalism ended at this very moment, the Republicans would still have three-quarters of a loaf because the status quo ante would be a federal budget at (or beneath) the spending levels mandated by The Sequester. Given that, what possible reason do the Republicans — or, at least, those Republicans who are currently driving the strategy now — have not to keep the government shut down not only through the upcoming debt ceiling fight, but for most of the rest of Barack Obama’s term? (Chris Christie might not be president? Too bad.) There is no serious effort within the party’s dwindling Sane People’s Caucus to rein these people in — Peter King? Please. — and there’s no power outside the party structure that’s stronger than the combination of safe districts and independent money that has created the monkeyhouse in the first place. Their concern for the general national interest isn’t worthy of discussion. They are doing what they want to do. They are getting what they want.
“You know, I think you may see a partial shutdown for several days. But [Fox and Friend co-host] Steve [Doocy], people are probably going to realize they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed,” she said, prompting host Brian Kilmeade to add, “it’s like the sequester all over.”
This is the unspoken subtext of what the vandalism is all about. This is the real motivation behind all the tricornered hats and the incantations about liberty and all the conjuring words that have summoned up the latest crisis in our democracy. Corporate money is the power behind all of it, and that corporate money has but one goal — the creation of a largely subjugated population and a workforce grateful for whatever scraps fall from the table. To accomplish this, the corporate money not only had to disable the institutions of self-government that are the people’s only real protection, it had to do so in such a way that the people expect less and less of the government and, therefore, less and less of each other, acting in the interest of the political commonwealth. (The dismantling of organized labor is a sideshow to the main event in that the goal there was to cripple organized labor’s political power within the political institutions so that there would be no countervailing force that could be brought to bear against the destruction of its power in the workplace.) For all the endless bloviation about the dead-hand of government, what the vandals in Washington are shooting for right now is a subject population whose tattered freedoms depend on the whimsical ethics of the American corporate class. This is the really deep game being played here, and they’re more than halfway to winning it.
As Digby points out, the Democrats have already offered the draconian Ryan budget minus 10 percent. Unthinkable, and yet, there it is. They’ve sold the political and chattering classes on the idea that we’re not entitled to much, and even that at the whims of the 1%.
Some federal employees are more equal than others
Yesterday, House Republicans came up with a novel idea to fund only the parts of the government that people would notice – things like the Veterans Administration and national parks – in an attempt to point the latest in a series of fingers at the opposition for their cruelty in ignoring important priorities. Democrats thundered back that such piecemeal efforts are “not serious” and “no way to fund a government.”
But that is exactly how one part of the government was funded just before the September 30 deadline. Without fanfare on Monday night, President Obama signed the “Pay Our Military Act,” ensuring paychecks throughout the government shutdown for all members of the armed forces, including active-duty reserve members, along with civilian personnel and contractors who happen to “provide support” to armed forces operations.
How can I put this delicately? This is wrong.
It’s a slap in the face to 800,000 federal workers, who do not deserve unfair treatment because their uniform is a different color, and their service to the country in a different form, than members of the military. The words of Senator Ted Cruz – “the soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines who risk their lives for this nation should not have their paychecks held hostage to any government shutdown in Washington” – apply to every member of the federal government, and singling out service members for hero worship is as pernicious for our foreign policy as it is for our budget debate.
To pre-empt the inevitable “why do you hate our troops” criticisms, the question is not whether men and women dodging bullets overseas or defending America’s shores and skies deserve to have to work without pay for as long as Congress denies a government funding resolution. The question is whether everyone else who serves the public does.
Good, I guess
Passing these bills would decrease Democratic leverage:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama would veto any “piecemeal” legislation that would restore funding only to certain parts of the government like national parks, veterans programs and the District of Columbia rather than a broad federal spending bill, the White House said on Tuesday.
“These piecemeal efforts are not serious, and they are no way to run a government,” spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement, noting that the White House wants the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass a bill that would continue funding the federal government without any unrelated policy measures attached.
“The president and the Senate have been clear that they won’t accept this kind of game-playing, and if these bills were to come to the president’s desk, he would veto them,” she said.
Notice anything?
I’ve really been too depressed to write about the shutdown in much detail, because the Democrats have already sold us out, just as I’ve predicted for months. Via Digby:
Last night Steny Hoyer shouted this on floor during one of the debates: “This is not a negotiation — we’re taking their number, and we would hope that they could also take their number so we can keep the government open.”
You see? The Democrats already folded. Sequestration is now the ongoing law of the land and Paul Ryan’s budget wet dream is considered the “clean” continuing resolution. Huzzah.
And yet, they were not satisfied. (You’ve heard the old saw “give ’em and inch and they’ll take a mile,” right?) Here’s one view of the “Willimsburg Accord” from the more radical (yes, more radical even than Heritage Action) Madison Society from a few months back:
Back in January, a number of conservatives rendered themselves irrelevant in the fight for liberty by signing onto an incomprehensible agreement with leadership, known on Capitol Hill as the ‘Williamsburg Accord’ (yes, everything in Washington has to have a silly name). That agreement was aptly hatched at the GOP Retreat in Williamsburg. They agreed to suspend the debt ceiling law for 4 months and vote for a CR that funds Obamacare on condition that leadership keep the sequester and pass a 10-year balanced budget. The idea was to pass an amazing budget blueprint for everyone to support, and fight for it in return for lifting the new debt ceiling in May or June.
Let’s ignore the fact that the sequester was already a fait accompli, as Republicans would have been forced to succumb to tax increases in order to overturn it. Let’s ignore the fact that leadership forced the Democrat Violence Against Women Act down their throats with Democrat support. Let’s ignore the fact that there was nothing new in this year’s Ryan budget to improve upon last year’s budget other than $3.3 trillion in new tax revenue.
Let’s look ahead to the future. We’ve been playing this game for two years. If Boehner is going to buy into the notion that the debt ceiling is off limits, why in the world would the Democrats feel the need to agree to any aspect of the Ryan budget, much less defunding Obamacare? How could Boehner make this comment while he is concurrently telling his conference that he will demand dollar-for-dollar cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling – whatever that means?
Hence, the conservatives who signed onto this deal were punked – unless they also buy into leadership’s claim about default. If Republicans were really serious about dealing with this issue, they would pass Tom McClintock’s Full Faith and Credit Act (H.R. 807), which prioritizes payments for interest on debt. All of those conservatives who agreed to the Williamsburg Accord are co-sponsors of this bill? Why don’t they force leadership to vote on their bill ahead of the May 18 debt ceiling deadline?
It’s clear now that the vote to suspend the debt ceiling for 4 months had nothing to do with their desire to push for a balanced budget, rather it was an expression of fear – the same expression they are evincing to Obama ahead of the new debt ceiling deadline.
We are looking for new candidates who will not be possessed by this incorrigible fear during a time that calls for intrepid courage on the part of conservatives. I’ve already found several promising candidates, and will not rest until we find an army of new savvy contenders who plan to play by a different set of rules. The way we approach elections is not working. The movement is not doing enough to change the face of the Republican Party. And by voting to suspend the debt limit and funding for Obamacare in the CR, conservatives are making it harder for us to run against the moderates, obviating our ability to send them reinforcements. As we’ve explained this week with regards to taking down the rule on bad bills, we have failed to even match the passion and commitment of the ’94-era Republicans.
This must change.
Over the next few weeks, at the Madison Project, we will be updating our index scores for the 112th Congress and our hall of shame, which is comprised of liberal members in conservative districts. Sadly, it’s a long list. You can email me with suggestions of new candidates at Daniel@madisonproject.com. We can either complain or we can take action.
That is the alternate universe in which these grassroots/teaparty/lunatics dwell.And yet this fact is all too real: they’ve got the Ryan budget already. And they’ve already moved on to the debt ceiling, which all the Fox freaks were going on about last night. Krauthammer suggested they could get Obamacare defunded if they are willing to hold out. They all believe the consequences of a default are phony concerns made up to force them to back down and they are having none of it. That threat to back primary challenges in those gerrymandered districts against those who deviate from this dangerous delusion is quite real (or these members of congress believe it is, anyway.) So, they are going to play this all the way out.
But why wouldn’t they? With the exception of some chump change from millionaires in the last round, the Democrats have been losing on policy every step of the way since these budget battles began, even as they seem to be winning the politics. What could be more telling than the fact that the numbers in Paul Ryan’s budget are now considered the starting point in any new negotiations to end the shutdown.
Who’s being played here?
Well, us. Obviously!
Superman to the rescue
http://youtu.be/V1DiXE9Rs_k
Yep, that’s it. By sheer force of character and personality, America will be saved! Bipartisan superhero Gov. Chris Christie explains how he would have stopped the government shutdown by throwing himself in front of the doorway and shooting laser beams from his angry eyes:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Monday blamed President Barack Obama for “not bringing people together” during the government shutdown debate and said the president would be ultimately responsible for a funding stoppage.
“My approach would be, as the executive, is to call in the leaders of the Congress, the legislature, whatever you’re dealing with, and say, ‘We’re not leaving this room until we fix this problem, because I’m the boss, I’m in charge,” Christie said.
“When you’re the executive, if you’re waiting for leadership from the legislative branch of government, whether you’re the governor, or whether you’re the president or you’re mayor, you are going to be waiting forever, forever because they’re not built to lead and take risk.”
This, from the man who was afraid to sign the same-sex marriage bill because he didn’t want to upset the Taliban extremists he needs to win the Republican primary!
Continue reading “Superman to the rescue”
‘Saving’ our schools
Remember, money “invested” by hedge funders in education “reform” almost doubles its value in tax credits over ten years! So when they start talking about how much they care about the kids, keep that in mind:
Remember how some of us were saying that as soon as the “shock doctrine” of manufactured budget crises put the fork in any hope of reviving Philadelphia’s public schools in any way, that the vulture capitalists would be diving in to pick over the carcass?
Don’t bother, they’re here. In fact, they’re everywhere, they’re everywhere! When we weren’t looking, someone apparently decreed that Monday, Sept. 30, 2013, shall be hereby known as Crush A Teacher Day in the city of Philadelphia.
It only takes $50,000 to participate!
On Monday, wealthy donors interested in the future of public education will gather for a two-day conference at the Union League: “All of the Above: How Donors can Expand a City’s Great Schools.”
Attendance is restricted to those who make $50,000 in charitable donations per year. One might hope, given the apocalyptic state of Philly’s resource-starved public schools, that they are here to plot a campaign to reverse deep state budget cuts — or, at the very least, to cut a check to rehire some laid-off school counselors.
Instead, they will meet with self-described school-reform activists who want to move yet more students out of the same “government schools” they have defunded and into privately-managed charters — and even straight-up private schools. The entirely broke School District of Philadelphia estimates that each student who attends a charter costs it an additional $7,000. That existential fiscal challenge posed by charter expansion will not, it seems, be on the agenda. Nothing about the sector’s rampant corruption and lack of state or local oversight either.
The cast of characters includes some of the usual suspects: Jeremy Nowak, who caught a fever during his brief tenure as head of the William Penn Foundation, and the only way he can scratch it is with more cowbell corporate education reform, and something that calls itself Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), that is basically funded these days by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.
Critical thinking skills
I was saying to a friend this weekend that many people simply can’t understand really complex situations, so they’re rather hear the wrong (but easy to understand) explanation than the accurate one. Because the accurate one makes them feel stupid.
And then last night, another friend said that a lot of human brains didn’t evolve to handle critical thinking skills as the world got more complex.
Which current events would seem to confirm.