According Matty Yglesias a lot of people he met blamed the websites failure on the shutdown, which isn't true but makes sense in a weird sort of way. The GOP shutdown the government on pretty much the exact day the website failed to launch claiming that the program the website represents was the reason they were shutting the government down. I can see how a reasonable person, paying a normal amount of attention to politics, would reach that conclusion.

There are very few times the phrase 'epic fail' is actually correct. Especially in politics. The Republican's shutdown is one of them. And not just doing it, but every single part of it.

1) Scheduling it right as the ACA exchanges opened, completely drowning out the failure of them to work. Wow, really? Just...really?
2) Scheduling it two weeks before the debt ceiling and threatening that, so that all the corporate interests woke up and said 'Uh, no.' and started pushing back.
3) Running about talking about national monuments being closed, while head start programs closed and government workers sat at home without a paycheck. (This happened to me three times: 'And Obama's shutting down the monuments out of spite!' 'Right, only unimportant things should be shut down, like military contractor sitting at home and police officers working without pay! How dare Obama take away the national monuments!'. Republicans always became _very_ quiet after that.)
4) Had literally no plan at all. I mean, no plan at all. And no escape plan if their first...uh...'plan' failed?

They tried for something that any rational person could have told them couldn't be obtained, and they did it such a way to drown out the actual problems in the thing they would attacking, and they did it in such a destructive way that even their own party hated it, and they had no idea what to do when the impossible thing they wanted did not happen.

'Epic fail' doesn't even start to cover it. It is quite possibly the dumbest conceivable thing they could have done.

...unless you're Ted Cruz or some other Tea Party Republican, of course, in which case it was a great fundraising opportunity.

They're up against their deadlines though for penalties (which they've waived thru March, which is logical, but not legal, as there is no Constitutional authority for the president to flat-out decline to enforce laws.)

Firstly, you're confused. No one needed to waive anything till March. To avoid paying penalties under the law, you must have health insurance 9 months of the year, which means if you bought insurance by the last day of March, you were fine. And, 'coincidentally', the last day of open enrollment in the exchanges is, indeed, the last day of March. (The intent is also that most non-exchange plans will also eventually rotate their open enrollment periods around to be the start of the year, but that's not required by law.)

That was how the law worked to start with.

Secondly, Obama hasn't done anything at all. Some Congressional Democrats have asked him to extend open enrollment, but he hasn't. And, yes, he has that power under the law. (I don't know if he has the power to reduce the 'nine months' rule for penalties, but he doesn't need to do that..penalties are proportional to time. So if someone is a week or so late in getting insurance, their penalty is rather small.)

It's rather doubtful he will extend it. That would make insurance companies nervous, and they might end up hiking their rates. (If it was up to them, open enrollment would be a day, and you'd have to sign up a year in advance. They _really_ worry about people signing up the second they get sick.)

Hey, moron, reread my post.

As I pointed out, almost everything the government pays out is 'debt' in one form or another, as in, things it owes people by law. You managed to complete ignore the entire fucking post, and have started yammering about the 14th amendment yet.

The 14th amendment requires that we pay all debt. (Well, not really, but, as I said, I won't argue that.) I will, again, point out as part of the debt we have to pay it gives examples of pensions and bounties. It does not say we have to repay 'bonds', it says we have to repay 'debts'. All of them. Bonds, pensions, bounties, back pay, social security, medicare owed to doctors, all debts.

You, while yammering that we have to repay all debts, have managed to completely fucking ignore is that almost everything is debt.

All those things are, equally, debt, and they have to be paid on time. By law. (And, you assert, by the constitution, to which I say 'Whatever.')

We cannot decide not to pay social security debts because we have bond repayment debts coming up tomorrow. (In fact, under your logic, it would be unconstitutional to try to do that.)

The laws about automatic spending can not be constitutional if the congress does not appropriate funding for it. Otherwise during a budget impass, none of the government would shut down at all.

This is a large part of why, under the budget shutdown, only 13% of the spending stopped, you idiot. Thank you for pretty much proving my point.

You seem to think the government is somehow deciding to spend money in real time, that it pays money and gets things in return.

Uh, no. Like all businesses, it hires people and they work for free for two week (Or however long) and then they get paid. Those people are owed their wages. Those wages are debts the government owes them.

Likewise, the government does not go out and buy bridges. It enters a contract with a company to build a bridge, and then when the bridge is done, the government owes that money.

(I won't argue social security in this post, because that is much more complicated, but people really are owed social security benefits under the law. But even without social security, we're still screwed.)

If we stop raising the debt ceiling, we still owe all that money, and, as you keep insisting, government debts shall not be questioned.

You can yammer about 'Not creating debt' all you want, but the fact is the government has billions and billions of outstanding debt that isn't bonds, right now, already existing, and the government must pay them, which means at some point, many debts payment are going to be missed, including bond repayment.

This is even accepting the dubious preposition it is legal for the president to 'choose' not to make new debt in violation of the laws saying he has to. The constitution says all debts are valid, but it does not logically follow from that 'And thus if the president thinks the government won't pay debts when they come up, he has the power to ignore current law and not create them.'! There's nothing in that amendment about the government not having the power to create debt, or the president to override the creation of debt.

But even in that rather surreal world which gives the president nearly unlimited power, the US would slide over a frozen debt ceiling almost immediately due to fucking payroll, even if the president instantly laid everyone off in violation of the law. (Because, duh, even laid off people get paid for the time they already put in.)

If the debt limit wasn'T increased, it would be a duty of the president to chose which spending continued within the bounds of the capabilities of what is availible.

No, it's not. It's the duty of the president to do what the laws and constitution say.

In the actual world, if Congress has allocated $40 million for a library in Dover, the president (That is, the executive branch, presumably not him personally.) is required by law to actually hire people to build it, even if we're near the debt limit. And when it is built, the executive is required by law (And, you assert, by the constitution) to pay the debt incurred by that. Even if the very next day there are bonds maturing that must be paid.

Not raising the debt ceiling creates some conflicting laws, but a) none of those conflict are in 'creating debt', he has to continue to do that exactly as much as the law requires, and b) if the president is able to follow any of them (For example, if $40 million in revenues) have just come in, he's required to actually follow the fucking law and spend the money. Regardless of whether or not it would have been better to save the money for tomorrow.

And just as relevantly, no one appears to be selling it. The entire premise of a snuff film is that there is a market for watching people get murdered, so someone kidnaps a person, kills them, and records it, and sells the film. That is not what happened here, and is a hard-to-believe premise.

We do know such a market could exist, as such a market sorta exists with child porn. In fact, snuff films are the fictional analogies of child porn, when you think about it.

But with snuff films, it is very hard to tell a simulation from the real thing, so there is really no point in making the real thing. No one's going to pay a premium for a 'real' snuff film, because they have no ability to prove it's a real one. (Which really does imply that it is best not to try to ban fake child porn, I guess?)

You know, sometimes after I make a post, I can psychically predict sumdumass's response, and this time I predict, drumroll please, that he will attempt to argue that the 14th's amendment is relevant here, despite the fact I pointed out it doesn't matter.

So, I will preemptively respond by conceding that point, for the purpose of this argument. The 14th amendment does apply here.

So now sumdumass will have to address my actual point, in that almost all government spending is to repay debts, so anyone who thinks the 14th somehow means 'bondholders get paid first' is an idiot. There's nothing special about their debt vs. everyone else's under the constitution or the law. It doesn't say 'US bonds shall not be questioned'. It says the debt can't.

In fact, let's look at the actual wording of that part of the 14th:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

...holy fuck, look at that. 'including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion,'

And before you try to argue that some specific thing isn't listed there, as I also psychically(1) predict you will do, please notice that 'bonds' are not in that list either. The list is not inclusive. I was just pointing out the amendment lists two specific examples of public debts, and neither of them is bonds...one is a retirement system, and one is wages!

1) It is very easy to psychically predict sumdumass's responses to things. He will pick a completely irrelevant thing said and argue as if it's important. Notice I didn't say an incorrect irrelevant thing...if sumdumass were to start accurately nitpicking responses, people would go 'By gum, you're right!' No, sumdumass will find something that is, indeed, completely correct, but completely irrelevant to the point, and argue about that, like he just did with the 14th amendment. That way other people will argue back over the pointless thing, and the original point will completely lost.

Don't fall for it. Ask yourself 'If sumdumass was right, would my point still stand? Yes, I know he's wrong, but if weren't, would my actual point be correct anyway?' If the answer is 'Yes', then just concede his idiotic position and repeat your actual point as if he's right. He'll keep trying to argue the point and come across as a complete idiot.

(For example, see his followup post, where he will try to argue somehow that 'public debt' only means bonds, despite the fact the 14th amendment just explained that 'bounties' and 'pensions' count as it!)

I know it is a problem for most of you on the left when the constitution gets in your way, but constitutionally, he is obligated to honor the debts before any spending by law. that means even if congress passed a law saying all money appropriated either by entitlement law or whatever must be spent on anything other then the debt, it would be unconstitutional to do so.

Hey, look, it's the complete dumbass who has no reading comprehension but constantly pops up to defend whatever fucking stupid thing the right believes.

You just repeated exactly what I said...that the president must pay any currently outstanding debt. I just additionally pointed out that if there's an outstanding debt, he has to pay it, period, he can't save the money for a more important debt that's going to happen later.

And, despite what is going on in your fevered imagination, he is, in fact, required by law to pay social security, for example. If the president could just decide not to pay social security, I have a feeling some Republican president would have actually tried that at some point, don't you?

You did notice I used the word 'obligations' in my post, right? What the hell do you think that means? The government owes that money to people on social security. The government owes defense contractors. The government owes its employees their wages. Those are debts. They must be paid, on the schedule laid out in law. (Only if the executive has money, presumably.)

You, along with the right, have decided that the only 'debts' are 'issued bonds'. Or, rather, you idiots have spent absolutely no time thinking about this.

If someone comes and works on your house for an agreed on amount, and you haven't paid them yet, you are in debt to them. Um, duh. If you are a company, and pay employees your wages on Friday, and it's Thursday, the wages you owe for the week so far are debts and will be reflected as such on your balance sheet. Um, double-duh.

Bonds, are, rather obviously, just one of the many ways to be in debt...if they were the only way, uh, no human being would be personally in debt, because human beings usually don't issue bonds. We should try that with banks. 'No, I don't owe you any money. To owe money is to be in debt, and according to the Republicans the only sort of debt that exists is bonds. I have never issued you or anyone else any bonds, thus I am not in debt.'(1)

Now, you say we must pay debts because of the 14th amendment, and I don't think the 14th is that relevant, and assert that's just basic law, but whatever, that's rather moot. The point is, 95% of money that exits the Federal government is to pay obligations, aka debts, created by the law. (And the other 5% is to pay obligations created by entities under the executive's control that he could stop, but are still obligations once created...but he could stop making more obligations.)

The President is required, by law (And possibly by the constitution, whatever.), to pay all those debts, not to just the ones to bondholders.

1) Hilariously, this logic makes the entire debt ceiling rather pointless, because if 'bonds' are the only 'debt', the president could just get loans some other way, like via credit cards and other unsecured bank loans. Heh. Actually, money owed to the social security trust isn't 'real' bonds (We call them bonds, but they are not, really.), so we're already a good deal under the debt ceiling if you only count 'bonds'.

And that post should not be read to imply that no government spending is under control of the executive. Grants, for example, could stop being issued, and certain projects where the executive has discretion could be delayed.

However, social security couldn't possibly be stopped by the executive, and neither could 90% of military spending. Hell, 60% of the budget is 'mandatory', meaning it is money we have to pay under standing law, not under the year-to-year budget process. And probably 90% of the remaining money is allocated, by law, under the budget process.

I'd be amazed if the amount of money legally under the control of the president, to the extent he can legally choose not to spend it, was more than 5% of the budget.

(And this entire stupid argument, ignoring the fact it's illegal for the president, is under the rather dubious logic that people would continue buying government bonds simply because that is the one part of the government still working, while we're failing to make payments on everything else. Uh, no. That's not how loans and bond markets work.)

The problem with not raising the debt limit is that we spend roughly 1/3 more then we take in so spending over that limit would be absolutely required to stop. This is easy to do but it would mean that entitlements stop and other things until either the debt can get under control or the limit is raised.

So a default for not raising the debt limit is only a default if the president insists on not servicing our debt and keeping entitlements and/or other government not subject to a shutdown active.

*BZZZZZT* Wrong.

Government spending is required by law. That mean each time a government obligation comes due, the President is required to pay it by law. (Well, presumably he only to pay it if he has the money on hand. This has never been tested in court, but he can't do things that are physically impossible.).

There is no legal justification, and it would be criminal, for him to refuse to pay an obligation on Monday just because on Tuesday he has some debt to service. Even if that obligation on Monday is completely trivial that the government could easily not pay at the moment, he is REQUIRED BY LAW to pay it, right then and there, no matter what consequences happen on Tuesday due to lack of money.

(There are some circumstances where he can possibly make a judgement, like if he had to make two payments in the same day but could only afford one, but that's not actually important here.)

People who assert otherwise are either a) morons who don't understand that the executive branch operates under the law, including _when_ and to _whom_ payments are made, and cannot diverge from this, or b) Republicans who do understand them but are rather suspiciously suggesting that President Obama decide to break the law...they all pinky swear they won't impeach him, of course.

Forbes Magazine actually published an article asserting (and providing some evidence) that the healthcare.gov site works poorly on purpose, because the government doesn't want you to know how high the actual rates are.

Then Forbes Magazine has idiots working for it. We actually knew the prices well in advance of Oct 1, and they aren't that high.

That is not a snuff film. 'Snuff film' is not any random recording that happens to catch an actual death on film. A snuff film is a murder made for the express purpose of filming it.

And they do not, as far as anyone can tell, exist. Murderers are, for some inexplicably reason, reluctant to film themselves murdering people and then sell the film.

I don't see how that would help. The problem is that if you rig the system where the Democrats cannot win a specific district, than you operate a system where the real election is the primary. Which breaks everything.

Let's look at a non-Geryymandered normal district, in, let's say, a Republican state. 45% Republicans, 20% independents, and 35% Democrats. (Yes, even in the most 'biased' parts of the country, the 'majority' party rarely has an actual _majority_ registered voters.)

What happens in that district? The Democrat runs as a conservative Democrat, and the Republican runs as slightly right of center Republican. This is because the Democrat needs Republican votes, and the Republican needs to not completely lose the independents to the Democrat so can't go too far right. This produces, on average, reasonable electoral results. If either party strays too far in their direction, the other party will leap in and win.

But in a gerrymandered district, it has 55% Republicans (rigged to be exactly that, remember) and 35% Democrats and 10% moderates. Now Republicans don't need the votes of anyone but Republicans. So the points of the election are happening entirely within the Republican party, so the center has moved...

...but that's not the only problem.

Each party has a set of issues and they best talk about those issues from their direction. The 'center' of the Republican party might be at one point, but put two Republican equal-distance from the Republican center and the right-most one wins a debate, because the Republican party _speaks in those terms_. It is very hard for a Republican to fight from the left and still sound like a Republican..

And, on top of that, primary attract the most partisan voters. Someone who is barely a Republican is probably not going to vote in them.

So, in races where the other party cannot win, you get, on average, people who are much more extremist than the average of the party, or the average of the elected officials, would indicate they should be. It's just how the system works. (And everything I just said about Republicans applies to Democrats also. It's just they do less gerrymandering so end up in this stupid situation less.)

And then they win.

Having a runoff or transferable vote in the primary wouldn't help at all with this. The primary is electing the 'correct' people. The winner is the person that the vast majority of people _voting in the primary_ want elected. If anything, a runoff might make it worse, because in a few cases we've had moderatism Republicans win a Gerrymandered primary because the batshit crazy Republicans stole votes from each other. Making the election better reflect the will of the primary voters might well make things _worse_.

If you mean a runoff in the general...well, at that point you're talking about either the centerist Republican not running as a Republican, or the fringe Republican not running as a Republican...either of which they can already do. And neither of which they will do because their district is so heavily gerrymandered that whoever has a (R) after their name will win.

No, I don't see how transfering votes will help this at all. The obvious solution is to stop gerrymandering so, but, as I said, without gerrymandering, the Republicans don't end up with a majority in the House, so they clearly won't do that.

Now, what might help might be removing the primary altogether, like the California system, and just having the election between whoever gets the two highest sets of votes in a primary. But that is a very strange system to set up, and a good deal of the cause of the Gerrymandering is very partisan Republicans at the state level, and it seems unlikely they would go along with such a plan.

Of course, they might go along with it once their extremist candidates state losing elections, even in the carefully gerrymandered districts, because 10% of the Republican looked at the guy their side picked and said 'WTF? I'm not voting for that.'. That is bound to happen sooner or later....but who knows how the state Republicans will deal with it. They'll probably just start redistricting so that almost everywhere has 60% Republicans....make their extremism problem even worse.

I don't actually see a way out for the Republicans that they would actually do besides complete collapse.

And as for how this happened?

Well, it was a series of mistake the Republicans made over the decades. Mistakes that made it harder and harder for the Republicans to shift their positions, and harder and harder to attract new people.

And demographics continued to happen. And then they elected George W. Bush, which sped things up by about half a decade. And it because clear, about 2000 or so, they'd either have to shift their positions or cheat.

They couldn't shift their positions. (In fact, the one policy failure of the Bush administration was the attempt to shift positions on immigration.) Their position had calcified. They had let too many people in their party based on attacking those societal shifts, and couldn't change those things now.

So...they 'cheated'. (Note I'm not saying there was any lawbreaking. I mean cheating in the sense of not playing by commonly accepted rules.)

1) They rigged things so that they'd stay in power with less and less people, via gerrymandering. (They've sorta been doing this for a while, but 2000 is where it took off.)
2) They started inventing completely amazing attacks on Democrats. The much-vaulted 'civility' completely disappeared at the hands of the Republicans. (This arguable started under Clinton.)

But this backfired horribly. Either of those alone might have been okay, but when you put them together, when you create Republican-safe districts and Republicans and Fox News yammers on and on about how evil anything to do with the Democrats are...

...you're going to end up getting challenges from the right.

And thus the Tea Party was born. In 2009, just in time to get elected to local government for the census, for more redistricting, making each district even more extreme.

The problem is...these victories just made the Republican's problems worse. Now they were even more extreme and had more of a problem. So, to keep power, we see stuff like reducing access to the ballot box, and nonsense like that.

And now you get a government shutdown to try to appease the extremists. Which will, of course, just makes things even worse electorally. To remain viable, the party must moderate itself, and it cannot moderate itself thanks to the system it set up to stay in power.

People think political parties die because they're no longer 'relevant'. But that's not really it. A political party die because instead of choosing to stay relevant, it tries (And succeeds for a short time) to rig the game to stay in power while continuing to be irrelevant, so it keep attracting less and less relevant people. Until the entire thing implodes.

The fact is...the Republican party is dead. It's thrashing around and can do massive harm as it goes down, but it really has no exit from where it is. I'm not entirely sure whether what's going on right now are the final death throes, but at this point, it's going to see its power reduced at basically every election. (Remember, it didn't even win a majority of votes cast for the House.)

What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.

Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.

Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?

The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.

And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?

Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.

I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.

And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)

Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.

Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.

In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.

So what magical new technologist do you mysteriously think it requires?

Can we build pylons? Check, we build bridges quite some distance.

Can we build metal tubes? Subways systems say check.

Can we build air turbines? Why, yes we can.

What exactly do you feel is the technologically implausible part of this proposal?

Indeed. It's just damn high-speed rail, except in the air and put in a tube. Anyone who thinks we can't do that seems unaware we build bridges and subway tunnels, and it's not exactly rocket science to put a subway tunnel on a bridge.

Seems to me like it would be more expensive than HSR, but there do appear to be a lot of savings to offset the added costs. (I.e., being in a tube allows it to be propelled in a novel manner with a lot less air friction.)

And anyone who thinks this is somehow more at risk of earthquakes is an idiot. It's a tube. We can cheaply put sensors on it to detect damage...unlike HSR, where stuff could fall on the track and not be noticed. And putting structures in the air makes them more resistant to earthquakes, assuming they aren't built by idiots. It's the stuff directly on the ground that gets thrown around during an earthquake.

The only actual objection would be something like 'Musk can't do it that cheaply', and t would be more expensive in the long run. Maybe that's valid, maybe not, I don't know...but all other objections are stupid.