It’s Thursday, October 10th, 2013…but before we begin, our thoughts regarding Der Obafuhrer’s purpose in exacerbating the effects of the latest government shutdown find perfect expression in the last two installments of Day by Day:

Meanwhile, though ordinary citizens are prevented from accessing even their own private residences on government property, the same doesn’t go for those espousing special rights for criminal trespassers:

Pro-Amnesty Forces Rally on National Mall

Any questions?!?  Yeah…unfortunately, neither does the MSM!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Conn Carroll describes why…

Obama is the man in the middle and his choice is statesmanship or obstinacy

A remarkable story appeared a few days ago in the news section of the San Jose Mercury News, which serves the Silicon Valley and Bay Area of San Francisco. In the story written by reporter Tracy Seipel, two residents run head-on into the reality of Obamacare:

“Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.

“Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.

“Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.”

No wonder Waschura, a self-employed engineer, said, “I was laughing at [House Speaker John] Boehner until the mail came today.” Then came the clincher from Waschura: “I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so p—-d about this.”

Millions of Americans are or soon will be having similar experiences as the country endures the Obamacare launch in real time, with real costs and real penalties attached for non-compliance (remember those 16,000 new IRS agents?). Comments like Washura’s may prompt Boehner and his fellow House Republican leaders to think very carefully before moving to pour the Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling issues together into one boiling stew.

RedState.com’s Erick Erickson argues this morning that “as long as the conversation stays on the debt ceiling, we are not talking about the deeply unpopular Obamacare. The GOP needs to immediately get a short-term debt increase done and keep the fight on Obamacare in the continuing resolution. “We cannot get both the debt ceiling and Obamacare done at the same time. They must be separate fights or the GOP will surrender on all fronts.” Other GOPers argue that combining the two issues is the only way congressional Republicans can maintain leverage against the brick wall of resistance from Obama and congressional Democrats on Obamacare.

In any case, the central player in this titanic battle of political wills sits in the Oval Office and he alone can in one stroke of inspired leadership calm the storm, begin healing wounds and reunify the nation by delaying Obamacare for a year and convening a bipartisan group to either fix it or replace it. If he doesn’t, Obama will be remembered as the president whose obstinacy ripped the nation apart.

Hmmm…”statemanship” or “obstinancy”; we’re going with obstinancy!  There’s any number of words and terms which accurately describe this prevaricating nincompoop; “misstater” perhaps.  But certainly not “statesman”…in any way, shape, form or fashion.

Next up, writing at Commentary Magazine, Seth Mandel notes how even a completely pliant Press can’t save The Obamao from himself:

Obama Stumbles Despite Friendly Press

This afternoon President Obama gave a brief statement on the government shutdown, said nothing new, and received a warm collective embrace from the press, who made sure not to ask him about the disastrous ObamaCare rollout. And yet, perhaps out of exhaustion or a case of the second-term blues, Obama managed to accidentally say something worth quoting at the tail end of the Q and A.

The president was asked if he had any regrets about his 2011 budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner, and how the present political dynamics would have to change going forward. In his response, Obama actually touched on a popular critique Republicans have deployed recently, which is Obama’s hypocrisy for his past opposition to raising the debt ceiling, a tactic he and his allies now consider arson and hostage-taking when used by Republicans.

After first saying that he learned from the 2011 standoff that the country cannot come that close to “default” again, the president said this:

And by the way, you know, I often hear people say, well, in the past it’s been dealt with all the time. The truth of the matter is, if you look at the history, people posture about the debt ceiling frequently, but the way the debt ceiling often got passed was, you’d stick the debt ceiling onto a budget negotiation once it was completed because people figured, well, I don’t want to take a bunch of tough votes to cut programs or raise taxes and then also have to take a debt ceiling vote; let me do it all at once.

But it wasn’t a situation in which, you know what, if I don’t get what I want, then I’m going to let us default. That’s what’s changed. And that’s what we learned in 2011.

When Obama opposed raising the debt ceiling, he was just posturing the way people do “frequently.” In other words, when Obama makes a speech on policy he doesn’t actually believe what he’s saying; he just thinks enough of the voters will like his message. Obama is not, Obama says, to be taken literally. They are just words.

The other interesting nugget in that paragraph was the part where Obama said that in the past the debt ceiling was easier to sneak through without the public noticing until it was decoupled from omnibus spending bills. The thought process of America’s elected politicians, Obama explained approvingly, was: “I don’t want to take a bunch of tough votes to cut programs or raise taxes and then also have to take a debt ceiling vote.”

The Obama campaign seems to have calculated correctly that “Obama: Change we can believe in” would make a snappier bumper sticker slogan than “Obama: I don’t want to take a bunch of tough votes.” (The latter would also draw attention to his predilection as senator to vote “present.”)

This exchange took place after CBS’s Mark Knoller asked the president why he doesn’t support passing bills to fund important priorities while these non-negotiations drag on. Aren’t you tempted, Knoller asked Obama, to sign bipartisan bills that fund programs you support? “Of course I’m tempted,” Obama responded, “because you’d like to think that you could solve at least some of the problem if you couldn’t solve all of it.” Well yes, that does seem to be the point. This may seem reasonable, Obama said, but don’t be fooled. It’s a trap:

But here’s the problem. What you’ve seen are bills that come up where wherever Republicans are feeling political pressure, they put a bill forward. And if there’s no political heat, if there’s no television story on it, then nothing happens. And if we do some sort of shotgun approach like that, then you’ll have some programs that are highly visible get funded and reopened, like national monuments, but things that don’t get a lot of attention, like those SBA loans, not being funded.

You see, by funding uncontroversial and broadly popular programs while not automatically funding everything else, the Republicans are trying to trick the government into setting priorities, building bipartisan coalitions, and engaging the public in how to spend their tax money. Obama seemed to think this was self-evidently foolish, which tells you much about what the president thinks of the taxpayers.

Then the president added, almost as an afterthought: “And you know, we don’t get to select which programs we implement or not.” Since Obama chooses which parts of which laws he wants to implement and enforce at will, as if Congress were a supercommittee brainstorming ideas rather than a coequal branch passing laws, I’m guessing he would explain that he is again being take too literally when he’s obviously just posturing. Now he tells us.

Since we’re on the subject of that lying piece of Marxist trash, as the WaPo relates…

Moody’s offers different view on debt limit

One of the nation’s top credit-rating agencies says that the U.S. Treasury Department is likely to continue paying interest on the government’s debt even if Congress fails to lift the limit on borrowing next week, preserving the nation’s sterling AAA credit rating.

In a memo being circulated on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Moody’s Investors Service offers “answers to frequently asked questions” about the government shutdown, now in its second week, and the federal debt limit. President Obama has said that, unless Congress acts to raise the $16.7 trillion limit by next Thursday, the nation will be at risk of default.

Not so, Moody’s says in the memo dated Oct. 7.

”We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact,” the memo says. “The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt. There is no direct connection between the debt limit (actually the exhaustion of the Treasury’s extraordinary measures to raise funds) and a default.

The memo offers a starkly different view of the consequences of congressional inaction on the debt limit than is held by the White House, many policymakers and other financial analysts. During a press conference at the White House Tuesday, Obama said missing the Oct. 17 deadline would invite “economic chaos.”

The Moody’s memo goes on to argue that the situation is actually much less serious than in 2011, when the nation last faced a pitched battle over the debt limit.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics-live/liveblog/live-updates-the-shutdown-4/?hpid=z2#c1e3ada3-dc00-41d8-92cb-327c5c814d82

We’d suggest Moody’s have their tax accountants on stand-by for the inevitable visit from the IRS.

Then there’s James Taranto’s take on…

Obama’s ‘Fever’ Pitch

The metaphor is more apt than he realizes.

In his Capital Journal column Gerald Seib, The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, identifies the central metaphor guiding the Democrats’ thinking about the current impasse over spending and the impending one over debt:

It’s called “break the fever.”

Breaking the fever is code for ending the cycle of recurring, last-minute crises over spending bills and increases in the nation’s borrowing limit—the debt ceiling. The White House believes these crises give outsize power to a minority of conservative House Republicans who don’t have the strength to push their agenda into law but can, in a crisis, stop the action.

More important, Democrats are convinced they must break the cycle now, or see much of the Obama second-term agenda sink away.

This is an old metaphor for the president. In January 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama was quoted as saying: “Part of my job as the next president is to break the fever of fear that has been exploited by this administration. We are told to be afraid of terrorists, immigrants and each other. This becomes the means by which our civil liberties are subverted and our values are distorted.”

He added: “We should show a willingness to speak to our adversaries,” which is rather different from his approach today.

But the domestic application of the fever metaphor goes back at least to April 2012, when he gave the following answer when Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner asked him how to “break through” Republican “obstructionism”:

My hope is that if the American people send a message to them that’s consistent with the fact that Congress is polling at 13 percent right now, and they suffer some losses in this next election, that there’s going to be some self-reflection going on–that it might break the fever. They might say to themselves, “You know what, we’ve lost our way here. We need to refocus on trying to get things done for the American people.”

At a June campaign appearance in Minnesota, he reiterated:

Now, I believe that if we’re successful in this election–when we’re successful in this election–that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope and my expectation is that after the election, now that it turns out the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again–that we can start getting some cooperation again.

What the 2008 version of the metaphor and the 2012-13 one have in common is that in both cases the “fever” is a phenomenon external to Obama. That’s important, but perhaps not in precisely the way the president thinks.

To make sense of the metaphor, let’s think about literal fevers. “A fever is usually a sign that something out of the ordinary is going on in your body,” explains the Mayo Clinic website. “For an adult, a fever may be uncomfortable, but fever usually isn’t dangerous unless it reaches 103 F (39.4 C) or higher.” “Fevers have an adaptive function,” notes John Durant in his new book, “The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health”: “A fever is a natural immune response to infection, not just an unpleasant side effect of being ill. Fever isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.” When the infection is gone, the fever “breaks” as the body’s temperature returns to normal.

So if America’s body politic continues to run a fever, that means it is still suffering from the underlying illness. And if the Republicans are fevered–or are the fever–then it follows that Obama and the Democrats are the infectious agent.

When you think about it this way, the metaphor makes perfect sense. The body politic heated up during 2009 and 2010, as Obama overcame its resistance and advanced his agenda. The 2010 election was a massive immune response, which seemed to have restored a measure of health.

By 2012, when both Obama and House Republicans were re-elected, the fever seemed to have broken on its own. Instead, as we now know, the Internal Revenue Service administered an anti-inflammatory treatment that merely masked the symptoms of the underlying infection.

Taking a longer view, one could see America’s current condition as a chronic one, which has gradually grown worse over decades. “Chronic infections become chronic in the first place due to an insufficient initial immune response,” Durant notes. If a virulent strain of the bug has now produced an acute fever, it may be a sign that the country has some vigor left.

As Ann Coulter so eloquently observed, “Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.”  Liberalism is indeed a disease, symptomized by uncontrolled amnesia, lying and hypocrisy; and only, if you’ll forgive the term, “liberal” doses of common sense and cold, hard facts can effect a cure. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as Marc Thiessen reports in the WaPo via the AEI, the nominal leader of The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight appears to have abandon one of the few weapons in the Republican arsenal capable of landing on target:

Why did the GOP surrender the spending fight?

Spin

So whatever happened to the GOP fight to cut spending? Remember during the last debt-limit showdown, when House Speaker John Boehner promised that Republicans would henceforth insist on at least one dollar in spending cuts for every dollar in debt limit increase? As Boehner put it, from now on “any increase debt limit has to be accompanied by spending reductions that meet or exceed it.”

It became known as the Boehner Rule.

Yet when the speaker recently laid out a laundry list of conditions for a debt-limit increase, he included a hodgepodge of GOP demands — from approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to a broad rollback of environmental regulations. Conspicuously absent were any “spending reductions that meet or exceed” the increase in the national debt.

Over the weekend, National Review’s Robert Costa reported that Republicans are talking about a package of modest demands to end the government shutdown and raise the debt limit — including a mechanism for revenue-neutral tax reform, small entitlement reforms and minor changes to Obamacare (such as repeal of the medical-device tax, a measure that enjoys bipartisan support).

But no one appears to be talking about enforcing the Boehner Rule. Not even Boehner.

Reality

Sticking to the Boehner Rule should be a no-brainer. A December 2012 poll found that 72 percent of Americans agreed that “Any increase in the debt limit must be accompanied by spending cuts and reforms of a greater amount.” By contrast, while a growing majority of Americans disapprove of Obamacare, only 27 percent wanted Republicans to shut down the government in an effort to defund it.

In other words, Republicans are abandoning an issue where they enjoy supermajority support while pursuing a strategy that a supermajority of Americans oppose. That makes no sense.

http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/legislative/house/why-did-the-gop-surrender-the-spending-fight/?utm_source=today&utm_medium=paramount&utm_campaign=100813

Welcome to the GOP!  And as this next headline confirms, even in the midst of sequestration AND a government shutdown, there’s still plenty of fat to trim:

Corp. for Public Broadcasting Got $445M Day After Shutdown

So PBS Newshour, Sesame Street and NPR are…more important than treating kids with cancer?!?  It’s should also be noted during a government “shutdown” supposed to curtail non-essential government activities, Republicans have funded critical activities such as Head Start, the FDA and a host of other programs and entities to which they are normally antithetically opposed.

Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, and Ann Coulter’s thoughts on the efficacy of the Unaffordable Care Act:

“…If you are in the minority of Americans not already unalterably opposed to Obamacare, keep in mind that the only reason the government is shut down right now is that Democrats refuse to fund the government if they are required to live under Obamacare. That’s how good it is!”

Turning to the Transparency Segment, as The Washington Times reports, courtesy of Bill Meisen…

ATF tries to block whistleblowing agent’s Fast and Furious book

1st Amendment battle over ‘gun-walking’ expose

Pay No Attention to the Bad Data

Behind the curtain at the IPCC.

Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) written by political appointees at the Justice Department, promising that the full 2,000-page report will be released a few days later. Would you print a front-page story based only on the 30-page summary, or would you demand to see the full report?

If you’d go with the politically massaged summary, then congratulations​—​you too can be an environmental reporter. Because that’s exactly what the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did on Friday, September 27, in Stockholm, releasing only the SPM while withholding the full report. And the media played along, generating predictable headlines over the weekend about the increasing certainty of climate scientists that humans are warming the world.

To be fair, if they had waited until Monday’s release of the full Working Group I report on the current state of climate science, they’d have had to make sense of a jargon-filled report that Dutch scientist Arthur Petersen told the BBC “is virtually unreadable!” Churchill once quipped about a massive bureaucratic report that “by its very length, it defends itself against the risk of being read.” The IPCC appears to be following this example.

Speaking of how data is used…or perhaps more appropriately, misused, this just in from TWS and contributor Bill Meisen:

Obamacare Marketplace: Personal Data Can Be Used For ‘Law Enforcement and Audit Activities’

Move along, folks; nothing to see here…

On the Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a day with another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Woman accused of texting in fatal crash

A woman who prosecutors say was texting and driving when she hit and killed a motorcyclist has been charged with negligent manslaughter by motor vehicle. Twenty-year-old Elizabeth Haley Meyers of Severn was also charged Monday with criminal negligent manslaughter, reckless driving, negligent driving, failure to yield the right of way and text messaging while driving.

The Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office says Meyers was trying to drive across Route 3 in Gambrills on March 10. Officials say she drove into the path of 30-year-old Jonathan Wesley Roberts of Aylett, Va. Roberts died at a local hospital.

Witnesses have said Meyers was texting at the time.; we hope whatever message she was sending was worth a man’s life, not to mention ten years of her own.  There’s an object lesson here, sports fans; we’d all do well to heed it!

Magoo