The Death Throes of the GOP

By Sean Wilentz

Powerless to control his caucus, John Boehner has proved to be one of the weakest congressional leaders in American history./J. Scott Applewhite

This latest episode in the endless Republican reality show is not chiefly about the incompetence and incessant squabbling of ideologues and petty politicians, although it's that, too. Nor is it the outcome of the intense partisan polarization that has thrown Washington into gridlock, as if the problem is abstract partisanship itself, with Democrats and Republicans equally at fault. Least of all is it about rescuing the economy from the Democrats' profligate deficit spending, as Republicans claim – not with the deficit shrinking to its lowest level since the financial disaster of 2008 and with the outlook improving. This crisis is about nothing other than the Republican Party – its radicalization, its stunning lack of leadership and its disregard for the Constitution.

Inside the Republican Suicide Machine: How the GOP Is Tearing America Apart

The Republicans have now joined a relatively small number of major American political parties that became the captive of a narrow ideology and either jettisoned or silenced their more moderate elements. The Democratic Party suffered this fate in the 1840's and 1850's, when Southern slaveholders took command of the party's levers of power. So, temporarily, did the Republicans in 1964, when Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign claimed the party for extremists on the right, an augury of things to come. But today's Republicans, whatever their pretensions about channeling the Founding Fathers, are so contemptuous of American history and institutions that they cannot learn from even their own recent past.

 Like earlier declines into dogmatic politics, the Republicans descended gradually, beginning with Ronald Reagan's departure from the White House in 1989. Reagan had governed shrewdly. While getting his way on what he thought was important, including dramatically lowering marginal tax rates and combating the Soviet Union, he knew how to compromise. He also knew how to exploit the culture wars, paying lip service to causes like the "pro-life" movement without risking any political capital on them. Reagan adroitly kept his true- believer supporters in line even as he raised taxes no fewer than 11 times, raised government spending by 57 percent (in current dollars), and nearly tripled the national debt to $2.6 trillion. Yet while Reagan's success continued to shape national politics for decades after he left office, he alone proved capable of holding together the conservative coalition that had swept him to power.

With no clear-cut successor on the right, the GOP turned to a scion of the old GOP establishment, George Herbert Walker Bush. Deepening divisions between center-right Republicans like Bush and a new crop of Republican right-wing firebrands like Newt Gingrich contributed heavily to Bush's ouster in 1992. Bill Clinton's innovative center-left politics seemed to revive the Democrats and sent the Republicans into paroxysms that fed their further shift to the right. But even though Clinton won re-election in 1996, his own precarious coalition did not hold. With George W. Bush's victory in 2000, engineered by a one-vote majority of the conservative phalanx on the Supreme Court, the post-Reagan GOP reached a new and more radical phase.

After an unsteady start, the new Bush administration won enormous popular support following the terrorist atrocities of September 11th, 2001. In time, his popularity diminished, but it proved strong enough to secure – narrowly – his re-election in 2004. Despite the thinness of the president's margin of victory, Bush's political strategist Karl Rove spoke of a "permanent Republican majority" that would last for a generation or more. In the conservative Weekly Standard, the pundit Fred Barnes remarked, almost matter-of-factly, that "Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades."

Four years later, the Bush administration was in its death spiral. The economy was on the brink of collapse in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis traceable to the utter lack of oversight and regulation of an out-of-control financial sector. Anger over the Iraq War, the government's passive early response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and more, had caused the president's public-approval ratings to plunge. Two years earlier, the Democrats had regained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in more than a decade, giving them virtual control of both houses of Congress.

The anti-Bush backlash, though, was not confined to Democrats and independents. Bush had already stirred resentment on the right during his first term with his unfunded Medicare prescription-drug reforms, which many hard-line conservative Republicans viewed as a big-government betrayal. Early in his second term, Bush tried and failed to advance the privatization of Social Security, which would have put the program in the hands of the bankers, derivatives speculators and mortgage brokers. Had it worked, Bush might have gained some credibility among the hard-liners, who had long dreamed of destroying the ultimate New Deal program. Then Bush enraged much of the Republican base with his efforts to liberalize immigration policy. But it was his drastic interventions in the wake of the financial crisis to bail out the floundering banks that most offended the right wing of his party. They saw Bush's prudent actions to prevent complete economic disaster as his final act of big-government treason. The ensuing protests sparked the uprisings that turned into the Tea Party phenomenon.

The Republicans' continuing transformation into a narrow ideological party, which some observers thought would halt after Bush's failure, would have many more cycles to go. Battered and discouraged, the GOP nominated Sen. John McCain, the last major national Republican whose career stretched back to the glory years of Ronald Reagan, but his reputation for irascible independence made the right-wing Republicans worse than squeamish. In desperation for party unity, McCain opted for the inexperienced, ignorant but unassailably far-right Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, momentarily exciting the party base but, in the long run, damaging his hopes with the rest of the electorate. Sen. Barack Obama won handily, the greatest Democratic presidential victory in nearly half a century.

The Tea Party uprising helped the Republicans regain the House in 2010, in the wake of Obama's legislative victories in enacting a large, if insufficient, economic stimulus package and a diluted but nevertheless historic national health care law. Yet the Republicans' apparent rebound was actually dismaying to party politicos who had historic connections to the party's more traditional and less dogmatic conservatism. Among the most powerful of them, Karl Rove, disdainfully remarked in 2010 that the Tea Party did not strike him as particularly "sophisticated." In last year's presidential election, it took Rove and his favored candidate, Mitt Romney, until late in the primary season to fend off a bewildering gaggle of conservative hard-liners. To secure the nomination, Romney had to adopt positions popular inside Tea Party circles but fatal in the general election, including naming the Ayn Rand-admiring congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate.

For their part, the Democrats – and, in particular, the Obama White House – actively resisted understanding how much the rightward push had radicalized the Republican Party, especially its caucus in the House of Representatives. Disappointing his ardent left supporters from the 2008 campaign who fantasized he would be their "movement" president, it turned out that Obama actually believed his own campaign rhetoric about ushering in a new post-partisan spirit to the nation's capital. Predictably, he failed. Not a single House Republican and only three in the Senate voted in favor of the administration's stimulus package in 2009. After almost a year of bargaining and stalling, Congress finally passed a watered-down version of the president's health care reform bill early in 2010. Not a single Republican, in either house of Congress, voted aye.

Meet the Eight Tea Party Morons Destroying America

Those outcomes should have been obvious to anyone with a glimmer of understanding of what the Republican Party had become. Working together with the president and compromising for the betterment of the nation was not in the cards. The Republican right turned to vicious personal attacks on Obama, not only on his health care plan, but also on whether he was really an American. This character assassination, along with high unemployment and the continued sluggishness of the economy, fueled the Republicans' recapture of the House in 2010. The new Congress brought to the fore a fresh crop of leaders, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and chairman of the House Budget Committee Paul Ryan. Dubbing themselves the Young Guns, they made no pretense of their discomfort with the new speaker of the House, John Boehner.

From the start, it was clear that the younger leaders would try to make the federal debt limit the focus of controversy, an ideal ploy for hostage-taking. Boehner demurred. "We're going to have to deal with it as adults," he lectured the incoming Republican freshmen about the impending debt-limit debate. "Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations, and we have obligations on our part." But the Young Guns, Cantor in particular, would have no truck with such timidity. Neither would the freshmen, most of them well to the right of the Young Guns and elected with Tea Party support. And throughout, the upstarts made it absolutely clear that if their demands were not met, they would not hesitate in forcing the nation, disastrously, to default on its debts.

Even Before the Shutdown, House Republicans Couldn't Get Anything Done

The Republicans either believe, or would have you believe, that the debt ceiling limits the size of the national debt and thus limits government spending. Raising it, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina has remarked, is just another way of saying, "Well, you've got a little bit more credit – keep spending." The words "debt ceiling" or "debt limit" can certainly sound as if that's what's involved. But these assertions are false.

The debt ceiling dates back to America's entry into World War I. Contrary to a widespread misimpression, it came into existence not as a constraint on congressional spending, but in order to make government fiscal procedures less cumbersome amid the pressures of mobilizing for war. It had – and has – nothing to do with authorizing spending; Congress does that as part of the normal legislative process. Nor does the ceiling have anything to do with annual deficit levels, which explains why even today, with the deficit shrinking, Congress still needs to raise the debt ceiling. Rather, the ceiling is an artificial cap, determined by Congress, on the amount that the government can borrow to cover obligations already made.

Through the era of World War II, the limit looked to some like it might actually act as a useful check on government borrowing. But over the decades that followed, as the size of the nation's economy – and with it the national debt – grew exponentially, the debt limit became a vestige of a bygone era. By 1974, it was truly obsolete; that year Congress passed a new law compelling it to approve a budget and thus set borrowing levels annually.

The implication by the Republicans that raising the ceiling will enable the government to spend the nation into bankruptcy all the faster is utterly phony, a pseudo-crisis rooted in no real problem, a fraud manufactured and then stage-managed by the GOP to frighten the public and score political points. Indeed, it is the Republican radicals, and not the Democrats, who are threatening to throw the government into immediate bankruptcy unless they get their way over other issues, above all defunding (which means, basically, repealing) Obamacare.

You don't have to be Paul Krugman to understand all of this. Since the 1950's, economists have called the debt ceiling an experiment that failed long ago. Addressing Congress in 2003 as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan disparaged the debt ceiling as "either redundant or inconsistent with the paths of revenues and outlays you specify when you legislate a budget." Eight years later, as the House Republicans threatened, Greenspan called the debt-limit problem "unnecessary" and said flat-out that the debt ceiling "serves no useful purpose."

For decades, though, Congress went along with raising the debt limit as a mere formality. Every year from 1941 to 1945, Congress raised the debt ceiling to accommodate the accumulating costs of World War II. Since 1960, Congress has raised the ceiling 78 times, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, six times under Bill Clinton, seven times under George W. Bush and seven times under Barack Obama. Occasionally members of both parties have voted against raising the ceiling as a symbolic gesture to focus attention on various issues. Indeed, in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama joined every other Democrat in the Senate in voting against raising the debt ceiling, a bit of political posturing that was part of the normal cut-and-thrust on Capitol Hill.

If the debt limit is not raised when necessary, the federal government will immediately default on some of its obligations. That, in turn, would disrupt its ability to pay its creditors, from bondholders and defense contractors to recipients of Social Security and Medicare. A default that lasted for just a single day – and perhaps even the threat of such a default – would have dire effects, causing every credit agency to downgrade the nation's credit rating while presenting to the rest of the world a bizarre spectacle: the richest and most powerful nation on Earth willfully damaging both its economy and its international credibility. A default that lasted more than a few days would risk triggering a catastrophic financial crisis. Until now, no member of Congress, from either party, has seriously entertained wreaking such havoc.

Early in 2011, in keeping with cantor's plans, the Republicans threatened a government shutdown and in a last-minute deal with the White House forced cuts in discretionary spending that amounted to $79 billion more than the White House had wanted. Gearing up for his re-election campaign, Obama tried to put a good face on the outcome, calling it a "worthwhile compromise." He even seemed to boast, in words that echoed Speaker Boehner's, that it was "the largest annual spending cut in our history." But the Republicans, particularly the Young Guns and the more volatile Tea Partiers, having wounded Obama, were only getting started.

In early summer, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner used fiscal gimmicks to delay the necessity of raising the debt limit while Obama and Boehner held secret negotiations that they hoped would produce what Obama called the "Grand ­Bargain." They outlined a deal that would reduce projected deficits by $4 trillion over the coming decade; it included cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits, and tax reforms that would reduce rates – with guaranteed revenues to take care of any shortfall. Boehner grew confident of a settlement. But when Cantor learned that taxes were on the table, he publicly undermined the talks, and on July 9th, Boehner killed the big deal.

Negotiations resumed a few days later, and on July 21st, another agreement was imminent – or so the White House believed. The next day, though, Boehner refused to return Obama's calls until late in the afternoon, when he informed the president that the latest deal was dead. The speaker had extracted major concessions from Obama – concessions that would have probably damaged the president badly with the Democratic base had the two sides agreed.

But Boehner was undone by fear of a backlash over taxes from the Tea Party members like Jim Jordan of Ohio, who were now pressing Cantor and the other Young Guns hard from the right. Naturally, Boehner blamed Obama for the breakdowns. Thus, the House Republicans, pushed by the Tea Party, saved Obama from quite possibly committing political suicide in pursuit of his post-partisan will-o'-the-wisp going into 2012.

Meanwhile, on August 3rd, the government was scheduled to default unless Congress raised the debt limit. Legal experts as well as Democratic leaders implored the president to head off a Republican-manufactured disaster by invoking or at least citing the 14th Amendment – specifically Section 4 of the amendment, which states that "the validity of the public debt of the United States," including payments for government pensions, "shall not be questioned." The explicit purpose behind the amendment, framed and ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, was to prevent Southern rebel sympathizers returning to Congress from using the public debt to extract political concessions – precisely what the leaders of the current Southern-based Republican Party were doing. Policies and ideology aside, the House GOP was headed toward a blatant violation of the Constitution. But Obama would have nothing to do with the 14th Amendment. "I have talked to my lawyers," he said. "They are not persuaded that that is a winning argument." And so the post-partisan president pursued a last-minute compromise.

In the nick of time, on August 2nd, Obama signed the Budget Control Act, which he, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, had worked out with Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky days earlier – the final product of the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis. This was the disastrous sequestration bill, which mandated that on January 2nd, 2013, unless Congress approved the recommendations of a bipartisan "supercommittee" on cutting billions from the budget over the ensuing decade, massive across-the-board cuts in mandatory as well as discretionary spending, including for defense, would take effect over that same decade. The sequester mandate was deliberately designed never to take effect; rather, it was a doomsday provision, intended to spur the "supercommittee" toward a new "Grand Bargain."

The sequester plan did nothing to relieve mounting anxieties in the bond markets. On August 5th, three days after Obama signed the bill, Standard & Poor's, having issued warnings for months, announced that it was stripping the United States of its sterling AAA long-term sovereign credit rating. "The fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to," S&P's announcement read, "falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics." But even that ominous embarrassment did not move the Republicans, who refused to bend their solemn oath never to raise any taxes and thereby killed any chance for a broader agreement. On January 2nd, the sequester bill's doomsday, the president had to sign emergency legislation to keep the country from falling off what had become known as "the fiscal cliff." But that only delayed the sequestration and did nothing to prevent future debt-ceiling crises down the road.

Sometime in the midst of these battles, Obama seems to have begun to grasp what he was up against in the Republican Party. He certainly did not repeat the old paeans to post-partisanship during his re-election campaign in 2012. Instead, he forcefully defended positive government and drew a clear line between his progressive political philosophy and that of his plutocratic opponent, who, at a secretly videotaped fundraiser of Republican donors, riffed on how 47 percent of the American people were parasites on government welfare. Republicans were dumbfounded when Obama won re-election by 5 million votes and by a landslide in the Electoral College, while the Democrats dominated the overall vote in both the House and Senate elections.

In fact, the Democrats won 1.4 million votes more than the Republicans did in House elections nationally. Republicans retained the House only as a result of gerrymandering congressional districts in the states that they had won in the 2010 midterms. Yet the voters had clearly repudiated them. The themes of Romney's campaign were rejected wholesale; the results marked an utter defeat of the anti-government, pro-big-business politics that have driven the GOP for decades. Republican vulnerability with key constituencies became clear over a host of issues, from women's reproductive rights to immigration reform.

For a brief time, Republican officials playacted as though chastened. The Republican National Committee released a post-mortem report, a self-described "autopsy," calling upon the party to change its public image as the callous party of the rich and to improve its links to blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told the Republicans to "stop being the stupid party" – remarks seconded by former RNC chairman and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

Such sober second thoughts, though, never made much of a dent in the minds of congressional Republicans who, in 2013, have doubled down on their strategy of threats and disruption. Since 2010, they have sought to undermine the executive branch in any way they can. In the Senate, where the Republicans remain in the minority, they have launched more filibusters than ever before in history, blocking Obama's appointments to virtually every position they could, from federal judges to Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Now, having been completely overrun by a radical faction within their ranks, they are practicing a variation of the subversive politics of nullification first elaborated in the 1820's by John C. Calhoun, the Southern slave holding arch-reactionary. Controlling just one half of one of the three branches of government – and having won that control only because of rigged, gerrymandered redistricting – they are out to nullify laws they don't like, in part by blocking otherwise uncontroversial appointments of those officials required to execute them.

The law they hate the most is the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, to their disbelief and horror, failed to declare the law unconstitutional in 2012. And so the Republicans are hellbent on nullifying the law by any means necessary, including paralyzing the government and, if need be, destroying the nation's financial credibility and throwing the economy into a catastrophic collapse.

How has a faction consisting of no more than four dozen House members come to exercise so much destructive power? The continuing abandonment of professional responsibilities by the nation's mainstream news sources – including most of the metropolitan daily newspapers and the television outlets, network and cable – has had a great deal to do with it. At some point over the past 40 years, the bedrock principle of journalistic objectivity became twisted into the craven idea of false equivalency, whereby blatant falsehoods get reported simply as one side of an argument and receive equal weight with the reported argument of the other side. There is no shortage of explanations for the press's abdication: intimidation at the rise of Fox News and other propaganda operations; a deep confusion about the difference between hard-won objectivity and a lazy, counterfeit neutrality; and the poisonous effects of the postmodern axiom that truth, especially in politics, is a relative thing, depending on your perspective in a tweet. Whatever the explanation, today's journalism has trashed the tradition of fearless, factual reporting pioneered by Walter Lippmann, Edward R. Murrow and Anthony Lewis.

A press devoted to searching for and reporting the truth, wherever it might lead, would have kept the public better informed of the basic details of the government shutdown and debt-ceiling showdowns. It also would have reported seriously the hard truths of the Tea Party "insurgency," including how it was largely created and has since been bankrolled by oil-and-gas moguls like David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, and by a panoply of richly endowed right-wing pressure groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation. It also would have reported on the basic reason for the hard right's growing domination of the Republican Party, which has been the decay of the party at every level, including what passes for its party leadership. No figure exemplifies the problem better than the GOP's highest-ranking official, Speaker John Boehner, whose background and politics have largely escaped scrutiny.

Boehner owes his position to little more than his stolid longevity. A self-made, chain-smoking, run-of-the-mill Ohio Republican, he arrived in Congress in 1991 and rolled with the rising conservative tide. Three years later, after the Republicans won their first majority in the House in four decades, he rose as far as the lower end of the House leadership, mainly because he was pliable and came from an important swing state. His chief assignment was to raise funds, and he was delegated to serve as a party emissary to the K Street lobbyists. His most publicized moment came in 1996, when he was exposed distributing checks from the tobacco lobby to fellow Republicans on the floor of the House. Two years after that, in the internal bloodbath that cost Newt Gingrich his job as speaker, Boehner, too, was deposed from his leadership position.

Eight Flagrant Examples of Republican Shutdown Hypocrisy

With a lock on his congressional district, Boehner returned to the House and even managed to sit as chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee from 2001 to 2006 – not an especially powerful or prestigious assignment. How, then, did such a lackluster figure come to be named speaker of the House? Only because the more prominent and able veterans were guillotined, one after another, and his was the only head left intact.

First, Gingrich was booted from the House entirely when his fellow Republicans removed him from his speakership in 1998 after a disastrous midterm election cycle. "I'm willing to lead," Gingrich wailed, "but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals." Then, in 2005, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the true malicious power behind the inert Speaker Dennis Hastert, was indicted on felony charges (later dropped) involving corporate campaign contributions and resigned his post in disgrace. In a surprise win over another unexceptional wheeler-dealer, Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, Boehner took over as majority leader, partly because he was so unthreatening. Finally, in the Democratic sweep of 2006, Hastert lost his leadership role in the party. Boehner became minority leader, which in turn put him in line to become speaker when the Republicans regained the House in 2010.

10 Horrifying Things About the Government Shutdown

Boehner is a remainder-man, the last figure from the Gingrich revolution left standing. In the absence of anyone with flair or talent, he rose to the heights with no virtue greater than his ability to hang around. And now, as speaker, he finds himself thrust into the middle of a momentous political crisis.

The speakership, historically, has offered an excellent opportunity for creative lawmakers to shape the politics of their times. Between 1811 and 1825, Henry Clay, the greatest speaker of all, transformed what had been essentially a rule-enforcer's job into a position second in importance only to the president, concentrating power in his own hands by appointing his allies to the most important committees. Having put political pressure on the more pacific President James Madison, Clay helped lead the nation through the War of 1812 and then through the early implementation of a sweeping national economic plan, which he devised and called the American System. He also brokered the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that calmed sectional furor over slavery for more than 30 years.

Several powerful men have followed in Clay's footsteps. "Uncle" Joe Cannon sternly ruled the Republican-dominated House for eight momentous years between 1903 and 1911, greatly augmenting the power of his "Old Guard" Republican faction and stifling legislation proposed by Theodore Roosevelt's Progressives. Sam Rayburn, the Democrat of Texas, held the job for 20 years with two brief interruptions, under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy; and with a firm but generous hand, he worked effectively with conservatives as well as liberals. Most recently the affable old-time Massachusetts liberal Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill held the House Democrats together during the lean years of the 1980's and struck up a strong and productive relationship, political and personal, with Ronald Reagan.

As a matter of history, Boehner is the most pathetic figure ever to serve as speaker of the House. Questioned last month about why he let right-wing members of his caucus overrule his own crucial – and publicly announced – decision to keep Obamacare out of the budget negotiations, Boehner could only reply that there were many points of view inside the Republican caucus and that "the key to any leadership job is to listen." Henry Clay, who could not only listen but also speak eloquently, would scoff at Boehner's withered definition of leadership. Days into the shutdown, Boehner reportedly told colleagues that he would prevent a default – an uncommon show of firmness. But those reports also raised questions about how long he could command the loyalty of his caucus.

If Boehner is the saddest speaker of the House in American history, the current Congress is among the lowest of the low. And while there have been numerous terrible Congresses, the closest parallel in our past had been the relatively obscure 46th Congress in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction. Then, the Democrats were the Southern conservative party. Otherwise, the similarities between now and then are striking. So are the lessons that an old and mostly forgotten history can teach the present about how the executive branch should deal with a tightly organized extremist faction in Congress.

A financial panic in 1873 had led to an earthquake in the midterm elections the following year, costing the Republicans control of the House for the first time since the Civil War. Lacking an effective leadership, the Democrats had few ideas about how to combat the economic difficulties. Their entire agenda amounted to rousing their white Southern base's resentment against the Republicans' efforts to protect black voting rights.

In the so-called Compromise of 1877, Republicans won a disputed presidential election by agreeing to remove all but a token number of federal troops sent to guarantee civil rights – but even that mostly symbolic presence, along with the presence and power of U.S. marshals, continued to infuriate Southern Democrats. In the spring of 1879, with the Democrats still controlling the House, Congress passed routine appropriations bills to fund the army and the rest of the federal government for the coming fiscal year, beginning July 1st. Seeing their opportunity, Southern Democrats attached riders to the bills that forbade the use of troops and U.S. marshals to keep order at Southern polls. Though the Democrats were not threatening a default on the public debt, there were clear affinities between that Southern-based party and today's Republicans. Pushed by its extremist wing, the party threatened to shut down the federal government – and defund the army – to secure the extremists' narrow political interests.

Poor Preschoolers Suffer During Government Shutdown

As it turned out, the sitting Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, did not care much about protecting black voters in the South – but he and his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill recognized the Democrats' blackmail for what it was, an attack on the fundamental American system of checks and balances. Five times the Democrats passed offensive bills, and five times Hayes rejected them, using the full powers of his office and denouncing the doctrine behind the Democratic threats – a doctrine, he said, that would "make a radical, dangerous and unconstitutional change in the character of our institutions." After a legislative impasse of more than three months, when public opinion moved sharply against them, the Democrats backed down. Defeated by a president who had become strong as well as principled, they soon ceased their mayhem.

According to the usual workings of the American political system, success demands building diverse coalitions that contain swings too far to the right or the left. But historically this has not always been the case – not in the movement for Southern secession that provoked the Civil War, not in the paranoid politics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy early in the Cold War, not the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign that openly courted extremism and took over the Republican Party, and not in the George Wallace campaigns against civil rights.

Republicans Shut Down the Government, But They Can't Stop Obamacare

The current Republican Party is the latest angry exception to the rules of normal consensus-building politics, and it is unlikely that the GOP will function as a normal political party once again anytime soon. The GOP's long rightward march – deeply rooted in the revolt against the New Deal, headed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980's and accelerated by Newt Gingrich in the 1990's – depends upon the "cannibalism" that Gingrich came to lament; and that cannibalism has devoured, among many things, what had once been the party's strong "moderate" and even "liberal" wings. All that remains as a supposedly tempering force inside the GOP are Republicans so conservative that they cannot really be called tempering, and so inept and on the defensive that they cannot be called a force. If John Boehner is the last man standing against extremism in the party, there is really nothing to bar the door.

Many experienced Republican politicos know that their party is at risk of dying. With the systematic removal of moderates from its ranks, the party has become based, more than ever, in the Deep South, along with the Mountain states – the least-dynamic regions in the country. Its base is also aging, a fact made all the more striking by the shift of young voters heavily toward the Democrats since Reagan's heyday. In 2012, Republicans ran worst among those national constituencies that are growing the fastest – from Latinos to youth – and in democratic politics, demography is pretty much destiny. One reason for the Republicans' ferocity is their sense that their time is inexorably running out.

Institutional reform could provide constraints that the Republican Party has long since lost. Changing the Senate rules to curtail filibustering and expediting the nomination process, for example, would halt some of the most outrageous obstructionism evident since 2008. The rise of a different kind of mainstream press, devoted to telling the plain, unvarnished truth, without fear or favor, instead of propping up a false equivalency and calling it objectivity, would also be a great improvement.

For the foreseeable future, though, the prolonged death throes of the Republican Party will lead from crisis to crisis. Certainly, there is little chance that the Republicans, even if they fail to get their way, will learn any lessons in moderation and self-control that might calm their destructive, subversive fury. For now, that spirit of subversive fury defines the Republican Party.

How President Obama Won a Second Term

So the acceleration of radicalism and the political crises will continue. Even Mitch McConnell – a notoriously conservative partisan, the party boss behind the obstructionist Senate filibusters and a man often openly contemptuous of President Obama – is the target of a primary challenge from the right in his 2014 re-election campaign. Sadly, frighteningly, after the 2011 debt-limit deal was struck, McConnell observed that "it set the template for the future," and threatened that soon "we'll be doing it all over."

And so, all too soon, we will, in a reprise that ought to alarm Americans across the political spectrum: the Constitution unheeded and endangered, the nation's history blithely ignored, and the security of the American people put severely at risk by an extremist political faction.

This story is from the October 24th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

ACA computer code riddled with typos, Latin filler text, desperate programmer comments and disastrous architecture

By Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

If I had told you one month ago that ten days into the launch of Obamacare not a single person could be confirmed to have successfully enrolled, you would have called me a lunatic. And yet, here we are, tens days into the launch, and guess what? The White House cannot produce a single person who has successfully enrolled through the federally-run exchange Healthcare.gov.

Not one.

The real story on the catastrophic IT disaster known as Healthcare.gov is only now beginning to be recognized by the nation. As a person with a strong IT background running large R&D projects, I was among the very first to claim that Healthcare.gov is not just broken, it's DOA because of critical design failures.

It's not merely a "glitch." It's way beyond a SNAFU. This is the defining failure moment of the delusional thinking of democrats and their fantasyland government-centralized economy.

Even ABC News is now calling Healthcare.gov, "nothing short of disastrous," adding, "Media outlets have struggled to find anyone who has been successful."

My analysis of the Javascript running Healthcare.gov

I have personally looked at the Javascript code running part of the Healthcare.gov website. If you are curious how I got the code, I simply typed the URL of the Javascript code into the browser address field. The browser then pulls up the entire code block, because Javascript is client-side code (not server-side).

What I am seeing in this code is nothing short of jaw-dropping. As people are now saying, this code is "CRAAAAAZY!" You almost can't even call it Javascript code. If you sat down 100 monkeys in front of 100 typewriters and told them to start banging away, I'm confident at least one of them would come up with something far better than the Healthcare.gov Javascript code.

In fact, I am practically ROFLMAO just looking at this code. Any competent programmer in the world, upon seeing this, would just burst their britches in knowing the U.S. government spent $600+ million dollars on this project. Inside the code, the Javascript programmer comments are just off-the-charts hilarious. Comments found in the code include (yes, these are actual text comments from the script):

"TODO: add functionality to show alert text after too many tries at log in"

"make sure we don't try to do this before the saml has been posted if (window.registrationInitialSessionCallsComplete)"

"Attention: This file is generated once and can be modified by hand"

"Fill In this with actual content. Lorem Ipsum"

"TODO: maybe modify the below to use a similar method instead"

Riddled with typos and errors in the error messages

The code is also full of juvenile typos such as "'Misssing Password" and "This is not a valid organazation ID." Seriously, was this written by eighth graders?

Even error messages contains their own errors, such as "'Exception in [sic] retreiving REInsurance Plan by criteria."

It also contains brain-dead user instructions such as:

"You need to send the Marketplace proof that you are not enrolled in Medicaid or the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Examples of documents you can send include Letter from Medicaid or CHIP." (Yeah, right. Can you imagine calling Medicaid and asking for a letter stating that you are NOT enrolled in Medicaid?)

"Verify [FN]'s SSN and date of death, if applicable"

"Check all attestations before submitting your application."

"Send the Marketplace proof that [FN] isnt incarcerated (detained or jailed) by [Date]."

Do you speak Gujarati?

Although this Healthcare.gov computer code fails to function it does however support the language known as "Gujarati." According to an online encyclopedia, "Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language, native to Gujarat, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli in India. It is part of the greater Indo-European language family. Gujarati is derived from Old Gujarati (1100–1500 AD) which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages, and is the chief language in the state of Gujarat."

I am absolutely thrilled to know that my tax dollars may someday pay for the health insurance coverage of an ancestor of the Gujarati and Rajasthani languages, from the state of Gujarat. So while our "greatest generation" World War II veterans are being barricaded out of national monuments, the Obama administration is prioritizing providing subsidized health insurance coverage to descendants of the state of Gujarat.

Latin filler text

Laughably, the application code is also riddled with Latin used as filler text. For example, one line of code actually says:

resources['ffe.ee.myAccount.home.specialEnrollment.description2'] = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.'

Latin is used by programmers as filler / placeholder text for unfinished applications. The fact that this Latin is found in the code is yet more proof that the entire system never even entered Alpha testing, much less Beta testing or an official release. This is pre-alpha code requiring possible YEARS of development for final release.

Bizarre error messages also found in Obamacare code

Error messages written into the code leave no doubt that the people who wrote the code are masters of chaos and confusion. Here are just a few of the error message I found by casually scrolling through the Javascript publicly posted on the Healthcare.gov website:

"Exception in inconsistency adjudication process"

"Notices are official messages that lorem ipsum."

"Exception in triggering the Inconsistency Clock Service" (By the way, this error message confirms I was right in my public prediction about the system suffering from time clock synchronization errors.)

"Not Acceptable - Queried enrollment group plan is empty OR Selected plan doesnt existException in calling RetrieveNonFaPlanReviewConfirmDetails service"

"Please wait a few minutes and try again." (Uh, 10 million people tried that already...)

And here's our favorite, which claims that your application can't be processed because somehow gremlins behind the curtain are going to "make sure you get the lowest cost..."

We cant finish your application now -- its going to take us a little longer to make sure we get you the lowest possible costs. We will contact you again soon with more information. If you have questions, please call us at 1-800-318-2596 (TTY: 1-855-889-4325).

Truly disastrous architecture calls over 1,000 resources just to load one page

Even though I have only seen the public Javascript code and not the server-side processing code, the Javascript itself is truly disastrous -- on an epic scale.

For example, the Javascript file loaded for each user transfers all error messages, form field messages and front-end error messages from the server to the user's browser repeatedly for each cultural language supported by the system.

In other words, the entire set of error messages is hard-coded into the Javascript for English, then again for German, then again for French, Spanish, and so on, all the way through Gujarati and who knows how many other unheard-of languages.

I don't even know how to begin to tell you how disastrously idiotic such a design is. It practically guarantees a critical server crash under any kind of real user load. No programmer with an IQ above 100 would design js code in such a manner. This code was designed and written by utterly incompetent people who have built into the system exactly the kind of architecture that will make it fail if anyone tries to use it.

When HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says this code is "functioning," she's actually painting a giant "dunce" sign on her forehead. This code is so far from functioning that all the government programmers in the world couldn't make it work smoothly by January 1.

Was Healthcare.gov designed to fail?

It's almost as if the entire system has been designed to fail. There is no rational justification for writing code like this. It's like someone held a contest to find out "who can write the most inefficient, wasteful computer code" and Healthcare.gov won the top prize!

And yet, at the same time, this project perfectly reflects the foundational philosophy of the Obama administration: sell the dream to get elected, then screw everybody when it comes to implementation.

It also forces you to ask the question: To what lengths will Obama go to try to cover-up this disastrous mess by causing some other crisis as a distraction?

I assure you this system has zero chance of smoothly functioning by January 1, 2014. And that means a massive public backlash is on the way. As the truth comes out on this, the Obama administration is going to be embarrassed like nothing else we've ever seen in the history of government. This failure is so monumental, so critical, and so disastrous that it discredits not just Obama but the entire socialist fantasy of government-run, centrally-planned economies. Healthcare.gov is the ultimate argument for a free market run without government interference. It epitomizes the incompetence of Washington D.C. like nothing else in history.

No need to delay Obamacare; it will collapse on its own

Ultimately, this also means we don't have to worry about trying to delay Obamacare. Obamacare is going to destroy itself! Sooner or later, the entire country will realize the absurdity of being fined by the IRS for not buying a mandatory insurance policy that cannot be purchased because the government-run exchange site is utterly non-functional.

Obamacare will go down in history as the greatest IT failure in the history of the world. I can already see this outcome reflected in the code. As usual, Natural News is days, weeks or months ahead of the curve on this, so don't expect the mainstream media -- largely staffed by fantasyland Obama worshippers who know nothing about computer code -- to grasp the seriousness of the critical failures that will bring this system down.

By the way, guess how much you and I paid to build this failed, disastrous system? $634 million. It's a bargain!

The sad story of Cruz's sidekick, Mike Lee

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McDonald's Worker Arrested After Confronting CEO Over Wages

By Lynette Holloway

 

Nancy Salgado (The Real News screenshot); Jeff Stratton (Courtesy McDonald's)

Jeff Stratton started out working behind a McDonald’s counter in Detroit nearly 40 years ago. Now he’s president of McDonald’s U.S.A. Not bad.

With such roots, it would seem that he would have strong relationships with workers, from those in corporate suites to line cooks. Perhaps he does, but that certainly did not appear to be the case during a recent talk in Chicago, near where the company is headquartered in Oak Brook, Il.

Nancy Salgado, 26, told the Real News that she was arrested last week after confronting Stratton at a meeting amid the cloistered elegance of the Union League Club and telling him she couldn’t afford to buy shoes or food for her children, according to an interview and transcript at the Real News.

A cashier, she has worked for McDonald’s for 10 years and the confrontation was staged as part of the "Fight for $15," an ongoing labor battle to increase the minimum wage for fast food workers across the nation.

"It’s really hard for me to feed my two kids and struggle day to day," she shouted as Stratton was speaking, according to the transcript. "Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 when I’ve worked for McDonald’s for 10 years?"

"I’ve been there for 40 years,” Stratton answered from the podium.

"The thing is that I need a raise," Salgado insisted. "But you’re not helping your employees. How is this possible?" After that, someone approached her and informed her that she was going to be arrested.

Stratton did not have to take the bait. He could offered to speak to her later. The company’s image has taken a hit in the minimum-wage battle, even as it reported a 4 percent increase to $1.4 billion in profits last quarter. Over the summer, the company was criticized after the joining forces with Visa to help workers create budgets. The sample budget presumes workers will have a second jobs. Perhaps McDonald’s does not see itself a full-time endeavor, but that’s not the message Stratton just sent.

He’s worked "there for 40 years" and look where it got him.

Watch the video here:

J.P. Morgan – the man and the bank

Posted by Jim Hightower

Listen to this Commentary

J.P. Morgan was recently socked in the wallet by financial regulators, who levied a fine of nearly a billion bucks against the Wall Street baron for massive illegalities.

Well, not a fine against John Pierpont Morgan, the man. This 19th century robber baron was born to a great banking fortune and, by hook and crook, leveraged it to become the "King of American Finance." During the Gilded Age, Morgan cornered the U.S. financial markets, gained monopoly ownership of railroads, amassed a vast supply of the nation's gold, and used his investment power to create US Steel and take control of that market.

From his earliest days in high finance, Morgan was a hustler who often traded on the shady side. In the Civil War, for example, his family bought his way out of military duty, but he saw another way to serve. Himself, that is. Morgan bought defective rifles for $3.50 each and sold them to a Union general for $22 each. The rifles blew off soldiers' thumbs, but Morgan pleaded ignorance, and government investigators graciously absolved the young, wealthy, well-connected financier of any fault.

That seems to have set a pattern for his lifetime of antitrust violations, union busting, and other over-the-edge profiteering practices. He drew numerous official charges – but of course, he never did any jail time.

Moving the clock forward, we come to JPMorgan Chase, today's financial powerhouse bearing J.P.'s name. The bank also inherited his pattern of committing multiple illegalities – and walking away scot free. Oh sure, the bank was hit with that big fine, but not a single one of the top bankers who committed gross wrongdoing were charged or even fired – much less sent to jail.

Banks don't commit crimes. Bankers do. And they won't ever stop if they don't have to pay for their crimes.

"Once Again, Punish the Bank but Not Its Top Executives," The New York Times, September 20, 2013
"As Inquiries Persist, JPMorgan Loses Favor," The New York Times, September 20, 2013.
"JP Morgan's Legal Hurdles Expected to Multiply," The New York Times, September 24, 2013.
"JPMorgan is fined $920m over London Whale fiasco," Financial Times, September 20, 2013.

Chris Christie OWNED By Barbara Buono

Published on Oct 9, 2013

October 08, 2013 C-SPAN
http://MOXNews.com

The 7 habits of highly ineffective political parties

When it comes to major policy battles, since 2009 the GOP is 0-3. Before it fails again, David Frum offers up seven ways the party is shooting itself in the foot.
By David Frum

Republicans have lost three major fights since 2009. They seem likely soon to lose a fourth—and all in the same way.

The three previous losses (in case you’re feeling forgetful) were, in order:

(1) The fight over Obamacare. Result: the most ambitious new social insurance program since Medicare, financed—unlike Medicare—by redistributive new taxes on investment and high incomes.

(2) The 2012 election. Result: Despite the worst economy since the Great Depression, the reelection of President Obama, Democratic retention of the Senate, and 1.4 million more votes cast for House Democrats than for House Republicans.

(3) The fight over the “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012. Result: In order to preserve some of the Bush tax cuts, Republicans for the first time since 1991 left their finger prints on a tax increase for upper income groups.

Now comes fight (4), the fight over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. This one isn’t lost yet. But unless Republicans are prepared to push the country into the catastrophe of national bankruptcy sometime around October 17, it’s hard to see how this one does not end in a Republican retreat, clutching whatever forlorn fig leaf they can negotiate from President Obama.

Behind all four defeats can be seen the same seven mistakes: what you might call the seven habits of highly ineffective political parties. Let’s call the roll:

Habit 1: Maximalist goals.

There’s a lot about Obamacare for a Republican not to like. But to demand Obamacare’s outright repeal (which is what “defunding” amounts to) barely 10 months after decisively losing an election in which Obamacare occupied a central place—well, that’s shooting for the moon. we’ve seen equivalent moon shots again and again since 2009. During the original Obamacare legislation, Republicans took the position: no, no, not one inch. During the election of 2012, Republicans were not content merely to replace one president with another. They also campaigned on the most radical platform the party since 1964. They wanted the biggest possible mandate. Instead they got whomped.

Habit 2: Apocalyptic visions.

Republicans have insisted on maximal goals because they fear they face a truly apocalyptic moment: an irrevocable fork in the road, with one path leading to socialist tyranny, the other to the restoration of the constitutional republic. There sometimes are such moments in history of nations. This is not one. If the United States has remained a constitutional republic despite a government guarantee of health care for people over 65, it will remain a constitutional republic with a government guarantee of health care for people under 65. Obamacare will cost money the country doesn’t have, and that poses a serious fiscal problem. But it’s not as serious a fiscal problem as is posed by the existing programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which cover the people it costs most to cover. It’s not a problem so serious as to justify panic.

Yet panic has gripped the Republican rank-and-file since 2009—and instead of allaying panic, Republican leaders have aggravated and exploited it, to the point where the leaders are compelled to behave in ways they know to be irrational. In his speech to the “Bull Moose” convention of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt declared, “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” It’s a great line, but it’s not a mindset that leads to successful legislative outcomes.

Habit 3: Irrational animus.

 

Barack Obama was never likely to be popular with the Republican base. It's not just that he's black. He’s the first president in 76 years with a foreign parent—and unlike Hulda Hoover, Barack Obama Sr. never even naturalized. While Obama is not the first president to hold two degrees from elite universities—Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did as well—his Ivy predecessors at least disguised their education with a down-home style of speech. Join this cultural inheritance to liberal politics, and of course you have a formula for conflict. But effective parties make conflict work for them. Hate leads to rage, and rage makes you stupid. 

 

Republicans have convinced themselves both that President Obama is a revolutionary radical hell-bent upon destroying America as we know it and that he's so feckless and weak-willed that he'll always yield to pressure. It's that contradictory, angry assessment that has brought the GOP to a place where it must either abjectly surrender or force a national default. Calmer analysis would have achieved better results.

 

Recently, GOP lawmakers have been pointing fingers at Democrats for a supposed unwillingness to compromise.

 

Habit 4: Collapse of leadership.

The Republicans have always been the more disciplined of America’s two political parities, and today they still are. But whereas before, discipline used to flow from elected leadership down, today it flows from factional leadership up. An aide to Sen. Mike Lee told the National Review: “The minority of the minority is going to run things until our leadership gets some backbone.”

The Lee aide was specifically referring to the Republican minority in the Senate, but the language has broader implication. According to Robert Costa, a well-sourced reporter at NRO: “What we’re seeing is the collapse of institutional Republican power ... The outside groups don’t always move votes directly but they create an atmosphere of fear among the members [of Congress].” Large organizations are inherently vulnerable to capture by tightly organized militant tendencies. This is how a great political party was impelled to base a presidential campaign on the Ryan plan—a plan that has now replaced the 1983 manifesto of the British Labour Party as “the longest suicide note in history.” It’s the job of leadership to remember, in the words of Edmund Burke, “Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” That job is tragically going undone in today’s GOP.

Habit 5: Self-reinforcing media.

The actor Hugh Grant once bitterly characterized his PR team as “the people I pay to lie to me.” Politicians do not always need to tell the truth, but they always need to hear it. Yet hearing the truth has become harder and harder for Republicans. It takes a very unusual spin artist to remember that what he or she is saying isn’t actually true. Non-politicians say what they believe. Politicians sooner or later arrive at the point where they believe what they say. They have become prisoners of their own artificial reality, with no easy access to the larger truths outside.

This entombment in their own artificial reality was revealed to the entire TV-watching world in Karl Rove’s Fox News election night outburst against the Ohio 2012 ballot results. It was the same entombment that blinded Republicans to the most likely outcome of their no-compromise stance on Obamacare—and now again today to the most likely outcome of the government shutdown/debt ceiling fight they started.

Habit 6: Politics as war.

The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said. American politics has been businesslike too. Americans understand that the business of the nation is ultimately settled by a roomful of tired people negotiating their differences in the small hours of the morning: everybody gets something, nobody gets everything. It’s a grubby business, unavoidably, and most of the time, Americans understand that. They build statues to Martin Luther King. They elect Lyndon Johnson.

From time to time in American politics, differences arise that are too wide to negotiate. Slavery versus no slavery. Prohibition versus drink. Pro-life versus pro-choice. Professional politicians usually keep their distance from absolutist movements. As George Washington Plunkitt observed, “The politicians have got to stand together this way or there wouldn’t be any political parties in a short time.”

That line was meant as a joke, but it contains truth. Professional politicians are disagreement managers. Since 2009, however, the GOP has given unprecedented scope to those who for their own ideological, financial, or psychological reasons refuse to allow disagreements to be managed—and instead relentlessly push toward the kind of ultimate crises the country so nearly escaped in 2011 and teeters again on the verge of today.

Habit 7: Despair.

The great British conservative historian Hugh Trevor Roper scoffed at the Marxist claim that history runs in one direction only. “When radicals scream that victory is indubitably theirs, sensible conservatives knock them on the nose. It is only very feeble conservatives who take such words as true and run round crying for the last sacraments.” The great conservative poet T.S. Eliot explained that there are no lost causes, because there are no won causes. How many ways can one express that idea? So long as there is life, there is hope; everything old is new again; etc. etc. etc.

The trouble with these assurances, however, is that they contain an implicit moral that politics is very hard work. Free-market economics—so discredited in the 1940's—returned to favor in the 1970's because of tireless research by brilliant economists. The excesses of the 2000's have undone that success, and now it will take serious thinking, and some necessary reforms, to repair the damage. It’s a tempting shortcut to throw up one’s hands and say, “I’ve seen the best of it.

The future holds only darkness.” It’s especially tempting for a party that disproportionately draws its support from older voters. The fact is that for those of us over 50, the future offers us as individuals only decline leading to extinction. It’s natural to believe that what happens to us must happen to the world around us. Who wants to hear that things will become much, much better for humanity shortly after we ourselves shuffle off the scene? Yet of all mental errors, despair is the most dangerous to a democracy. The “politics of cultural despair” lead to authoritarianism and worse, as the German historian Fritz Stern warned in his history of that same title.

The man who has no hope will make the most irrevocable errors—and unnecessarily plunging the United States into the first national bankruptcy since the 1780's would be about as irrevocable as an error as history contains.

Any room for compromise for Boehner?

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SNK demands halt of Neo Geo X sales

By Brendan Sinclair

Original console maker says licensing agreement with Tommo was terminated last week, wants it pulled from stores

The company behind the original Neo Geo wants the console's retro revival off store shelves. SNK Playmore has announced that on October 2, its licensing agreement with Tommo Inc. for that company's Neo Geo X Gold console was terminated.

"Upon termination of the License and Distribution Agreement, SNK has demanded that Tommo Inc. immediately cease any and all manufacturing, distribution, marketing and promotion and selling of the Licensed Products," the company said.

The products in question include the Neo Geo X Gold, a handheld device that plays old Neo Geo games and can be plugged into a base for playing on a TV with reproduction Neo Geo arcade sticks.

SNK has demanded that the console, as well as the arcade stick accessories and a variety of game bundles, be pulled from store shelves. SNK Playmore said it is protecting its intellectual property, and "decisive measures will be taken" against the continued sale of now-unlicensed Neo Geo X products.

A Tommo representative had not responded to comment as of press time, but the console was still being offered on websites like Amazon and GameStop.

Shutdown Pain Grows Harder For GOP To Ignore

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Capital Hill Chaos

Woman shot and killed by Capitol police after chaotic chase from White House

 

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Cameras roll as authorities try to take control of the woman who first tried to breach White House security before heading to the Capitol.

30 Or 40 Birthers Are Driving Government Shutdown

By Sarah Rae Fruchtnicht, Wed, October 02, 2013

Republican Rep. Peter King (NY) said Tuesday that the government shutdown is being driven by “probably 30 or 40 Republicans” who believe President Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the U.S. and therefore is not in office legitimately.

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“There’s absolutely no reason for the government to be shut down,” King told MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews.

Matthews told King that he has heard members of the GOP make statements that they cannot accept the fact the Obama was elected.

“I’ve had members, they know who they are, they say — ‘I really can’t say with my lips that this man, Barack Obama, was legitimately elected president.’ They choke on that,” Matthews said. “How many are there in Congress on your side that represent that rejectionist front?”

“I would say there’s probably 30 or 40 who are like that,” King said. “As there were a number of Democrats who felt that way about George W. Bush, and going back to when you and I first met, Republicans who felt that way about Bill Clinton… This is a very dangerous aspect to our government.”

“What is?” Matthews asked.

“The fact that we have people who are willing to demonize the president of the United States because he’s from a different party," King said. "When I got elected in '92, I had Republicans elected with me who say they would never set foot in the White House for even a social event while Clinton was president … and now, obviously, with President Obama, it’s definitely there."

King is part of a growing contingency of Republicans who are against the shutdown and want an immediate resolution.

GOP congressmen Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa; Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo.; and Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., have openly questioned the president’s birth certificate, according to ThinkProgress.

House Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., even told a conservative radio host that he believes Congress should “revisit” the president’s “validity.”

King has considered a 2016 presidential run as a “cure” to the Tea Party’s ascendency into the GOP.

The Radical Republican Attempt To Defund The Affordable Health Care Act

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Federal Government Shuts Down

Last-minute tactic fails, government shuts down

By Suzy Khimm and Benjy Sarlin

12:00 AM on 10/01/2013

 

The federal government is closed.

After months, weeks and then a frantic day of brinksmanship on Capitol Hill, Congress failed to pass a bill to fund the government Monday night, shutting it down for the first time in 17 years.

At the heart of the debate was The Affordable Health Care Act, a law that survived Republicans taking control of the House, a presidential election and a Supreme Court challenge. Attaching it to a deal to fund the government was the Republican Party’s last chance to block its rollout–which begins Tuesday.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rejected all attempts to touch the law and President Barack Obama threatened a veto.

The law will still roll out on schedule, despite the shutdown, and millions of Americans without health insurance will be able to begin signing up for coverage online.

The question for the rest of the government is: what’s next?

Late Monday night, the Office of Management and Budget ordered heads of executive departments and agencies to “execute plans for an orderly shutdown.”

Here’s where things stand: Boehner tried to force negotiations into a formal committee process Monday night. But Reid balked at the idea.  “Republicans are still playing games,” said Reid on the Senate floor. “This is all a subterfuge to satisfy the Tea Party-driven Republicans.”

“We will not go to conference with a gun to our head,” Harry Reid said.

Reid said he would be willing to send senators to conference to work on a solution for funding the government through the rest of the fiscal year, once the immediate threat of a shutdown was removed.

It’s also an abrupt about-face by Republicans who have spent months refusing Democratic offers to hold a conference and work out a budget before October 1.

“The right thing to do was to go to conference any time in that last six months, as we asked 18 times but were told no by the same people who are now sitting on the other side of the aisle saying we want to shut the government down,” Patty Murray said on the floor.

In the House, Boehner wrestled with a conference pressuring him from the right and the left.

House moderates were pressuring their conference to pass the Senate’s “clean” stopgap budget, but Boehner ultimately heeded the calls by the conservative flank to rule out such a measure.

Boehner lost a dozen votes on his final bill, when moderates peeled off.

Other Republicans tried for a  last-ditch solution to stop a shutdown, including Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul who both floated the idea of a one- or two-week delay.

Sen. John McCain predicted Republicans would ultimately need to fold–and should just do it.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - The Beginning

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt "The Beginning" provides exclusive information about the creative process behind the game.

Key developers are inviting you on a journey into Geralt's world, where you'll fall in love with the breathtaking vistas and experience the atmosphere that helped us shape some of the locations in the game.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Debut Gameplay Trailer

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Debut Gameplay gives you an exclusive sneak peek into the vast and gritty world of Geralt of Rivia, the witcher. Experience a realm where morality is not a simple choice between good and evil and where every decision ripples through the one hundred hours of gameplay CD Projekt RED has hand-crafted to meet the needs of the RPG fan.

 

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt features:

- Vast, living, open world full of meticulously created quests and Points of Interest, 35 times bigger than the one in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

- Genre-defining story set in a universe created by the acclaimed writer Andrzej Sapkowski

- Redesigned combat mechanic that merges a fluid and highly responsive skirmish system with the precision of a dedicated fighting game

And many, many more...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will premiere on Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC in 2014.

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Killing Monsters Cinematic Trailer

'Left Behind' video game creator faces U.S. SEC fraud charges

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON
Wed Sep 25, 2013 3:27 P.M. EDT


(Reuters) - The creator of a video game based on the popular Christian "Left Behind" novel series and his friend have been charged with scheming to inflate the company's revenue by nearly 1,300 percent, U.S. regulators announced Wednesday.

Left Behind Games Inc Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officer Troy Lyndon issued nearly 2 billion shares to his friend Ronald Zaucha, purportedly as compensation for consulting services, the Securities and Exchange Commission's complaint alleges.

The real reason for issuing the stock was so Zaucha could sell millions of unregistered shares in the marketplace and then kick back the proceeds and use other "sham purchases" to help bolster the struggling company's books, the SEC said.

The SEC's lawsuit was filed late on Tuesday in a federal court in Hawaii, where Lyndon and Zaucha both reside. The SEC suspended the company's stock Wednesday.

The complaint charges both men with fraud, and the SEC said its probe is continuing.

The charges come roughly two weeks after the company announced in an SEC filing that its public accountant Malone Bailey had resigned after previously expressing "substantial doubt" about the company's ability to continue.

Last year, in March 2012, Lyndon filed a voluntary petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the SEC said.
Lyndon, of Honolulu, said he only learned of the charges early Wednesday morning after a press inquiry from Reuters and that he believes the government is discriminating against him.

"I'm just a video game guy. If any violation occurred, it would never have been intentional - and certainly, never fraudulent. My attorney told me that any person that earned shares could use them for any purpose," he said.

"For more than two years, I've asked SEC to explain how and if I have violated any rule, so that I could self-report it. As I see it, the government has systematically and intentionally conspired to dismantle Left Behind Games and the facts are both true and hard to believe - worthy of a Ron Howard film or John Grisham novel."

A more detailed statement from Lyndon can be found at www.troylyndon.com/govt

Efforts to reach Zaucha were unsuccessful.

According to the SEC's allegations, Lyndon and Zaucha made a "last ditch" effort to save the struggling company in 2009.

After issuing 1.7 billion shares in stock, the SEC said Zaucha sold most of it for $4.6 million, roughly $3.3 million of which was later kicked back to the company in a variety of ways.

One such example, the SEC said, was when in December 2010 Zaucha formed a company and used the stock sale proceeds to buy $1.38 million in obsolete Left Behind Games inventory.

Zaucha's company then gave most of the products away to churches and religious groups, while Left Behind went on to recognize the transaction as revenue.

The SEC also said Zaucha never truly performed any real consulting services to the company, and he was also allowed to keep more than $1 million of the stock sale proceeds that he used for personal expenses, including buying property in California and Hawaii.

According to his online biography, Lyndon was the "original team lead developer" of the first 3D versions of the John Madden Football video game, among others.

Reuters could not immediately independently verify those details.

He started working on development of religious video games in 2002, and took Left Behind Games public in 2006, he says.

"Although government regulations have resulted in the loss of nearly 50 percent of America's public companies over the past 15 years, Left Behind Games continues to operate and has products in more than 500 retail locations throughout the USA," he wrote on his website.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; editing by Andrew Hay)

Lab Tests on French Wines Find Pesticide Residue in Every Bottle

By News Desk | September 30, 2013

Laboratory tests on 92 wines by a French consumer group found traces of pesticides, insecticides and/or fungicides in virtually every bottle. Even wines made from organic grapes had pesticide traces, although the levels were much lower.

The levels were below the European Union’s maximum residue limits, according to the group, UFC-Que Choisir. However, there are no EU toxicity limits for bottled wine, only for wine grapes before fermentation.

Bloomberg reported on Sept. 25 that the group tested wines from various regions across France, ranging from a $2.20 bottle of generic red to a $20.25 bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Wine producers only use 3.7 percent of France’s farmland but account for 20 percent of the country’s pesticide use, UFC-Que Choisir noted.

“By drinking a glass of wine, you have every chance of unknowingly swallowing a few micrograms of these pesticide residues,” UFC-Que Choisir wrote. “No wine today escapes the pollution by plant-protection products applied to the vines.”

The lab tests even found residues of an insecticide and a fungicide not allowed in the EU, the group said. Wines produced from grapes from “conventional” agriculture on average contained four pesticides, mainly fungicides, while for wine from organic grapes residues mostly consisted of one to two pesticides.

The highest pesticide count was found in a bottle of 2010 Bordeaux, with 14 chemicals detected, followed by 2012 Bordeaux with traces of 13 products, the group reported.

UFC-Que Choisir indicated that climate has a great effect on whether, and to what degree, French wine grapes suffer from diseases and bug infestations.

“Weather conditions, particularly rainfall, have a direct impact on diseases of vines and attacks by parasites,” they wrote. “The warm and dry weather of Provence and the Rhone valley partly explains why the wines from these regions are significantly less loaded with pesticides than their cousins from Champagne and particularly Bordeaux.”

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