KalashnikovMarine wrote:

I have only one problem with the shut down of the Federal government of these United States. Those useless feths in Congress are still getting paid. Cut them off, kick'em on the street, lock up the capitol building and let's call it a year people.

sebster wrote:Who's Unicron?

Jihadin wrote:Someone remind me again why I spent 23 years, last year was involuntary, in uniform.

 Jihadin wrote:
I did it for the Bennies, 1st and the 15th pay period, more time off then from civilian work force, free pay to countries, prestige, adventures, and like I said Bennies to name a few.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
Why do we not have a "Reset with new players in Congress Button"?

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
That would be cool. "Pass a functioning, balanced budget that reduces the debt or you're all fired"

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
That would be cool. "Pass a functioning, balanced budget that reduces the debt or you're all fired"

Shutdown coverage fails Americans

U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)

And holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.

But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.

What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.

In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices, who is risking serious damage to the nation, whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.

Instead journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.

One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of plague-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican Party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."

But as Mann explained in an interview last year, "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."

Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.

Media critics — and members of the public — have long decried this kind of he-said-she-said reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "view from nowhere."

Blaming everyone — Congress, both sides, Washington — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.

But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.

So, no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.

Shutdown coverage fails Americans

 Jihadin wrote:
Side note. Dangit Az you have wanting me to look for the Battletech cartoons now....since I already own all of Robotech.

 Andrew1975 wrote:
The National Debt, it will eat us all if its not dealt with, but the Decepticons and Autobots are to busy fighting amongst each other to deal with it.

This would however make Boehner Galvatron.

America, we are told, is in the grim midst of an unrivaled constitutional crisis that is being perpetrated in anger by “racist,” “bomb-throwing” “anarchists” whose “endgame” and ultimate fantasy is the shutting down of government — not, of course, because the co-equal branches of the American polity cannot come to a budget agreement, but because a vocal “extreme” minority, that has magically managed to transmute itself into a majority of the House and 46 percent of the Senate, does not believe in having a government at all.

E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post’s resident worrywart, yesterday assured his concerned readers that Washington has shut down because “right-wing extremists” who do not accept the president’s “legitimacy” have taken an axe to America’s “normal, well-functioning, constitutional system,” and swung it, too, against “anyone who accepts majority rule and constitutional constraints.” Among his ideological bedfellows, this is a popular complaint.

Still, popular or not, the abject folly of making “majority rule” arguments in a system of equally ranked branches should be self-evident. This truly is painfully simple: Republicans are the majority in the House, and the House’s assent is necessary to a legal budget. Indeed, if any of the players in the budgetary game is superior, it is the House. Not only is it wholly wrong to pretend that the House is expected to acquiesce to the fiscal and legislative demands of the president simply because he won the last election, but it is dangerous — just one more step on the road to the imperial polity that the American system of separated powers was contrived to prevent.

If one were being charitable, one might inquire as to whether Dionne and his acolytes are confused about where in the world they are. Certainly, in Britain’s parliament the contents of the winning party’s manifesto are protected from the dissent of the upper chamber. But in America’s system of separated powers, no such rule or convention obtains. Mandates are afforded to each branch, and each may do as it wishes — preferably without being maligned as “arsonists” or accused of ushering in an unprecedented breakdown in order.

As one might expect, it is not just the structural questions that Dionne and his cohorts get so spectacularly askew, but also the congressional history — and, thus, the crucial context of what happened yesterday. I acknowledge that pretending the emergence of a spending gap is indicative of the end times is an enormously profitable tactic for politicians to deploy. But there is no reason for an esteemed journalist to so supinely parrot the lie. Reviewing Dylan Matthews’s comprehensive list of the other 17 federal shutdowns in the last 40 years, one realizes rather quickly that it is not the appearance of a government shutdown that is remarkable, but the long absence of one. That shadowy figure on the horizon? Not so much death as the old friend that we had forgotten we knew.

The opportunity for convenient pretense has apparently proven too tempting for some. Salon’s Joan Walsh, one of the least lettered among our political columnists, made the queasily predictable argument on Tuesday that the shutdown was really to do with race. “That this crisis hit under our first black president, over ‘Obamacare,’ Walsh screeched, “isn’t an accident.” Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush, all of whom presided over fractious shutdowns, might find this insinuation rather perplexing. In the last 40 years, only President George W. Bush was spared such a conflict.

The frequency with which America has previously reached this point betrays another inconvenient truth: the willingness to shut down the federal Leviathan is by no means limited to the advocates of small government. As my colleague Andrew Stiles notes today, during the supposedly bipartisan wonder years of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill — which are typically rolled out by revisionists to demonstrate what can happen if we all just “work together” — the government shut down no fewer than eight times, mostly at O’Neill’s insistence. Likewise, during Bill Clinton’s eight years in office, which are fondly remembered as a time of solid economic growth and bipartisan achievement, the government was sent home twice — on both occasions after Clinton rejected the budget.

Overall, the statistics might surprise: Of the 17 shutdowns in America’s history, Democrats controlled the House during 15 and had charge of both chambers during eight. Five shutdowns happened under unified government! This makes sense. Government shutdowns are caused by legitimate and welcome disagreement between equal branches. They are certainly more likely to happen in divided government, but it is not a prerequisite.

What stands out here is not the shutdown itself, but the president and Harry Reid’s public refusal even to engage with Republicans. As Matthews documents, most budget gaps are resolved by the participants’ compromising. The quaint notion that there is no obligation to come to a negotiated agreement because one branch of government “won” would be almost certainly regarded as somewhat odd not only by the architects of America’s constitutional order but by the major players in the previous few decades. Eleven shutdowns ended with a deal, five were resolved with an agreement temporarily to fund the government while debate continued, and one ended with Congress overriding a presidential veto. Stand firm if you want, Mr. President, but the history is against you here.

 Ahtman wrote:
The electorate.

What stands out here is not the shutdown itself, but the president and Harry Reid’s public refusal even to engage with Republicans.

 whembly wrote:

That this is the first shutdown in which one side -- Reid/Obama -- has simply refused to negotiate at all.

 Manchu wrote:

Shutdown coverage fails Americans

 sebster wrote:

Who's Unicron?
.

 reds8n wrote:
Lot of energon deposits in Alaska.

 whembly wrote:
That this is the first shutdown in which one side -- Reid/Obama -- has simply refused to negotiate at all.

 whembly wrote:

I'm honestly curious... which case was that?

 Jihadin wrote:
Why do we not have a "Reset with new players in Congress Button"?

 Jihadin wrote:
Why do we not have a "Reset with new players in Congress Button"?

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 whembly wrote:

I'm honestly curious... which case was that?

Perry v. United States. (No, it didn't deal specifically with the debt ceiling or the authority of the president. What it did deal with was the Government failing to pay it's bills).

Under the 14th Amendment the US cannot default on it's debts. As the President is ultimately, charged with enforcing the laws, to uphold that one, he could issue a PO to the effect that the Treasury (as head of the executive branch, the Treasury broadly falls under his authority) could borrow enough money to pay the governments outstanding obligations. He just can't write any 'new' spending.

We'll see how far this goes at debt ceiling time. I just like how the party that takes oaths to uphold the constitution conveniently forgets the part of the 14th Amendment that requires them to pay the bills and honor all debts. It's only been around since the 1880's.... Perry v. US in 1935 resulted in case law that has stood since that the payment of public debt "went beyond the congressional power." Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes summed it up well, "To say that the Congress may withdraw or ignore that pledge is to assume that the Constitution contemplates a vain promise; a pledge having no other sanction than the pleasure and convenience of the pledgor."

The House can play chicken with the Supreme Court if they want to....but I think they would be in danger of handing power over to the Executive branch to increase the debt ceiling if there's a hold-up. The House technically has the power to start all budget bills but the Constitution requires public debt be serviced and it will happen with or without the rabid yahoos running the show now.

 Peregrine wrote:

 whembly wrote:
That this is the first shutdown in which one side -- Reid/Obama -- has simply refused to negotiate at all.

You would have a point except for two problems:

1) The "negotiation" isn't about the budget. We aren't talking about two different budget proposals with one side refusing to compromise on their proposal. The republicans are just holding the budget hostage to get concessions on an unrelated issue. If you give in to those demands you reward that strategy and you can guarantee that the next financial issue is going to be another hostage crisis.

2) The republican party has shown no willingness to negotiate in good faith. When the democrats do compromise the republicans immediately make new demands and insist on more compromising, until the end result is far from the middle ground between the two sides. And no, this isn't superior negotiating skill, it's entirely because of the republican party's willingness (and even eagerness) to hold the country hostage and a general lack of confidence that they won't actually carry out their threats to trash the country if their demands aren't met.

You know, you might have a point if the Senate had actually done anything to the bills the House sent to them. But no, they simply utterly rejected it and sent it back. The House kept changing what they were bringing to the table but the Senate refused all of it without altering anything themselves.

And no, the Country is not being held hostage. Only the nonessential parts of the Government are being held hostage. The rest of the country is not majorly effected by a shutdown, certainly not more than the fact the Government hasn't passed a budget in forever effects them.