Edgy City

++A women from Stamford, Connecticut, with a one year old child in her SUV tried to ram the White House and the Capital Police chased her to the House where she was gunned down and the girl rescued. No one knows what this was about.

++But it set the scene for the continued posing on the shutdown. Eric Cantor's memo this morning was that the House GOP caucus was in an unprecedented situation because President Obama was not going to negotiate with them. However, he urged the Caucus to remain united.

++Perhaps the most bizarre situation was that Denny Hastert renounced the Hastert Rule, which this blog has written about often. He said it was not a hard and fast rule and doesn't apply all the time. Was this a message that Boehner would have a way out.

++Speaker Boehner in conversations with the House Caucus has said he will not allow a default on the national debt and he would allow a clean debt ceiling bill without conditions. But then he said he expected concessions. From whom? It wasn't clear.

++The White House outlined why President Obama feels so strongly about not negotiating on the debt ceiling. He learned his lesson from last time and believes that it fundamentally changes the relationship between the legislative and the executive. He is concerned that after elections this would be used in the future to negate a President's priorities.

++Part of the riddle why he will not raise it unilaterally has been said. The White House believes that U.S. Treasuries sold at that time would exist in a legal cloud and this would ,in effect, act like we did default.

++In Maryland, President Obama repeated that he would not negotiate to re-open the government nor to raise the debt ceiling. He said the GOP would not get a "goody bag" for holding the country ransomed.

++Much has been made about the hard-core tea baggers not willing to compromise. Many websites point to their total invulnerability in elections. Some were elected in districts where Obama got less than 30% of the vote and the district is over 80% white.

++A more thoughtful analysis of where the GOP's attitudes are is in the latest Democracy Corps analysis of the segments of the GOP conducted through focus groups. It is a group scared and discouraged by the demographic fate before them and an overwhelming feeling that establishment Republicans are powerless to stop the trend.