++Yes,the President did hold tough and the GOP got nothing--except what was already in the ACA law already about income verification.
++The initial cost of the shutdown was $24 billion for a stunt, the most expensive political charade in history. It will lower our GDP by .6%.
++While we escaped financial death this time,we all got wounded. Three contributors from the American Conservative--Rod Dreher,Josh Barro, and Daniel Larison launched attacks on the GOP and the TeaParty for the shutdown. Dreher in his excellent "Strangelove Republicans" hit upon something that was diving my anxiety throughout the shutdown. I lost two different retirement possibilities under W's Administration and have only begun to get above water. A default would have wiped me out and doomed any prospect that my wife and I could ever retire. Dreher points this out about millions of Americans and Barro says succinctly that the Republicans are "dangerously incompetent" and , as I noted this past week, forfeited their claim to governance.
++Charlie Cook switched 14 races from Republican to leaning Democratic because of the shutdown. In today's National Journal,Cook went further into questioning the GOP's strategy. He asked a psychiatrist what accounts for the GOP doubling down on what is obviously untrue. He answer he got was this was known as"hysterical delusional affirmation" or "delusional synergy". Writers such as David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have tagged this "epistemic closure", the inability of conservatives to deal with contradictory evidence that refutes their ideological claims. Cook's psychiatrist says this syndrome "entails the suspension of logical intellectual processes with a selective consideration of only confirmatory input."
++While the Obamacare roll out for the uninsured has been a technological mess, Democracy Corps has found that a majority of Americans know believe you should just fix it and not repeal it or even defund it.
++Shivers went down my spine when I realized that the budget conference between the Senate and the House meant debates over the Ryan budget. However,there were good signs. Harry Reid blasted the idea of social security cuts for increased defense spending and appointed Bernie Sanders to the Senate group of negotiators. By this morning,the budget team of both the House and the Senate said that there would be no Grand Bargain and that they were aiming at building confidence measures rather than going for an over-arching long-term fix to the debt.
++On Monday,New Jersey becomes the 14th state to recognize same-sex marriage.
++In Virginia, usually the Governorship is on by the party not the Presidents. This year could be historic. T-Mac has been winning all the polls over the Cooch since July and got three more polls this week. However, the Cooch has managed to conduct a voter purge ,which the Federal Court upheld today,all the way until the election.
++Real bettors are now waging that the Democrats will win the House. I'll wait until the dust dies down.
++Paul Krugman, who actually knows more than I do about the economy,agrees with me that without the shutdown and the January obstruction,the economy would show a 6% unemployment based on macroeconomics. If you added anything positive like the Jobs Bill,we would be back at normal. Remember that in the months ahead. All of this slowness in the recovery is entirely politically made.
++The GOP has a new spin that even Karl Rove is circulating. President Obama wanted this shutdown and he and Valerie Jarrett plotted the strategy to make Republicans look bad. Rove says this is to split the GOP and make the Party weak for 2014. Amazing! Then how does Rove explain the letter signed by 80 tea baggers to Boehner demanding a shutdown over Obamacare.
++The Teabaggers now vow to block Immigration Reform because this is another Obama plot to annihilate the GOP.
++While Senator Cruz would not rule out another shutdown, Mitch McConnell said that in no way is this going to happen and that the debt ceiling would not be held up. But that didn't work out last time.
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