The [Republican] Government Shutdown

[A Black Falcon]

I won't rewrite my post about how stupid the Republicans are acting and how the extremists who run the party now are anti-democratic, but yeah, those things are true. It really is fantastic that the Democrats are not caving this time, and as time progresses, the Republicans have edged closer and closer to surrender. Now they're talking about what they want, but they've backed down from "we must kill health care reform"; now they're just going back to bad old Republican ideas about shrinking government, cutting taxes, etc. Their demands are still quite unreasonable, though, and Obama and Harry Reid have no reason to give in now. And indeed, they aren't. The Republicans will need to give up a lot more of what they want before they get anywhere, for sure. And that's good -- we cannot allow them to destroy the government, or the government's ability to function, just because of their ideological crusade against the concept of governance (unless it's THEIR medicare/social security in question, that they want!).

Also, it's good that some of the Senate Republicans, who are not nearly as affected by the gerrymandering problem (once again, gerrymandering leads to house districts being more polarized because most members have no threat from the other party -- it's a very, very serious problem in our government right now), aren't quite as crazy as the House, or Ted Cruz, are. They're still wrong, but not completely out of their minds extreme...