University police say the vehicle is meant to be used for “large-scale emergency situations,” but will primarily be used to carry university police around campus and to provide a police “presence” on football game days, the Ohio State University Lantern reports.
The gun turret will be disabled apparently. Well, that’s a relief – wouldn’t want to freak out students or anything.
Previous Dish on police militarization here, here, here, and here.
Ryan Kearney finds little mention of it in the right-wing press:
[T]he shutdown barely registers on the nation’s top conservative websites. The Weekly Standard is leading with a story about first lady Michelle Obama’s apparently insidious campaign to get Americans to drink more water, The National Review has a piece about how Obama’s agenda is “Transforming America,” and although The Daily Caller’s lead story, “Shutdown Party for Big Democrats,” claims to be on topic, it’s actually about a fundraiser Hillary Clinton hosted Monday night for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. It seems the editors of these websites have read thepolls, too, and would just as soon downplay, or outright ignore, that our government is grinding to a halt—lest the GOP be rightly blamed.
Joshua Keating has begun “a regular feature in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries.” The inaugural dispatch covers the lead-up to the shutdown:
The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity. Activity in the legislature ground to a halt last week for a full day as Cruz insisted on performing a time-honored American demonstration of stamina and self-denial, which involved speaking for 21 hours, quoting liberally from science fiction films and children’s books. The gesture drew wide media attention, though its political purpose was unclear to outsiders.
Better still, in my view, is this classic piece by Henry Fairlie way back in 1980:
“Just as Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country’s institutions. If one of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man to bypass the institutions he ought to defend.”
The American conservative is being revealed right now as the purest form of political vandalism known in the Western world. It is emphatically not conservative. Conservatives try to reserve constitutional order; today’s Republicans seek to destroy all such restraints and any form of moderation.
Most Americans know very little about the Sikh religion:
The study, titled “Turban Myths,” found that 70 percent of Americans misidentify turban-wearers, with 48 percent identifying men in turbans as Muslim despite the fact that most turbaned men in the U.S. are actually Sikh. More than one-third of Americans associate turban wearers with Osama bin Laden, more than with other named Muslim or Sikh alternatives and more than with no one in particular. And at least one in five people surveyed said that they would become angry or apprehensive if they encountered a stranger wearing a turban.
Although Sikhs have lived in the U.S. since the 19th century, the study also found that Americans still know relatively little about the community. According to the survey, 70 percent of Americans cannot identify a Sikh, and 79 percent cannot identify India as the religion’s country of origin. In fact, nearly half of Americans believe that Sikhism is actually a sect of Islam.
Despite conservative efforts to discourage Americans (particularly young and health Americans) from buying health insurance under Obamacare, Gallup finds that about two-thirds of the uninsured say they will comply rather than doing without insurance and also risking fines. Just under half of the uninsured say they plan to use the exchanges. But an astonishing 51% of the uninsured are “not at all familiar” with the exchanges, and another 21% are “not too familiar.” Those numbers are going to change quickly, and so, too, will the numbers of those planning to use the exchanges (and take advantage of the tax subsidies available to those with incomes under 400% of the poverty line), and those understanding their lives just got better.
If you’re an insurance shopper, buying coverage Tuesday doesn’t make a ton of sense. Your policy won’t start until January, but you will have to pay your first month’s premium right away. There’s no advantage to being first in line to sign up for health coverage.
The Congressional Budget Office expects 7 million people to enroll in the new marketplaces this year. There’s not going to be a lot more that we know Oct. 2 about whether the White House can hit than goal, beyond what we know this very moment.
It’s even worse for Jesse’s girls. For more Breaking Bad Internet goodness, check out this ingenious mashup of the series with The Walking Dead. And find out what finally becomes of Huell. Meanwhile, a reader asks:
How did you feel about the final run of Breaking Bad? I know you’re a fan. I can’t be the only one to be wondering. Perhaps trivial considering everything else that’s going up, but we would love to know.
It felt calming to me. I confess that I found it close to impossible to want Walt to face his true-come-uppance. I wanted that ricin to be used the way it was; I wanted Jesse to escape the way he did. For me, Flynn is the tragic figure and Skyler the true complicated, compromised heroine of it all. As for Hank? He lost me in his fanaticism toward the end. And Marie? May she live in her forever purple.
But like all great dramas, this one defied easy judgment. It remains one ghastly, murderous, prideful, greedy, needful mess.
I can think of only two words to express my final feelings: Kyrie Eleison.
[I]f the base has been told true commitment should lead to actual legislative victory (and that this might be the “last chance” to stop Obamacare), then merely threatening a shutdown, or letting one happen for a few days and then cutting a deal, is as likely to disillusion conservative voters heading in to 2014 as it is to mobilize them. And if the G.O.P. doesn’t want to disillusion them, then it doesn’t have an obvious way to back off or quickly make a deal – in which case the party is risking a real debacle with non-base voters, who might forgive a brief shutdown but probably won’t forgive Republicans if it turns into a lurching political and economic crisis.
Waldman predicts that, no matter how long the shutdown lasts, that the base will blame failure on Republicans giving up too soon:
[T]he idea that conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed, extends beyond ideology to its tactical extension, eternal and maximal opposition to Barack Obama and everything he wants to do. Fighting Obama is a strategy that can never fail. If failure happens, it can only be because we didn’t fight him hard enough.
Once this is all over, they’ll be telling everyone the same old story. If only the party had been stronger, if only Boehner had stood firm, if only we had kept the government closed for another week or another month, everyone would have seen we were right, Obama would have been crippled for the remainder of his term, we would have won a smashing victory in the 2014 mid-term elections, and the blow that led to Obamacare’s inevitable death would have been struck. But we were betrayed by Boehner and the other cowards and quislings.
Kate Pickert notes that the “insurance exchange web sites scheduled to launch this morning were riddled with glitches, rendering many unusable”:
The exchanges, or marketplaces, are where millions of uninsured Americans are expected to sign up for new health insurance plans and access federal subsidies to make coverage more affordable. An open enrollment period lasts until March 31, 2014, and the earliest new coverage can begin is Jan. 1, 2014, so there is time correct web site snafus. But widespread glitches have complicated the Obama Administration’s efforts to heavily promote the law the same day Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act led to a shut down of other parts of the federal government.
Yglesias expects the shutdown to decrease reporting on these problems:
The reality is that the first few days are likely to be rough and then the experience will improve. Absent a government shutdown, though, the rough first few days would be a dominant political story and cover everyone’s perception. With eyes glued on the shutdown this week, HHS will have the chance to do fixes and anyone who can’t log on today will just come back next week.
Ezra agrees that the shutdown “gives the administration, as well as the states, a bit more breathing room to find and fix bugs in the early days without seeing the law declared a failure.” But:
The downside for the law is that less focus on Obamacare means fewer people hearing that the insurance marketplaces have gone live, and thus fewer people knowing they should go and sign up for coverage. The Obama administration, some of the states, and a consortium of outside actors all have plans to promote the law through paid media in the coming weeks and months, but the launch could’ve earned them a lot of valuable free media.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t costs to Republican shenanigans. A tea party-led shutdown would reinforce just about every reason why the public doesn’t like the Republican Party—that they’re extreme, unconcerned with real problems, and unwilling to compromise. That may not concern representatives running for reelection in safe districts, but it could matter in the Senate, where the GOP needs to beat Democratic incumbents, not just defend safe seats. The GOP’s image problem will make life more difficult for its eventual 2016 nominee. And with 28 percent of the time between Obama’s reelection and the 2016 Iowa caucuses now in the rearview mirror, the GOP can’t afford to reinforce and deepen its existing problems.
The bottom line is this: The shutdown will probably not be a good thing for the GOP, and there’s a good chance Republicans won’t achieve their intended goal of limiting Obamacare’s reach. But at the same time, a lot of the prophecies of doom for Republicans are heavily overwrought. Unless things get too far out of control, the predictions of heavy GOP losses from a shutdown are likely overstated.
The Dish 