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A Shutdown Outbreak?

The USDA reported last night that 278 people have fallen ill with salmonella, “likely” due to eating chicken from a California-based poultry firm. Maryn McKenna describes the outbreak as “the exact situation that CDC and other about-to-be-furloughed federal personnel warned about last week”:

As a reminder, a CDC staffer told me at the time: “I know that we will not be conducting multi-state outbreak investigations. States may continue to find outbreaks, but we won’t be doing the cross-state consultation and laboratory work to link outbreaks that might cross state borders.” That means that the lab work and molecular detection that can link far-apart cases and define the size and seriousness of outbreaks are not happening. At the CDC, which operates the national foodborne-detection services FoodNet and PulseNet, scientists couldn’t work on this if they wanted to; they have been locked out of their offices, lab and emails. (At a conference I attended last week, 10 percent of the speakers did not show up because they were CDC personnel and risked being fired if they traveled even voluntarily.)

While the USDA has yet to link the outbreak to a “specific production period,” Robert Gonzales notes that the shutdown has hampered the CDC’s ability to respond to such threats:

Foster Farms’ food safety chief Robert O’Connor insists that the USDA’s food inspection process “has not been affected by the recent government shutdown.” But according to the Associated Press, the CDC, which helps monitor multi-state outbreaks of food poisoning, “was working with a barebones staff because of the federal government shutdown, with all but two of the 80 staffers that normally analyze foodborne pathogens furloughed.” While the AP reports “it was not immediately clear whether the shortage affected the response to the Salmonella outbreak,” shutdown memos issued last week by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA both indicated staff relating to food inspection would be furloughed, further indicating that the government was ill-prepared to prevent and respond to a food-borne outbreak.

The Brittle Certainty Of Fundamentalism

Dreher reflects on it:

Fundamentalists don’t compromise. That is their strength. But it’s also their weakness. I went over a book the other day written by a theologically stout Evangelical (which is not the same thing as a fundamentalist). The book was about approaching culture. I found it hard to take, even though I found myself agreeing with the author on most general points. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was that irritated me so much about the book. What finally became clear to me was that it wasn’t so much the opinions the author held as it was the iron grip with which the author held them. It was as if nuance, irony, and complexity were the enemies of clear thought and pure faith. The worldview expressed in this book was pretty conservative, and as I said, I agree with much of it. But it was airless and highly ideological.

I have been critical of the fact that I didn’t have any doctrinal rigor in my religious education as a young person, and I am allergic to Andrew’s idea that just about any attempt to draw or hold to doctrinal lines makes one into a quasi-fundamentalist (“Christianist”). But I tell you, if I had been raised as a fundamentalist or an Evangelical who was taught to see the world through a narrow and severe idea of truth, I wonder if I would be a Christian today. It’s impossible to say. These things always are. Raise a kid with tap-watery religion, and don’t be surprised if he leaves it. Raise a kid with a religion as hard and cold as ice, and don’t be surprised if he leaves it. This is hard!

I do not believe that adherence to doctrinal lines makes one a Christianist. A Christianist, like an Islamist, cannot rest until his view of the world is enforced by law on others through political action. A Christian can be a rigid doctrinal enforcer in his own faith community without being a Christianist. Let me give Rod an example of a doctrinal line I would not cross: the Incarnation. Or, in fact, the entire Nicene Creed, which I recite at Mass with conviction. But I have no desire at all to impose that view of the meaning of the universe on anyone else whatsoever – let alone backed by the coercion of the state. That is where I differ from Christianists.

Where I differ from doctrinal fundamentalists is where the Pope differs. To wit:

If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt.

That means not making things like homosexuality and contraception the focus of our faith – turning matters of faith and morals into inviolable doctrine – but insisting on the very core truths and accepting mystery about so much else. In important things, unity; in doubtful things, humility; in all things, charity. But I take Rod’s point about upbringing – and its sometimes counter-intuitive effects. My elementary school – Our Lady and Saint Peter’s – was a wonderful Vatican II Catholic place of learning.

I discovered my faith as a joyful, wondrous, mysterious thing. When it came time for me to go to what Americans call high school, I was enrolled for a while at a Catholic Grammar school, until my parents took me for a visit. Its dourness, brutality, darkness and rigidity made me and my parents shudder and they mercifully placed me at a Protestant high school. I think I probably owe my faith to that decision. If I had been exposed more fully to the dark side of the Catholic church and its institutions – and you only have to look at the hideous history of the church in Ireland for how dark it truly was – then I almost certainly would have rebelled completely. I have authority issues, as some readers may have noticed.

Fighting for my faith in an alien space and climate made me own it more deeply – which is, perhaps, another reason why I have never really believed that enforcing religious beliefs in law helps religion at all. It is more likely to kill it.

Reality Check, Ctd

Various polls on the shutdown find that American disapproval is highest for Congressional Republicans. Kilgore warns against over-interpreting these numbers:

[T]he big differentiator is that self-identified Democrats approve of Obama’s handling of the budget fight by a 77/21 margin, while self-identified GOPers approve of their congressional party’s positioning by a mere 52/45 margin. … What we know beyond the numbers is that despite John Boehner’s forced march towards Ted Cruz’s position on the government shutdown and Obamacare, quite a few conservative opinion-leaders don’t think GOPers have gone far enough. In particular, the Senate Conservative Fund and Heritage Action—along with RedState’s Erick Erickson—have been loudly unhappy with Boehner’s “watering down” of the bedrock “defund Obamacare” position on the continuing resolution.

So it’s entirely possible that a portion of the “blame gap” is represented by conservatives who wouldn’t side with Obama or congressional Democrats on the appropriations or debt limit issues if pigs learned to fly—just as a sizable portion of the people claimed by Republicans as “repeal Obamacare” fans actually favor a single payer system and wouldn’t back GOPers on health care issues if their lives depended on it.

Enten remains focused on the economy:

[T]he political arguments over the shutdown and debt ceiling fight may not matter that much at all.

As University of North Carolina political scientist Jim Stimson found (via Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post), it’s consumer sentiment that tends to have the greatest impact on approval ratings and hence elections.

After the last go-round on the debt ceiling, the economy had started to pick up by the end of October 2011, and Obama’s approval rating followed. But the lesson for Democrats who may be thinking smugly that the Republicans will take the biggest hit for the federal shutdown and government default angst is that if the economy goes south as a result, then it’ll likely be the Democratic president who sustains the most damage.

How Facebook Makes You Feel

A recent study suggests that spending time on the social networking site may darken your outlook:

[P]articipants initially completed a set of questionnaires, including one measuring their overall satisfaction with life. Following this, participants were sent text messages 5 times a day for two weeks. For each text, participants were asked to respond to several questions, including how good they felt at that moment, as well as how much they had used Facebook, and how much they had experienced direct interaction with others, since the last text. At the end of the two weeks, participants completed a second round of questionnaires. Here, the researchers once again measured participants’ overall satisfaction with life.

So, how does online interaction make us feel?

The researchers attempted to answer this question by examining the data in two different ways. First, they looked at how the participant’s moment-to-moment feelings, or affect, changed between each text message. The data showed that as participants reported using Facebook more often in between any two texts, the more their affect tended to change for the negative. In other words, across the two weeks, increased Facebook use was associated with declines in affect. Interestingly, this relationship disappeared when participants had very little direct social contact, and was much stronger when they had quite a lot of social contact.

In the second set of analyses, the researchers looked at whether each individual’s average amount of Facebook use over the course of two weeks was related to their overall life satisfaction at the end of the study. People who tended to use Facebook more also tended to have larger declines in life satisfaction at the end of the study.

Previous Dish on Facebook here, here, and here.

Could The GOP Lose The House?

Relying on PPP’s latest polling, Sam Wang thinks it’s possible:

If the election were held today, Democrats would pick up around 30 seats, giving them control of the chamber. I do not expect this to happen. Many things will happen in the coming 12 months, and the current crisis might be a distant memory. But at this point I do expect Democrats to pick up seats next year, an exception to the midterm rule.

Nate Cohn throws some cold water:

Democrats aren’t yet poised to mount serious challenges to a clear majority of the Republicans running on competitive turf, let alone actually win. So you should probably take this morning’s PPP poll with an additional grain of salt: it’s about how House Republicans would fare against a “generic” Democrat, not the mediocre one they’ll face in 2014. Perhaps the shutdown will trigger a wave of GOP retirements and Democratic recruits. But without both, Democrats will probably crest short of 218.

Enten also tackles PPP:

This “generic” bias might have been balanced in vulnerable seats for Democrats, except PPP didn’t poll any. If PPP and MoveOn had any real interest in seeing what the state of the House was, they’d poll Democratic controlled seats too. After all, the Rothenberg Political Report finds a nearly equal number of Democratic and Republican seats in play.

Theodore Arrington explains why retaking the House is so difficult for Democrats:

To get half the seats, Democrats will have to garner about 53% of the two-party vote. This is not impossible, as they performed above this level in 2006 and 2008, but it makes the task of winning a majority of the House seats an uphill climb.

Kyle Kondik adds:

[I]f Republicans do open the door to the Democrats in the House, it’s not going to be the “Ted Cruz Republicans” who will pay the price. Rather, it’s the House Republicans in marginal districts who could see their ranks decimated, just like the House Democratic moderates whose anti-Obamacare votes couldn’t save them in 2010.

Meanwhile, Kornacki notes that Republican recklessness could create “fallout for the party in Senate races, where the excesses of Tea Party-ism have already cost the GOP winnable races in 2010 and 2012 and could do so again next year.”

Can We Pay The Debt First?

Yglesias shakes his head:

Because payment prioritization is illegal, Treasury’s payment system is not designed to allow prioritization to happen. Cardiff Garcia has an in-depth roundup of coverage of this angle, but the best simple explanation comes from the Treasury inspector general, who explains that on a technical level, the systems “are designed to make each payment in the order it comes due.” Of course systems could always be changed. But look at all the problems Health and Human Services is having in getting the Affordable Care Act computer systems to work. They can’t just whip up an entirely new computer system in the next two weeks. (And, of course, given the government shutdown, it would be illegal for them to hire someone to try.)

Caroline Baum disagrees:

The Treasury makes 100 million payments each month, but the idea that it has no ability to determine what it pays to whom doesn’t pass the smell test.

… The Government Accountability Office has said the Treasury secretary has the authority to prioritize payments. Former budget Director David Stockman says it can be done. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill tells me Treasury “could prioritize, and it’s a lot easier today than when people were doing payrolls in advance.” But any such actions “would start eating into things that would cause a revolution,” he says.

Felix adds:

[W]hile the systems are designed to make payments in the order they come due, they have also been designed so as to effectively insulate bond repayments from all other payments. Bond repayments are made through a system called Fedwire, while all other payments are made through the standard banking ACH system. Logistically, it’s entirely possible to keep up to date on all Fedwire payments without making any ACH payments at all. … Could Treasury decide to prioritize Fedwire payments, and then turn on the ACH payments sporadically, only insofar as they didn’t eat up enough cash to endanger bond repayments? I don’t see why not.

Even if we can avoid default, Plumer cautions against hitting the debt ceiling:

So it’s possible, though not certain, that the Obama administration could avert a default and complete meltdown of financial markets in the event of a debt-ceiling breach. But avoiding a recession would be extremely difficult. And markets would likely react badly in either case: A recent note from Deutsche Bank’s David Bianco estimates that if we blow past the debt ceiling and Treasury starts prioritizing payments, the S&P 500 could lose 10 percent of its value … And that’s without an actual default on the debt

I do not understand who anyone calling himself a conservative would be willing even to entertain this kind of risk. But then “conservative” does not mean what it used to mean any more, does it? It now means revolutionary risk-taking and brinksmanship.

What’s Ailing Healthcare.gov?

Suderman is unsatisfied with the administration’s excuses:

Despite repeated promises that the implementation process was on schedule and the exchange system would be ready on time, it wasn’t. It wasn’t fixed within a few hours, or a few days, or most of a week—even with hours of offline time for retooling. And the massive traffic volume that was supposed to be responsible for the site problems was, at most, only one part of the problem.

So if the administration knew that the problems were due to more than just traffic, and that they would not be resolved in the first week, then they weren’t telling the truth. And if the administration did not know, then that suggests they may lack the understanding or capability to easily resolve the technical flaws with the exchanges. Either way, at this point, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the administration is either intentionally misleading people, or incompetent, or both.

Allahpundit worries about the errors that are harder to see:

Eventually, someone in the federal brain trust will figure out how to tweak the site so that it’s capable of processing basic vital information about the enrollee and creating an account for him/her, just like every privately-run commercial website in the world does every day. The hard part, which has already forced some of the state exchanges to partially suspend website operations for awhile, is accurately calculating the subsidies that each enrollee is entitled to under the law. If the coding is so poor that it can’t create accounts for people, how will it handle a higher-end function like that?

Dan Mangan reported late last week that as “few as 1 in 100 applications on the federal exchange contains enough information to enroll the applicant in a plan”:

Experts said that if Healthcare.gov‘s success rate doesn’t improve within the next month or so, federal officials could face a situation in January in which relatively large numbers of people believe they have coverage starting that month, but whose enrollment applications are have not been processed.

Jyoti Bansal, the founder of a company that specializes in keeping essential functions of websites up and running, argues that high traffic was not a good excuse for the problems:

In sites like these there’s a very standard approach to capacity planning. You start with some basic math. Like, in this case, you look at all the federal states and how many uninsured people they have. Out of those you think, maybe 10 percent would log in in the first day. But you model for the worst case, and that’s how you come up with your peak of how many people could try to do the same thing at the same time. Before you launch you run a lot of load testing with twice the load of the peak , so you can go through and remove glitches. I’m a very very big supporter of the health-care act, but I don’t buy the argument that the load was too unexpected.

Tom Lee weighs in:

It is much more likely that Healthcare.gov’s problems are due to more expensive operations related to the insurance application process itself. Checking users’ eligibility and filing their applications requires integration with a separate and more complex set of systems–ones that have little to do with your web browser. Fixing those sorts of bottlenecks can be easy or difficult; the boring truth is that it’s hard to say definitively from outside the system. Much harder than carping about uncompressed Javascript, at any rate.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #174

A reader writes:

Based on the types of cars in the parking lot and the shape of the license plates, it’s got to be the US. And I’m just taking a wild guess here, but the proximity of the railroad tracks simply reminds me of a business trip I took a few decades ago to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The city had a large cereal plant in the center of town and you could always tell from the smell, which breakfast cereal they were making, so we renamed Cedar Rapids – whose slogan is “the City of Five Seasons” – the City of Five Smells.

Another:

Hensall, Ontario, Canada? Sure looks like Canadian license plates; train tracks seem like the town of Hensall. I was there many years ago. They had a grain silo in town.

Another:

Battle Creek, MI? As a native Michigander, I recognize the landscape of trees and shrubs. Additionally, Battle Creek is along the railway with numerous small factories nearby. (Battle Creek is home to Kellogg’s Cereal and the trains come through frequently). Also, notice how the cars don’t have front plates? It’s not required in Michigan.

Another:

This VFYW contest is hard. I think I make out both Florida and Georgia license plates. Neither state requires front license plates. I’ll choose Valdosta, GA because Valdosta has railroad tracks. And cars. And sun. That’s the best a parent of two small children can do at this time.

Another:

No idea. I was going to ask my brother-in-law (who works in law enforcement) as a favor to run the personal information off the two clearly visible plates. I figure “Cowgirl” would be thrilled to have a random dude call her to see if I could get her e-mail address, send her a picture of her car I got on a public website, and have her tell me where exactly she parked. Instead I decided not to risk the offer of tagging along on a meth lab raid next time my brother-in-law gets the opportunity.

Another gets on the right track:

I am thinking that this outside a major city of Georgia based on the GA license plates that on the cars in the lot. Too bad I can’t run them without paying. I am also thinking that this place is near a Walking Dead film site. (The show premiers October 31, as usual.) Did you know there’s a WD Google Map?

In fact there a several, and they were WAY too detailed for me to spend time looking for nondescript buildings. I’ll choose Grantville because it’s one of the main sites for filming, but I can’t spot dual train tracks near there.

Another:

That is small town Georgia, for sure. Somewhere along the CSX line. One is right behind our home. Let’s see, Lee county is using PH in its tag sequence. Your submitter shows a PIA, so must be in Southern, or SW GA. The county name is large, so a few guesses there. I have seen a couple of readers from Tifton and from Tallahassee, so must be from somewhere around there.

Another quotes one of our grand champions:

What are the most common red herrings?

Mike: License plates.

There are so many, and they change so quickly. It’s easy to look at a plate and think you know where it’s from (or even to look it up on a license plate site), only to discover that it hasn’t been used for years, or even worse, that the same design is used in myriad countries or states.

But I’m no expert and the license plates are all I got here. I followed the red herring to a license plate site. These look like Georgia, which, according to the possibly-outdated plate site, also does not use front plates. I say this is Georgia. I have no idea where in Georgia so I’m saying Atlanta. Some very specific window in Atlanta.

Another:

I’m pretty sure at least three of those license plates are from Georgia. And it certainly looks like Georgia, specifically one of the towns centered along the railroads radiating from Atlanta (I should know, since I grew up in one of them). In other words, one of about a hundred towns in the northern half of the state that look more or less exactly alike. Aw, what the hell …

Another:

This one was ridiculously difficult. I could narrow it down to the state of my birth, Georgia, because most of the cars have Georgia plates and it looks like a typical small Georgia town. The presence of the Range Rover from Florida made me think it’s in South Georgia near the Florida line, except the hill with the large red brick building threw me. South Georgia isn’t very hilly. It’s impossible to read the name of the business in the building with the red facade, and all I can make out about the billboard to the far left is the word “Pain,” which this contest certainly is.

So, for no good reason I’m going with Tifton, Georgia because Tifton is a small town and I’ve decided that the red building on the hill is part of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, otherwise known as ABAC. It’s located at 119 Love Ave. It’s in need of a paint job, but establishments like those are struggling these days, especially in small towns.

Another:

I got Georgia from the license plates and Calhoun because it came back in the first page of search results for both “cement plant Georgia” and “Oxycodone Georgia” (note billboard with the word “PAIN” in the background).

On the other hand, “The sign advertising pain (bread) and the cars point me to the province of Quebec.” Another reader:

I’ve viewed every cement depot in Georgia (number plates) that is within a mile of a railway line, going over the same ones twice if they were within 50 miles of a KIA dealership and 10 miles of a McDonald’s, and short of making enquiries of the DMV, I’m completely out. I’ll go with College Park, Georgia, although it could have been any number of towns. Would love to know *how* the pro-bowl VFYW players get this one.

Another gets this one:

I thought this week’s contest would be easy because of the Georgia license plates on the cars and railroad tracks. Well, it turns out that there are lots of railroad tracks in Georgia to search and the contest took longer than I thought it would. But I have the time. I’m furloughed.

This week’s photo was snapped in Dalton, Georgia. The window could be in one of several neighboring brick buildings in downtown Dalton to the west of the railroad tracks. I think the window is most likely in the upper floor at the rear of 222 North Hamilton St.

Another notes the place of business:

That’s 3 Divas in the Attic, and I even creeped a photo of their building off their Facebook page to verify their address. It’s of their ribbon-cutting earlier this summer, the submitter is probably even pictured in this photo:

Internet, you scary.

Another:

As a long-time reader, subscriber and lurker on the VFYW pages, I am happy to jump in this week. I believe that the picture is taken from the back of the 3 Divas in the Attic interior design shop in Dalton, Georgia. Exact address is 222 N Hamilton St Dalton, GA 30720. I believe that it is taken from the 2nd floor middle rear window.

One other thing: I have been meaning to write to you about After Tiller. It is kind of an amazing feeling to have two disparate parts of ones life come together. My partner and I did the post-production sound for the documentary. It is a project that we have loved and championed in our own tiny way. I can remember talking to Lana and Martha when we mixed the film and hearing their disbelief that the film would get into Sundance or have much of a life. So, as an avid reader of the Dish and Andrew’s writing, I was so happy to see Martha and Lana on the Dish. After Tiller really is a special and wonderful film.

Another:

This is one of those weeks where random knowledge comes to the rescue. I spent much of my early search near Georgia’s major cities but I wasn’t finding much. Then, while focusing on the railroad tracks, I remembered that during the Civil War there was a major rail line between Chattanooga and Atlanta which became the central axis of Sherman’s march. A quick look at the state’s northwest corner not only found the rail line, but our location as well: the 2nd floor of 222 N. Hamilton Ave.

I’ve attached an image that compares an 1865 map of Dalton to a present day satellite image:

The red arrows not only point in the direction your viewer was looking, but also roughly in the direction of a Confederate attack which took place on August 14th, 1864. The Second Battle of Dalton, as it is called, was one of the final battles in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. Despite the Confederate desperate and repeated cavalry attacks on the Union fortifications to the east of town (visible as the blue boxes in the civil war map), the Union positions held; two weeks later Sherman’s troops marched into Atlanta.

Today there’s not much left of the Union fort, but its location can be seen in the upper right of your viewer’s image, where a red brick junior high school sits on the same hilltop site.

Another bit of history:

The stretch of tracks in the photo lay on the Atlanta to Chattanooga line that was the scene of the Great Locomotive Chase in 1862 when Union soldiers captured a passenger train and damaged telegraph wires, bridges and tracks as they travelled north towards the Union lines in Tennessee. They ran out of fuel and didn’t make it to Chattanooga.

About a half-dozen readers correctly guessed 222 N Hamilton, but the following reader breaks the tie because he has entered the most contests without yet winning:

Wow. This might be my finest moment in Contest history. Well, luckiest anyway. I got this window on my first random, semi-blind stab, despite the fact that I’ve never even been within 500 miles of the locale. First the license plates. The orange blob in the middle, plus the alphanumeric sequence, plus the fact that they are rear only plates put me in Georgia. On a railroad track. With nothing else to go on. So I pulled up a railroad map. There are a lot of railroads going through a lot of small towns in Georgia. Because there seems to be several tracks here, I decided to start with places where two or more lines share the same right of way. So I started at the top of the map. Dalton, Georgia. BINGO! There was a big white hopper or silo, there was a parking lot right on the tracks, there was a white cement truck. First try. A semi-educated stab in the dark!

The StreetView of the town is very low quality. I can’t get a good image of the area to find a street number. I can’t even make out business names in the shots to help zero in, so I’ll go with StreetView’s best estimate of the address: 222 N. Hamilton St. Dalton, GA 30720. Second story rear window. I’ve made a picture to help:

Details from the photo submitter:

The address is 221 Depot Street, Dalton, GA. The GPS coordinates are 34.773016, -84.967386

222 N. Hamilton Street could also be considered accurate as it does identify the correct building but the wrong entrance. The window and entrance to access the window are on the rear of the building. The correct address for that rear entrance is Depot Street, but many people are unaware of the rear entrance or the name of the street. The front of the building is 222 N. Hamilton St.

I am always amazed at how precise the winning entries are, so here is a shot of the window (circled in red) courtesy of Google Earth:

You can also see downtown Dalton and Rocky Face Ridge in the background. Thanks for using my photo!

(Archive)

Is Negotiation Possible?

Obama pointed out yesterday that the Democrats have already compromised:

He’s having a presser today at 2 pm. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, Douthat thinks the president’s refusal to negotiate is a mistake:

It makes it sound like the very idea of negotiating around the debt ceiling is unprecedented (which it isn’t) and a threat to the constitutional order (which it hasn’t been), and makes it seem like the Republican Party’s grave sin is the politicization of the debt ceiling per se (even though both parties have regularly politicized it), rather than the fact that the G.O.P. is trying to enter into debt ceiling negotiations in pursuit of politically-impossible goals.

Chait counters:

Douthat proceeds to argue that debt-ceiling extortion would be fine if Republicans had attainable policy demands. It’s somewhat of a characteristic flaw of Douthat’s style that he dwells inordinately on the imagined world in which the sane, technocratically reasonable Republican Party he wishes existed actually exists. … Ultimately, Douthat is not grappling with any of the structural problems inherent in leaving the weapon of default lying around the political system, waiting to be picked up by any sufficiently ruthless actor. He’s subsuming the problem in a fantasy world in which nobody would ever use such power irresponsibly.

I’m waiting for Ross to unload on the GOP, which he should, given the rationale of his post. But he appears to be rhetorically lying low – the position “reasonable” Republicans have taken as their party has become more and more galvanized by the crazy. In my view, the cowardice of Republican elites and Republican moderates is at least a big a problem as the fanaticism of the Republican base. George Will, for example, has gone from being a calm conservative to being a climate change denialist who is now going to work for Fox News. And people wonder why we are in a deep crisis of governance. First Read suggests a compromise:

[H]ere is a POTENTIAL resolution to this entire stand-off: Congress could pass a clean debt-ceiling for a few months, meeting the president’s requirement of doing it without negotiating. But after that, there’s a negotiation over a longer raise (or ending the debt limit altogether), with the sequester, entitlements, etc. thrown in. Everybody wins: The president gets to say he got Congress to act without negotiating; Boehner can claim he got Obama to the negotiating table.

Some in the GOP are now proposing yet another super-committee along those lines. Dickerson sees the rationale:

House would pass a “clean” debt limit increase and clean continuing resolution to keep government funded, which is what the president wants. Then there would be a side agreement cooked up by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Boehner that would include something that Republicans want. That agreement would name budget conferees to debate the big issues of spending, taxes, entitlements, and economic growth, and it would include some guarantee—probably in the form of a stick—to make sure the conferees did their work. …

Both sides need an escape hatch. When Boehner has told members he won’t allow a breach of the debt limit, this is the kind of jerry-rigged deal he’s envisioning. Such an agreement would also allow President Obama to stand firm on his position that he won’t negotiate, but it also rescues him from the potential downside of looking like he’s refusing to act during a crisis that could cripple the economy. In return, House Republicans could tell their supporters that they earned a real chance at future reductions in government spending.

Ezra doubts that yet another budget commission would produce anything of value. But it could be a way out of the current crisis:

The White House’s view is that they’ll compromise on process but not on policy. A new commission counts as a process compromise. If that’s enough for Republicans to save face, then it’s a low-cost way out of this mess. But it’s hard to believe anyone in Washington will buy the idea that yet another budget commission has even a shadow of a chance at success. And even if they do, what happens when the commission fails, and the next CR and debt-ceiling increase needs to be passed?

Steinglass urges Obama to stop being so damn reasonable:

The problem Republicans are having right now is an outgrowth of a longer-term issue they’ve had ever since the 2008 elections: the GOP does not really have much of a policy agenda. For the past five years, the party has been defined almost entirely by everything it is against. ….

When Mr Obama stops speaking as a partisan advocate of ambitious liberal goals, adopts his mature school-principal voice, and demands simply that political players adhere to reasonable norms of democratic governance, Republicans are left with nothing to oppose except the reasonable norms of democratic governance. At the moment, Republicans need to be reminded that Democrats do not want the government to reopen and the interest on our debt to be paid. They want the government to reopen, double its infrastructure spending and guarantee pre-school from age three to poor Americans; they want to pay the interest on our debt, then borrow more to run larger deficits right now and for the next couple of years, and lock in higher taxes five to ten years down the road to handle the long-term deficit problem. A fight between Democrats and Republicans over whether or not those are good ideas is a fight America can survive and even thrive with. A fight over whether or not to default on our debt isn’t.

The Debt Ceiling Denialists

Bouie watches their ranks grow:

No one knows exactly what would happen if the United States breached its debt ceiling—an artificial limit on what the Treasury can borrow to pay its bills—but almost everyone agrees it would be disaster. I say “almost” because a growing chorus of Republicans insist the opposite, that hitting the debt limit wouldn’t cause a default, and even if it did, it’s no big deal for the nation or the world.

Some of the current GOP delusions: the deficit is rising (it isn’t); the debt is currently unsustainable (it isn’t); the public wants Obamacare ended (it’s split on even delaying it); climate change has nothing to do with human-produced carbon emissions (it is, according to almost every single reputable scientist examining the issue). Why are we surprised that the people who predicted a Romney landslide a day before he was trounced might actually be prone to believing in things that simply are not true by any empirical, objective standard? That’s the true danger here. Their epistemic closure is now not just threatening them, but all of us.

Bruce Bartlett has a must-read on the whole topic here. It’s exhaustive and careful and irrefutable. The GOP is currently threatening not just the core stability of the American economy but of the entire global economy. And the ultimate sign of their craziness is that they deny that – against universal agreement among economists for whom the word “catastrophe” keeps popping up – there is any threat at all. A reality check from Bruce:

Wells Fargo Bank economist Scott Anderson has said of a default, “It would be an earth-shattering event. It’s taken as given that U.S. Treasuries are a safe asset. Once you question that assumption, it shakes the foundations of global finance and the way it’s been established over the last 50 years.”

University of California, Berkeley, economist Barry Eichengreen, a world-renowned expert on the international monetary system, warned that a debt default could lead to a run on the dollar if foreigners come to feel that the U.S. is being run by irresponsible leaders. As he put it:

“If there is a threat to the dollar, it stems not from monetary policy, but from the fiscal side. What is most likely to precipitate a dollar crash is evidence that U.S. budgets are not being made by responsible adults. A U.S. Congress engaged in political grandstanding might fail to raise the debt ceiling, triggering a technical default. Evidence that the inmates were running the asylum would almost certainly precipitate the wholesale liquidation of U.S. Treasury bonds by foreign investors.”

A “wholesale liquidation of US Treasury bonds by foreign investors.” This is becoming a national emergency of economically existential proportions. Weigel identifies a source of this delusion:

[Republicans] were told for years that a shutdown would be a disaster for the economy and their party. They were told the same thing about sequestration. Neither crisis has really lived up to the end-of-times hype, especially not in their districts. … Republicans have a new, cold confidence that the president, and the press, are lying to them about the downsides of these crises.

As an example, here’s Hannity downplaying the danger of hitting the debt ceiling:

It sounds a little bit like sequestration. Predictions of doom and gloom, and none of it ever happened. The world isn’t collapsing … I’m really not that afraid of it.

And here is a list of other debt-ceiling denialists. Krugman frets:

Given all the forms of debt denial, I really wonder about the confidence many people still have that there will be an 11th-hour resolution.

I don’t believe there will be. American pseudo-conservatism is about to achieve its paramount goal: the wholesale destruction of the American government and economy. It is, indeed, the only way to return to the nineteenth century. And that, after all, is what they want.