shutting down the government

19th century American poet, essayist and champion of individual freedoms, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had a pretty good definition of what it means to be a conservative in his The Conduct of Life: "All conservatives are such from personal defects.

Well, the regular working families are the ones who take it in the neck, of course. Republicans grudgingly prepared to not shut down the government by bragging to their extremist fringe that they would still enforce plenty of pain on the poor people their party is perpetually at war with.

Ted Cruz has a vision: President Ted Cruz, the first U.S. President born in another country. From a family of Cuban fascists who found Texas compatible with their authoritarian ideology, Cruz is eager to implement a plan to force Obama to rescind his executive action delaying the deportation of Hispanic and Asian immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens.

Right after the Republican Party decided a good electoral strategy would be to cater to the hardcore elements inside their own Fox-fed base and shut down the government, polling showed that dozens of Republicans in Congress had put themselves in jeopardy of electoral defeat for that vote.

Fred Upton voted to shut down the government once-- and he plans to do it again, right after the midtermsThere are virtually no Republican-held districts outside of the former slave-holding states where shutting down the government polls well.

If politics was rational Roll Call's list of the 10 most vulnerable House Members might look very different and possibly include other congressional sociopaths besides Staten Island Mafia thug Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm. Almost everyone but Grimm on the list-- Carol Shea-Porter excepted-- is just some dull 3rd rate hack backbencher.

Congress has been on vacation from their "grueling" three-and-a-half day schedule for five weeks but the least competent Speaker in history, alcoholic mess John Boehner, has only scheduled seven legislative days for Congress between now and November.

Hard core right-wing GOP voters, particularly in the former Confederate states-- something between a quarter and a third of all voters-- are pretty gung-ho on shutting down the government. Normal voters, on the other hand, just hate it.

You probably saw the whole McConnell kerfuffle this week when he admitted the Republicans plan to shut down the government if they keep control of the House and win control of the Senate in November. Republicans with pretensions to national office and some aura of being part of the mainstream, were having coronaries.

It's been nearly a year since Move On, in the wake of the Republican government shut down, polled dozens of competitive congressional districts in Republican-held districts across the country asking, among other inquiries, these two questions: