shutting down the government

Last night 26 Senate Republicans-- basically, the hardcore lunatic fringe-- voted to shut down government operations.

Can you guess which political party these 2 are leaders of?Conservatives report that they weigh more than liberals report weighing. That isn't just because more liberals are starving and poor or because conservatives are selfish, greedy bastards who inevitably all turn into Chris Christie and Rob Ford.

I know just where to go for some Inside-the-Beltway convention wisdom and yesterday I found out that momentum has swung away from House Democrats and towards House Republicans-- they're tied at 39-39%-- because Obama's image has suffered due to the amateurish roll-out of the Affordable Care Act website. The GOP-directed media frenzy over the website worked. And now it's time to get back to reality.

There are no moderates left in the Republican House Caucus. The "best" you'll get is a mainstream conservative willing to stand up to Tea Party extremism from time to time-- or a libertarian who may be good on an important issue or two but is still, essentially, a raving lunatic on everything else. Walter Jones (R-NC) is kind of a mix of the two.

Boehner and Cantor-- who allowed the GOP's racist wing shut down the government because of their pathological fury over an African-American in the White House-- have been whining that Obama wants to "kill the Republican Party." Unfortunately, he isn't… and even if he wanted to, suicide seems a far more likely cause of the once-credible party's demise.

JoshUtah may be the most right-wing state in the country. The nuts in Texas may be more vicious and dangerous but Utah only gave President Obama 25% of its vote last year-- compared to 41% in Texas, 44% in Mississippi, 46% in Georgia and even 33% in the 4th Reich Idaho. The least red district in the state, UT-04 (home of hopelessly conservative Blue Dog Jim Matheson) has a PVI of R+16.

What most "real" Americans "know," as they've "known" since the days of St. Ronald of Reagan, is that government is the enemy, and anything that's bad for the government is good for "real" Americans."The government shutdown is over. National default has been averted, for now. According to an estimate by Standard and Poor's, the Tea Party's brinkmanship cost the American economy twenty-four billion dollars -- more than half a percentage point of quarterly growth.

Both Boehner and McConnell have tried reassuring voters-- who have turned massively against the Republican Party in poll after poll-- that the GOP will not shut down the government again in January.

The GOP shutdown may indeed be dead-- at least for now-- and Obamacare is still being birthed but that GOP shutdown cost the taxpayers something like $24 billion, killed a million jobs, raised unemployment, reduced the GDP, left us without food safety inspectors or even nuclear regulatory inspectors and put our government on a very economically precarious and dan

Are you one of a tiny handful of Democrats who gets to vote in a primary this cycle? If so, let me suggest which candidate you should vote for-- the one who answers the questions most like this guy Salon talked to yesterday.