Six hours after the federal government shut down for the first time in 17 years, a new Quinnipiac poll delivered the first warning sign for a Republican Party that stands to take the brunt of the blame.
According to the poll, American voters oppose shutting down the federal government to block implementation of the Affordable Care Act by a significant, 72-22 margin. And on another upcoming fight — raising the debt ceiling — Americans oppose using it to stop the health-care law's implementation by a 64-27 margin.
And in general, 58% of Americans oppose cutting off funding for Obamacare to tinker with its implementation.
All of these should be significant red flags for the Republican Party, which polls have shown will take the bulk of the public's blame for the shutdown.
According to the Quinnipiac poll, Democrats now hold a 9-point advantage in the general Congressional ballot — that is, Americans said they would vote for the Democratic candidate in their district over the Republican candidate by a 43-34 margin. That's the highest it's been all year.
And of course the so-called establishment Republicans KNOW this is a loser for them.
This according to Politico:
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has privately warned House Republicans that they could lose their majority in 2014 as a result of shutting down the government.
Gee no wonder Boehner drinks!
Let's face it despite conservative rhetoric to the contrary this does NOTHING to help the Republicans in any way. At least not long term,
And really bizarre fact is that essentially they have already won a HUGE concession from the last stupid fight over the CR.
Courtesy of Mother Jones:
Democrats have already agreed to fund the government at Republican levels. In other words, they've already caved in. It wasn't even a compromise. They've just flatly given in to Republican demands to continue funding at sequester levels.
This is the CR that Republicans now refuse to pass.
So even though they got what they wanted in the last battle, they are so greedy that they simply cannot be happy with it, and instead always want more.
And they DARE question why Obama is more willing to negotiate with Iran than he is to negotiate with the Congressional Republicans?
Yeah, that's REAL confusing.
I'm writing to a half-dozen Republican House members, none from where I live, to remind them that I'll be giving money and support to any GOP primary opponent who is not a teabagger.
ReplyDeleteThey think the tea bags hold the future -- they'd better watch out. The party can be recaptured from these tea-terrorists when the time comes.
Better yet. Tell them if they manage to win their primary, you'll be supporting their Democratic opponents.
DeleteLike a teenager taking the car out for the first time......feeling their Wheaties......
ReplyDeleteTea Party Republicans (and some plain Republicans) have a way to un-skew a poll. It worked well for them in 2012.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if you're being sarcastic...I hope you are and, if so, good call. In case anybody believes their ability to unskew (ha,ha...spell checker just replaced unskew with undies) polls, I'll just say: No, they were able to falsely claim that polls were skewed. Too many uninformed viewers on Fox believed it. Remember their claims that all the polls were skewed about Obama, and he trounced them!
DeleteI don't think they are going to pull off that hat trick a second time. People are angry. Really angry. Some will be losing their homes over this. Some will DIE over this. People are NOT going to forget this in the next year. Republicans will hope the public will forget before the polls, forgive, or that they can just spin it to be the Democrat's fault. But it's not going to work this time.
DeleteThey aren't just shooting themselves in the foot. They are shooting themselves in the head. They are killing their own party. They are going to lose people to this stunt. Republicans are going to change parties over this.
The real reason they are white-knuckling through this is that they know that once citizens begin to appreciate the ACA, the GOP will be G-O-N-E.
ReplyDelete"Democrats have already agreed to fund the government at Republican levels."
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why Dem. congressmen and women aren't making a bigger point of this...this and the House GOP's unprecedented, extortionist effort to hold government funding hostage to legislation they can't otherwise pass.
Here's more info on the funding amount:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/budget/news/2013/09/30/76026/the-senate-continuing-resolution-is-already-a-compromise/
And a very cool graph of the funding amount:
https://twitter.com/alivitali/status/384885433647132672/photo/1
It's called "chess." Biding their time...biding their time....
DeleteI think negotiating with Iran is a cake walk compared to negotiating with the right wingers in the House. And to paraphrase Sarah; let Allah sort it all out.
ReplyDeleteBeing serious now, I think all of us know what we need to do. We need to target everyone in our own circle who does not vote and convince him or her to vote. I got my two youngest sons to vote as soon as they turned 18, but they have more than a dozen friends who do not vote. I pledge to get those friends (who like me; I cook for them) to vote.
Let's get the unregistered registed and drive the newly registered to the polls if needed. And I am going to invite the new voters to my house for an election night get together. We can watch the results together and eat some great food, etc... But you cannot enter the door without that "I Voted" sticker that they give to every voter in every town here in the State of Maine.
Let's get some folks registered and we can get excited about 2014. The Speaker may well be right; Nancy has a shot at getting back the gavel.
Thanks for your wonderful, positive attitude!
DeleteHear that, Esther, you know-nothing TWIT?
ReplyDeleteYou would think some of them would remember Newt and his "Contract on America" that worked out so well for them.
ReplyDeleteY'all see her tweet about preying on schools? Hahaha
ReplyDelete-SJP
They've done all they can to attack, lie about, demonize, twist and miscontrue, but it looks like people are more interested in getting insured than in playing those stupid political games...
ReplyDeleteObamacare in Action
1 million visits to http://HealthCare.gov in first 3 hours. 5x more users than ever on http://Medciare.gov at once
10,000 hits per second to the @CoveredCA website at times today. #GetCovered
Hi @SenRandPaul --> MT @igorvolsky Since midnight Kentucky's health exchange had 24,000 visitors, processed over 1000 applications by 9:30AM
Looking at @MNsure (MN's Obamacare exchange), jaw on floor. Even w/o subsidies, this may save my small business bundles on health insurance.
2.8 million visits to http://Healthcare.gov since midnight. 81,000 calls. (via @Schultz44)
@MarthaPlimpton if obamacare had existed four years ago, i would not have stage iv breast cancer.
so much more to be found at the link. it's awesome!
http://theobamadiary.com/2013/10/01/obamacare-in-action-3/
Barack's mama and grandma must be smiling from above at this ENORMOUS accomplishment of their little boy who grew into a deeply kind and extremely compassionate man.
As Obamacare Sign Up Begins Tea Partiers Are Fighting A Battle They’ve Already Lost
ReplyDeleteMost Americans understand it is autumn in 2013, and that it has been nearly a year since voters re-elected Barack Obama to serve a second term as President. According to a poll released yesterday, by a margin of two-to-one, respondents said “the results from the 2012 presidential election represented a referendum on moving forward with the Affordable Care Act” that has been the law of the land since March 23, 2010. However, for Republicans it is still 2010 and they are fighting to defeat what they imagine is a health insurance reform bill in Congress even though the Supreme Court ruled the ACA was constitutional in 2012. To impress on Americans they are still fighting the health law, they shut down the government.
Now that it is October 1 and Americans can begin signing up to buy affordable healthcare insurance, it is unlikely that reality will sink in to Republicans in Congress that the next phase of the Affordable Care Act is underway and that their man-god, Ted Cruz, is just another deranged teabagger; albeit one Republicans admit is leading congressional Republicans. Traditionally, in both houses of Congress there are procedures for picking the leader of each party that worked for a couple of hundred years, and it is true that John Boehner was elected as Speaker of the House, but he is just a sycophant answering to Ted Cruz.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/01/obamacare-sign-begins-tea-partiers-fighting-battle-lost.html
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/01/obamacare-sign-begins-tea-partiers-fighting-battle-lost.html
Bleeding Money: The GOP Shutdown Will Cost Between $40-$80 Million a Day
ReplyDelete...It gets worse. Annie Lowrey, an economic policy reporter for the New York Times, tweeted a staggering estimate of the damage the shutdown is doing to GDP, “David Stockton, formerly of the Fed, estimates a shutdown costs 0.15 percent of GDP growth a week.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/01/republicans-pay-fed-estimates-shutdown-costs-15-gdp-week.html
"Meet the 8 men who just put 800,000 people out of work. They have a net worth of $119,003,347"
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/urbandata/status/385123961521967104/photo/1
How can John Boehner listen to the will of the American people if he can't follow his own rhetoric?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvvhrpOTQaI
This behavior displays the endemic characteristics of the 1%ers. Greed.
ReplyDeleteJust as no matter how much money they have, it isn't enough, no matter how many concessions they get, how much of their agenda they take, no matter how much the Democrats cave to their demands IT IS NEVER ENOUGH.
And they're drinking and partying while they shut the country down. They are celebrating further hurting the government's credit rating, driving the deficit UP, crippling the economy even further, putting more people into foreclosure, basically killing Americans and America.
*These* are our domestic terrorists. They are the ones that are destroying our country. Not with bombs. With hubris, greed and fanaticism.
mlaiuppa... well said!
DeleteHear that, Esther?
DeletePoll: Who do you hold responsible for the shut down?
ReplyDeleteHouse of Representatives (83%)
President Obama (7%)
Senate (5%)
The pandas (5%)
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-live-blog-government-shutdown-20131001,0,6899432.story
At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed. One result: director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center into clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/the-saddest-paragraph-youll-read-about-the-government-shutdown-today/280174/
Time to Depose Boehner. But the teatards are afraid to because they know they'll get someone more moderate - since the moderate repubs and the dems will not vote in one of their loonies. So, they have to keep them. And he has to keep cow-towing to them or lose his seat in the next primary. What a freakin' mess. A game they play with real live flesh and bones.
ReplyDeleteChris Hayes' interview with Bruce Bartlett and Mike Lofgren is a must-see. His guests' take on the current GOP is chilling! Think religious, neoconservative revolutionaries who are set on destroying our democracy.
ReplyDeleteGryphen, the problem with the national polls is that they misunderestimate the 'safe-district effect' of heavily gerrymandered house district boundaries that in all too many cases guarantee a severe conservative victor. Nationally, voters may blame the Congress, but when it comes time to pull the lever, they're still gonna vote for their own right-wing representative. And good luck trying to primary any of these douchebags with more moderate candidates. Taint gonna happen. It just taint.
ReplyDeleteThe domestic terrorists aren't negotiating a thing to begin with, they're trying to use extortion to kill the Affordable Care Act which was declared the law of the land by the conservative leaning SCOTUS. They're hellbent on trying to screw the country and stop President Obama from succeeding at anything.
ReplyDeleteIn the mean time, Rience Pepuce delivered a check for a hundred and fifty grand from the GOP to keep the WWII veteran's Memorial open to "keep up appearances" and show that the GOP "Cares" for veterans.
Only problem was, he did this AFTER the President had already released the funds.
This "piecemeal" bullshit isn't going to stand. They shut down government, and the Teaparty owns the death panels. Kids with Cancer, Veterans Hospitals, etc. They could stop this and they wont. Where's Sarah's outrage? I'm sure Trig misses his head start program and having his food and drugs checked for safety.
Who's got the right to pick who lives and who dies? The Teaparty!
Open your mouth NOW , Baldy, I dare ya!