The Daily Show's Jason Jones tries valiantly to reason with yet another Right Wing nutjob. Gotta admire his perseverance.

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"The GOP is trying to save the American people from a disastrous health care plan."

You know if this really WERE a disaster the Republicans would be sitting back with a large tub of buttered popcorn just waiting for it to crater so they could ride in with their "I told you so's" blazing all ready to sop up all of that sweet sweet political credibility.

I loved the hostage negotiation metaphor.,

New poll should put quite a scare into the Republicans currently holding the country hostage.

Courtesy of Business Insider:

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. 

15 Republicans who are threatening to shut down their government if they do not get their way.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

Republican Senators are threatening to force a government shutdown unless Democrats agree to give up on the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has gotten 14 of his colleagues to sign a letter pledging to block a bill to fund government operations unless Obamacare is defunded, according to conservative activist and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson. 

The list includes such prominent members as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a possible 2016 presidential candidate, and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX). 

At the end of September, government funding under a March continuing resolution will run out. Without appropriations bills or another continuing resolution, the government would be forced to close. 

A shutdown would likely cause 800,000 federal employees around the country to be furloughed, disrupting public services even further than sequestration cuts already have. A shutdown would also freeze many government programs like small business lending and environmental assessments for construction projects, exacerbating sequestration’s damage to the economy.

You know one of the most frequent reasons given for wanting to stop the  Affordable Care Act from moving forward is that it will hurt small businesses and result in an undue burden on the states during implementation.

So..uh..their response is to completely shut down the government causing almost a million people to lose their jobs, disrupting vital services, and doing away with loans to small business?

Oh yeah, THAT makes sense.

Perhaps somebody should point out that acts of desperation like this make it crystal clear that the Republican fear is NOT that Obamacare will hurt our citizens, and businesses, but that it will do the exact opposite.

Five year old Alabama hostage rescued unharmed, hostage taker not so lucky.

Courtesy of ABC News:  

A week-long Alabama standoff in which a retired trucker held a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker has ended with the kidnapper dead and the child safe, according to law enforcement. 

"FBI Agents safely recovered the child who's been held hostage for nearly a week," FBI Special Agent Steve Richardson said at a news conference. 

The agent said negotiations with the suspect Richard Lee Dykes "deteriorated" in the past 24 hours. 

"Mr. Dykes was observed holding a gun. At this point the FBI agents fearing the child was in imminent danger, entered the bunker and rescued the child," Richardson said. 

The boy identified only as Ethan "appears physically unharmed" and is being treated at a hospital, authorities said. 

Dykes, 65, is dead, but officials have not yet provided details on how he died.

Is it wrong to hope that he died while suffering significant pain? This man also murdered the school bus driver who tried desperately to protect his passengers from this man, before he took little Ethan off of the bus and down into his bunker with him.

I am sure that all of you, like me, have been following this story and wondering what could make a man do something so horrendous to a small child. Would you believe conservative radio?

This courtesy of our friend Sarah Jones over at Politicususa:  

Michael Creel said Dykes kept to himself and listened to a lot of conservative talk radio. 

“He was very into what’s going on with the nation and the politics and all the laws being made. The things he didn’t agree with, he would ventilate,” he said. 

James Arrington, police chief of the neighboring town of Pinckard, put it differently. 

“He’s against the government, starting with Obama on down,” he said. 

Dykes also has been arrested for possession of marijuana and neighbors say he once killed a dog with a lead pipe. According to neighbors, he patrols his yard with a flashlight and a firearm, threatening to shoot children who step foot on his property. 

Ironically, given his hatred of government, Dykes lives in a FEMA trailer on his rural property. 

“I think he’s just a really angry and bitter guy with some anger management issues,” Morris Dees of Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery told the AP. “He is just against everything – the government and his neighbors.” 

Against everything. That pretty much sums up the anti-government, Obama hating, conservative mantra.

I am not sure how this man's anti-Obama, anti-government, hatred spilled over onto this little boy's life but the source for it seems relatively easy to ascertain.

Yet another example of the constant Right Wing hatred laced pollination directed to the mentally ill, undereducated low hanging fruit of this country.

Well at least that boy will be going home safely to his parents. It could have been so much worse.

President Obama lays the blame for the bad jobs report right where it belongs, on the do nothing Congress and the obstructionist Republican party.

Courtesy of the Campaign for America's Future:

One cost of conservative obstruction is the loss of 28,000 construction jobs. Those are workers who would likely be on the job if the House had at least adopted a transportation spending bill that was passed by the Senate earlier in the spring. Instead, that bill is stalled in a House-Senate conference, and hundreds of state transportation projects are being stymied because there is no long-term federal funding commitment. 

Also in May 13,000 public sector jobs were lost, including 8,000 state and local government jobs. The Wall Street Journal noted Thursday that if state and local government payrolls had remained stable since December 2008, the unemployment rate would be 7.1 percent today instead of more than 8 percent. 

The austerity policies that congressional conservatives hunger to impose on the United States continue to be an epic failure in Europe. The unemployment rate in the Eurozone was reported Thursday to be 11 percent, a record high. Governments imposed a harsh regime of government budget cuts in an effort to lower deficits, and all those cuts did was put people out of work, making it even harder for those governments to close those deficits. 

With congressional Republicans continuing to vow that they would oppose any effort to increase government spending to put people back to work—House Majority Leader Eric Cantor dismissed any new government initiatives this morning on CNBC—we are in effect repeating the Eurozone failure. It's not to the same degree, but it is still the same wrong direction. 

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says today's jobs report reflects the failure of Obama administration policies, remember that even the Recovery Act that President Obama did get through the Congress was mortally compromised: It was not nearly big enough to address the crater left in the economy by the Great Recession (or as Paul Krugman calls it, the Lesser Depression) and half of the stimulus took the form of tax cuts that had less stimulative effect than the direct spending. 

Today's real lesson is that the de facto austerity that is the fruit of conservative obstruction is choking our economy just as it has choked the Eurozone. The faster that America can end the trip down this conservative austerity road, the better.

There is little that pisses me off as much as watching the GOP hamstring this President's efforts to turn this economy around, and then use his perceived "failure" to do so as a political weapon against him.

It is just about the ugliest thing I have seen in politics, and the truly horrific part is that there are REAL Americans who are losing their homes, their livelihoods, and their opportunity to provide a future for their children all in the name of partisanship and the desire to retake the White House.

As I have said before, what is happening today is NOT politics, it's a hostage situation. And we the people (Yes WE can use that phrase too!), are the hostages.