The Long October And The Damage Done

Word is the deal is done in the Senate, and it's pretty much all over but the shouting (except for any last-minute disaster that may yet rear its head).

But the Shutdown caused by this reckless House GOP has left major damage across the board:

• The sciences - which rely a lot on funding from the federal government as much as foundation support - have taken a huge hit.  The ongoing sequestration was cutting back heavily on projects, studies, new developments... the Shutdown piled on top of all that, disrupting a lot of work and forcing a good number of scientists to start over from scratch.  A lot of potential innovation and discovery is going to be devastated by all this.

• Economic confidence - one of the driving forces of a consumer-capitalist system is the willingness of people to spend money on stuff - has dropped as though we're in the middle of another recession.

• No matter how quickly a deal gets done, the Shutdown has forced a lot of government systems to stall or go inert, requiring massive effort to reboot their offices, restart projects, get funding out, get financial aid out, all of that.  It will take weeks even after the Shutdown ends to see government functioning anywhere near normal levels.  And the costs will be enormous.

• Foreign investors - a serious way to get economic growth happening in our nation - have been scared off by the uncertainty of a political system that kills itself on the whim of a mere handful (32 Far Right Republicans in Congress) who under other circumstances would have no power like this anywhere else.

And there's little hope to be certain that this all won't happen again.  This current deal from the Senate, after all, only delays the fight another three months.  The debt ceiling will come up again as an issue.  The threat of a Shutdown can well happen again even though the Republican Party has been hit HARD by the public's revulsion of how this whole Shutdown came to be.  That's because the Far Right Tea Partier elements of the House GOP - and worse their media elite enablers like Limbaugh and Erickson - have not been fully chastened by their screw-up: some of them have even been emboldened by the publicity they think they've received, that they're still heroes to the Far Right Noise Fear-Making Machine.  As Tomasky says over on the Daily Beast:

Today, we have a clavern of sociopaths who know nothing of honor, and we have no easy way to stop them. Except at the ballot box. Except that they've rigged that, too, with their House districts. They've rigged the whole game so that they light the match and then point at President Obama and shout: “Look! Fire!”...

...This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren't going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren't suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren't going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn't you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will...

This is why it is very important to stop voting Republican.  Just stop.  Don't vote for ANY Republican at any level.  They cannot be trusted with the jobs.  They cannot be trusted with government.

Please, for the LOVE OF GOD.  Stop voting Republican.  Get your voter identification switched from "Republican" to "No Party Affiliate" or hell even the "Libertarians" at this point (okay, maybe not). I don't know for how long.  Maybe when they're finally down to just three Representatives from one state and they're all thinking "gee, what's the Modern Whig Party got that we don't?"