Government shutdown is likely, Pelosi aide says

[Joanne98]

Source: Politico


A high-ranking aide to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told chiefs of staff of Democratic lawmakers that a government shutdown is more likely than not, according to attendees.

Speaking at a regular meeting of the top aides to House Democrats, Pelosi’s floor director, Jerry Hartz, offered, unprompted, his assessment that the odds favor inaction before the government runs out of money, sources said.


That became the focal point of the meeting, sources said, with the other aides asking only questions about “the possibility of a government shutdown and the logistics” — i.e., what it would mean for their offices and government services — according to one chief of staff who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity.

The aide said the message of a likely shutdown did not appear geared toward ginning up the staffers for political purposes.

“It was genuine,” the aide said.





Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49814.html

[madrchsod]

1. we can only hope they do......

it worked so well for newt in the 90`s.......

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Scary thought for those of us who depend on Social Security.

[davidthegnome]

3. Anyone care to elaborate

on what the consequences of a government shutdown would most likely be?

[plumbob]

4. Last time, all nonessential personnel were sent home.

Essential functions continued. Republicans took a huge black eye.

[Joe Bacon]

9. Social Security workers were forced to work for no pay for 5 weeks!

Oh, I was given a letter to take to my landlord indicating I wasn't getting paid and ask them to let me pay my rent when the appropriation bill finally passed. Landlord had a good laugh at that as I borrowed on the Master Card to make the rent payment...

[plumbob]

10. That's why having ideologues running things instead of real people

is always a bad deal.

Always.

I wish these out of touch sonsabitches could experience real life for just a bit.

[sofa king]

14. And nobody returned a phone call to a Republican for two and a half years.

I remember being astonished in the blistering hot summer of 2000, toiling in an un-airconditioned wing of the Department of the Interior, when the phone rang and the DOI guy who I was working with actually picked up the phone, instead of screening the call against Republicans. I said it was the first time I saw a government official answer the phone since 1997 (and that was not a joke).

Yes, said the official, Republicans in Congress had recently inserted a rider into an appropriations bill requiring that all phone calls to his office in the Department of the Interior be answered, by a human. With no money to pay for it, of course, which meant that this incredibly busy office head spent all day answering his phone, and doing his real work at home. Time after time I watched this same poor guy get skewered at Senate hearings, because a fact would come up and the one Republican Senator in the room would wake up and say, "hey, I never saw that." Seems this fellow's correspondence to Republicans had a bad habit of getting lost in the mail, too.

[sofa king]

8. My favorite consequence: President For Life Obama

The Republicans are cleverly trying to maneuver the timing of the shutdown so that it happens during the August recess. That way they and their staff members can go on vacation as planned.

What they have failed to notice, however, is that in between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, someone tried to murder a few Democratic Senators with anthrax, and in return got them on board to pass sweeping emergency powers to the President in times of crisis.

Shutting down the government in the middle of two wars is definitely a crisis. If there's even the threat of terrorism at the time (and, you will recall, the terror-o-meter has never gone below "Elevated"), the President can automatically begin to assume near-dictatorial powers.

So this time, the President gets to activate FEMA, suspend habeas corpus, use the Army as police on home soil, detain an unlimited amount of people for an indefinite time, form labor battlalions and (in theory) compel people to join them, remove anyone he wants from their homes, set wage rates, and see to all distribution of essential goods and services like food, water, gasoline, and electricity. You know, innocuous stuff like that which the Republicans were happy to entrust to President Obama's predecessor.

President Obama can also unilaterally enact a de facto version of universal health care through the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, signed into law under George Bush.

If the state of emergency is deemed by the President to persist, he can retain these powers, and the Republican Congress under Bush wasn't real clear about how far some of those powers extend, or how long some of them last. He can also prevail upon states to activate their own emergency statutes. Some states, like Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia, even helpfully provide the opportunity to postpone elections, which, oh no!, might leave the electoral votes from those states uncounted in a general election.

So sleep well, my Republican friends who are reading this. Thanks to your eternal vigilance, America will do just fine with an angry black man in charge and running the government all by himself.

[defendandprotect]

12. Government bites back at GOP? Meanwhile, certainly proves GOP knows "terraism" is a crock ... !!

[sofa king]

13. Seriously, I don't know why Bush and Cheney didn't steal it all in 2005.

They had meticulously set all this up, step by step, capitalizing on the amazingly fortuitous anthrax attacks to slingshot the Patriot Act and a dozen even worse, lesser known laws.

In September of 2005, when it was clear they had burned one of their own spies and rolled up their own nuclear proliferation spy network, Karl Rove was facing indictment, and thousands of anti-war protesters were converging on Washington, they initiated Operation Granite Shadow, which practiced a takeover of the federal government by the President and the armed forces. Since much of the power grab was predicated on a "terrorist threat," and Rove was calling up Tom Ridge and telling him to raise the threat level whenever they were in trouble, the needed criteria for a takeover already existed.

All they had to do was pull the trigger.

Then, scarcely a month later, Harry Reid threw the Senate into a rare closed session, and all of a sudden, the Bush Administration backed off, eventually to set a fire so large everyone would be occupied with putting it out instead of putting them to death, and slipped away smiling.

I've asked a lot of people what it was that stopped them. Many have pointed out that you have to give some time for the wool to grow back after you fleece the sheep. Others note that the Bush Administration had just learned from Hurricane Katrina that they were not competent enough to actually utilize even part of the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, much less all of it. And then there's whatever Harry Reid said to make the Senate shit its pants that day.

[defendandprotect]

15. Now that's a very interesting poser ...

Many don't know that Ollie North was assigned to work on a way to overturn the

Constitution --

Many also don't know about Nixon's "Huston Plan" which was intended to stop the '72

election and was based on Operation Northwoods' tactics!

Agree re Anthrax attacks -- and quite obviously traces back to Bush/Cheney --

but think was also about stopping criticism of 2000 election.

Patriot Act was ready to go like the day after 9/11!!!

And certainly looks like here and in UK attack on Iraq had been planned for at least two years!

Don't really understand this ....

Then, scarcely a month later, Harry Reid threw the Senate into a rare closed session, and all of a sudden, the Bush Administration backed off, eventually to set a fire so large everyone would be occupied with putting it out instead of putting them to death, and slipped away smiling.

If you can believe what is said, the purpose was specific -- footdragging on investigating Bush

re Iraq War. And what is the "eventually to set a fire so large everyone would be occupied

with putting it out"?

You could probably figure this all out if you had all the pieces to the puzzle -- so much

unknown, however.


I've asked a lot of people what it was that stopped them. Many have pointed out that you have to give some time for the wool to grow back after you fleece the sheep. Others note that the Bush Administration had just learned from Hurricane Katrina that they were not competent enough to actually utilize even part of the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, much less all of it. And then there's whatever Harry Reid said to make the Senate shit its pants that day.


How much power the American people still appear to have I think is a concern to them.

They like their enemies really weakened -- like attacking the poor and the disabled.

That works for them. They're working overtime now on impoverishing everyone -- from A to Z.

And keeping everyone in shock and awe!

Like attacking Iraq first time with a full military while Iraq's army was pretty much the

size of our LAPD! Then 25 years of bombing them -- atrocious attacks -- and then a new war

on them!!

Keep in mind the Pentagon was beaten by the Vietnamese!! Something we shouldn't forget!!

[sofa king]

16. Here's some of what I remember.

Way too soon after the attacks of September, 2001, we acquired an advance copy of a big part of the Homeland Security Act--dozens and dozens of pages of carefully crafted legislation that should have taken months just to write and properly cite with controlling legislation.

One part had us worried off the bat: the treatment of Indian tribes as "local governments" within the Act, excluding them from direct federal funding (citing the Johnson Act, I think). Two dozen tribes abut either the open ocean or a foreign border, so, you know, that was quite an oversight--or so we thought at first.

The proposed legislation came to us indirectly from the lobbyists at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenberg_Traurig">Greenberg Traurig, specifically, the Homeland Security team there, run by Jack Abramoff. We had it on excellent authority that it was GT that had actually written the bill, and had obviously been writing the bill long before the attacks of 9/11. They were all over the Patriot Act, too. (Allowing lobbyists to write the legislation, complete with lucrative loopholes like this one, was a great way to pay back all those illegal campaign contributions. I'm sure they still do it, even though the contributions aren't illegal anymore.)

We knew Abramoff well because, according to our information at the time, it was he who orchestrated the so-called Brooks Brothers Riot which helped steal Florida for Bush. (Later well written articles named Roger Stone as that guy, so I don't know if our information was correct or not.) We knew him for a much more important reason, too, which was that he was successfully stealing our clients (soon to start ripping them off with tactics very similar to this which I describe).

Shortly after the bill was signed into law, we heard that Abramoff was charging his Indian clients to lobby for their inclusion in the Homeland Security Act as sovereign governments--the same act that his own people had obviously been writing well before 9/11. We were doing something similar, but all the amendments we got someone in Congress to offer died in committee, year after year. Then Jack got busted and that whole part of the story wisped away in the face of much more egregious (and well documented) crimes.

Oh, and the 9/11 terrorists paid a visit to Jack's casino boat on the day they were told to funnel their remaining funds back to al Qaeda. The FBI collected the surveillance tapes, and the story was buried. (I still remember the article: "SunCruz Casinos turns over documents in terrorist probe," September 27, 2001, by Vicky Chachere, published in the St. Petersburg Times. It used to be very hard to find. Now it's been completely rewritten).

What do I think all this means? I think they stole the election and just like the damned Nazis they needed a Reichstag fire to scare the shit out of people and consolidate their illicit power gains. They caught wind of Osama bin Laden's plan, early, called off attempts to assassinate him, and did nothing but watch it. After it went down, they successfully intimidated Pat Leahy and Tom Daschle with the anthrax, and began laying the groundwork for a permanent coup.

Abramoff was involved and, being the sociopath that he is, prepared to cash in on it by being there first with the legislation--legislation which not coincidentally would fuck over his Indian clients as well. The legislation also paved the way for a dictatorship, expanding Presidential power everywhere. Karl Rove, in the meantime, was playing around with his terror warnings, making sure the balloon went up whenever it looked like he or anyone else in the Bush Administration was about to get pinned. But it also served a darker purpose: if the walls ever did close in, they could simply call "terra" and take over for good.

But the problem for them, I suspect, is that their greed and lust for power totally overrode their ability to actually govern. They staffed every office with frat boy fundraisers who were so focused on getting themselves and their friends rich that they had no clue how to actually do their jobs. The reigns of power were tightly concentrated in the hands of just a few very self-absorbed people who couldn't be bothered to deal with the actual functioning of government, so nobody dealt with it, and by 2006 they'd fucked things up so bad that they simply didn't want the job anymore. So instead, they sat back and watched the housing crisis balloon, again doing nothing about it except tipping off their pals about how to cash in, and used that crisis to get the hell out. Maybe they know better than we do that we're all going down soon, and the world won't be worth controlling again for a long time.

But now the shoe is on the other foot, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let this opportunity pass without trying to scare the ever-loving shit out of the knuckle-dragging brownshirts who made all this happen. America can still be stolen, easily--but now, they get to worry about being first against the wall. So maybe they'll fucking listen and help us reverse all these evil laws before someone uses it to take what little we have left.

[defendandprotect]

17. Just want to acknowledge your post ... back later --

but two quick comments --

One part had us worried off the bat: the treatment of Indian tribes as "local governments" within the Act, excluding them from direct federal funding (citing the Johnson Act, I think). Two dozen tribes abut either the open ocean or a foreign border, so, you know, that was quite an oversight--or so we thought at first.

Americans don't really understand, imo, that there is still an ongoing war by US government on

Native Americans and their assets!!


and, re Brooks Bros fascist riot -- its my understanding that our new Chief Justice John Roberts

was managing all of that for W -- and organized the rally -- not that others might not have

participated -- but look who got rewarded for their dirty work in the 2000 campaign!!



:)

Running off to do errands -- back later

[defendandprotect]

18. Completely agree with you ....

with one exception ... I think MIHOP --

too much worked well for Bush/Cheney, etal for it to have been a Bin Laden plan --

which imo would have been impossible to begin with!! Too many here benefitted to

make it other than MIHOP.

[quakerboy]

22. Gah. There isn't the drive to do that.

Thats not who Obama has shown himself to be. The Pubs have little to fear from strong arm tactics and they know it all too well.

[Catherina]

5. Whatever Nancy. If you had, at the very least, started impeachment proceedings

we wouldn't be at this point.

[creon]

6. 50/50

I say at least even money.

The hotheads and fire eaters want to do it.

[sofa king]

7. ...Leaving an angry black man in charge.

Thank goodness the Republican Congress of the 00s delegated a huge amount of its authority to the Executive Branch, giving the President the ability to assume near-dictatorial power in times of crisis, such as a government shutdown in the middle of two wars.

I'm sure they'll sleep better at night knowing that if they do shut down the government, the President will be able to suspend habeas corpus, use the full force of the Department of Defense on home soil, detain huge masses of people indefinitely, and forcibly place out-of-work Republicans into labor battalions.

[defendandprotect]

11. Last time GOP did this, they tried to kick Clinton out of the presidency ... !!

[Kablooie]

19. It's either that or lick the bottom of GOP feet.

They'd damn well better force the Republican's hand.

But I have little faith that they will.
They have a history of rolling over when the the Republicans decide to push.

They are too afraid of Republicans blaming Democrats for the shut down.
It rarely occurs to them that since the Republicans caused it they can be blamed instead.

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. We expect it

and we have savings to live from. But many people do not. May I say what I think of this? Fucking idiots!!!! On the bright side, perhaps my Social Security and SSI neighbors who luve them republicans will get it, FINALLY. Or most likely not.

[JCMach1]

21. If they shut down the government, how about a NATIONAL STRIKE

to protest the BS. You shutdown the government, the PEOPLE shut down the country.

[Rex]

23. Run out of money!? You mean we can't just go print some more

at the Treasury? When did that start? Who put a stop to that? Don't tell me the moneytrain has left the station.